What would Paris be without the Seine? The capital’s real source of oxygen, our favorite river is not what it seems. While we all congregate on the quays of the Seine when the weather’s fine, in reality we gather on the quays of the Yonne.
Seine or Yonne… An old story!
But how to explain this misunderstanding, which has lasted for centuries right up to the present day? To unravel the story, we’ve investigated for you. And the answer lies 80 km south of our favorite capital…
Somewhere upstream from Fontainebleau, in the village of Montereau-Fault-Yonne, the Yonne and Seine rivers meet. The Seine absorbs the flow of the Yonne, and heads for Paris. Or is it the other way round? According to the rules of hydrography, the study of watercourses, when two rivers cross, the one that brings the greatest flow of water to the point of convergence keeps its name. The other, smaller river then becomes its tributary, like the Saône for the Rhône, the Indre for the Loire or… the Seine for the Yonne. In fact, it is the Yonne that brings the greatest volume of water to the confluence point. So, scientifically speaking, it’s the Yonne that flows through Paris!
So we should be talking about the Yonne-Saint-Denis department. And the quays of the Yonne. And the Rock-en-Yonne festival. So how did the Seine win this river arm wrestle? We have to go back to the Gallo-Roman period of our history to understand the origins of this misunderstanding. Our Gallic ancestors didn’t study hydrography, so they had no idea which river carried more water than the other. What they did know, however, was that the land where the Seine’s source is located is sacred, and that a Gallo-Roman temple was set up there, where this holy water was venerated. The sacred nature of the Seine persisted for a long time, and by the time it was realized that it was the Yonne that flowed through Paris, it was too late. The Seine was already too closely associated with the capital and the geography of the region. You know all about it!