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Between Jean Delumeau's literary fiction of the collective feast and Michel Foucault's political fiction of the plague society, this session examines the constitution of historians' knowledge of plague epidemics in the years 1975-1985. It hypothesizes that this is inseparable from a certain contemporary haunting, reducing the theater of contagion to the narrative structures of an epidemic narrative.

Contents

• Festival d'Avignon, cour d'honneur, July 9, 1983: "In this palace, there was the plague and the papacy, together, in 1348" (Jean-Pierre Vincent)
• "There is in the theater, as in the plague, something both victorious and vengeful (Antonin Artaud, "Le théâtre et la peste", 1938)
• How does a society organize its indestructibility ?
• Microbiology, the environment, world history : a triply overwhelmed history
• Seeing history through "the imagination of the truth of reality" (Goethe)
• A look back at the "terrible stench of the dead" in Marseille in 1347: memory and the inflammation of the imaginary
• "The gestures of the plague, like those of fear and pain in general, deliver a memory we have lost" (Georges Didi-Huberman, Memorandum de la peste, 1983)
• Writing in a depopulated theater: the story of a delayed coincidence
• A choral survival: "But the plague needs a narrator, one who can, who dares to say, ' My eyes have seen it all', a surveyor of the disaster, a melancholic, one whose illness was a little different from the others, an illness with death, not a mortal illness, yet. One who senses that he cannot die" (Georges Didi-Huberman)
• The plague as a collective celebration and a city under siege: Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (^XIVe-XVIIIe siècles), 1978
• An "inhuman break" in the ordinary order of days
• La persistance historiographique de " l'âpre saveur de la vie " (Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardins dir., L' odeur du sang et des roses. Relire Johan Huizinga aujourd'hui, 2019)
• History of mentalities, medicine and crowd psychology: the "dissolution of the average man" (Paul Fréour, "Réactions des populations atteintes par une grande épidémie", Revue de psychologie des peuples, 1960)
• The fundamental anthropological features of a "plague society"  
• "Daniel Defoe's Diary of the Plague  - our best document on a plague despite being a novel -  is full of hallucinatory scenes and shocking anecdotes" (Jean Delumeau)
• "the Homeric battle of explosion and sealing, deliquescence and hardening, mad disorder and the relentless will to put things in order" (Bernard Chartreux, Dernières nouvelles de la Peste, 1984)
• Jean Delumeau's literary fiction of the festival, Michel Foucault's political fiction of the plague
• "Here, according to a plague regulation from the end of the ^17th century, are the measures that had to be taken when the plague broke out in a city" (Surveiller et punir, 1975)
• Visible in the archive and making the archive legible: the Foucauldian paradigm, between singularity and exemplarity
• In Marseille in 1720, a surveillance society and "ordinary plague experiences" (Fleur Beauvieux)
• From 1347 to 1722, the second plague pandemic: in the shadow of the paradigm
• The paradoxical foundation of 1975-1985: historical knowledge, chronological indistinction and theatrical obsession
• "Of course it's the plague. You can never be too careful. The plague then, but first a plague, no matter which one..." (Bernard Chartreux)
• Theater of contagion and epidemic narrative: three acts and patient zero
• Charles Rosenberg, "What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective", Daedalus, 1989
• The third act only opens up the possibility of the end of the epidemic: when does it end, really ?