The French Knight Who Took A Hundred Galley Convicts Into the Streets of Plague Marseille and Came Out With Eight

The Chevalier Nicolas Roze (1675–1733) was a Marseille-born naval officer with thirty years of Mediterranean service when the Great Plague of Marseille broke out in summer 1720. He had retired from active service in 1717 and was substantially private when the outbreak began; he volunteered to the municipal authorities for plague-response work in early August.

By early September the catastrophe had outrun the city’s capacity to bury its dead. The Esplanade de la Tourette — the wide harbour-side esplanade between the Old Port and the Fort Saint-Jean — had become an open-air corpse-collection point. Approximately 1,200 bodies lay piled there, decomposing in the September heat. The city’s professional grave-diggers had themselves died.

The convict labour

Roze proposed an unusual solution. The Marseille royal galley base held approximately 100 condemned convicts under sentence of life service at the oars. Roze persuaded the municipal authorities and the royal naval commandant to offer the convicts a deal: clear the Tourette corpses, and any survivor of the operation would receive a royal pardon and full release.

The convicts accepted. Roze organised them into work parties, equipped them with carts and quicklime, supervised the clearance personally, and worked alongside them in the same clothes — a calculated act of solidarity that contemporary reports note specifically. The clearance took approximately five days. Most of the corpses were carried to a series of large pits dug at the Cimetière des Catalans and covered with quicklime; the carts were burned afterwards.

Of approximately 100 convict labourers, eight survived. The eight received their promised pardons and royal releases. Their names are recorded in the municipal archive. Most disappeared from documentary history afterwards.

Roze himself contracted plague during the clearance, developed severe bubonic symptoms, and survived — substantially the only documented case of survival among the senior plague-response personnel of the Marseille outbreak. He returned to his Marseille property after the outbreak ended in 1722, was decorated by the Regency, and was given a substantial royal pension. He died at Marseille in 1733, aged 58.

The Tourette esplanade is now a small public garden. A plaque near the Cathédrale de la Major commemorates the September 1720 clearance and Roze’s eight surviving convicts.