A ‘Taste’ of Voltaire

Roseanne Silverwood has just received an MA in Translation (French and Spanish) from the University of Bristol (with distinction). Her dissertation project was to translate Voltaire’s article Goût from Questions sur l’Encyclopédie into English. She studied Modern Languages as an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford.

To say I was daunted is probably an understatement. Who was I to translate a previously untranslated text of Voltaire’s from French to English? Voltaire, the highly esteemed eighteenth-century French writer who still tops bestseller charts in France today.  However, for some reason this translation project piqued my attention and I knew, despite the hard work that it would entail, that I did not want to turn down the opportunity to be part of something that had the potential to be bigger than just my own academic studies.

From Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1771), vol.6.

I first spoke to Adrienne Mason, the intermediary between the Voltaire Foundation and myself, in late 2018 to find out more about how the collaboration between the University of Bristol and the Voltaire Foundation would work. However, it was early 2019 before I really embarked upon the project of translating Voltaire’s article Goût from Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, which formed the basis of my Master’s dissertation. After two years of studying for my MA Translation (part-time) as a distance learner at the University of Bristol, whilst working full-time in a completely different industry, I knew that taking on the translation of Goût (p.280-98) was going to be an enormous challenge, not just because I would be continuing to work full-time during the week, but also because I was planning a wedding at the same time!

What surprised me the most was how accessible Voltaire’s writing was to me as a modern-day reader, especially given that I am not a native French speaker. As part of the commission I was also tasked with translating the scholarly peritext (i.e. the footnotes to the article Goût in Volume 42A of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire), and I have to admit that I enjoyed translating Voltaire’s own writing much more than the critical annotations that accompanied his article. I expect this is because Voltaire’s writing was more free-flowing and abstract, whereas the academic peritext was factual and punctuated with constant references and quotations from other authors, which presented many challenges in translation.

I spent much of my spare time in spring and summer that year locked away in my study working through all twenty pages of the commission. If I could at least do a first draft of one page whenever I had a spare day at the weekend, I had a chance of getting my dissertation project completed by the September deadline. I was impressed that, equipped with my student library privileges, there were so many resources that I could access online, even more, I think, than when I was completing my undergraduate degree between 2007 and 2011.

Title page of Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1771), vol.6.

One of the hardest aspects of this translation was where Voltaire, or the author of the peritextual material, quoted from different authors in languages other than English. In these cases, I had to first search for an existing translation of the quotation, and only if this did not exist could I translate the fragment myself. Therefore, I found myself trawling through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts online for this purpose, and was truly amazed at what was available at the click of a button. As I write this blog post, most of the world is under some form of lockdown due to Covid-19, and this certainly brings to the forefront the importance of initiatives such as the Voltaire Lab – where my translation can now be consulted – a ‘virtual space for cutting-edge research and experimentation on Voltaire’, so that scholarship can still flourish in the modern day despite the challenges that could be posed by distance learning, or even global pandemics.

For me personally, I have always loved studying languages and hope to make a career as a translator one day, so during this project it was interesting to consider translation as a profession, and in particular how it can be perceived as an undervalued discipline. This, in turn, can mean that academic texts in other languages, such as the critical annotations to Voltaire’s article, or even the essay Goût itself if considered as a social science text, are often overlooked because they are not originally written in the academic lingua franca, English. Furthermore, if a spotlight can reveal the important role that translations can play in advancing scholarship about a writer such as Voltaire, perhaps the discipline of translation as a whole could be elevated to greater heights. After all, as I well know, it is an academically demanding and time-consuming process.

Fortunately, I managed to complete my dissertation project by the deadline so that I could go and celebrate my own hen party guilt-free the following weekend. I got married a month later, and once the excitement of the wedding had subsided I was delighted to get the fantastic news that my dissertation had received a mark of 82%, which tipped me over into a distinction for my Master’s grade overall. I cannot thank my supervisor, Clare Siviter, Adrienne Mason and the Voltaire Foundation enough for the opportunity to participate in such a pioneering research project that highlights the importance of digitisation in academia and the fruits that can be borne by collaboration between different universities.

