Toilet paper has been around, at least, for over 1,500 years.

But its use did not really spread until the 19th century.

This hygiene product, now essential for billions of human beings, has come to replace a (long) series of others, ranging from the sponge sticks of the Romans to the sheet of newspapers, including animal furs.

If there is one object anchored in our daily life, it is it: toilet paper.

Today and for generations, it has imposed itself, has become essential for billions of human beings.

And yet, its generalization is recent, at least in the West: a little more than a hundred years barely.

What is the history of toilet paper?

What did we use before?

Our columnist David Castello-Lopes answers it in

Historically yours

, on Europe 1.

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“Being a human being still has many advantages: in particular that of having hands. However, having hands is an absolute prerequisite for reaching certain parts of your body ... starting with the one we are talking about in this column. And since we can reach it, we human beings, well we can also clean it. But we still have to want it ... And it seems that this will intervened quite early in history.

The Romans, in fact, already had it.

And they were using a very cool tool to execute it that they called xylospongium, which, as the name suggests, was kind of a stick with a sponge on the end.

Pieces of wood, moss or seashells

After the Romans, over the centuries, people used lots of other things like bits of wood, moss, shells, animal furs, hay, corn bark, etc. But the first who used paper, it was obviously those who invented paper, namely the Chinese.

Paper in China dates from at least the third century BC.

But the first mention of paper used as toilet paper dates 700 years later, from the 6th century.

We must then make a leap until the middle of the 19th century.

A time when, in the cities anyway, most people used old newspapers or old books, leaflets, scraps of paper which had in common that they had not been produced in order to end up where they were. were landing.

It was a kind of second life for the object, a bit like today when you hold a wobbly table with a Florent Pagny CD or when you clean your windows with old briefs.

But in 1857, there is an American, another, named Joseph Gayetty.

It is he who markets what is considered to be the ancestor of modern toilet paper.

And he advertised it in the newspapers of the day, saying, "Everyone knows that printed paper is like poison for some delicate parts of our body."

What Joseph Gayetty offers is toilet paper sold in loose sheets, pre-soaked with Aloe.

And, interesting little thing, Joseph Gayetty had his name watermarked on each of the sheets.

The Scott brothers behind toilet paper

As for the modern paper we know, that is to say the rolls of tear-off sheets, it was popularized in the West by two brothers, Clarence and Irvin Scott, in the early 1890s. And it was very successful, everything right now.

We then entered a new age of toilets: toilets connected to the plumbing, in which we could not throw newspapers because it blocked the pipes.

On the other hand, one could very well throw away the paper of the Scott brothers. 

Since then, there have been some innovations.

The softness, the triple thickness, the fragrance.

But one of the ones I like the most is recycled toilet paper.

Because I am like that, I like nature.

There are plenty of big brands that make it.

But there is one that I like more than the others, it's Popee.

It is a French PQ startup that manufactures its toilet paper only with paper from the trash cans of Normandy and Breton companies.

So in addition to the pleasure of hygiene, there is that of telling yourself that you do your business with old balance sheets of SMEs in Calvados.

And that pleases me ".