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vulnerabilities,

what do maps say?

English texts

Documentaries

Introduction

Map factory

Health risks

Militaryrisks

Naturalrisks

Industrialrisks

Imagining vulnerabilities

Main texts

exhibit panels

Sensitive maps

Natural hazards & mapsThere are several types of natural hazard in Lyon, including flooding, frost, heat waves, drought, landslides and storms. These hazards become risks when they affect populated areas where people are exposed to them. These are known as natural risk zones. The public authorities draw up maps showing the location of these zones according to the nature and intensity of the phenomena. The location and extent of these zones vary: the risk of flooding will mainly concern the rivers' surroundings, while a heatwave will affect a much wider area. These natural hazard maps are used to define the most appropriate policies to protect populations. They guide town-planning procedures, such as prohibiting construction in flood-prone areas or providing technical advice on building permits in sloping areas.

Industrial risks & maps The development of industry was inextricably linked to the associated risks: noxious fumes, possible explosions, water and soil pollution. As early as the early 19th century, sketch maps were produced to show the location of acid fumes from a vitriol (sulfuric acid) factory, for example, as part of a court case. In a completely different way, at the end of the 20th century and right up to the present day, risk maps are distributed to help people adopt appropriate behavior in the event of industrial accidents, fires and explosions, derailments of trains carrying chemical or flammable products, or nuclear accidents. The map is the result of a scientific risk assessment, designed to minimize the impact of such events on the population. "Seveso" classified industrial sites represent the highest risk, and are the first to be covered by these maps.

Lyon is no more Following the overthrow of the Jacobin municipality (the Jacobins were a radical political group during the French Revolution) by the citizens of Lyon on May 29, 1793, Lyon was besieged for three months, from August 8 to October 9, 1793. Repression was fierce, and the city was deprived of all freedom and food. Lyon capitulated on October 9, 1793. At the end of the siege, Bertrand Barère, an influential member of the National Convention (the revolutionary government of the time), announced to the assembly on October 12 that Lyon, “which waged war on liberty”, would be destroyed and renamed Ville-Affranchie (meaning “Liberated City”).The siege led to massive destruction, some caused by fires set during the bombardments, others by the demolition of buildings, mainly those belonging to personalities deemed counter-revolutionary or those that had sheltered suspects. On October 7, 1794, a law restored its name to Lyon.

A sea of ice on the Saône The extreme cold wave of 1879 was one of the most severe ever recorded in France since the winter of 1709. In Lyon, as early as December 1879, large amounts of ice, from 6 to 12 meters thick, appeared on the Saône, from Lyon-Vaise to Ile-Barbe, blocking the river's flow. The Saône took on the appearance of a sea of ice. In his report of January 17, 1880, the engineer in charge of the Rhône department, Mr. Pasqueau, describes “an immense glacier that bears no resemblance to those that have occurred on other parts of the Saône”, made of “blocks which, by their color and shape, appear to have come from the Doubs, i.e. from over 200 kilometers away”. He adds that, over the entire width of the river, the total volume certainly exceeds five million cubic meters, and that almost everywhere the glacier reaches down to the very bottom of the Saône bed, completely obstructing the river. Exceptionally powerful means are needed to break it up.

A hygienic city Lyon's location at the confluence of two rivers, combined with its lack of hygiene and environmental conditions, favored the development of epidemics. The city was immersed in fog and unhealthy humidity. With its multiple floods, sewers and cesspools overflow and contaminate well water. This contamination also came from the miasma of hospitals and cemeteries. Lyon's extensive industrialization in the 19th century led to a deterioration in the city's health and working-class living conditions. The 19th century also marked the beginning of the hygienist movement in Lyon, committed to improving hygiene conditions and combating the causes of epidemics. Jean-François Terme, convinced of the benefits of supplying drinking water to every home, set about improving the city's water supply system; Isidore de La Polinière strengthened sanitary surveillance of hospitals, slaughterhouses, prisons, cemeteries, etc., and devoted himself to improving hospital accommodation conditions. Gabriel Roux and then Joseph Tessier recommended measures to prevent and limit epidemics.

The hill ripped open twiceOn the night of November 12-13, 1930, shortly after midnight, a landslide swept away part of Fourvière hill, along with a number of houses and inhabitants. Warned by the Saint-Just police, firefighters from the 2nd company of the Madeleine fire station arrived at the site of the landslide. They proceeded to evacuate the neighborhood and free the trapped victims. Given the seriousness of the situation, additional reinforcements were requested. Three-quarters of an hour after the first landslide, firefighters and peacekeepers were surprised by the roar of a new mass of soil that suddenly broke loose and rolled down the hill. At 1:50 a.m. on November 13, 1930, 19 firefighters, 4 policemen and 16 residents were killed by the massive wave of soil. Following the landslide, the municipality set up commissions to monitor land and buildings likely to be a threat to public safety.

