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It has often been reported that Paris is home to around six million rats, which works out to about two rats for every human living within city limits. The population is so large that a British magazine columnist suggested a new motto for the 2024 Olympics, which are set to open this week: “Citius, Altius, Fortius, Rattus.”
Rats might make for compelling protagonists in animated film – you should google the 2007 hit “Ratatouille” – but in real life, they are often harbingers of disease. For the moment, they are also taking up unwanted space in the city’s Olympic spotlight.
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“Ultimately, no-one should aim to exterminate Paris’s rats, and they’re useful in maintaining the sewers,” Anne-Claire Boux, the deputy mayor of Paris, said in a recent interview with the wire service Agence France-Presse. “The point is that they should stay in the sewers.”
She said all Olympic venues have been “analyzed” for rats ahead of the Games.
It is not a new fight for Parisians.
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In September 1920, The New York Times ran a headline stating that a “War Against Rats of Paris” had been proclaimed. Residents of the city had been instructed on how to murder the rodents, and told “just how to employ arsenic acid, phosphorous carbonate of barium and other deadly drugs.”
The humans might have won a battle here and there, but the rats clearly won the war.
Today, as organizers prep flotillas and performers go through their routines ahead of the Opening Ceremony on Friday, workers are sprucing up the city to keep the rodent residents at bay.
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The city’s rat hunters, known as the “Smash” team, are advising the Paris organizing committee on which sewer exits to cover up and other mitigation measures to tackle.
The most effective strategy involves a deep cleaning: Getting rid of any food residue, placing rat traps in problem areas and treating areas with chemical solutions.
“The most important thing is that the bins are sealed and closed,” Boux said.
The Louvre gardens, where the Olympic cauldron is due to light, and the space behind the Eiffel Tower, where beach volleyball will be staged, are said to be among the most rat-infested.
In 2023, Paris’ other urban blight, the bed bug, also crept into the headlines.
“No one is safe,” Emmanuel Gregoire, then the deputy mayor, tweeted at the time.
Photos shared at the time showed hotels piling up “mattress mountains” on the sidewalk, some covered in plastic, according to The Mirror.
The rats, though, have for centuries refused to be covered.
Underneath Paris is one of the oldest and most extensive sewer systems in the world. According to the French National Academy of Medicine, Paris has close to six million sewer rats, or about 1.5 to 1.75 per resident.
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The city extensively used rat poison and invested in thousands of air-tight trash bins in 2017 as part of an aggressive mitigation strategy.
The measure was criticized for being ineffective and cruel by the animal rights group Paris Animals Zoopolis.
“Rats are present in Paris, as in all major French cities, so the question of cohabitation necessarily arises,” the group said in a statement at the time.
“Rats play a very useful role for us because what they eat we do not need to dispose of, so it’s very economical for us, and when rats are underground they also clean the pipes with their fur when they run through them,” Gilles Demodice, a manager in the city’s animal control department, told The New York Times in 2016.
“So we need to keep them. They’re sort of our friends, but they need to stay below. That’s all we ask: that they stay below.”
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