CHAPTER V
THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON’S RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN
The twenty years of fighting that followed the French Revolution, and into which all Europe was drawn, were everywhere accompanied by outbreaks of pestilence, many of which were very serious. At the very beginning of the first Coalition War (1792–7) they played an important rôle. A severe epidemic of dysentery broke out among the Prussian troops when they were advancing into Champagne, and this was chiefly responsible for the failure of the invasion. Typhus fever had also appeared and caused a great many deaths among the Prussians, as well as among the inhabitants of the Departments of Meuse, Moselle, Meurthe, and Ardennes.[[78]] When the badly infected army of the Allies retreated, after the engagement at Valmy (September 20, 1792), it left behind its sick in various cities and villages, and thus infected the French army that followed in pursuit. In Longwy itself (which had remained in the power of the Allies until October 22), and in the immediate vicinity, the streets were filled with the bodies of soldiers who had succumbed, partly to exhaustion, and partly to dysentery.[[79]]
Verdun suffered terribly during the siege of the Allies, and at the end of August was obliged to surrender. The chief cause of the widespread occurrence of disease there was the fearful lack of sanitation; ‘à Verdun,’ say Maréchal and Didion[[80]] ‘une des causes les plus puissantes d’infection était le dépavement de la ville au moment du siège. Tous les jours on jetait de chaque maison au milieu de la rue des immondices de toute espèce, des déjections humaines et animales, des débris, des végétaux, qui se mêlant à la boue se liquéfiaient et se putréfiaient par l’action des pluies. Les agents de la ferme des boues ne pouvaient rien contre tel foyer. Il s’en échappait une odeur infecte, quand quelque voiture venait à passer, et l’on voyait souvent des personnes frappées de spasmes, prises de vomissements et même asphyxiées en traversant les rues.’ (One of the most potent causes of the infection at Verdun was the unpaved state of the town at the time of the siege. Every day refuse of all kinds was thrown from each house out into the street—the evacuations of men and animals, rubbish, and garbage—and there it mixed with the mud, liquefied and rotted through the action of the rain. The officials in charge of street sanitation were powerless. All this filth emitted a foul odour when a carriage drove through it, and one often saw people seized with convulsions and sickness, or even suffocated while crossing the streets.) There was no more thought of taking proper care of the sick and wounded in Verdun at that time, than there was in the later French wars; they lay in numbers on rotten straw, in their own excrement, two or three of them sharing a single blanket. The result was that two-thirds of the patients died.
Pont-à-Mousson, where three military hospitals were erected, also had a severe epidemic, as did Metz; the hospitals could not accommodate the many patients that came streaming in from all directions. Typhus fever continued to appear sporadically in the next two years; from 1792 to 1795 as many as 64,413 patients were received into the Metz hospitals, and of that number 4,870 died.
In the years 1793–4 typhus fever was frequently conveyed into Germany in consequence of the warfare along the Upper Rhine. In May 1793, it was brought to Frankfurt-on-the-Main by French prisoners-of-war, whom the Austrians on their march through the country had left behind. In addition to the cases of ‘putrid fever’ in the military hospitals, a few cases were also observed in the city; until November the disease raged extensively, but in the winter it increased in fury and did not disappear until the summer of 1794. ‘The descriptions of putrid fever,’ says L. Wilbrandt,[[81]] ‘while they make no mention of exanthema, nevertheless positively prove that the disease was none other than exanthematic typhus, war-typhus. The facts that the disease described was highly infectious, and that it is expressly stated that diarrhoea was not observed, lead us to this conclusion.’ In the report of the health-officer, issued at the end of July 1793, it is nevertheless asserted that ‘the disease was of a putrescent nature, involving spots and purpura’. The transportation of French prisoners caused the epidemic to spread to Günthersburg and from there to Bornheim, but only in a mild form.
A short article by Canz[[82]] informs us about the spreading of typhus fever from the Rhine to the Black Forest. The disease was borne by French prisoners to Hornberg (near Triberg), where in the autumn of 1793 they spent four weeks. Owing to numerous outbreaks of ‘infectious nerve-fever’, a war-hospital for such patients was established at Hornberg, which had some 1,000 inhabitants. In November the first patients appeared in the town, and the epidemic lasted until the beginning of June of the following year; scarcely a single house was spared, especially among the poor, and often entire families contracted the disease. All told, sixty people died, including eight outsiders who had been brought to the hospital. According to Canz, infectious nerve-fever also made its appearance in Kinzigtal, in the Rhine region, and in several parts of Swabia. ‘In some cases,’ he says, ‘petechiae appeared between the fifth and eighth days on the breast, arms, and back; at first they were very small and rose-red, but later they turned yellow, brown, and finally blue and black, occasionally taking the form of large blue blotches, like suggilations.’
