Chapter 5: All Roads and Plagues Lead to Rome--Via Strasbourg

We headed to the local "vaccinodrome" set up in the tourist darling of Strasbourg known as “Petite France” for Covid-19 vaccines. Vaccination for the 12-and-over age group had just opened in France, and Big Eyes and Sashay received their first injections. This is a big relief for many reasons, including our upcoming travel within France to visit our friends and former stomping grounds in Ardèche, and a highly anticipated visit from some special overseas travelers later this summer. After a perilously slow start, France has managed impressively to pick up the pace on vaccination; in our region (department of Bas Rhin, region of Grand-Est), new Covid cases and ICU admissions have plunged in recent weeks.

Strasbourg and the surrounding region were among the hardest hit in France during the first big Covid-19 wave in March-May 2020. Features such as a busy transportation hub and global jet-setting population contributed to making the city an early hotspot. When the numbers of sick and dying soared here, many patients had to be transferred by train or helicopter to regions that still had hospital capacity. Alas, this was not the first time in history that Strasbourg’s role as an international crossroads fueled a major epidemic. Exploring past epidemics as we live through the current one here has enriched my understanding of and connection with the city’s history, and I'd like to share some intriguing learnings before I move on to the most mysterious of epidemics in my next article.

Black Death

The Bubonic Plague was the first major epidemic documented in Strasbourg. It arrived gradually from the East in 1349, and while there was plenty of warning, no one knew at the time that it was spread by the fleas of rats originally contaminated on boats carrying goods from Asia. The main “remedies,” including the burning of aromatics, self-flagellation and rinsing the nose with vinegar, did not pan out well. The black plague wiped out at least 25% of the Alsatian population of all socioeconomic groups and between 30% and 50% of all Europeans. In the worst of indirect ways, the plague led to the deaths or flight of nearly all Jews of the region (the "pogrom of Alsace" on Valentine's Day 1349)—which is part of the important story of the Jewish population in Alsace that merits a separate chapter soon.

Spread of the Black Death in Europe 1347-1351 © Encyclopedia Brittanica via link

Syphilis

About 150 years later, Syphilis arrived at the local ports and struck Strasbourg so hard that an entire neighborhood was named for the disease. Shortly after Columbus and his crew had returned to Europe from their American adventures with a strange and progressive ailment (although there is debate about whether the disease may have already been found in Europe), France’s Charles VIII invaded Naples in 1495. The Italian Wars ensued, and as numerous European countries joined the fray, returning soldiers spread Syphilis across the continent from the late 1400s through the early 1500s.

Everybody pointed fingers—the French blamed the Italians, the Russians called it Polish, the Polish were sure it had come from Turkey, the Turkish considered it a Christian disease, the Japanese pointed to the Chinese, the Italians blamed the Spanish, in India it was assumed to have come from Portugal, and the English, Italian and Germans called it the “French pox”. Strasbourg was at that time Germanic, so in this area, the disease was attributed to the French.

Once again unclear on the transmission vectors, but understandably panicked in the face of its hideous symptoms, the Strasbourgeois sought to quarantine the growing number of sufferers. The low-rent neighborhood on the Southwest side of town where tanners and millers lived next to putrid canals amidst the added stench of animal hides drying in the attics of their half-timbered houses seemed a good place to relegate flesh-shedding Syphilis patients. So, a hospital was established specifically to treat the new disease, and the neighborhood became known ever-after as “Petite France” (Little France), thanks to this disease coming back with the soldiers fighting a war declared in Naples by the French.

Cholera

In the mid-1800s, Strasbourg and the surrounding communities (along with many others throughout the region) were repeatedly hit by cholera. This disease disproportionately affected the poor, whose living conditions were favorable to oral-fecal contamination, and around 2,000 people died in Strasbourg alone over the course of a few years. As the population once again searched in vain for the source of the sickness, a rumor spread that cholera came from, get ready: cucumbers.

In the nearby town of Colmar (a 45-minute drive South of Strasbourg today), police stormed the market to stop the cucumber vendors. The vendors, three scrappy women of a certain age, responded by chasing the police around and hitting them with their cucumbers until they could finish selling their wares. I found this story of the “Cucumber Riots” of 1854 amusing enough to warrant a fitting drawing, and since I was surprised not to find any, I commissioned one from Isak.

Cucumber Riots of 1854 in Colmar, with thanks to artist Isak Sinclair

Spanish Flu

The most cited precursor to Covid-19 of course, the so-called Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919, also did not spare Strasbourg. As a country that remained neutral during World War I, Spain’s lack of media censorship earned it scapegoat status. What I failed to appreciate before studying Strasbourg history (I may have not been paying attention in High School history class) was the facilitating role that the war and armistice played in the spread and impact of that epidemic.

Four years of war had severely weakened the European population; people in Alsace had been half-starved and totally taxed, physically and emotionally, for nearly four years when the disease appeared. As the flu began to spread, the French and other warring governments sought to downplay its threat to keep up wartime morale, and patently false and dismissive reports were published about the insignificance and supposed easy treatment of the disease.

When the surviving soldiers returned home—crisscrossing the continent through and to Strasbourg—rejoicing was in order. But the continuous, large, merry reunions of less-than-robust organisms made a perfect recipe for the sniping virus. The flu ravaged Alsace, and while the local numbers are imprecise, between 50 and 100 million people worldwide are estimated to have perished from the Spanish Flu—more than the number killed in World War I and around 5% of the world’s population.

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As our family walked and cycled to and from the hyper-organized vaccinodrome in Petite France these past weeks, it has been rewarding to remember past epidemics, the similar collective and sometimes comic searching for answers as we feel our way forward half-blind through uncertain times, and then see the sparkling resilience of this epidemic-scarred, historic quarter of the city.

France has been gradually loosening restrictions, and Eirik and I took advantage of the newly reopened outdoor terraces this week to enjoy a cold Weißbeer beside an old half-timbered house on the bank of a canal in the shade of a 350-year-old tree in Petite France. Later, I read that in non-pandemic times, this area is unbearably packed with tourists. So, as frustrated and pent-up as I have felt during Covid, and acknowledging the suffering and loss of life and livelihoods here and all around the world, I understand that it has been a rare treat so far to learn about and enjoy these spaces in relative tranquility.

There is one more epidemic that left a strong impression on Strasbourg and whose particularly curious history really seizes my imagination. I can’t wait to delve into it with you in the next chapter.