Plague Laws from the Municipal Archives of Paris

by Michael Sizer

Sixteenth-century Paris was the largest city in Europe, and one of the most cosmopolitan as well, a crossroads for trade, home to people rich and poor, and site of a sizeable and opulent royal court until it moved to Versailles in the seventeenth century. Paris municipal archives were kept from the fourteenth century by the Provost of Paris, the king’s main lieutenant overseeing the administration of the teeming capital. Many of the decrees and court rulings produced over the years in the governance of the city were compiled into registers named for their colorful bindings: the Livre Rouge, Livre Gris, etc. Over the centuries most of these registers were lost or destroyed, such that only a handful of them remain today. Fortunately, an eighteenth-century legist named Nicolas Delamare copied many otherwise lost items in his magisterial Traité de la Police (Treatise on Governance). In these records we see the efforts by administrators to run the complex affairs of a burgeoning and crowded city, and thereby we can gain rare access into the day-to-day lives of pre-modern Parisians otherwise mostly lost to history.

Below are two excerpts from Parisian municipal records, coming from instances of plague at both ends of the sixteenth century. The first is a municipal decree from November 16, 1510, requiring the recently stricken or convalesced to carry “a white rod or baton” with them if they ventured outside to signal to others that they are or were a plague-carrier. This practice was in effect for much of the century. The second document below, from October 5, 1596, overturns this long-standing practice, recognizing that it was inadequate in preventing contagion, and also because plague-free beggars had come to exploit the sympathies of passers-by in carrying white batons when asking for money. Instead it requires a forty-day quarantine. (“Quarantine” is derived from an Italian word referring to forty days of seclusion mandated for an infected person in some fourteenth- and fifteenth-century towns.) Both excerpts are drawn from Nicolas Delamare, Traité de la Police, volume one, page 626.

November 16, 1510 – “[The Provost of Paris decrees] that all persons who have been sick of the contagion, and all their household members, must carry a white rod or baton in their hand while going about the City, or risk a variable fine.”

October 5, 1596 – “[The Provost of Paris] forbids all who have been sick of plague, in whatever place, to walk or find themselves about the City, with a white baton or otherwise, unless 40 days have passed since their convalescence. [This decree] forbids also those who have had this malady in their houses, to leave from there and go about the City, unless they have previously brought to the Magistrate a certificate from the Commissioner of their neighborhood [quartier], and of six of their closest neighbors, that they have been well for 40 days […] This same decree forbids all those who have or have had this malady, to keep themselves on the great roads and avenues of this City of Paris, either to ask for alms, or for whatever other reason, under pain of being beaten in the Crossroads of the city; [the decree] requires Provosts of Health and their aides to take this [matter] in hand, and to imprison all those defying [the order] to be rigorously punished and chastised.”

In reading these historical records of past struggles against epidemic disease, we recognize some of the same tensions present in our world: community safety versus individual autonomy, coercion versus cooperation, and intrusive surveillance versus the need for good data. We also see that centuries of experience with the plague had given pre-modern communities awareness of the dynamics of contagion and practices to combat it—mirroring our own in effect today—several centuries before the development of germ theory in the nineteenth century.

As a historian of pre-modern France, focusing on the lives of everyday people rather than the kings, warriors, and intellectuals that feature most prominently in the sources (and, therefore, the history books), I rely largely on archival sources such as tax, criminal court, and municipal records to gain small but precious glimpses of those moments when peasants, artisans, and workers made their faint blips on the radar screens of larger institutions and thus were registered in history. While these records are generally mundane and even faintly cruel in their bloodless and bureaucratic efficiency, immersing myself in them is a profound and moving experience that is hard to explain. My chances to go to the Archives Nationales in Paris are few: two-week forays every five years or so where I spend as much time as I can in the Archives to collect as much material as possible to bring back home to work with. I am always gripped with a desperate sadness in my last day in the Archives, copying or photographing madly in my last chance to collect material, and when I finally must walk out the Archives’ doors for the last time on each of these trips, I dream ridiculously but fervently of abandoning my current life and buying an apartment in Paris near the Archives so I could come every day and pore over these centuries-old registers and codices to discover more and more.

This vaguely addictive relationship I have with the archive is strange, because 99 percent of this labor is flailing about or pursuing dead ends, and is “unproductive” in that it will not manifest itself in a product—a scholarly book or article, or item useful for teaching. However, in this way I feel a shared futility with the lives I come across in the archive itself: 99 percent or more of human activity, after all, does not end up in a historical record, even as a small entry in a tax register. This is why, I think, the Archives are so precious, and my time there so treasured. Amid the oblivion of the past, we can reach out and touch—faintly, imperfectly—the lives of some of our predecessors, just a little. It is something solid in the void.

For this reason it is even more poignant when we read in these records about moments similar to our own. In this moment of the COVID-19 pandemic, I feel a sudden sense of kinship in reading about the struggles against epidemic disease—mostly plague—in these records of the past. The pandemic the world faces today is a humbling reminder that in spite of our scientific and technological achievements, modern humans are not so different from our pre-modern predecessors in that we are subject to powerful and deadly natural forces much like they were. There is something encouraging in it too: we have been through it before.

Michael Sizer is a historian specializing in pre-modern French political and urban culture. A member of MICA's Humanistic Studies Department for twelve years, he has taught courses on utopias, bandits, mythology, crowds, the Black Death, and other elements, exalted and wretched, of the human condition.