An Incomplete and Biased Guide to French Toilets

(6 minute read)

Because nobody tells you this stuff, and by the time you need to know, it's already an emergency.

There is a specific moment, somewhere around day three of a trip to France, when you find yourself standing in a strange corridor, weighing your options, and understanding for the first time that this is a subject you should have researched.

Nobody researches it. Every guidebook on earth will tell you what time the Musée d'Orsay opens and not one of them will tell you what to do with the two buttons. So here is what we've learned by living here, including the parts we got wrong.

Carry Coins

The internet has convinced Americans that France is a nationwide toll booth for your bladder. It isn't, quite. But train stations charge, and the last one cost me one euro, dropped into a turnstile, in coins.

Which brings up the one piece of currency advice nobody gives Americans: carry coins. At home, coins are a nuisance you dump in a dish by the door. Here, one and two euro coins are real money, they buy real things, and we spend them every day at the boulangerie. You'll arrive with a tap-to-pay card and a deep cultural conviction that change is garbage, and then you'll find yourself in front of a turnstile with nothing in your pockets but a phone.

On the autoroute, the aires (rest areas) are free, and their quality is a genuine lottery. Some are startlingly nice, with real architecture and better coffee than they have any right to serve. Some are the kind of place you visit once and think about for years.

Paris Is Better at This Than You Are

The city you expect to be the worst is the best.

Paris has 435 self-cleaning street toilets, the pods you've walked past a hundred times and never tried, and they have been free since 2006. Every single one is built to be wheelchair accessible, with a transfer bar, braille, and audio instructions. Most run 6am to 10pm, and around 150 are open around the clock.

They are, unglamorously, the most reliable toilets in Paris. And almost every American we've met would rather walk twenty minutes with their knees together than push that door open.

Push the door open.

The Café Is Not a Loophole. It's the System.

Here's the question people actually want answered: can you walk into a café, use the toilet, and walk out?

Technically, nobody will tackle you. But they will notice, and they will know exactly what you did, and it's bad form in a way that's hard to explain to Americans, who are raised to believe a Starbucks bathroom is a civil right. In bigger cities like Lyon you'll often find the door locked behind a code, and the code is printed on your receipt, which tells you everything about how this transaction is understood.

The move is to sit down and order a coffee. It costs about two euros. That is not a fee for the toilet. That's the entire relationship: you took a table, you gave the place a reason to exist, and now the room in the back is yours. It's cheap, it's civilized, and it takes six minutes.

Two euros is the going rate for belonging somewhere.

The Two Buttons Are Not a Puzzle

You will find, on the wall or the cistern, a big button and a little button. Americans stand in front of this arrangement like it's a riddle.

It isn't. Small button for liquid, big button for solid. Somebody in Europe did the math on how much drinking water gets flushed away for no reason, and the fix was to put a second, smaller button next to the first one and let you sort it out. It works. It costs nothing. It's sitting on the wall of every bathroom in France.

You'll have it figured out by Tuesday. Then you'll go home, look at your own toilet, and think: one button. Huh.

À la Turque

A toilette à la turque (Turkish toilet) is a ceramic basin set into the floor, with two raised footpads and a hole. You squat. That's the entire fixture.

We've found two in France, both recently. One was in a bar on a boat in Lyon. One was at an autoroute aire. Both were grim, and in both cases it was the only toilet there was, with no normal stall to retreat to. They aren't common, and we want to be clear about that, because half the internet will tell you to brace for them on every corner and that simply isn't true. But they exist, they are not confined to some picturesque rural past, and you'll meet one eventually.

If all you need to do is pee, and you're built for it, this is an inconvenience.

If you need to do anything else, or if you're wearing a dress, or carrying a handbag with nowhere clean to set it down, it is a considerably larger problem. There's nothing to hold on to. The floor is wet. You have to get down into a squat, hold it, manage your clothes, keep your bag off the ground, and then get back up. For some people that's an indignity you laugh about later. For some it isn't possible at all, and no amount of good humor about it changes that.

This is not a charming foreign custom that visitors must learn to appreciate. It's a bad old fixture nobody has gotten around to ripping out. The French don't like it either. Nobody has ever liked it. It has no defenders.

The Stairs Are the Real Problem

If you're worried about any of this, the squat toilet isn't your enemy. The staircase is.

The toilet in a French café or bistro is frequently in the basement, down a narrow, dim, tightly spiraling staircase installed at a time when nobody was asking questions. Sometimes it's on the same level and you'd never guess from the street. There is no way to tell which until you're already committed, standing at the top, looking down.

That's the most useful sentence in this article, so let's put it plainly: the barrier isn't the fixture, it's the flight of stairs between you and the fixture. And it's almost never mentioned, because it isn't a problem until it's your problem, and by then you're standing at the top of the stairs.

The Part Where This Becomes Our Job

Here's what changes when you're planning a trip for somebody rather than just taking one yourself.

When a client mentions, almost in passing, that his wife had knee surgery in the spring, that's when we start calling restaurants to ask where the toilets are and how many stairs stand between here and there. It isn't glamorous. It's a lot of phone calls in a second language, about basements.

But it's the difference between a good day and a day somebody spends quietly doing arithmetic about how long they can hold out. Nobody says that part out loud.

What did France, or anywhere, throw at you that no guidebook prepared you for? And did you handle it with dignity, or did you handle it with wine? Tell us in the comments, and be specific. The people who need to know are the ones too polite to ask.