Category: History

Can’t We Just Get Along? A Lesson the Past

Henri of Navarre - Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the more fascinating personages of times past was Henry of Navarre, a ne’er-do-well and free thinker who became king of the French during the religious wars of the 1500s.  It was right after the Reformation, and society was rather tense, as seemed always to be the case when religious reformation broke out. The Protestants hated the Catholics. The Catholics hated the Protestants.  This was nothing new, but in France, the hatred was so intense that people killed each other by the thousands for over 30 years.

It should be noted that, religion aside, everyone involved was French, everyone spoke the French language, everyone ate baguettes, but if you believed in the wrong number of sacraments or had ornaments in your churches, you were bad, pure and simple — so bad, in fact, that you needed to be tortured and killed.

Henry of Navarre was a Protestant. For a while, then he became a Catholic.  For another while, then he got excommunicated twice and became a Protestant again.  And finally, just to put the proverbial icing on the cake, he converted back to Catholicism.  He called his last conversion a small price to pay to keep Catholic Paris happy in the new tolerant France that he intended to govern.

All this was accomplished, albeit slowly, through the enacting of the Treaty of Nantes, which flawed though it was, did permit Protestants some degree of religious freedom in France.  With this feat, decades of assault and battery, murder and bloodshed, came more or less to an end. And while the former combatants never got to peaceful coexistence, they were able to manage in a segregated fashion which was as good as could be expected in 16th century France.

There may be ideas worth dying for, but Henry didn’t think religion was one of them.  Which is why it’s rather ironic that he met his end at the hands of someone who did.  In 1610, some dozen years after establishing peace in the realm, he was fatally stabbed by a Catholic monk who was angry with Henry for not being sufficiently intolerant of Huguenots.

And so it goes.  More than 400 years later, our mutual hatred is just as great, although now it’s for political rather than purely religious reasons.  If there is any lesson to be learned it is this: beware of ideology.  It can never be appeased.

Image credit:  Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Reading Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year (So You Don’t Have To)

Great Plague London 1665

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I’ve been reading “plague literature,” which is really only interesting if you happen to be going through something comparable as we are now. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year is just what you’d expect — an account of one year in the life of a Londoner as he navigates the complexities of surviving the Great Plague of 1665.

To begin with the differences, Covid-19 has nothing on the Black Death. Bubonic plague is a gruesome bacterial infection that causes horrible symptoms with a very high chance of mortality. It’s definitely a matter of degree. But it was a pandemic, at least in the British Isles, and despite the long span of years between our two events, there are surprising similarities between “the Plague Year” then and now.

It should also be pointed out that Defoe’s Journal is not a real journal — he was only 5 years old when the events occurred and his book was written over 50 years later. However, as a Londoner born in or near St. Giles, Cripplegate where the plague started, his interest in the subject must have been keen. So although Defoe’s account is well researched, Journal of a Plague Year is what you might call fictionalized fact.

The book begins thusly (cue ominous music):

“It was about the beginning of September 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland.”

Everyone knew what that meant. It meant the plague was coming. When would it come? Where would it strike? Would it come at all? People fretted these questions all fall and into the early winter. Meanwhile, the government immediately met to discuss “ways to prevent its coming over” but, Defoe says, “all was kept very private.” Meanwhile, the plague percolated in the background just as coronavirus did around the world in 2020.

It wasn’t until early December that the first cases emerged in the suburban borough of St. Giles, just south of London. The first statistics were created: “Plague, 2. 1 parish affected.”

Says Defoe, “the people showed a great concern at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town, and the more, because in the last week in December 1664 another man died in the same house, and of the same distemper.”

And then there were no more cases for six weeks.

After this, it became a game of watching the numbers, the so-called Death Lists that each parish issued weekly to report how many people had died and of what. Of course, in the early going, no one wanted to admit they had the plague, so (Defoe theorizes) people lied on the death notices and said it was something else like an accident or spotted fever. But the numbers went up and up, and pretty soon, people couldn’t hide it anymore.

