Plague and its metaphors in Early Modern France

Representations

Volumn 53, Issue , 1996, Pages 97-127

  Jones, Colin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0346261247     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.1996.53.1.99p0319n     Document Type: Review

References (138)

1. Jacques Roland, Antiloiminie, ou Contre-peste, oeuvre chirurgicale qui traite des moyens de préserver et de guarir chacun de la maladie pestilentieuse (Rouen, 1630), 16-18. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French are my own.
2. Pierre Gabriel, Le Proselite charitable, ou Petit discours de la peste (Tübingen, 1666), 22 - a particularly vivid description of plague symptoms.
3. Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: La vie, la mort, la foi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981), 1:468.
4. Guillaume Potel, Traité de la peste advenue en cette ville de Paris, les années 1596 et 1597 et années 1606 et 1607, comme aussi en l'année 1619 (Paris, 1623), 123.
5. Isaac Quatroux, Traité de la peste (Paris, 1671), 2
6. (cited in Andrew Wear, "Popularised Ideas of Health and Illness in Seventeenth-Century France," Seventeenth-Century French Studies 8 [1986]: 239).
7. Contemporary accounts stress the universal, quasi-democratic character of the plague - but, paradoxically, often also signal the greater vulnerability of the poor to the disease. See, for example, Potel, Traité de la peste advenue en cette ville de Paris, 60-61;
8. Vincent Robin, Advis sur la peste recognue en quelque endroit de la Bourgogne (Dijon, 1628), 33.
9. On this theme, cf. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).
10. Roland, Antiloiminie, 6.
11. Raymond Besard, Discours de la peste (Dôle, Fr., 1630), 13.
12. This is cogently illuminated in A.M. Brenot, "La Peste soit des Huguenots: Etude d'une logique d'exécration au XVIe siècle," in Histoire économie et société (Paris, 1992), which could be read alongside the present study to show how the metaphors used to describe plague can be used connotatively beyond the circumstances of an epidemic outbreak.
13. This is strongly argued in Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society (Baltimore, 1989).
14. See too the helpful discussion by Robert Jütte, "The Social Construction of Illness in the Early Modern Period," in J. Lachmund and G. Stollberg, eds., The Social Construction of Illness: Illness and Medical Knowledge in Past and Present (Stuttgart, 1992).
15. The classic work on plague in western Europe is Jean-Noël Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975-76).
16. Specifically on France, see two useful syntheses: Monique Lucenet, Les Grandes pestes en France (Paris, 1985);
17. and Françoise Hildesheimer, La Terreur et la pitié: L'ancien régime à l'épreuve de la peste (Paris, 1990).
18. For the demographic context generally, cf. Jacques Dupâquier, ed., Histoire de la population française, vol. 2, De la Renaissance à 1789 (Paris, 1988).
19. The materials for localities affected by France cited by Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste 1:362-72 and 377-88, have been regrouped into five-year periods for ease of comparison. It need not be emphasized that, reliant as they are on the presence and survival of archival sources, these figures are extremely crude, especially in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
20. The last plague in Scotland was in the 1640s, in England in 1665, in Spain in the 1690s, in the Low Countries and central Europe in the 1710s, in Italy (at Messina) in 1743, in Russia in the 1810s. Cf. Michael Flinn, "Plague in Europe and the Mediterranean Countries," Journal of European Economic History 8, no. 1 (1979): 138.
21. For the 1660s in particular, see Jacques Revel, "Autour d'une peste ancienne: la peste de 1666-70," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 17, no. 4 (1970);
22. and Andrew Trout, "The Municipality of Paris Confronts the Plague of 1668," Medical History 17 (1973).
23. For this general picture, see, for example, Lucenet, Les Grandes pestes, esp. 161-62.
24. Cf. Besard, Discours de la peste, 31.
25. See also Ann Carmichael, "Contagion Theory and Practice in Fifteenth-Century Milan," Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1991): 231.
