‘Tout frémit au seul nom de cette maladie’: on strategies for (not) naming the plague, Marseille 1720

Abstract

The last major plague epidemic in France hit Marseille in 1720 and ultimately took the lives of over 120,000 people across the city and Provence. Yet to what degree did the act of naming the plague impact on its deadly dissemination in the city and beyond? This article seeks to answer that question. In the process, it contends that equivocations in designating the disease as ‘la peste’ revived fraught relations between the cosmopolitan sea port and central government in Versailles and Paris; and, more locally, they exposed how power was unevenly exercised economically, socially, and medically in the city. Such discursive choices cost thousands of lives. Naming the plague had a performative power beyond simple diagnosis; and medical and religious responses in particular to the Marseille epidemic suggest how the name of the plague was deployed (or withheld) to gain control over the narrative of the catastrophe.