How Historic are the Paris Floods?

This week my wife and I took the kids on holiday to Paris for the first time. In our heads we pictured beautiful, sunny, warm Paris full of outdoor activities, baguettes and warm croissants. But Mother Nature had other plans and dumped tremendous amounts of rain on us. We literally watched River Seine rise and by Wednesday morning, she had begun to breach the lower banks. On Friday the Louvre even closed and had to move many pieces of art from its basement.

As I arrived the airport Friday morning for my flight back to London, I downloaded historical rainfall data for Paris and put together this Tableau story. The news story have made the floods sound terrible, and they are, but I wanted to know how terrible the floods are in historical context.