Русский | English

Survive the epidemic: the experience of the Great Marseille Plague of 1720

Forrest Alan

The visitation of bubonic plague that struck the French Mediterranean port of Marseille in 1720 was the last to afflict western Europe, and it is as such that it has lived on in popular memory. Plague arrived in Marseille, as so often in the past, from the sea, aboard a cargo vessel arriving in the roads from the Levant, and it spread death and devastation both in the city itself and in the towns and villages of its hinterland. It killed nearly half the population, brought maritime commerce to a standstill, and led to a demographic catastrophe that would last for fifty years.  Fear and paranoia swept the city, and with it the sense that no one was safe, that anyone, rich and poor, nobleman and vagrant, risked being infected. The consequences and the reactions of the public are familiar to anyone who has lived through a pandemic, and it is instructive how little they have changed over the centuries: hospitals were overwhelmed, provisioning was threatened, the citizenry shunned their neighbours and avoided human contact, and those who could do so fled the city to seek safety elsewhere. The civic authorities had only time-honoured remedies to which to turn: quarantine, exclusion, fire, and the physical destruction of goods and property. And they faced the eternal quandary that still haunts us today: should they sacrifice lives to protect businesses and livelihoods, or risk seeing the commercial future of their city destroyed?

Keywords: history, France, Marseille, epidemic of 1720, plague
Link: Forrest A. Survive the epidemic: the experience of the Great Marseille Plague of 1720 // Annual of French Studies 2021. Т. 54: Epidemics in the history of France.М. P. 43-62.
References:

Aubert М. La médecine à Marseille au XIXe siècle // Provence Historique 43. 1993. Fascicule 172.

Avis au public. 3 September 1720.

Barnes D.S. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-century France. Berkeley, 1995.

Benedict С. Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-century China. Stanford, CA, 1996.

Butler Т. Plague history: Yersin’s discovery of the causative bacterium in 1894 enabled, in the subsequent century, scientific progress in understanding the disease and the development of treatments and vaccines // Clinical Microbiology and Infection. 2014. N 20. P. 202-209.

Carrière Ch., Coudurié M., Rebuffat F. Marseille, ville morte. La peste de 1720. Marseille, 1968.

Cohn Jr. S.K. Cultures of Plague. Medieval Thinking at the End of the Renaissance. New York, 2010.

Devaux С.А. Small oversights that led to the Great Plague of Marseille (1720–1723): Lessons from the past // Infection, Genetics and Evolution. 2013. N 14. P. 169-185.

Echenberg М. Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894-1901 // Journal of World History. 2002. N 13:2. P. 429-449.

Ermus С. The Plague of Provence: Early Advances in the Centralization of Crisis Management // Arcadia. 2015. N 9.

François É. La mortalité ou la mort? // Covid 19. Tour du monde / Éd. par S. Kuriyama et al. Paris, 2021. P. 88-89.

Frith J. The History of Plague – Part 1. The Three Great Pandemics // Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health. 2012. N 20:2. P. 1-16.

 Gouri М. Hypothesis about the transmission of plague aboard the Grand Saint Antoine // Plague: Epidemics and Societies. // Ed. by M. Signoli, D. Chevé, P. Adalian, G. Boëtsch, O. Dutour. Florence, 2007. P. 163-173.

Goury М. Un homme, un navire : la peste de 1720. Marseille, 2013.

Henderson J. Florence under Siege. Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City. New Haven, 2019.

Homet М.-С. Michel Serre et la peinture baroque en Provence, 1678-1733. Aix-en-Provence, 1987.

Honigsbaum М. A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics. Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830-1920. London, 2013.

Kudlick C.J. Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris. Berkeley, 1996.

Margadant T.W. Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution. Princeton NJ, 1992.

Mohr J.C., Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown. New York, 2005.

Panzac D. La peste à Smyrne au XVIIIe siècle // Annales : Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 1973. N 28. P. 1071-1093.

Pullan В. Plague and Perceptions of the Poor in Early Modern Italy // Epidemics and Ideas. / Ed. by T. Ranger, P. Slack. Cambridge, 1992. P. 101-123.

Relation historique de la Peste de Marseille en 1720. Cologne, 1721.

Roper L. When plague came to Wittenberg // London Review of Books. 2020. 6 July.

Roser М., Ritchie Н. HIV / AIDS. https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids.

Signoli М., Séguy I., Biraben J.-N., Dutour О., Belle Р. Historical Demography in the Context of an Epidemic: Plague in Provence in the Eighteenth Century // Population (English Edition). 2002. N 57:6. P. 829-854.

The Sun. 2020. 24 January.

What can History tell us about epidemics? // History Today. 2020. N 70:4.