page_title: Canal du Midi
section_title: Work organization and social conditions
hierarchical_section_title: Canal du Midi / History / Construction of the canal / Work organization and social conditions
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: France, Aude (11), Seuil de Naurouze, épanchoir de Naurouze
context_page_description: The Canal du Midi is a 240 km long canal in Southern France. Originally named the Canal royal en Languedoc and renamed by French revolutionaries to Canal du Midi in 1789, the canal was at the time considered one of the greatest construction works of the 17th century.
  The canal connects the Garonne to the Étang de Thau on the Mediterranean and along with the 193 km long Canal de Garonne forms the Canal des Deux Mers, joining the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. The canal runs from the city of Toulouse down to the Étang de Thau near the Mediterranean.
  Strictly speaking, "Canal du Midi" refers to the portion initially constructed from Toulouse to the Mediterranean – the Deux-Mers canal project aimed to link together several sections of navigable waterways to join the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: first the Canal du Midi, then the Garonne which was more or less navigable between Toulouse and Bordeaux, then the Garonne Lateral Canal built later, and finally the Gironde estuary after Bordeaux.
context_section_description: For fifteen years nearly 12,000 workers worked on the construction of the canal. Riquet hired men and women between 20 and 50 years old whom he organized in sections forming workshops led by a controller-general. This rationalization of work permitted the optimisation of tasks and allowed several projects to be performed at the same time. All of the work was manual and the digging of the canal was with shovels and pickaxes. The workforce was made up of farmers and local workers whose number varied from one period to another during the year. Pierre-Paul Riquet appealed to the military to compensate for this fluctuation. He also set up monthly payments of workers for their loyalty. He also offered accommodation for two deniers per day.
  The women labourers were surprisingly important to the canal's engineering. Many came from former Roman bath colonies in the Pyrenees, where elements of classical hydraulics had been maintained as a living tradition. They were employed at first to move earth to the dam at Saint Ferréol, but their supervisors, who were struggling to design the channels from the dam to the canal, recognized their expertise. Engineering in this period was mainly focused on fortress construction, and hydraulics was concerned mostly with mining and problems of drainage. Building a navigational canal across the continent was well beyond the formal knowledge of the military engineers expected to supervise it, but the peasant women who were carriers of classical hydraulic methods added to the repertoire of available techniques. They not only perfected the water supply system for the canal but also threaded the waterway through the mountains near Béziers, using few locks, and built the eight-lock staircase at Fonserannes.
  The financial and social conditions of employment of the workers were very favourable and unusual for the time. To retain his workforce, Riquet paid his workers well enough. More importantly, he gave benefits never before seen such as non-working rain days, Sundays and public holidays, and finally paid sick leave. The employment contract was individual and done by free recruitment. Pay was, at the beginning, 20 sols (1 livre) per day, double the agricultural wage. Discontent from farm owners, however, forced Riquet to reduce pay to 15, then 12 sols per day. In 1668 he established the monthly payment of 10 livres.
caption: The Naurouze Spillway built by stonemasons
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