26. I call "pathosystem" the pathocénose discussed in M. D. Grmek, "Préliminaires d'une étude historique des maladies," Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 24, no. 6 (1969).
27. For further discussion of the term, see Colin Jones and Laurence Brockliss, The Medical World of Early Modern France (forthcoming).
28. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "A Concept: The Unification of the Globe by Disease (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)," in his The Mind and Method of the Historian (Brighton, Eng., 1981);
29. and Vivian Nutton, "Pieter van Foreest and the Plagues of Europe: Some Observations on the Observationes," in H. L. Houtzager, ed., Pieter van Foreest: Een Hollands medicus in de zestiende eeue (Amsterdam, 1989).
30. Helpful too is James Riley, Sickness, Recovery, and Death: A History and Forecast of Ill Health (London, 1989).
31. Croix, La Bretagne, 254.
32. François Lebrun, "Les Crises démographiques en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles," Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 35, no. 2 (1980): 210.
33. and, as a dreadful warning of where such an approach might lead, see Elizabeth Badinter, The Myth of Motherhood (London, 1981),
34. on which cf. the sane remarks in Stephen Wilson, "The Myth of Motherhood a Myth: The Historical View of European Child-Rearing," Social History 9, no. 2 (1984).
35. Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (Paris, 1960);
36. and F. Lebrun, Les Hommes et la mort en Anjou (Paris, 1971).
37. See too Jean Delumeau, La Peur en occident (XIIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1978).
38. For quarantine, see F. Hildesheimer, Le Bureau de santé de Marseille (Marseilles, 1980);
39. and Daniel Panzac, Quarantaines et lazarets: L'Europe de la peste d'orient (XVIIe-XXe siècles) (Aix-en-Provence, 1986).
40. Works on Early Modern Europe that are useful for comparative purposes include James Amelang, ed., A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelonan Tanner Miguel Parets, 1651 (Paris, 1991);
41. B. Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes épidémies dans le nord de l'Espagne à la fin du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1969);
42. A. Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 1986);
43. Ann Carmichael, "Plague Legislation in the Italian Renaissance," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57 (1983);
44. a whole raft of microanalyses by Carlo Cipolla, the most useful from the point of view of the present study being his Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Madison, 1981);
45. Richard Palmer, "The Church, Leprosy, and Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe," in The Church and Healing: Studies in Church History, vol. 19, ed. William Sheils (Oxford, 1982);
46. and Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985).
47. The titles of Giulia Calvi, "A Metaphor for Social Exchange: The Florentine Plague of 1630," Representations 13 (1986),
48. and Giulia Calvi, "The Florentine Plague of 1630-33: Social Behaviour and Symbolic Action," in N. Bulst and R. Delort, eds., Maladies et sociétés (XIIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1989) look promising from the point of view of the present paper, but they again concern social behavior rather than textual analysis.
49. There are some new approaches and fine scholarship too in Bulst and Delort's Maladies et sociétés: see esp. N. Bulst, "Krankheit und Gesellschaft in der Vormoderne: Das Beispiel der Pest," and John Henderson, "Epidemics in Renaissance Florence: Medical Theory and Government Response";
50. and Paul Slack and Terence Ranger, eds., Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge, 1992).
51. Slack, The Impact of Plague, 24 (referring to texts before the mid-seventeenth century).
52. Chapter 2 of Slack's work, "Attitudes and Actions," covers for England some of the ground here dealt with for France, though with evident differences of emphasis and approach. See too Paul Slack's fine essay, "Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England," in Charles Webster, ed., Health, Medicine, and Mortality in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1979).
53. As regards the genre in continental Europe, it is noticeable that in David Steel, "Plague Writing from Boccaccio to Camus," Journal of European Studies 11, no. 2 (1981), for example, no mention is made of the lesser works that are the subject of the present paper, the author preferring to stay on the cultural high ground.
