Paris rubbish collectors have released a video to sound the alarm over a plague of rats that have invaded the banks of the Seine, claiming that the rodents now pose a physical threat to dustmen.

Shot last month between the tourist landmark of the Musée d’Orsay and the Pont Royal, the film shows a huge group of the large vermin desperately trying to escape from a deep plastic municipal rubbish bin.

The dustman who shot the film, known only as David, can be heard shouting: “Look in the bin, there are a million rats!”

He said colleagues were so overwhelmed, they simply shut the bin and “crushed” all the rats in their garbage truck.

The “horror” scene was, according to the municipal collector, far from a one-off.

“For the past year, we’ve seen a proliferation of rats in all the arrondissements on the banks of the Seine,” the dustman told Le Parisien, the French capital’s daily newspaper. He said the situation was no longer tenable “both for Parisians and tourists who come to visit the most beautiful city in the world”.

The rats are becoming increasingly emboldened and are highly aggressive, he added. “One colleague told me that a rat jumped at his throat and another at his arm,” he told the paper. “To my knowledge, there have been no bites for now but we don’t want to wait until drama strikes.”