The Black Death

The Black Death in Paris

Paris in 1348 was the largest city in Europe, with a population of perhaps 200,000 people. The capital of the Kingdom of France, the seat of the most prestigious university in Christendom, and a major centre of commerce and ecclesiastical power, Paris was connected to the wider world through the Seine, the trade routes of northern France, and the commercial networks of the Low Countries and the Mediterranean. When the plague arrived from the south in the summer of 1348, it struck a city whose density, diversity, and institutional complexity made it both uniquely vulnerable and uniquely well-documented.

The Arrival of the Plague

The plague reached Paris in the summer of 1348, carried along the Rhône-Saône corridor and the overland routes from the plague-stricken cities of Provence and Languedoc. The disease entered the city through the southern gates and spread rapidly through the crowded streets of the Île de la Cité, the Left Bank, and the Right Bank.

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, located in the heart of the Right Bank — was unable to accommodate the volume of corpses. Mass graves were dug, and the stench of decomposition pervaded the surrounding neighbourhoods. Jean de Venette reported that, with mortality at the Hôtel-Dieu (the city’s principal hospital) so high, more than 500 dead were carried daily in carts to the cemetery of the Holy Innocents at the epidemic’s peak.

The Mortality

The mortality in Paris was severe, though precise figures are difficult to establish. Contemporary estimates vary widely, and modern scholars generally place the death toll at between thirty and fifty percent of the population. The city’s dense housing, its narrow streets, and its open sewers provided ideal conditions for the spread of bubonic plague, and the crowded conditions facilitated the transmission of pneumonic plague as well.

The French royal court was affected by the plague, though King Philip VI himself survived. Queen Jeanne de Bourgogne died during the epidemic — though whether of plague or another illness is uncertain — and the Dauphin Jean died in 1349. The political instability caused by the plague compounded the kingdom’s difficulties during the Hundred Years’ War, which had begun in 1337.

The University of Paris

The University of Paris — the pre-eminent centre of theological and medical learning in Europe — was thrown into crisis by the plague. Students and masters fled or died in large numbers, and the university’s intellectual life was severely disrupted. The Medical Faculty of the University of Paris had produced the famous report on the causes of the plague in 1348, attributing the epidemic to a conjunction of planets. The faculty’s authority was undermined by its inability to offer effective treatments or preventions.

The loss of scholars and students affected the university’s reputation and its capacity to train the next generation of clerics, lawyers, and physicians. The impact on education was significant, as the university was the primary institution for higher learning in northern Europe.

The Religious Response

Paris’s religious institutions played a central role in the response to the plague. The great cathedral of Notre-Dame, the numerous parish churches, and the monastic houses of the city organised processions, masses, and prayers for deliverance. The Church’s response followed the established pattern: collective repentance, the veneration of relics, and the invocation of plague saints.

The mortality among the clergy was heavy. The religious houses of Paris — the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the convent of the Friars Minor, the Dominican house on the Rue Saint-Jacques — lost large numbers of their communities. The impact on monasteries was severe, and the rapid replacement of experienced religious with hastily professed novices eroded the quality of spiritual life.

The Economic Impact

Paris’s economy was based on commerce, manufacturing, and the presence of the royal court and the university. The plague disrupted all of these activities. The trade disruptions caused by the epidemic weakened the city’s commercial position, and the loss of artisans and merchants affected the production of luxury goods — textiles, metalwork, manuscripts — for which Paris was famous.

The labour shortages that followed the plague drove up wages and gave workers greater bargaining power. The impact on guilds was significant: the craft guilds of Paris lost masters and apprentices, and the shortage of skilled workers led to the relaxation of guild regulations in some trades.

The concentration of wealth among fewer survivors stimulated demand for luxury goods in the post-plague period, and Paris’s role as the centre of French royal patronage ensured that the city remained an important centre of artistic and cultural production.

Recurring Plague

The plague returned to Paris in subsequent waves throughout the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Major outbreaks struck in 1418, 1438, and 1466, each killing a significant proportion of the population and preventing sustained demographic recovery. The cumulative effect of these repeated epidemics was to keep the city’s population well below its pre-plague level for generations.