Contenu du sommaire : Peurs citadines

Pain which spreads Terror? Urban Areas, Disease and Epidemics in the Middle Ages Are urban fears equivalent to the dread of city life? The variety of behaviours and responses to epidemics calls in question the connections between the urban areas and the illness. If the medical discourse is unable to condemn the environment of towns, it does provide information both about pathological realities in the cities and about the consciousness of their dangers. Theory and practice combine to protect the urban areas against their sources of pollution: they put on light a partition of water supplies according to the different uses, that archaeology and topographical analyse seem to confirm; a rational system which was restricted however by the successful development of the cities themselves.

Memento Mori... Among the fears that beset the inhabitants of early modern London, the fear of death was a constant presence. Mortality was high, funerals common, reminders of death everywhere. However, responses varied: some Londoners, like Nehemiah Wallington, acknowledged their fear of death and tried to confront it by spiritual effort. Many others, including Samuel Pepys, preferred to suppress their awareness of danger for as long as possible, delaying making a will until the last moment. The rich array of funeral practices also suggests that citizens used ritual and ceremony to appease fear and to console anxiety.

Insecurity in Imperial Rome: between reality and fiction. The study of the relatively copious sources concerning Imperial Rome allows to underline the diversity of facts generating daily (thefts and burglary, brawls) or more occasional (fires, shortages) insecurity, and to analyse their geographic and social distribution as well as the means used to prevent them. Insecurity is a political stake which refers to the representations of the imperial power and the city.

Fear in towns of Brittany in the 15th century The Breton towns in the 15th century have suffered from a conjonction of natural calamities, repetitive epidemics, armed conflicts and individual and collective violence. Witnesses' accounts, inquiries, extracts from local or seigniorial counts reveal the traumatisms engendered by those crisis. The reactions are often contradictory, discouragement, flight or agressivity. Some solutions however announce that mentalities are changing, with the awareness of contagion's danger, the necessity of improving hygiene and the first measures for disease prevention.

Accidental death in Lille and Douai in the XVIII th century: risk measurement and appearance of a preventive policy. Accidental death in Lille and Douai in the XVIIIth century may be measured with the ‘‘ecouages,'' which are a proceeding of aldermen's justice about corpses of people who died violently. About a thousand ‘‘ecouages'' in Lille and one hundred in Douai have been studied. The most frequent accident is drowning in the town's canals or in the house's wells. Drowning represented more than half of all the deaths. Next came accidents at home, with numerous deadly falls and young children burned. Then work accidents, mainly for building workers; and last, street accidents, which were rather uncommon. The urban authorities, by the second half on the century, will concentrate their efforts on the drowning problem. They will try to convince people to give help to the victims as soon as possible. Though their attemps were not quite successfull, these efforts contribute to the great growth of urban security in the XVIIIth century.

Town, Secret Police and Fear: Lyon between subsistence plot and political manœuvres in 1816-1817 During the period immediately following the Bourbon Restoration, in 1816-1817, Lyon experiences some chronic popular agitation, linked with the subsistence crisis. Particularly, there are rumors that the surrounding countryside, which is suffering a terrible dearth and is often waiting for an hypothetic come back of Bonaparte, is going to launch an attack upon the city and to take it. Some clandestine manœuvres from the political secret police tend to make believable that a ‘‘plot'' is on run, or to create it, in such a way that the ultraroyalist faction dominating the city might command without mercy a repression and put Lyon back into order. Collective fears here are provoked by dearth and by the current distrust between the city, its popular suburbs, and its provisioning rural hinterland, but they are closely jointed to the atmosphere of political suspicions, to denunciations, and to the methods of a policing and judicial machine.

Paris going to hell: the « Diable Vauvert» or «Lions' Den» Under the Ancien Regime, the «Lions' Den» (La Fosse aux Lions) at Montrouge, to the South of Paris, was the name given to a vast hollow, formerly an entrance to a stone quarry. This region, then at the outskirts of the inhabited city, was reputed to be haunted, being situated, as a saying had it at the time « au diable Vauvert» (at Vauvert's Devil). In 1853, taking advantage of a lease between a contractor charged with clearing out the hollow and the owner of the site, the Paris Hospital Administration (Assistance publique), a miserable shanty-town of a settlement, made of wooden huts, came into existence on this site. This was a frequent occurrence in Paris, one of the effects of Haussmann's works. But this particular settlement was a frightening place on account of its location. Priests in cassocks who ventured there were not welcomed and fled in panic. In fact, the hostility they elicited on the part of the settlement's inhabitants was due to their superstitious fear of men in black. Visitors from the Society de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul subsequently undertook the evangelisation of the population. For these charitable bourgeois, the fear that the place traditionally inspired was rapidly transformed into fear of a social nature. Their misery and godlessness made the inhabitants of the «city » the avant-garde of a people of barbarians, impossible to integrate into society and likely to destroy all the values of civilised life if nothing were done to prevent it.

From threats engendered by modern technologies to fear of suburban areas The scientific and technological progress achieved during the 20th century has reduced the deepest fears which haunted previous centuries. But it has given birth to new fears, for example the consequences of nuclear energy, genetic modification, pollution or standardised food products. As new communication technologies make the world a global village, the fear of other people and the fear of losing one's identity, seem to be more prevalent than ever. In the world's big cities, whole areas isolate themselves and turn their backs on outside influence. In France, an increasing feeling of insecurity embodies this fear of other people. It is particularly pronounced in deprived suburban areas and in the sense of failure of young people. But these suburban areas also gather fears which then overcome them. They are often a pretext to talk about the fear of the future and the difficulty of living together, as opinions expressed by teenagers in a survey conducted in schools show.