By June, Londoners were pretty convinced they were in for it, and anyone who could escape London for the countryside did so posthaste. Defoe says (backed up by actual diarist Samuel Pepys) that there were so many people evacuating, by horse, cart, post, and on foot, servants and possessions in tow, that it hardly seemed there could be any people left in London to catch the plague. But there were.

A flood of governmental decrees was issued, in this case from the Lord Mayor of London, aiming at mitigating and relieving the plague. All but essential businesses were closed. Provision was made for the poor and unemployed, of whom there were many. Many new job titles were created such as watchers and dead cart drivers. Most controversially, any household stricken with the plague was ordered “shut up” with all members of the household inside, regardless of their state of health, and kept there under 24 hour armed guard.

You can imagine the distress of families thus locked in together. This is not to say that they were abandoned there to die — they received home food delivery free of charge, medicine and medical assistance, and anything else they needed. They just couldn’t leave the house.

The trouble with this practice was that healthy people anxious to avoid infection were forced to remain in the house with plague victims. This resulted in a great outburst of civil disobedience, which is to say, many people who had been shut up simply escaped, out of back doors and windows, or, if they could get the guard drunk enough, out the front door. While Defoe agreed that it was a good thing to keep plague victims from raving in the streets, he thought it cruel to keep the “sound” in with them, and felt that since so many escaped confinement and ran away taking their contagion with them, it did no good in the end.

It wasn’t until the plague reached its peak in August that people started to realize that apparently healthy people could still transmit the plague. The idea of a symptomless carrier was probably the most frightening to contemporary Londoners. Up to then, they could identify plague victims much as we identify zombies today — they looked horrible and were lurching around. But healthy plague carriers was too much. Many people who had been trying to keep a limited social life going up to that time went right back into isolation.

Defoe goes on at length about the psychology of the people, from nonchalance in the early going to panic when the Plague struck, to abject fear and misery during its height, and finally resolving into resignation and nihilism as it seemed as though none would escape. But then in late September, with weekly numbers approaching 20,000 dead, a strange thing happened. The death rate began to fall. As many as before and more so caught the disease but the numbers of the dead declined. It was, says scientific-minded Defoe, an act of Divine Providence, a reprieve direct from God on high. Today, we might have other postulations.

As for the citizens, their greatest desire was a return to normalcy — to go back to face to face meetings, parties and gatherings, and normal social relations between people. People’s desire to hang out together was so great that restrictions were dropped as soon as the numbers did. This led to many unnecessary deaths, according to Defoe, because people were still dying, just not so many. But clearly man is a social animal and to be deprived of human company was a fate worse than death for many.

Once the plague was over, it took a while for things to return to normal. From a trade standpoint, it was months before any European port would allow English ships to enter. Moreover, the poor and unemployed were generally still poor, but the plague being abated, no one bothered to help them any more.

Nevertheless, the Great Plague gradually ebbed away never to return, and life did finally return to normal. Gone were the dead carts and gruesome sights and sounds of dying people. Gone the open pit graves outside of every church in London, filled to the brim with the bodies of the recently dead. Gone the fear of making a mistake and catching it yourself. It was all over, if not forgotten.

In light of all that had happened, it may have been just as well that the following year, the entire city burned to the ground in The Great Fire of London. The fire may not have killed the plague but it certainly destroyed a lot of plaguey places, giving people a chance to rebuild anew.

A Journal of a Plague Year is a gripping little book that manages to make something quite awful into a surprisingly entertaining read. The details are horrific but there are so many interesting similarities to our own times, that it carries you right along. Readers of today will recognize many elements from this strange and terrible episode in human history.

And so, as we close, I will leave you with the final lines of the novel, a couplet attributed to our fictional narrator, H.T., and of which I will say in advance, may we all be so lucky:

“A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!”

Fire Next Time — The BLM Protests of 2020

Black Lives Matter 2020

We were in Brooklyn visiting family when the Ferguson protests broke out after the police shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown.  We watched the protests via live stream and felt then that surely something must come of this.  

