1604-1680

French Engineer

French engineer Baron Pierre-Paul Riquet de Bonrepos designed and built the Languedoc Canal, sometimes called the Canal du Midi. The latter, which connects the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, has been called the greatest civil engineering feat between Roman times and the nineteenth century.

Riquet worked as a tax collector under King Louis XIV, during whose long reign he became interested in a problem that had long perplexed French civil engineers: how to construct a means of travelling by boat from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean. The relatively narrow width of the land between the two bodies of water made this a tempting prospect, as did the fact that two rivers at either end—the Garonne and the Aude—already provided part of a waterway. Without the canal, vessels from southern France had to...