RIQUET DE BONREPOS, PIERRE-PAUL, BARON

born 1604, Bziers, France died Oct. 1, 1680, Toulouse French public official and self-made engineer who constructed the epochal 150-mile (240-kilometre) Canal du Midi (also called the Languedoc Canal) connecting the Garonne River to the Aude River, thus linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The canal has been called the greatest civil engineering project in Europe from Roman times to the 19th century. A tax collector under Louis XIV, Riquet interested himself in the long-discussed problem of constructing a navigable waterway to provide a shortcut from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean. In 1662 he laid a proposal before Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister. Through Colbert's influence, Riquet obtained from the province of Languedoc loans that permitted him to carry out the work, which required many locks, a reservoir to provide water for the summit section during the dry season, and the famous Malpas Tunnel, where Riquet became the first engineer to use an explosive (black powder) for blasting rock. Worn out by his labours, he died while executing the final work on the harbour of Cette (modern Ste) at the Mediterranean terminus. The canal opened the following year (1681).