– Roseanne Silverwood

Virtue in crisis: Enlightenment perspectives

With frightening speed, COVID-19 has brought about a global crisis. In western democracies the phenomenon was first tracked and measured from a distance, then discovered to be not just ‘their’ problem, but ‘ours’ too. In the process, common behaviours were subjected to new scrutiny; with the virus, moral sentiment proliferated. Formerly anodyne acts were proclaimed to be vices, twinned with equal and opposite virtues. Politicians devised lists of what may and may not be done, and other lists, of what should and should not be done. These lists concerning ‘should’ and ‘should not’ are in fact a plea for civic virtue: if the majority are sufficiently virtuous, the nation will be healed. Striking a utilitarian note, certain commentators began to argue that the good of some must now be sacrificed for the good of all, and current lives, for future prosperity.

Thanks to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virtue and Truth prevent Human Pride from resisting the efforts of Nature to allow children to live a happy life. Engraving by G. Vidal after Ch. Monnet. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

In the Enlightenment era, natural disasters, contagions, and wars also fed debates about civic (and other) virtues. Then as now, these were embedded in larger discussions of morality, the common good, and the relation between individual citizens and the polity. For instance, we may recall an exchange that took place between Rousseau and Voltaire, following the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Voltaire wrote a poem expressing rage against Optimists who might still argue, with Alexander Pope, that ‘partial evil’ is ‘universal good’. In the case of the Lisbon earthquake, ‘partial evil’ would consist in many thousands of deaths. Yet according to Voltaire’s Optimists (whom he addresses as ‘wretched mathematicians of human suffering’), universal good would be sustained by those very deaths. After all, children could inherit their parents’ wealth, stone masons find employment, and animals feast on rotting corpses. In a letter to Voltaire, Rousseau objected that the disastrous effect of the earthquake was not tied to some unfathomable cosmic riddle. It was, rather, the consequence of the European tendency to live in large cities, where so many are exposed at once to a single danger; and neither God nor nature, but humanity was responsible for this. More generally, as in his celebrated Second Discourse, Rousseau argues that, as it pursues what (other) philosophes see as progress, civilisation reaps what it sows.

If we can hear echoes of such debates in contemporary life, it is because we are, in important respects, heirs of the Enlightenment. Many of us think about virtue and the common good in an entirely secular way; our moral duties are owed, we feel, not to God, but to our fellow citizens. It makes sense to describe this as a ‘post-Enlightenment’ view. After all, it counted as a bold step when, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle wrote that a society of atheists might be capable of virtue.

But by the mid-eighteenth century, secularisation, linked by the historian Paul Hazard to a ‘crisis of the European mind’, had gained extensive ground. In France, atheistic thinkers suggested that virtuous behaviour should be understood as whatever contributes to the common good in this, the only life we have. Diderot and the materialist coterie of the baron d’Holbach, for instance, tended towards this view. But Voltaire and Rousseau, who abhorred atheism, were secularisers, too; for they rejected ecclesiastical explanations of the Lisbon earthquake (or anything else). In brief, secularisation in France was in the first instance a case of pushing back against the mundane influence of the Church and its theology. We should be wary, however, of casting a few major writers as the isolated prophets of secular modernity. If there was a crisis of the European mind, it was caused by a nexus of cultural, social and historical forces which far exceeded the ‘Republic of Letters’.

James Fowler is the co-editor of the March volume in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, Enlightenment Virtue, 1680-1794, in which contributors analyse complex and shifting relations between religious and civic virtue during the Age of Enlightenment.