Art and VulnerabilityIn the course titled "Drawing Objects," second-year students at the Émile Cohl School practice creating narrative drawings. Much like text composition, narration through images follows rules similar to those that structure and govern language use. Its initial vocabulary is built from the observation, analysis, and representation of reality.The keystone of this narration, staging in the service of meaning, is intensified by the principle of visual transposition: selected objects, drawn without changing their shape except for the scale, take on different functions. Their new role is primarily identified through staging. Through their surreal dimension, these two images remind us of the ambivalence of our relationship with objects: • The affectionate relationship praised by poet Alphonse Lamartine in "Milly or the Native Land": "Inanimate objects, do you have a soul that clings to our soul and the power to love?" • The conflicted relationship generated by pollution linked to overproduction, screen dependencies, and more. Without yielding to the temptation of pathos, the choice of poetry to evoke the vulnerability of our living spaces is a message of hope intended for the exhibition visitors by the young authors.

The map as a tool of governance As geographer Yves Lacoste wrote in 1976: "Geography is first and foremost a tool for making war". Protecting a city, fortifying a territory, knowing the details of the topography have long been at the origin of the best maps. During the world wars or in the Soviet Union, military needs led to gigantic cartographic production, even if today's military map is confidential and inaccessible, as were its predecessors (now available online, in archives or on the antiquarian market). Governing also means providing the means to intervene effectively in space, for roads, railroads, river development, energy installations, urban planning and development in general; hence the maps of the "Ponts et Chaussées", the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of the Navy, and numerous state and local government bodies... Maps have become omnipresent in all areas of territorial transformation, and are a fundamental tool in the functioning of our societies. One area in particular is taxation. Alongside the military needs generated by artillery, it has played a decisive role in the development of cartography. The maps of the lordships, then of the land registry, soon covered the territory to better collect various taxes. There's a paradox here, as cadastral maps only serve indirectly to intervene in space. Fundamentally, these maps provide information on immaterial aspects of society, such as property ownership, but they are rooted in a spatialization that helps to define the human being.As we can see, maps are used to govern, whether its nature that needs to be controlled, the developments required by human societies, or the framing of immaterial techniques of political and economic management. Finally, a new paradox today: the map is increasingly dematerialized, and while it is widely used for tourism, it is still difficult to access or read in areas where government is at stake. Who can read a town planning scheme? Where are today's military maps? Where are the maps produced for major developments? Where is the information linked to cadastral divisions? Big data does not in any way mean transparency; the profusion of data open to the public is not necessarily associated with meaning.

The Austrian occupation of Lyon When the Austrians crossed the Rhine on December 21, 1813, Napoleon entrusted Marshal Augereau with the protection of Lyon. Following his army's defeat at Mâcon on March 11, the Austrian army marched on Lyon. Augereau tried twice in vain to stop it. By March 21, 1814, the city was surrounded. The municipal authorities, who considered all resistance vain, capitulated and handed over its keys to the Austrians. Augereau's troops withdrew to Vienne and Valence. Peace was signed in Paris on May 31, and the Austrians evacuated Lyon on June 9. On June 18, 1815, following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, the Army of the Alps, commanded by Marshal Suchet, took refuge in Lyon. However, as in 1814, Suchet left Lyon. Austrian troops occupied the city for five months, from July to December 1815.

Under the nuclear threat In April 1976, the French government decided to build the Superphénix fast-breeder reactor on the banks of the Rhône, about 80km away from Lyon. When construction began in July 1976, the first protests drew between 15,000 and 20,000 people. Anti-nuclear activists organized themselves into a hundred or so committees. The fight against Superphénix went beyond national boundaries, becoming a symbol of the European anti-nuclear movement and of environmental associations such as Greenpeace, which took part in most of the demonstrations. On July 31, 1977, several thousand protesters gathered at the construction site to march against the project. To prevent them from entering the prohibited zone, the prefect mobilized a large number of policemen, helicopters, vehicles, mobile bridges, a regiment of parachute officers and members of the anti-riot squad. After violent clashes, five police officers were injured, while one demonstrator died and about a hundred were injured. Operation of Superphénix lasted 11 years (1985-1996), and the final shutdown of the reactor was decided by the government in June 1997.