54. Susan Sontag's well-known dissection, in her Illness as Metaphor (New York, 1977), of the demeaning contemporary languages of cancer is taken further,
55. and given a more analytical edge, in her AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York, 1989) - from which the present paper derives its title and part of its inspiration.
56. For a discussion of Sontag, see Derek Duncan, "AIDS No Narration: Writing beyond Gender," in Sally Ledger, Josephine McDonagh, and Jane Spencer, eds., Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (New York, 1994);
57. and David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (forthcoming).
58. Although there are some interesting analyses of single treatises - see, for example, P. Borghi, Antidoti contro la peste a Milano (Milan, 1990) - the only author who seems to take seriously the problem of genre in utilizing plague treatises as sources for social history is Lawrence Conrad,
59. notably in his "Arabic Plague Chronologies and Treatises: Social and Historical Factors in the Formation of a Literary Genre," Studia islamica 54 (1981),
60. and then again in his "Epidemic Disease in Formal and Popular Thought in Early Islamic Society," in Slack and Ranger, Epidemics and Ideas. On the question of literary influence, note concern on this score expressed by Slack in his introduction to Epidemics and Ideas, notably 9-10.
61. Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste, 2:196-413;
62. Bibliothèque nationale, Catalogue des sciences médicales (Paris, 1868). Thèse sources contain a high concentration of texts with a medical orientation. However, there are probably other sources of a religious (e.g., sermons) or administrative sort that could be brought to complement these materials.
63. On the period ending in 1500, three studies that chime with the orientation of the present papers are D. W. Singer, "Some Plague Tractates (14th-15th Centuries)," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 9-10 (1916-17);
64. K. Sudhoff, "Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des 'Schwartzen Todes,' 1348," Archiv f. Geschichte der Medizin, 2-17 (1909-25);
65. and M. Chase, "Fevers, Poisons, and Apostemes: Authority and Experience in Montpellier Plague Treatises," in P.O. Long, Science and Technology in the Middle Ages, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 441 (New York, 1985).
66. For the 1770s, see J. T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore, 1980);
67. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. L. Landa (Oxford, 1969). Written about the last great London plague of 1665, Defoe's work - as its date of publication (1722) suggests - was inspired by news from Marseilles. It is noticeable that European newspapers also devoted much time and attention to that outbreak.
68. Panzac, Quarantaines, 85.
69. See the statistical materials assembled in Henri-Jean Martin, Livres, pouvoirs, et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1969). A rough comparison with the plague-text figures above suggests that in his survey of medical publishing Martin did not include some of the brochure-style materials I have included in my statistics.
70. Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., Histoire de l'édition française, vol. 2, Le Livre triomphant, 1660-1830 (Paris, 1982), 95. The proportion of plague texts in Latin was 10.6% overall, but this average covered extreme oscillations: the figures were 73.3% in 1500-1549; 24.1% in 1550-99; 7.4% in 1600-1649; 9% in 1650-99; and nil in the eighteenth century.
71. For background to this tradition, see Andrew Russell, ed., The Town and State Physician from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Wolfenbüttel, Ger., 1981).
72. Guillaume L'Erisse ("capitaine de santé de la cité de Grenoble"), Méthode excellente et fort familière pour guérir la peste et se préserver d'icelle, (Vienna, 1628);
73. D'Entrechaus ("premier consul de Toulon pendant ladite année"), Relation de la peste dont la ville de Toulon fut affligée en 1721 (Paris, 1756).
74. Cf. ["Commissaires de la santé de Lyons"], L'Ordre public pour la ville de Lyon pendant la maladie contagieuse (Lyons, 1670).
75. Maurice de Toulon, Le Capucin charitable, enseignant la méthode pour remédier aux grandes misères que la peste a coutume de causer parmi les peuples (Paris, 1662).
76. Cf. on this point, the notions about the gendered circulation of responses to plague outbreak in Calvi, Histories of a Plague Year, passim.
