The Black Death

The Black Death in France

The Kingdom of France was the most populous state in medieval Europe, with an estimated population of sixteen to twenty million people in the mid-fourteenth century. Its cities — Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux — were centres of commerce, learning, and ecclesiastical power. When the plague arrived from the Mediterranean in late 1347, it struck a kingdom already weakened by decades of warfare, famine, and political instability. The resulting catastrophe killed perhaps a third of the French population and left scars that shaped the country’s history for generations.

Marseille and Provence

The plague entered France through the port of Marseille in November 1347. The city, a major commercial hub on the Provençal coast, maintained extensive maritime connections with the ports of Italy, Sicily, and the eastern Mediterranean. Genoese and Provençal ships arriving from plague-infected ports carried infected rats and fleas into the city’s crowded harbour district.

The mortality in Marseille was devastating. Contemporary sources suggest that the city lost more than half its population — perhaps 25,000 to 30,000 people — within a matter of months. The city’s religious houses were particularly hard hit: the convent of the Friars Minor lost all but one of its members, and the Dominican friary was similarly decimated.

From Marseille, the plague spread rapidly through Provence. The cities of Aix-en-Provence, Toulon, Arles, and Avignon were all struck in early 1348. The Provençal countryside, with its scattered villages and hamlets, suffered heavily, and the disruption of agricultural production caused food shortages that compounded the epidemic’s effects.

Avignon: The Papal Court in Crisis

Avignon, the seat of the papacy since 1309, was one of the most important cities in Christendom. The papal court attracted clerics, diplomats, merchants, and petitioners from across Europe, creating a cosmopolitan and densely populated urban environment. When plague struck in January 1348, the city was ill-prepared for the scale of the catastrophe.

Pope Clement VI remained in Avignon throughout the epidemic, demonstrating a courage that contrasted with the flight of many secular rulers. He consecrated the Rhône River as a burial ground when the city’s cemeteries overflowed, granted plenary absolution to all who died of plague, and issued two papal bulls in 1348 — one on 5 July and Quamvis perfidiam on 26 September — condemning the persecution of Jewish communities that accompanied the plague’s spread through the Rhineland.

The mortality at the papal court was significant. Cardinal Giovanni Colonna died of plague, as did numerous lesser clerics and officials. The English Augustinian friar Henry Knighton, writing decades later, claimed that 1,400 clerics died in Avignon — a figure that may be exaggerated but reflects the severity of the losses. The papal physician Guy de Chauliac, who remained in the city and treated plague patients, left a detailed medical account of the epidemic in his Chirurgia Magna, one of the most important medical sources for the Black Death.

Paris and Northern France

The plague reached Paris in the summer of 1348, carried along the Rhône-Saône corridor and the trade routes that connected the Mediterranean to the north. Paris, with a population of perhaps 200,000, was the largest city in Europe and the capital of the most powerful kingdom in Christendom. The University of Paris, the pre-eminent centre of theological and medical learning, was thrown into crisis as students and masters fled or died.

The chronicler Jean de Venette, a Carmelite friar who witnessed the plague in Paris, described the overwhelming of the city’s burial infrastructure. The cemetery of the Holy Innocents, the principal burial ground for the city’s poor, was unable to accommodate the volume of corpses. Mass graves were dug, and the stench of decomposition pervaded the surrounding neighbourhoods. The Hôtel-Dieu, the city’s principal hospital, was overwhelmed by the sick and dying.

The French royal court was affected by the plague, though King Philip VI himself survived. His queen, Jeanne de Bourgogne, died in 1349, as did Bonne of Luxembourg, wife of the king’s heir, the future John II — both probably of plague. (The heir himself survived and succeeded his father as John II in 1350.) The political instability caused by the plague compounded the kingdom’s difficulties during the Hundred Years’ War, which had begun in 1337.