French prisoners also conveyed typhus fever to Bavaria. According to Seitz,[[83]] this was the case, for example in Regensburg, where the disease raged furiously in December 1793. ‘There is no doubt,’ he says, ‘that the germ of this disease was brought there by French captives, since many contracted the disease and succumbed to it on the transport-ships on which they were carried; and Schäffer (a physician in Regensburg) also saw many people contract the fever who had come in contact with them.’ Typhus fever was disseminated all along the Danube—Donauwörth, Neuburg, Ingolstadt, Vohburg, Kehlheim, Donaustauf, Pfatter, Straubing, Deggendorf, and other places. Kulmbach was also infected by the French soldiers.
During the Coalition War violent conflicts took place in western France in the Vendée, where the Royalist population had risen against the new potentates. When Nantes was besieged by the Royalists in 1793, a furious outbreak of typhus fever occurred in that city.[[84]] The prisons and hospitals were greatly overcrowded, the city was filled with dirt which nobody took the trouble to remove, and many carcasses were left unburied. In the latter part of September the disease broke out in the prison of Saintes-Claires, where the prisoners were very closely packed together. According to le Borgne, the official inspector said of this prison: ‘Tout manquait dans cette maison—l’air, l’eau, les aliments, les remèdes, tout jusqu’aux moyens d’ensevelir et d’enterrer les morts.’ (Everything was lacking in the building—air, water, food, remedies, and even the means for covering and burying the dead.) Without beds, without even straw, the prisoners had to lie on the damp ground and be scantily fed on bad bread and water. Regarding the Le Bouffay Prison, we read: ‘Des morts, des mourants, et des prisonniers nouvellement infectés gisent sur le même grabat! Les cachots répandent des miasmes putrides, et les lumières s’éteignent lorsqu’on entre dans ces cloaques empestés!’ (Dead, dying, and recently infected prisoners lie on the same pallet! The cells reek with putrid miasma, and the lights go out when one enters these pestilential sewers.) And regarding the L’Entrepôt Prison we read: ‘La maladie était si intense à L’Entrepôt que, de 22 sentinelles qui y montèrent la garde, 21 périrent en très peu de jours, et que les membres du Conseil de salubrité, qui eurent le triste courage d’y aller, en furent presque tous les victimes.’ (The disease was so intense at L’Entrepôt, that twenty-one out of twenty-two sentinels who went on duty there died within a very few days, and almost all the members of the Board of Health who had the sad courage to go there fell victims to it.) The hospitals were so crowded that three or four persons were obliged to occupy the same bed. After December the disease also spread to the city; of 300 grave-diggers employed by the Revolutionary Committee, the majority were taken sick and many died. The total number of deaths in the city and in the prisons was estimated at 10,000.
In Italy very severe pestilences spread in a very short time over the entire peninsula, and even to Sicily, in consequence of the war that had been going on there since 1796. These pestilences were unusually severe in both camps during the siege of Mantua (1796–7). (We shall learn more about this in the tenth chapter.) In the year 1799 the French troops under Scherer were forced to retreat in disorder before the victorious advance of Suvarov and the Austrians, and they took refuge in Nice. There, in the autumn of 1799, a severe epidemic of typhus fever broke out in the French army and soon spread to the non-belligerent population, one-third of which was carried away by it.[[85]] In consequence of the removal of the patients the disease was conveyed into southern France, infecting Aix, Fréjus, Marseilles, Toulon, and even Grenoble.[[86]]
The disease spread much more widely in the direction of Italy, where it soon attacked the entire coast of Liguria. A terrible epidemic of typhus fever occurred in Genoa in 1799–1800, when 14,000 people succumbed within six months.[[87]] Rasori had noted the first cases as early as the summer of 1799; the patients were fugitives from Upper Italy, commercial travellers and military persons. Not until the end of the winter and in the spring did the disease become very widespread; it attacked principally the poorer people. Rasori held the disease to be ‘nosocomial fever’ (typhus fever), and his description of it makes this diagnosis seem undoubtedly correct. Regarding the increased prevalence of typhus fever during war-times, we are informed by the following table of deaths, compiled by Ozanam:[[88]]