During the Revolution, various factions laid claim to civic virtue. Speaking for the Montagnards, Robespierre asserted, not only that virtue was the essence of the (French) Republic, but that Terror could be an ‘Emanation of virtue’. He also echoed those, including Rousseau, who (had) admired the ‘male’ virtues of Sparta, or other ancient republics. Despite women’s participation in the Revolution, the virtues prescribed by the Terror were gendered ones; indeed, what was virtue in a man might be vice in a woman. The Moniteur universel of 17 November 1793 held up three recently executed women as examples of vice: Marie Antoinette; ‘la femme Roland’ (married to the Girondin Jean Roland); and Olympe de Gouges (author of a Declaration of the Rights of Woman). The former queen was a ‘bad mother’ and ‘debauched wife’; as for the others, they had in different ways ‘forgotten the virtues of their sex’. For a brief period, at least, it must have seemed that the state did not distinguish between private, public, and gendered virtue, nor between unvirtuous thoughts and crimes against the nation. Public executions became, as never before, virtue’s instrument.

In moments of national crisis, we tend to inquire, earnestly and urgently, what should count as civic virtue. If only half-consciously, we may turn to notions of the common good, especially utilitarian ones, which we have inherited from the Enlightenment era. Certainly, that period is an excellent place to start if we wish to put the current debate into historical perspective.

– Dr James Fowler, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, London

This post is reblogged from Liverpool University Press.

In memoriam Frank A. Kafker (1931-2020)

Frank A. Kafker (1931-2020). Picture courtesy of the Kafker family.

The Voltaire Foundation learned with regret last week of the passing of Professor Frank Arthur Kafker on April 1 due to complications arising from Parkinson’s disease. Kafker figured among the luminaries of eighteenth-century studies, specializing in the French Enlightenment, the Revolution, and the relationship between the two.

Born in Brooklyn to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants during the Depression and coming of age just after the Second World War, Kafker entered adulthood and academic life at a time of expansion of the American academy and professoriate, and he became a historian in the 1950s and early 60s during a tremendously fertile moment for the discipline, when intellectual and social history, and French studies, came to the fore. Across the four decades of his career, he made signal contributions to the broad renewal of historiography of the French Enlightenment and French Revolution in post-War American research universities.  He became a pioneer in his pursuit of manuscript sources, his deployment of social historical methods, and his abiding interest in humanistic inquiry as a collaborative endeavor.

Educated in New York City public schools in the 1940s, he met in high school Serena who became his wife, intellectual collaborator, co-author, and lifelong companion. Kafker studied History at Columbia University (BA, 1953; MA, 1954), where he first discovered the French Enlightenment and French Revolution in a course taught by Ralph Bowen. Bowen at the time was writing on Denis Diderot, whose manuscripts had recently been unearthed by Herbert Dieckmann. Bowen encouraged Kafker to pursue his curiosity about the relationship of the Enlightenment to the Revolution and recommended that he pursue a doctorate under the direction of Jacques Barzun, then the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia.

Benefitting from the then newly established Fulbright grant program, Kafker and Serena (who served as his research partner and became his co-author, before launching her own scholarly career) pursued a year of research in provincial archives, documenting the identities, backgrounds, social origins and political orientations of 139 of the contributors to the Encyclopédie.  He completed his doctorate in 1961 for a dissertation entitled ‘The Encyclopedists and the French Revolution’, and acquired teaching experience at a community college in upstate New York, before taking up a position at the University of Cincinnati, where he served on the faculty for 36 years, retiring as Professor of European History in 1998.

Kafker was a thoughtful and careful editor of historical scholarship. He co-edited two widely influential compendia, The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations (with James Laux and Darlene Gay Levy, first published in 1976 followed by four subsequent editions, the latest in 2002), and Napoleon and His Times (1989, with James Laux). He also served as editor of the journal French Historical Studies (1985-1992).