The South: Languedoc, Gascony, and the Pyrenees

The plague spread through southern France in 1348, striking the cities of Languedoc — Toulouse, Montpellier, Narbonne, Carcassonne — with particular severity. Toulouse, a major centre of commerce and learning, may have lost a third of its population. Montpellier, home to one of Europe’s oldest and most distinguished medical schools, saw its university community devastated. The medical faculty, which might have been expected to provide effective treatment, proved as helpless as any other institution against the disease.

Gascony, the English-held territory in southwestern France, was struck in 1348. The plague’s presence in this region had direct consequences for England, as ships carrying goods — and infected fleas — crossed the Channel regularly between Bordeaux and the ports of southern England. The arrival of the plague in Dorset in the summer of 1348 is generally attributed to a ship from Gascony.

The Pyrenean regions, straddling the border between France and the Iberian Peninsula, were affected somewhat later, and the mountainous terrain may have slowed transmission. However, the major passes and valleys that channelled trade and pilgrimage traffic — particularly the routes to Santiago de Compostela — carried the disease through the mountains.

The Countryside and Rural France

The impact of the plague on rural France was profound. The French countryside in the mid-fourteenth century was densely settled, with villages scattered across the fertile plains of the north and the river valleys of the south. The Great Famine of 1315–1317 had already weakened rural populations, and the decades of warfare that accompanied the Hundred Years’ War had disrupted agricultural production and displaced communities.

The plague struck rural communities with a ferocity that matched its impact on the cities. Villages lost their priests, their millers, their blacksmiths — the essential infrastructure of rural life. Fields were left unplanted, harvests uncollected, and livestock untended. The chronicler Jean de Venette described a countryside where “the fields were not sown, the vines were not pruned, and the harvests were not gathered.”

The economic consequences for rural France were transformative. The labour shortages created by the plague gave surviving peasants greater bargaining power, as landlords competed for tenants. The French crown attempted to control wages and prices through legislation, but these measures were largely ineffective. The resentment generated by the government’s attempts to maintain pre-plague social hierarchies contributed to the Jacquerie — a peasant uprising that erupted in 1358, a decade after the plague’s arrival.

The Flagellants in France

The Flagellant movement, which originated in the German-speaking lands, spread to France in 1349. Bands of penitents marched through the cities and towns of northeastern France, whipping themselves in public processions and calling for repentance. The movement was initially tolerated by local authorities, but the Church soon condemned it as heretical, particularly when Flagellant leaders began to challenge clerical authority and incite violence against Jewish communities.

King Philip VI banned the Flagellants from France in 1349, and the movement was suppressed with the cooperation of the secular authorities. However, the anxieties that had given rise to the movement — fear of divine wrath, distrust of ecclesiastical institutions, and the search for scapegoats — persisted long after the Flagellants themselves had been dispersed.

Persecution of Jews

France was one of the regions where the persecution of Jewish communities during the Black Death was most severe. Jews had been expelled from the Kingdom of France in 1306 by Philip IV, but some communities remained in the southern territories and in the papal enclave of Avignon. In the Dauphiné and Savoy — territories that were not part of the French kingdom but were culturally and linguistically connected — Jewish communities were accused of poisoning wells to spread the plague.

The most notorious episode occurred in the spring of 1348, when Jews in the Dauphiné were arrested, tried, and burned on charges of well-poisoning. The confessions extracted under torture — which described an international conspiracy to poison all of Christendom — were circulated widely and provided the template for similar accusations in the Rhineland and Switzerland. Despite Pope Clement VI’s condemnation of the accusations, the massacres continued.

Recovery and Recurrence

The plague did not disappear from France after the initial outbreak of 1348–1349. The disease returned in subsequent waves that struck throughout the 1350s, 1360s, and beyond. The pestis secunda of 1361–1362 was particularly severe, killing many who had survived the first outbreak. The cumulative effect of repeated epidemics prevented demographic recovery and contributed to the political and social instability that characterised France during the later stages of the Hundred Years’ War.