77. For the medicina clericalis tradition, see D. W. Amundsen, "Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978).
78. For example, François de Courcelles, Traité de la peste, clair et très utile (Paris, 1596), 165-82.
79. Quatroux, Traité de la peste, 68 ff., for example: over seventy compositions cited.
80. For a general overview, see Elfrieda Dubois, "How to Face the Plague: Some Seventeenth-Century Practices," Newsletter of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Studies 2 (1980).
81. Nicolas de Nancel, Discours très-ample de la peste (Paris, 1581), unpaginated note to the reader at the end of the book.
82. L'Erisse, Méthode excellente, 28.
83. Anthoine Demery, Anthidote contre la peste (Paris, 1545), 5.
84. For the "femmelettes," see Gabriel, Le Proselite charitable, 28.
85. and Durand de Montlauseur, Manifeste de ce qui s'est passé en la maladie de la peste à Villefranche-de-Rouergue, avec quelques questions curieuses de cette mesme maladie (Toulouse, 1629).
86. For the term "medical penumbra," see Jones and Brockliss, The Medical World.
87. Cf., for physicians attacking surgeons for incompetence, J. Duret, Le Général et Souverain Remède contre la maladie pestilentieuse, nouvellement mise en lumière (Paris, 1623);
88. and Le Général et Souverain Remède contre la maladie pestilentieuse ["Nouvellement mis en lumière par un Médecin du Roi"] (Paris, 1623).
89. For surgeons attacking physicians, esp. for cowardice, see D'Entrechaus, Relation de la peste;
90. Cf. (especially in the light of the discussion on page 111), Fournier, L'Antiloimotechnie, 21: "The family father must attend to the conservation of the household as the magistrate may do for the city." This seems a quite different sense of the household than appeared in the "domestic" medical literature of the eighteenth century that was aimed at mothers.
91. Guillaume L'Hoste, Petit Traicté familier et utile pour se préserver de la peste, ensemble le moyen de guarir ceux qui en sont malades (Amiens, 1619), 6.
92. César Morin, Traité de la peste, divisé en trois parties. (Paris, 1602), 112.
93. Cf. Brian Pullan, "Plague and Perceptions of the Poor in Early Modern Italy," in Slack and Ranger, Epidemics and Ideas, 101-24, for a good discussion of this point in relation to the whole of Europe.
94. Maurice de Toulon, Le Capucin charitable, 63.
95. For the unifying importance of the body as a means of representing the safety and solidarities of the cosmos and the community, see esp. L. Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, 1975);
96. and Natalie Davis, "The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon," Past and Present 90 (1981).
97. Mervyn James, "Ritual, Drama, and the Social Body in Late Medieval English Towns," Past and Present 98 (1982), is particularly helpful in relating discussion of the metaphor of the body back to the work of cultural anthropologists. See too the work of Calvi, cited in note 27.
98. Jacques Le Goff, "Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages," in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980).
99. Etienne Ydeley, Des Secrets souverains et vrais remèdes contre la peste (Lyons, 1581), 12.
100. Pullan makes this point, though with reference to social behavior rather than plague texts, in "Plague and Perceptions of the Poor," 117. The symbolic transgression achieved in carnival is discussed in a literature that owes much to Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
101. See esp. Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975);
102. and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986).
103. For sex generally, cf. Carrière et al., Marseille: ville morte, 117-20;
104. From a bibliography that could be easily elongated, see especially Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (London, 1981);
105. Michel Vovelle, La Mort et l'occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris, 1983);
106. Michel Vovelle, Mourir autrefois: Les Attitudes devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1974);
107. Pierre Chaunu, Mourir à Paris(XVIe-XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1981);
108. Robert Favre, La Mort dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au siècle des Lumières (Lyons, 1978);
109. Roger Chartier, "Les Arts de mourir, 1450-1600," Annales:Economies, sociétés, civilisations 31, no. 1 (1976);
110. Daniel Roche, "'La Mémoire de la mort': Recherche sur la place des arts de mourir dans la librairie et la lecture en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles," Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 31, no. 1 (1976);
111. and John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes Towards Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981).