Black Lives Matter was born out of that historical moment, but despite lots of lawn signs, the killings continued.  A year later in Baltimore with the killing of Freddie Gray, the protests were again sudden and youth-driven.  Again we watched, and again we thought, this time, there would be a change.  But no, the black mayor of Baltimore called them thugs (and lost her job) but the police involved were all exonerated. Read More

How Humans Deal With Plagues – Quarantine Is Normal

Bell Telephone - Flu Quarantine

As the debate between the Stay Safers and the Open Uppers continues, it seems a better time than most to take a look at what people have done in the past during times of plague and pandemic. Not surprisingly, they did pretty much the same things we’re doing now. Although they knew nothing of pathogens, the instincts of our forebears were to stay away from the plague in every way possible.

Here is a list of reactions that are typical of people dealing with a major pandemic:

  • Fear and panic
  • Clean up
  • Run away
  • Restrict inbound travel
  • Quarantine the infected
  • Practice social isolation
  • Practice social distancing
  • Break quarantine
  • Commit crime
  • Pray

These strategies are repeated during all the various plagues from the Black Death in the 1300s through the 1919 flu epidemic and beyond. This is what the human race has had in its pandemic-fighting toolbox then and now.

Drawing from just one example, Florence in the mid 14th century, it’s possible to find most if not all of these practices in play. Boccaccio gives a detailed account in the introductory chapter of The Decameron, a book set in Florence, Italy during the plague year of 1348. Then as now, the plague came “from the East,” carried along trade routes until, making truth of rumor, it landed in Florence in the Spring.

The Florentines had been through this before, and they immediately began cleaning their city, getting rid of as much “filth” as they could to eliminate potential breeding grounds for disease. Travel restrictions went into effect — mostly on incoming ships — to prevent the plague from washing ashore.

To no avail. The disease struck with a vengeance and soon people were dying in the streets. Naturally, quarantines were imposed on any person or household struck by the disease. The word quarantine has its origin during the Black Death, and refers to the 40 days that they believed necessary to disinfect a person who had come in contact with the disease.

Among the healthy, there were several camps: the ones who ran away, the ones who stayed home, and the ones who carried on as (or somewhat more than) usual.

Among those who fled the plague were the wealthy nobles who left the city en masse to wait out the pestilence in their countryside villas. Needless to say, they carried some amount of contagion with them. The tale-tellers of The Decameron are among this group.

The second group was composed of those who tried to stay safe by staying home and hiding from the plague. Boccaccio says it got them too, sometimes whole families living in one house.

The third group included those who felt that since we’re all doomed anyway, we may as well have the best time we can while we’re here. Their motto might have been “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” 

It also bears mentioning that at least some small proportion of the citizens went to church and prayed, although there seem to have been no formal services. Even then, long before we knew about the causes of infectious disease, we knew about infection.

During today’s pandemic crisis, we have all the personality types represented, and even one more — the live free or die, back to work, business as usual people. This one did not exist in pre-capitalist, feudal Florence.

So to recap, when it comes to government responses, imposing quarantines and averting incoming traffic was typical. In some places, they had guards posted around the city walls as well. The goal, at least in the beginning, was to keep the disease out. Once it was in, the goal was to keep it from spreading. On an individual level, people sought to avoid catching it by running away or hiding at home. Some people partied like it was 1348. You know what they say. It takes all kinds.

Be that as it may, modern people are doing the same things today that we did in olden times, including the wearing of masks — mask wearing by plague doctors began in the 1600s when the earliest forms of PPE were invented. Then as now, no one really wants to get sick and die.

So as much as the Open Uppers want their freedom and as understandable as that is, they’re incorrect if they think there’s anything unusual or strange about trying to stop the transmission of a major epidemic. We’re just doing the same things we always do. As to whether the disease is serious enough to warrant the draconian efforts governments are taking to prevent it, that’s something we’re likely to find out once “lockdown” ends in enough places.