The Last Major Plague Outbreak in Western Europe Was Brought to Marseille by a Ship in 1720

The 1720 Marseille plague was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in Western Europe — the closing event of the four-century Yersinia pestis cycle that had begun with the Black Death of 1347–1351, recurred at irregular intervals through the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, and culminated in the 1665 London outbreak. After Marseille, the disease did not return to Western Europe in epidemic form. Why it stopped — and what role the substantial public-health response in Provence played in stopping it — is one of the central questions of early-modern European epidemiology.

The outbreak began with a single ship.

The Grand Saint-Antoine

The Grand Saint-Antoine was a Marseille-registered three-masted merchant vessel of approximately 200 tons, owned by a consortium of Marseille merchants including the city’s First Échevin (effectively the mayor) Jean-Baptiste Estelle. The ship had departed Marseille in July 1719 on a standard Levantine trading voyage: she carried French finished goods to Smyrna (modern Izmir), Saida (modern Sidon), and Tripoli, traded them for raw silk and Persian cotton, and was returning to Marseille for the spring 1720 trading season.

She made the homeward trip in difficult conditions. The crew had been substantially exposed to plague at the Levantine ports — the Ottoman Mediterranean had a continuous low-level plague background that European trading houses managed through the standard 40-day quarantine system (the word quarantine itself derived from the quaranta giorni of the Venetian Mediterranean trading system). At least eight crew members died during the homeward voyage, several with symptoms that the ship’s surgeon recognised as plague.

The Grand Saint-Antoine called at the Italian port of Livorno in April 1720 for water and provisions; the Livornese harbour authorities, inspecting the ship’s bill of health and noting the recent crew deaths, refused her permission to land cargo or passengers. She was forced to continue.

She reached Marseille on 25 May 1720.

The quarantine breach

Marseille’s plague-response system in 1720 was approximately the best in Europe. The city had a dedicated Bureau of Health (Bureau de la Santé) with quarantine powers; an isolated quarantine island (the Île de Jarre, approximately 5 kilometres from the main harbour) for suspected plague ships; a large quarantine hospital (the Lazaret d’Arenc) for crews and cargo from quarantined ships; and a 40-day quarantine standard for any vessel arriving from a port with active plague.

The Grand Saint-Antoine should have been held at the Île de Jarre for the full 40 days. She was held there briefly — perhaps a week — and then released to the Lazaret d’Arenc and finally to the inner harbour after a substantially-truncated quarantine of approximately ten days. The cargo was unloaded into Marseille warehouses by mid-June.

The reason was commercial. The spring 1720 trade fair at Beaucaire (the largest mercantile event in southern France) was scheduled for late July; the Marseille consortium that owned the cargo had pre-sold most of it to Beaucaire buyers; delay would have cost the owners (including First Échevin Estelle) a portion of their expected profits. The Bureau of Health, with Estelle’s direct political pressure, accepted a shortened quarantine on the-incorrect basis that the surviving crew showed no active plague symptoms.

The cargo carried plague-infected fleas in the silk bales. The cargo was unloaded by Marseille dock workers in the second week of June 1720. The first Marseille plague deaths followed within two weeks.

The outbreak

The 1720 outbreak’s mortality curve was compressed compared with the 1665 London curve. The plague hit a smaller city (Marseille’s contemporary population was approximately 90,000–100,000) within a denser harbour district, with fewer routes for the wealthy to evacuate (the surrounding Provençal countryside imposed a cordon almost immediately, partly as a public-health measure and partly as rural panic about contagion).

The first confirmed plague deaths were in the harbour districts in late June 1720. By mid-July the weekly mortality was approximately 100 per week; by mid-August approximately 1,000 per week; by the peak in early September approximately 1,500 per week. Approximately 30,000 Marseillais died in the city’s first three months of outbreak.

The wealthy who could leave did so. Approximately 25,000-evacuated to country estates in the Provençal hinterland during late June and early July. Approximately a third of these were eventually intercepted at the developing rural quarantine cordons and returned to Marseille or held in improvised camps outside the city. The departing wealthy exported the plague to the Provençal interior; the secondary outbreaks at Aix-en-Provence (3,000 deaths), Toulon (3,000), Arles (8,000), and approximately a dozen smaller towns accounted for the additional 50,000–70,000 deaths beyond Marseille itself.