Kafker’s most cited and intellectually ambitious works were his books on the encyclopédistes and the publication of encyclopedias in the age of Enlightenment. He published five books on these topics with the Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Two were studies of the predecessors and successors to Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s great work, Notable encyclopedias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: nine predecessors of the Encyclopédie (1981), and Notable encyclopedias of the late eighteenth century: eleven successors of the Encyclopédie (1993). He also co-edited, with his colleague Jeff Loveland, and contributed to a volume on the first editions of another important encyclopedia, The Early Britannica: the growth of an outstanding encyclopedia (2009).

Certainly, though, his greatest intellectual contributions were two books that set forth the fruits of his years of archival research and sociological analysis on the contributors to the Encyclopédie, The Encyclopedists as individuals: a biographical dictionary of the authors of the Encyclopédie (1988) with Serena L. Kafker, and The Encyclopedists as a group: a collective bibliography of the authors of the Encyclopédie (1996). The former of these remains among the two most widely circulated books in the history of SVEC, and its capsule biographies are now available in direct proximity to the relevant articles on the ARTFL edition of the Encyclopédie.

The latter, in many ways the culmination of the original research query that launched his dissertation, remains an influential model of historical prosopography and the social history of ideas. His biographical and sociological approach, and the unmatched precision of his research, on the encyclopedists and their networks has found new use in digital humanities such as in the aforementioned ARTFL edition of the Encyclopédie and in Mapping the Republic of Letters, as seen in the article ‘The French Enlightenment network’. Melanie Conroy has discussed further the significance of Kafker’s findings for the study of Enlightenment social networks in two peer-reviewed blog posts, published on the Age of Revolutions website.

Beyond his own teaching and scholarship, Kafker also made important contributions to the scholarly community of eighteenth-century studies and French history. He was part of the trans-Atlantic efforts of the 1960s and 70s to establish new scholarly societies to study the Enlightenment in an international, interdisciplinary environment that would foreground the philosophes and their contribution. Accordingly, he was an active member over many years of the American, Scottish and International Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the Sociétés Diderot and Voltaire; the American Historical Association; and the Society for French Historical Studies.

Kafker is survived by Serena, his sons Scott and Roger Kafker, their wives, four grandsons, and a sister.

– Gregory Brown (Voltaire Foundation / University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Melanie Conroy (University of Memphis), Jeff Loveland (University of Cincinnati)

Introducing Tout d’Holbach

Have you ever used Tout Voltaire or the ARTFL Encyclopédie and thought: ‘Wow! This is so helpful!’? Have you ever planned on giving a Zoom talk on pandemics in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and realised that all you had to do to get your primary sources was to search the database for ‘peste’, ‘pestilent.*’, ‘épidémi.*’, nothing more? Or maybe you wanted to write an article on Voltaire and dodos? You looked up ‘dodo’ in Tout Voltaire, and it only took you about three seconds to realise that you had pushed your quest for originality a bit too far. Have you ever wished that something like Tout Voltaire existed also for other authors? Well, if you work on d’Holbach, we’ve got good news for you!

The ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago and the Voltaire Foundation are very pleased to announce the release of Tout d’Holbach, a database that brings together fully searchable transcriptions of the vast majority of d’Holbach’s works. (If at this point you cannot be bothered to read more and wish to start experimenting with the database right away, here is the link: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/tout-d-holbach.)

At the moment, Tout d’Holbach only includes d’Holbach’s original writings, defined as those considered to be ‘œuvres originales publiées isolément’ (‘original works published separately’) in Jeroom Vercruysse’s fundamental Bibliographie descriptive des imprimés du baron d’Holbach (1971; new ed. 2017) (The Essai sur les préjugés and the Tableau des saints are not there yet, but they will be soon! We promise!). Moving forward, full transcriptions of d’Holbach’s translations and editions, respectively marked as Ds and Fs in Vercruysse’s bibliography, will be added, making the database more worthy of its high-sounding name.  At the same time, we are also thinking about making Tout d’Holbach a bit less ‘d’Holbach’: adding to the database texts whose attribution to the Baron is highly controversial will put us, we hope, in a position to better understand the real contours of d’Holbach’s textual corpus, thus answering a question that has occupied scholars’ minds for more than two centuries.