Measuring the city The first two measuring instruments were the eye and the legs, which were used, for example, for the scenographic plan of Lyon drawn up around 1544. The great innovation from the 16th century onwards was the use of increasingly rigorous and organized measurements: - Detailed measurement of military elements, and triangulation to faithfully arrange their parts in the fortification plan of 1556, geometrical expression of space, instruments for sighting angles (sight) and measuring (chain) according to a given scale, all transferred during fieldwork to a tablet; - Introduction of rigor in detail with Séraucourt's plan in 1735, with precise indication of north and a geodesic grid of lines spaced at 10-second angles for longitude and latitude. The city was now part of a scientific concept that linked space to the cosmos; - In 1819, contour lines were introduced to map the relief of the Fourvière hill; - In 1856, an altimeter datum was set at sea level in Marseille, for use in the detailed topographic plan of Lyon; Use of aerial photography and photogrammetry from the 1930s onwards; - around 1990, the transition from ink-on-paper to digital information led to the abandonment of traditional cartography. Today, cartographers use aerial or satellite photographs in raster mode, as well as layers of information in digital form, expressed as required on their screen depending on the purpose of the representation project.

To drain or to remove? On September 19, 1871, Lyon's mayor, Hénon, revoked all authorizations for private individuals to use the sewers, including those on Rue Impériale. The ban provoked protests from the owners of the 300 buildings, which had to be fitted with cesspits and blocked off from the pre-existing sewers. They managed to maintain the existing situation until 1882. Pestilential odors invaded the streets of the town center, and the excrement that local residents piled under their feet caused major problems. In 1873, Gobin, director of municipal roads, described the sewers of the peninsula as a lawless and criminal area. Reporting to the Rhône prefect on his explorations in the bowels of the city, he wrote: « [...] there is, under the city center, a true labyrinth of private canals which had never been cleaned out and which were so clogged with fecal matter that access was quite impossible. » By 1880, the situation had become even worse. As witnessed by the paper presented, to the National Society of Medicine, by Dr. Joseph Teissier, who discovered that the underground conduits were in an even worse state than previously imagined. As a result, the peninsula was doomed to live surrounded by nauseating odors. Until the 1894 law imposing the «all-to-the-sewer " system in Paris. The question of "all-to-the-sewer" in Lyon was the source of bitter debate between those in favor of removal in the name of complementarity between town and countryside (the town returning to the fields what it received in the form of food) and those highly critical of maintaining the pits, who preached total drainage to the sewers. It wasn't until 1920 that Edouard Herriot made full sewerage possible in Lyon.

Health risks and maps The relationship between maps and the study of disease is complex. Cholera maps, for example, are often used to understand how epidemics spread, but few doctors considered environmental factors in health crises. In the late 19th century, the interpretation of regional differences in disease distribution was varied, sometimes influenced by the presence of doctors in key government positions, as in Lyon. Interestingly, the most deadly diseases were not always mapped. For example, there is no map of tuberculosis in Lyon, even though it was a major cause of death in the early 20th century. Sometimes, maps are difficult to understand for those not used to using them, and they can disappear quickly after a crisis or political change. Beyond disease mapping, actions to improve health, such as disinfection campaigns or the creation of mask-wearing zones during difficult sanitary conditions, are also mapped.

A city on fire Since the burning of Lugdunum in 64 AD, Lyon has been repeatedly damaged by fire, whether natural or caused by human activity. Although the fire department was professionalized as early as 1801, with the creation of the “Company of the Fire Guards”, the volunteer battalions remained essential to the fight against fire. Their organization was restructured several times over the course of the 19th century. The last major reorganization took place in 1907, leading to the end of the volunteer battalions in 1912. Industrial development, the installation of factories in the city and the widespread use of electricity intensified the risk of fire. However, the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th witnessed technical advances that improved emergency services. The first steam-powered pump was acquired in Lyon in 1867, followed by motorization: Lyon's fire stations were equipped with Berliet fire engines in 1909. In 1888, a telephone network was installed linking the various fire department stations, enabling fast intervention by the emergency services. The spectacular fire at the Rivoire et Carret pasta factory on March 16, 1908 was not fully extinguished until March 23, despite the speed with which the fire department was alerted by telephone. The massive destruction suffered by the factory meant that it had to be rebuilt on a new site.