112. For the chrétien lecteur, see Arnaud Baric, Les Rares Secrets, ou, Remèdes incomparables, universels et particuliers, preservatifs et curatifs, contre la peste des hommes et des animaux (Toulouse, 1646), 4.
113. That the literature about a good death is essentially about how to lead a good life is skillfully related in Roche, "'La Mémoire de la mort.'" For the role of the Counter Reformation in producing a cadre of devout, zealous, and pastorally committed secular clergy, see J. Delumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire (New York, 1977).
114. For the magistrate as "père du peuple," see for example, Cottin, Traité de la peste fait en faveur de la ville de Laon, 80.
115. A helpful list of measures is itemized in Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste, 2:85-181.
116. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1979), 195-8. Foucault opposes "a whole literary fiction of the festival" implicit in plague outbreaks with "a political dream of the plague, which was its exact reverse" (197-8).
117. Cf. the remarks on these lines about the Merovingian period in Peregrine Hordern, "Disease, Dragons, and Saints: The Management of Epidemics in the Dark Ages," in Slack and Ranger, Epidemics and Ideas, 47-48.
118. Henri de Rochas, Discours très utile sur la maladie contagieuse de ce temps (Paris, 1619), 5.
119. P. Baux fils, Traité de la peste, ou l'on explique d'une manière nouvelle les principaux phénomenes de cette maladie (Toulouse, 1722), 61.
120. For Henri-Xavier Belsunce at Marseilles, see Carrière et al., Marseille: ville morte, 65, 100-103, 122.
121. For medical police, cf. George Rosen, From Medical Police to Social Medicine: Essays on the History of Health Care (New York, 1974);
122. [G. Wion], "Avertissement," in Traicté politique et médical touchant la préservation des villes qui sont dans l'appréhension de la peste (Douai, Fr., 1647).
123. On the growth of royal bureaucracy, see esp. R. Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624-61 (Oxford, 1978).
124. On the "Great Confinement," see esp. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'age classique (Paris, 1961), esp. 492 ff.;
125. and Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London, 1989), 40.
126. For the army, André Corvisier, L'Armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul: Le Soldat (Paris, 1964), 2:714.
127. For the limitations of absolutism, see the recent summary in Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London, 1992).
128. [Francois Chicoyneau and Jean Sénac], Traité des causes, des accidents et de la cure de la peste, avec un recueil d'observations (Paris, 1744).
129. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
130. Thomas W. Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989).
131. On the interface between plague histories and literature, cf. John Bender, "The City and the Rise of the Penitentiary: A Journal of the Plague Year" in his Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the
132. L. S. Mercier, Le Tableau de Paris, 12 vols. (Amsterdam, 1782-88), 10:261.
133. Nancel, Discours, 364.
134. [Chicoyneau and Sénac], Traité des causes, 117.
135. The Montpellier physicians' approach, with its emphasis on the pathogenic qualities of the environment, nicely exemplifies the neo-Hippocratic environmentalism recently studied by J. C. Riley, in his The Eighteenth-Century Campaign Against Disease (London, 1991).
136. For fuller details on Chicoyneau's career, see Louis Dulieu, "François Chicoyneau," in La Médecine à Paris du XIIIe au XXe siècle (Paris, 1984).
137. Cottin, "Avertissement," in Traité de la peste fait en faveur de la ville de Laon. These remarks, prefacing a work originally published in 1635, seem unmistakably to echo post-Marseilles opinion about medical professionalism.
138. Cf. Daniel Roche, "Talents, raison, sacrifice: L'Image du médecin des Lumières d'après les eloges de la Société royale de médecine (1776-89)," Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 32, no. 5 (1977).