Thanks to the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Voltaire Foundation is currently working on a born-digital critical edition of d’Holbach’s writings: Digital d’Holbach. Unlike Digital d’Holbach, Tout d’Holbach is not a critical edition: none of the texts is annotated, and the transcriptions, while broadly accurate, may contain occasional typos. Tout d’Holbach is a research tool, and one, we hope, that will prove invaluable to researchers collaborating on Digital d’Holbach as well as to scholars working on the European Enlightenment more broadly.

So, here is the link again for those of you who haven’t yet given in to temptation and already clicked on it: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/tout-d-holbach.

P.S. If you have some time to spare while you #stayathome and would like to contribute to the project by checking the transcription of a section of one of d’Holbach’s works, or if you would like to know more about Digital d’Holbach, please email Ruggero Sciuto at ruggero.sciuto@voltaire.ox.ac.uk.

– Ruggero Sciuto and Clovis Gladstone

Voltaire’s Louis XV, from bien-aimé to mal-aimé

The French victory at Fontenoy in 1745 provided Voltaire, newly appointed historiographe de France, with a welcome opportunity. Present with the French army on 11 May had been Louis XV himself, at his best on campaign and already nicknamed le bien-aimé. Voltaire had a distinct turn for flattery when it suited him. What could be more fitting than the composition of an account of the ‘campagnes du Roi’?

This is the context for the first half of what became Voltaire’s Précis du siècle de Louis XV (OCV, vol.29A). After Fontenoy Voltaire looked with the rest of France for a favourable and honourable peace, with French glory personified in the figure of the king. But the war dragged on until 1748, by which point Voltaire’s enthusiasm for reporting it had dwindled: ‘les détails en sont si ennuyeux’, as he said to Frederick II. It was not ideal subject matter for Europe’s most renowned poet and dramatist.

The second volume of the Précis, now published (OCV, vol.29B), completes the text, showing how what began as a celebration of the king’s campaigns transforms itself into a history of Voltaire’s time.

Accordingly, the succession of endless marches and manoeuvres, the clash and clang of victory and defeat, give way to a series of chapters featuring men whose deeds provide heroic highlights beyond the battlefield. What do Admiral George Anson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the naval adventurer Mahé de la Bourdonnais have in common? Not much, except that Voltaire bunches them together to fill out his account of the final years of a war in which he had lost interest. These characters – their literary function is as relevant as the historical examples they provide – are all instances of personal heroism and perseverance in the face of long odds.

The Shooting of Admiral Byng, on board the Monarque, 1757. (British Museum)

After the war Voltaire may have felt that he had finished with writing about conflict, but although he regarded the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) as a truce rather than a lasting peace, he did not anticipate the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756, over which he passes with comparative brevity. While the earlier war is spread across twenty-five chapters in the Précis, its sequel is compressed into just five (ch.31-35). The first of these centres on the execution of the British Admiral Byng, ‘pour encourager les autres’, followed by that of the Franco-Irish general Lally, condemned for his military failures in India. The struggle for Canada is reduced to a dispute over a few acres of snow. The struggle in Europe is reduced to a personal contest between Frederick II and the duc de Richelieu. War is no longer a realm of heroism, and it is painted in a harshly negative light. Louis XV is nowhere to be seen. Voltaire, settled into life as seigneur of Ferney, no longer had to try to flatter his king.

‘Thomas Arthur de Lally, condamné par arrêt du parlement de Paris d’avoir la tête tranchée en place de grève le 8 mai 1766’. (BnF/Gallica)

The later chapters – mostly written in the 1760s, soon after the events they describe – allow Voltaire to move beyond war. They reflect the preoccupations of the philosophe engagé that he was soon to become. Religious questions are ever-present: the problems surrounding the papal bull Unigenitus and the refusal of sacraments; the expulsion of the Jesuits from Bourbon Europe. The dangers of religious fanaticism are highlighted through chapters on Damiens’s attack on Louis XV, or the attempt on the life of the king of Portugal. Voltaire’s campaign for justice and tolerance comes to the fore in his strongly argued advocacy of judicial reform.