Military risks & maps Military maps were among the first to be highly accurate. Their purpose was to enable the most effective warfare possible, either for aggression (optimizing the risk to the enemy), which justifies detailed knowledge of the territory concerned, or for defense (limiting the risk in the event of external aggression), for example when fortifying a city. In the case of the canuts (silk weavers) insurrection in Lyon in 1834, a very precise map was made of the positions of the rebels and the police: it was in fact a hazard map, made by the army, since it was not used during the military takeover of the city. On the other hand, an extract from this map was used 20 years later to justify the need to destroy and renew the central district, in order to eliminate the risk of insurrection by evicting the working-class population of the area. Today, military installations in the Lyon area appear only very discreetly on maps and photographs, due to their strategic value.

A contaminated river It's one of the most serious industrial pollutions known in France. Acrolein, a highly toxic product, has been manufactured at Pierre-Bénite since 1965. On July 10, 1976, an operator mistakenly began rinsing a wagon full of acrolein: 20 tons of acrolein were spilled into the Rhône. Over a period of 8 days, 367 tons of dead fish were collected along 90 km of the river. Safety measures were put in place to prohibit swimming, monitor water catchments and wells fed by the Rhône, and control the distribution of drinking water.

Risks & hazards Risk exists only because there is a threat, to a human being, an animal, a plant, an infrastructure or anything else. In our societies, risk is primarily human and/or economic, because it threatens a value. Because it depends on the value we place on it, it is different from a hazard, which is simply the event itself, for example natural or social, with its dimensions of unpredictable chance and fate, without considering its consequences in terms of value. In the days we couldn't control the flow of the Rhône, flooding was mainly a hazard - we just had to deal with it - and not a risk. This hazard only really became a risk when we were able to control the river. Thus, risk in the proper sense of the word only took on greater importance with the rise of modern societies, increasingly equipped to limit it, but paradoxically also increasingly sensitive to hazards and the probability of their occurrence.

Bringing the Rhône Back to Its River bedSeveral documents, both written and printed, preserved in the archives, testify to the existence of a branch of the Rhône on its left side in the 16th century. It was the dikes constructed between 1659 and 1662, notably by Rodolphe Chambon, totaling over 1500 meters in length and requiring nearly 15,000 trees, that closed off the left bank branch of the Rhône despite the major floods (1659, 1662) that damaged the works as they were being completed. This closure remained fragile until the mid-18th century. The Rhône threatened several times to bypass the dikes to the east, particularly during the major floods of 1711 and 1725. New works were therefore undertaken between 1719 and 1721, in conjunction with repairs to the bridge. Finally, in 1742, engineer Lallié led works that definitively stabilized the bank. This allowed for the establishment of a ferry for the benefit of the Hôtel-Dieu.

Vulnerabilities, what do the maps say ?The city of Lyon is vulnerable to a variety of events, whether sudden or long and undetectable, until they take hold and threaten. Most of these events have left behind only words, which are not enough to help us understand what happened, or how people dealt with it. This history is sometimes represented on maps or by images that allow us to grasp its scale and particularities. From this point of view, maps came late, accompanying a vision that was increasingly informed by science. This exhibition looks at the city from the point of view of its vulnerabilities, through documents that are rarely seen and even less shown, while today's cities are full of measures to ensure the utmost security.

When the storm hits LyonOn Saturday August 27, 1955, a meteorological combination of torrential rain, walnut-sized hailstones and 90-kilometer-an-hour winds hit Lyon and the surrounding area. Damage was significant, particularly in the Vaise district, still recovering from the effects of the recent floods. After the stormy downpour, stunned residents found their city unrecognizable, covered in tons of mud and littered with thousands of shattered windows from stores, businesses and homes. Gardens and parks, such as the Parc de la Tête d'Or, were completely devastated. The fire department made over 200 trips that evening, and it took several days to restore telephone and power supplies to the factories and many of the city's districts.

From measles to covid The emergence and spread of diseases have evolved in step with the movement of people and goods, economic and social changes, urban morphologies and technological advances, as well as medical knowledge and health standards. So, whether we're talking about measles epidemics or the COVID-19 pandemic, analysis of the logics of disease emergence and spread provides a framework for reading the spatial practices of societies and the way they anthropize their environments. In this respect, cartography is an important tool for identifying both health issues and possible political responses. Maps of infectious diseases or, as they were then called, "zymotic diseases" (measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox) are present in the city's administrative balance sheets at the turn of the 20th century, as are disinfection campaigns. These were launched shortly before the founding of a Municipal Hygiene Office in 1890. Published during the terms of office of Antoine Gailleton (1880 - 1900) and Jean-Victor Augagneur (1900 - 1905), both doctors at the Antiquaille, these maps disappeared just after Edouard Herriot, a great advocate of hygiene, came to power.

