Inland navigation

Like maritime navigation, fluvial or inland navigation developed very early on on rivers and remained the predominant means of transporting goods in France until the development of the rail network in the 19th century, and then of the road network in the second half of the 20th century.

At the beginning of our era, the Greek geographer Strabo, a contemporary of Caesar, wrote about the rivers of Gaul: "In general, these rivers flow in plains or along hills whose gentle slope in no way hinders navigation. It's true that carts had to be used for part of the journey, but this was over a small area and all on plains, where the road offered no difficulty, and most of the journey was made by the rivers, which were alternately ascended and descended. From this point of view, the Rhône beats all other rivers...".

During the Middle Ages, the installation of mills on watercourses necessitated the provision of openings to allow navigation, which led to divergent interests between bargemen and mill owners, until the appearance of inclined planes in the 12th century in the lowlands of Flanders, and then of the Bruges lock, introduced much later in France by Leonardo da Vinci in the 16th century to design the Ourcq canal, intended to bring the waters of the Ourcq and Marne rivers to Paris, gradually made it possible to extend navigable waterways to canals, notably with the invention of Adam de Craponne's canal à bief de partage in 1525.

In 1604, Sully commissioned the construction of the Briare canal, designed to link the Seine to the Loire via the Loing valley.

At the time, floating was highly developed, as rivers made it easy to bring wood down to the Paris region. The Canal du Languedoc or Canal des Deux Mers, which owed much to the tenacity of Riquet , was followed in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Canal d'Orléans, then the Canal de Picardie, and in Burgundy by the three canals of Charolais, Burgundy and Franche-Comté. Throughout the 19th century, the river network expanded, culminating in the reign of Louis-Philippe, when 2,000 km of canals were put into service, thanks in particular to Charles-Antoine-François Poirée's...