‘Le vrai portrait de Robert François Damiens, infâme parricide de Louis XV, le bien-aimé’. (BnF/Gallica)

These later chapters demonstrate the melding of Voltaire’s historical and philosophical concerns. The final chapter reviews the progress of l’esprit humain in Voltaire’s own time. His findings are mixed: despite some advances in certain areas, notably science, literature is in decline and can do no more than distract the reader, who would otherwise be ‘trop accablé de la contemplation des misères humaines’. As for the king, Voltaire almost blames him for bringing about his own death by sanctioning France’s failure to adopt the practice of smallpox inoculation. Louis le bien-aimé has by now become le mal-aimé.

Voltaire’s Précis du siècle de Louis XV tracks its author’s development as a philosophe, but also as a historian, analyst and commentator on his own time, making it both a summary account of the age of Louis XV and a reflection of Voltaire’s concerns over the last thirty-three years of his own career.

– Janet Godden and James Hanrahan

Leadership matters in the first days and weeks of an outbreak: lessons from the Great Plague of Marseille, 300 years later

It seems as though American society has all but ground to a halt: all sporting events postponed or canceled, Broadway shuttered, entire states closing schools and businesses, and issuing stay-at-home orders. While these tactics may seem extreme, the goal is to “flatten the curve”, or prevent local outbreaks of the COVID-19 from overwhelming our medical system and exacerbating a once localized crisis.

This year, we mark the tricentennial of an important event in the history of infectious disease, one that carries many lessons for us today as we assess the threat of the novel coronavirus in the United States, and debate the extent to which we must impose such social distancing and interrupt the daily routines of millions of Americans.

On May 25, 1720, a ship named the Grand Saint-Antoine, which had journeyed for nearly a year in the eastern Mediterranean, arrived back at the port of Marseille, France carrying bales of cotton, imported fine silks and other valuable goods destined for the foire de Beaucaire, one of the most important trade fairs in the Mediterranean. Unbeknownst to those on board and on land, it also carried the bacteria that causes plague. Within two years, as much as half the population of the port city had succumbed to the infection.

Eighteenth-century engraving of the Foire de Beaucaire. Musée de Nîmes.

The Great Plague of Provence, or Great Plague of Marseille, brought southern France to its knees, and led much of the rest of the world to impose strict measures to prevent its spread. Understanding how the outbreak was mismanaged in its earliest days reveals that human actions and inactions can turn what begins as a local outbreak into a rampant pandemic. The key lesson for us today: we must demand more from our leaders than we have received to date, and they must prioritize containing the pandemic over everything, including economic well-being.

About two months prior to the arrival of the Grand Saint-Antoine in Marseille, a passenger died of what appeared to be bubonic plague days after boarding the vessel at Tripoli. Soon thereafter, another seven or eight men, including the ship’s surgeon, are said to have died on the route from Tripoli to Livorno, where Captain Jean-Baptiste Chataud made an emergency stop before heading back to Marseille. In this time, another three likely perished from plague.

Even so, local Italian doctors inspected the ship and declared the illness a case of pestilential fever rather than plague. As a result, authorities in Livorno allowed the ship to depart for Marseille with a patente nette, or certificate of health, that declared it free from infection, and the ship’s captain – who was reportedly in a hurry to get back to Provence in time for the trade fair – was more than happy to depart.

Upon the vessel’s arrival in Marseille, the ship endured an unusually short quarantine – only a few days, rather than the full term of about six weeks – despite the deaths that took place on board. Jean-Baptiste Estelle, the city’s premier échevin, or municipal magistrate, who owned part of the ship and a large portion of its cargo, had used his influence to arrange for the premature unloading of his shipment into the city’s warehouses – already infected with the bacteria, Yersinia pestis – so that they could be sold soon thereafter at the trade fair.