A Lake in the City The memory of the 1840 flood was still fresh when, in June 1856, a terrible flood struck Lyon. On the night of May 29 to 30, 1856, the Rhône, overflowing its banks, submerged the lower part of the city. The Tête d'Or dyke, upstream of Lyon, suddenly broke, releasing a powerful wave over Lyon. The districts of Brotteaux, Guillotière, and Charpennes were submerged for several days. Other districts were also flooded: Vaux, Villette, Brotteaux, Cours Morand, as well as Villeurbanne. The left bank of the Rhône, from Tête-d'Or to La Mouche, became nothing more than a vast lake.The flood of the Saône was much less severe than that of the Rhône, but it lasted much longer, nearly a month. On August 24, 1856, the flood protection works were declared a public utility.

Draped in a thick fog Lyon, the city of mists, according to Baudelaire, has long suffered from its reputation of being an industrial city draped in thick fog. Lyon's municipal administration has been working on the fight against smoke and fog for a long time. Measures and regulatory trials had already been put in place in 1905. So, in 1929, in agreement with the Rhône prefect, Mayor Édouard Herriot set up a technical commission to study fog, smoke and impurities in the atmosphere of the Lyon urban area, made up of doctors, physicists, climatologists, hydrologists... On February 25, 1929, a municipal decree prohibited the production of smoke, soot, dust and toxic gases. The bans were extended in 1932 and again in 1937 to all industrial facilities and administrative establishments.

The Imaginary of VulnerabilityVotive practices call upon creative expressions, such as painting, that combine the spiritual and real worlds to materialize and showcase, within sacred spaces, individual and collective concerns and fragilities, often linked to catastrophes. Similarly, cinema, like literature and the visual and performing arts, puts the world on display through the fusion of fiction and reality. To suspend us in a state of vulnerability, they stage and amplify the ideas of risk, danger, and catastrophe that structure and animate our collective memory, provoking in us a sense of urgency and unease. In such a state, the acceptance of ambiguity, uncertainty, and fragility leads us to question our own relationship to the risks that surround us.

Domino effect The Lyon metropolitan area is marked by the pollution and dangers of the chemical and petrochemical industries. Since 1960, accidents linked to technological hazards have multiplied. Their severity is heightened by the "domino effect", as at Feyzin in 1966, and the "substance effect", when different products interact, producing either an explosion or a toxic cloud, as with the fire at the Edouard-Herriot port in August 1990. Political responses, often of a regulatory nature, only come into play after disasters have occurred. They do not take into account the question of relocating the activities at the origin of the hazard or the populations living there, because of the considerable costs involved. From this perspective, risk management focuses on defining the perimeters of exposure to different hazards, and on land management. This approach leads to the relocation of activities, facilities and public services away from the most exposed neighborhoods, thus disadvantaging residents already penalized by the proximity of danger sources.

The plague in Lyon Between the last third of the 16th and the middle of the 17th century, Lyon was under constant threat from the plague. It resurfaced in 1628, entering the city in August and spreading with great violence, taking half the population with it. From the very start of the contagion, the Consulate relied on the Health Office, a crisis health institution with multiple powers that brought together police judges, “king's men”, the governor, the lieutenant general, the seneschal, the archbishop and various religious communities, to implement drastic sanitary measures: widespread quarantine, hospitalization of the infected, street cleaning, perfuming of houses and streets, surveillance of the movement of goods and people, generalization of measures for food supplies and recovering patients... In response to this major epidemic, the Health Office was made permanent. Under the authority of the consulate, it provided perfumers with recipes for perfuming houses, organized the purification of objects and contaminated air, and cleaned streets, courtyards and wells. The epidemic gradually declined until it disappeared in 1640, but the risk remained.

Cholera Cholera morbus struck France starting in 1832. It initially affected Paris, where it caused 18,500 deaths between March and September. Lyon was not affected because its mayor, who was also a doctor, Gabrielle Prunelle, was cautious and anticipated the arrival and spread of the epidemic by implementing a series of precautions and drastic measures as early as 1831.To quickly address the needs of all populations in Lyon, especially the most disadvantaged, the mayor created a health commission, divided the city into 7 autonomous health sections with the same organization, and established local medical commissions. Additionally, he recommended cleaning the city and homes. Gabriel Prunelle appealed to the generosity of the people of Lyon to meet the expenses and urged them: "In these moments of calamity, where all political opinions should disappear and unite to aid the unfortunate... The municipal administration nevertheless does not forget that what has happened in Paris imposes the most active and severe surveillance."