The political collapse inside Marseille was complete by August. The city government had largely fled; the remaining city authority was the Chevalier Nicolas Roze, a city magistrate who organised the work of removing the accumulated plague dead from the harbour districts (the bodies had piled up in the streets after the standard burial parties had been overwhelmed). Roze’s-personal organisation of the Esplanade de la Tourette — the harbour-side esplanade where approximately 1,200 plague dead were collected, doused with quicklime, and dumped into pits in the late summer of 1720 — is the most-remembered single act of the outbreak.

The most-prominent religious figure of the outbreak was Henri-François-Xavier de Belsunce, the Bishop of Marseille. Belsunce remained in the city for the duration of the outbreak (the contrast with the-evacuated First Échevin Estelle was widely noted in contemporary commentary),-personally administered last rites to plague victims across the city’s parishes, and survived the outbreak despite repeated direct exposure. His personal correspondence from the period is one of the central sources for the modern reconstruction of the outbreak’s chronology.

The Mur de la peste

The most-defensive measure was the Mur de la peste — the Plague Wall — built across the Provençal hinterland in the late summer and autumn of 1720 to enforce a cordon between the-infected Marseille region and the rest of France. The wall ran approximately 27 kilometres across the dry limestone uplands of the Vaucluse, in the rough quadrilateral bounded by Cabrières-d’Avignon, Lagnes, Murs, and Méthamis. It was approximately 2 metres high, built of dry stone, and patrolled at regular intervals by Royal Army detachments under standing orders to shoot any unauthorised person attempting a crossing.

The wall was effective. The plague did not cross it. The Provençal outbreaks of 1720–1722 (Marseille, Aix, Toulon, Arles, Avignon, and approximately twenty smaller towns) were contained within the Provençal heartland. The-larger French national outbreak that contemporary observers had feared did not occur.

The wall still survives in sections — approximately 6 kilometres of-intact dry-stone wall, with several restored guard towers, is now a marked walking route in the Vaucluse. The Mur de la peste is one of the physical monuments of 18th-century European epidemic-response infrastructure.

What happened to the responsible

Captain Jean-Baptiste Chataud of the Grand Saint-Antoine was arrested by French authorities in late 1720, tried for criminal negligence in the quarantine breach, and imprisoned at the Château d’If in Marseille harbour. He was held there until 1723 and never charged with a specific capital offence. He was released without trial and died in obscurity in approximately 1730.

The Grand Saint-Antoine herself was burned at sea on the orders of the French Royal Navy in September 1720. Her hull and remaining cargo were towed to the Île de Jarre and set on fire; the wreck was destroyed and the iron fittings sank to the seabed. A French underwater archaeological expedition rediscovered the wreck in 1978; it is now a protected archaeological site.

First Échevin Jean-Baptiste Estelle was never prosecuted. He resigned the Échevinat in 1722, retired to private business in Marseille, and died of natural causes in 1739. The-modern reconstruction of his direct political role in the May 1720 quarantine breach has been the work of the last fifty years of academic research; he was regarded by his contemporaries as a competent commercial administrator who had had the misfortune of being in office when a plague ship arrived.

Why this was the last one

The Marseille outbreak was the last major plague event in Western Europe. The disease did not vanish — cases continued in the Balkans, in the Ottoman Mediterranean, in Russia (the 1771 Moscow outbreak killed approximately 50,000), and in North Africa (Marseille itself had a small secondary outbreak in 1722 that killed approximately 500) — but the Western European pandemic cycle of 1347–1720 did not resume.

The modern explanation is demographic and ecological. The European Rattus rattus population (the small black rat that had been the primary plague-vector reservoir) was displaced over the late 17th and early 18th centuries by the larger and more rural Rattus norvegicus (the brown rat), which had a-different relationship with the Xenopsylla cheopis flea responsible for Yersinia pestis transmission to humans. The progressive 18th-century urban improvements in housing (brick and stone rather than timber-frame; tiled rather than thatched roofs; better separation between food storage and human habitation) reduced the human-rat contact opportunity. The 18th-century systematisation of the quarantine response (Marseille being the last European port to lose a quarantine battle) progressively closed off the introduction routes from the Levantine plague background.

The combination of changes was sufficient. After 1722 Western Europe had no major plague outbreak. The disease continues to circulate in rural rodent populations on three continents and produces approximately 1,000–2,000 confirmed human cases per year worldwide. Modern antibiotics cure approximately 90% of treated cases.

The 1347–1720 cycle ended in Provence three centuries ago. The 18th-century public-health infrastructure that closed it is the foundation of the modern European disease-surveillance system.