Dramatic scenes of suffering along Marseille’s Cours Belsunce during the Great Plague of Provence. Vue du Cours pendant la peste de 1720, by Michel Serre (1721). Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille.

Meanwhile, however, the signs of plague were becoming unmistakable as it claimed more victims. Several porters who had reportedly handled the ship’s merchandise fell ill and perished within two to three days. At this time, a local surgeon was called to inspect the bodies and determine the cause of death. Only then was the ship redirected to the quarantine station on the island of Jarre. But it was too late – plague had arrived in Marseille.

And yet, despite people purportedly “dropping like flies” according to one local eyewitness, rather than undertaking emergency measures to contain the plague, officials instead launched a major and elaborate campaign of misinformation. Local authorities hired doctors (for a large sum of money) to diagnose the local distemper as merely a malignant, pestilential fever, and thus, not plague. The reason? Money and feckless leadership. At stake was both the reputation of the city’s leaders, and more importantly, the livelihood of this ancient port city, which by the 18th century had become a major commercial capital.

Another representation of the plague in Marseille by Michel Serre. It depicts the city’s hôtel de ville with scenes of death and dying in the foreground. Vue de l’hôtel de Ville de Marseille pendant la peste (1721). Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille.

Amidst rumors throughout Europe, and fearing the consequences that a plague epidemic could have on Marseillais commerce, the city’s leaders and the Bureau of Health sent letters in July 1720 to the Regent in Paris, as well as to health officers in ports all over Europe, stating that local authorities had managed to contain the contagion. But they hadn’t. A full two months after the beginning of the outbreak, when plague in Provence could no longer be refuted, French authorities finally suspended all commerce out of Marseille, quarantined the city (and later the entire region), and put a number of measures in place to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

Unfortunately, however, thanks in part to the lies of local officials, it was too late. The epidemic had already begun to spread throughout the region of Provence, where it ultimately took as many as 126,000 lives.

In those first crucial weeks after the start of the outbreak, Marseillais authorities prioritized economic interests over public health. As a result, what began as a few dead aboard a ship became a virulent epidemic that raged in southeastern France for two years.

Such negligent misdeeds are all too familiar to us today. The first several weeks of the current health crisis saw the President of the United States, and his backers in the conservative media, refer to the novel coronavirus as a hoax, part of a conspiracy to destroy his presidency. Much like Marseille’s officials in 1720, the current administration claimed, incorrectly, that the virus has been contained. The president has also wrongly insisted that sick people should go to work, and that “anyone who needs a test gets a test.”

In an effort to downplay the pandemic, he ignored the advice of the CDC that the elderly avoid large crowds and long trips. And on March 11, his Oval Office speech – key parts of which his administration later scrambled to clarify – all but proved to the American people, and the world, that the president cannot be trusted to sensibly and effectively manage the current crisis.

Much as in 1720, the administration’s failure to act prudently in the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak has resulted in an emergency that is now more difficult to predict, to track, and to contain.

Not for the first time, we are witnessing a breakdown of institutions that we would otherwise trust in times of crisis. Inept leadership and a campaign of misinformation helped turn yet another disease outbreak into a full-blown emergency.

In times of public health crises, and especially in those crucial early days of a new outbreak when concentrated, steadfast measures are essential, the quality of leadership matters.

– Cindy Ermus

Cindy Ermus is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and executive editor for the online journal, Age of Revolutions. She is currently completing a book on the Great Plague of Provence. Follow her on Twitter @CindyErmus.

A version of this article first appeared in The Washington Post under the title, “The danger of prioritizing politics and economics during the coronavirus outbreak: Three hundred years later, the lessons of the Great Plague of Provence are sounding an alarm.”