Fortifications before 1800The history of Lyon's fortifications is complex and largely unknown. On this map, the Gallic fortification is not indicated. Its layout has been taken over by that of the Roman enclosure, which may have been the case elsewhere around the city. Part of the Late Antique enclosure has been recognized, but the rest of its layout is unknown. In the early Middle Ages, several enclosures surrounded St-Just, St-Irénée, St-Paul, probably la Platière, and the St-Jean cathedral area, around which a wall was established or consolidated in the early 12th century. At the end of the 12th century, a larger meeting enclosure was built on the flanks of Fourvière and the Croix-Rousse slopes, as well as a wall around the villeneuve St-Just/St-Irénée, which presented itself as another city close to Lyon. The city wall decided on in 1346 and gradually built took up the northern route of the latter, reversing its direction. It joined the castle of Pierre-Scize, built in the 13th century. The enclosure around the Terreaux, probably established during the revolt of 1269, was never used as a fiscal boundary, as it was preserved further north at the gates dating from the end of the 12th century. The wall that linked the St-Vincent district to the city in the early 15th century had a defensive function at a time of great insecurity. It was in the 16th century that the city boundary was established, as it remained until the 19th century, with an extension on the hill beyond Loyasse, the resumption of the moat built after 1346 and then abandoned, at the edge of the Croix-Rousse plateau, and the inclusion of the new districts and the Ainay abbey to the south.

Cemeteries Outside the City The question of the unsanitary conditions of Lyon's cemeteries was raised on December 4, 1776. Abbot Antoine de La Croix shared his thoughts. After studying the wind patterns, he proposed the creation of a single cemetery to the east of the city, "protected from the putrid vapors that would emanate from it." An investigation conducted in 1777, initiated by the Paris Parliament, examined all burial places in Lyon (crypts, cemeteries, burial places at hospitals, etc.) by a commission comprising magistrates, surgeons, architects, etc. The investigation highlighted the sanitary dangers posed by Lyon's burial practices: Cemeteries, with few exceptions, were narrow, overcrowded, and poorly ventilated due to being too integrated into the city. As a result of this study, solutions involving relocation to more suitable locations, especially to the east and west of the city, were recommended.However, it was not until 1807 that a cemetery on the outside of the city was established.

From the Canuts revolt to the breakthrough of the Imperial street The revolt of autumn 1831 was part of a conflict that began in 1744, when the silk merchants obtained a monopoly on silk sales. The canuts (silk weavers) were unhappy with their working conditions and demanded an increase in their prices, in vain. On October 25, 1831, negotiations between the mayor and the prefect led to an agreement, which was never implemented. As a result, the association of workshop chiefs decided on a general strike on November 20. The revolt was violent, with around 600 dead or wounded. The canuts, with no clear political demands, returned to work without obtaining any changes. The Duke of Orleans and Marshal Soult recaptured the city with a large army, and the Prefect of Isère, was appointed to head the Rhône administration. Despite some social measures taken by the prefect, the canuts' problems persisted. In 1833, the bosses considered lowering workers' pay. In February 1834, the canuts launched another general strike. 6,000 workers from the Croix-Rousse, the right bank of the Saône and the southern center of the Presqu'île rose up. Repression was brutal, with several hundred victims and 10,000 arrests. In 1866, Lyon was still marked by the Canuts uprisings. The city center was densely populated, with narrow, winding streets and deplorable hygiene conditions. On March 25, 1853, the arrival of Vaïsse, in charge of both the department and the municipality, revived the project to pierce a central street, the Rue Impériale, to bring “movement, air, light and health” and “chase away the riot by replacing narrow, tortuous streets with wide, straight ones, always accessible to the armed force”.

2003, a record-breaking year In the summer of 2003, Lyon, like the rest of France, was hit by an exceptional heatwave that was both exhausting and deadly. From June, the heat persisted for 23 days, reaching 39.6°C, a record not seen since 1922. After a relatively mild July, temperatures increased again in August, reaching high levels for the first two weeks. The number of deaths rose by over 70% compared with the same period in 2002. Following this disaster, the deadliest of the last 100 years, a National Heatwave Plan (PNC) was set up to anticipate, protect vulnerable people, and to provide measures for institutions and professionals in the health and social sectors.