73 DANA SIMMONS Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France D   ,F socialist Pierre Leroux wan- dered through the streets of London in the early 1850s. ‘‘What a stupid city!’’ he remarked, ‘‘one only needs to see this swarm of poor people to understand what wealth [lies in] a city’s manure.’’ Leroux believed he held knowledge that could end London’s pullulating poverty forever. ‘‘I went to buy an old iron mortar,’’ he re- counts. ‘‘Then I went to collect sand from the banks of the Thames at the Vauxhall Bridge.’’ Leroux ground the sand with ashes and pieces of brick into a fine ‘‘mineral- vegetable powder.’’ ‘‘I mixed this powder with my urine and my excrement.... The excremental material that a man produces in one day is enough to create twenty-five pounds of vegetable soil.’’ Leroux planted seeds in this unortho- dox material, beans that grew, blossomed, and bore abundant fruit even out of season. Thereby, Leroux wrote, ‘‘I had demonstrated that MAN IS THE RE- PRODUCER OF HIS OWN SUBSISTENCE.’’ ‘‘Every one of these unfortunate people . . . could live by his own manure.’’ 1 Leroux hoped to turn excrement into life, waste into subsistence. He sought to end social misery by the wondrous operation of nature. In place of wage work, Leroux imagined a perpetual recycling process. Humans consume food and create waste, which in turn produces more food. This vision absolved the poor man of the need to labor; nature’s cycle alone would provide for each person’s needs. Produc- tion and consumption were collapsed in a single precept: ‘‘MAKE BREAD WITH HUMAN EXCREMENT.’’ 2 Despite its eccentricity, Pierre Leroux’s agricultural technique was not the product of a lone crackpot. On the contrary, these words were written in the wake of the great guano decade. The odiferous excreta of Peruvian seabirds already had struck European travelers by their power to fertilize local fields. In 1840 and 1841, a group of Peruvian entrepreneurs with English connections shipped nearly eight thousand tons of the stuff to Southampton. 3 And thus began a commercial sensa- tion. Agriculturalists in Europe and the United States all rallied around the miracu-  In mid-nineteenth-century France, the science of animal nutrition morphed into a Roman- tic political program. Scientists and socialists formulated a kind of industrial physiocracy that sought to replace wage work and finance capital with an unimpeded flow of excrement. / R 96. Fall 2006  2006 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533– 855X, pages 73–98. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.