Sometime around 1710, a furniture maker working for the French royal family built a porcelain basin set into a wooden frame. You straddled it. The French called it a bidet — their word for a pony — because of the position you had to adopt.
His name was probably Christophe des Rosiers. We say probably because historians have never reached consensus on who built the first one, and some argue the practice existed well before anyone wrote it down. What is documented is that a bidet was installed for the French royal family in 1710, and that the aristocracy took to it immediately.
Three hundred years later, roughly seven in ten people on earth clean themselves with water. And most of northern Europe — the continent where the thing was invented — still reaches for paper.
That gap is the most interesting fact in this entire subject. It is not a story about technology. Every piece of technology involved has existed for generations. It is a story about how habits get fixed in place, and what it takes to move them.
The map does not match the story
If the bidet spread outward from France in ever-widening circles, you would expect adoption to fade with distance. It does not.
Italy is the only country in the world where more than three quarters of bathrooms have a bidet. Portugal and Spain adopted it widely. So did much of the Arab world, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Brazil — places the French basin never reached, and which arrived at water through their own traditions entirely.
Meanwhile France itself drifted away from it. Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and Ireland largely never started.
Two countries that share a border, a climate and an economic bracket can sit on opposite sides of this line. Whatever explains it, it is not income, and it is not access to plumbing.
What Italy did differently
Italy is the one case where we can point to a specific mechanism rather than a cultural mood.
On 5 July 1975, an Italian Ministerial Decree set out the minimum fixtures for a home. Article 7 requires that in every dwelling, at least one bathroom must have a toilet, a bidet, a bathtub or shower, and a sink. The decree goes further and specifies spacing: the bidet must sit at least 20 cm from the toilet and the bath, and at least 10 cm from the sink.
This is not decorative regulation. In Italy, a home needs a Certificato di Agibilità — a certificate confirming it is fit to occupy — and the fixture list is part of what the certificate depends on. No bidet, no certificate. No certificate, and selling the property becomes difficult.
The custom came first and made the law possible. But the law is why virtually every Italian bathroom built in the last fifty years has one, and why renovations of older bathrooms usually add one.
It is worth sitting with that. A habit that most of Europe considers a matter of personal preference was, in one country, treated as a building standard — like a smoke alarm or a handrail.
Why the north did not follow
Here the honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, and we would rather say so than invent a tidy explanation.
The most repeated theory is that American and British soldiers in the Second World War first encountered bidets in European brothels, and carried home an association with vice rather than hygiene. It is plausible, it is widely cited, and as far as we can tell it has never been properly evidenced. Treat it as folklore that may contain some truth.
Two duller explanations probably do more work.
The first is plumbing economics. Post-war housing in northern Europe and North America was built fast and to a standard that did not include a second fixture. Once a bathroom is built without space or pipework for a bidet, adding one later is a renovation, not a purchase. The habit was locked out by floor plans.
The second is that nobody talks about it. Anal hygiene is the last domestic subject that remains genuinely awkward in public. Habits that cannot be discussed cannot be compared, and habits that cannot be compared do not change. A German family and an Italian family can be friends for twenty years and never once establish that they do this differently.
What the habit costs
This is the part where most articles on this subject reach for dramatic figures. We are going to be careful instead, because the numbers in circulation vary wildly and a lot of them trace back to sources that cannot be checked.
Here is what is reasonably well established.
Estimates put the average person in the United States, Canada and western Europe at somewhere between 15 and 25 kg of toilet paper per year. That is a wide band, and the width is honest — national consumption is measured differently in different places.
Tissue products represent roughly 10 per cent of global paper production, according to the Environmental Paper Network, and the category is growing.
The European Environmental Bureau notes that turning wood into paper is a polluting process, and that fragrances added to toilet paper introduce chemicals that serve no hygienic purpose.
And there is the point that gets lost most often: making paper consumes water too. The comparison is not "water versus no water." It is water used once, at the point of use, against water used upstream in pulping, bleaching and manufacturing — plus the fibre, the transport and the packaging.
We are not going to tell you the exact ratio, because we have not measured it ourselves and we do not think you should trust anyone who quotes it to two decimal places.
The objection that was always real
For three centuries, the argument against water had a solid core, and it was not squeamishness.
A bidet is a second ceramic fixture. It needs floor space and plumbing. A hygienic hand shower — standard in Brazil, Portugal and much of Asia since the 1960s — needs a water line beside the toilet. A smart toilet seat, which Japan normalised after TOTO launched the Washlet in 1980, needs a power socket in a bathroom that may not have one, and costs more than most people will spend on a bathroom fitting.
Every one of those solutions asks the same thing: change the building.
That is a genuine obstacle, and it explains far more of the map than any theory about soldiers. You cannot adopt a habit that requires you to renovate, and you certainly cannot take it with you when you travel to a country that never adopted it either.
That is the objection that stopped being true recently. A portable device that holds its own water and runs on a battery asks nothing of the building. It fits in a bag. It crosses a border.
We built one. We would rather you understood the three hundred years first.
A note on our numbers
Spray Up publishes figures with their sources, labels estimates as estimates, and does not claim measured results we do not have.
The impact calculator on our site is a model, not a measurement, and it says so on the page. When we have verified data on paper reduction, we will publish the methodology alongside it. Until then, the historical record above is the strongest argument we have — and we think it is strong enough.
Spray Up is a non-profit association working to reduce toilet paper consumption through water-based hygiene.
Sources
- Ministerial Decree of 5 July 1975 (Italy), Article 7 — minimum sanitary fixtures for dwellings
- Euronews, The average European uses 20kg toilet paper a year, February 2025 — consumption band of 15–25 kg
- Environmental Paper Network — tissue as a share of global paper production
- European Environmental Bureau — environmental profile of paper manufacturing
- World Toilet Organization — 1710 attribution and the des Rosiers account
- TOTO — launch of the Washlet G Series, 1980
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