McCallam, D. (2024) ‘Tout frémit au seul nom de cette maladie’: on strategies for (not) naming the plague, Marseille 1720. Early Modern French Studies, 46 (2). pp. 214-228. ISSN 2056-3035
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | naming; plague; Marseille; discourse; disease; eighteenth century |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of Languages and Cultures (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 Mar 2025 15:33 |
Last Modified: | 05 Mar 2025 15:35 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Informa UK Limited |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/20563035.2024.2317156 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:223984 |
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