90

The Structures o f Everyday Life

which might correspond to future outbreaks. The flu virus is perhaps a parti cularly unstable one, but other pathogenic agents may well have been trans formed with the passage of time. This might explain the variations in tubercu losis, which is by turns mild and virulent; or the waning in the strain of cholera originating in Bengal, which may be being replaced today by a strain from Indonesia; or the appearance of new and sometimes relatively short-lived dis eases, like the sweating-sickness in sixteenth-century England. 1400-1800: a long-lasting biological ancien rgime So the human battle for existence was waged on at least two fronts: against the scarcity and inadequacy of the food supply - this was macro-parasitism - and against the many and insidious forms of disease that lay in wait. On both fronts, mankind was in a precarious situation throughout the ancien rgime. Before the nineteenth century, wherever he lived, man could only count on a short expec tation of life, with a few extra years in the case of the rich. Notwithstanding the baneful luxuries in which the European rich indulge, and the disorders of repletion, inactivity and vice to which they are subject, according to one English traveller (1793), the mean duration of their lives exceeds about ten years that of their inferiors, whom excessive fatigue has contributed to wear out before their time; whom poverty has deprived of the means of proportional comfort and subsistence. 197 This separate demography for the rich is lost in the scale of our averages. In the Beauvaisis in the seventeenth century 25 to 33% of new-born children died within twelve months; only 50% reached their twentieth year.198 Thousands of details demonstrate the precariousness and brevity of life in those far-off times. No one was surprised to see the young Dauphin, Charles (the future Charles v) govern France at the age of seventeen, in 1356, and disappear in 1380 at fortytwo with the reputation of a wise old man. 199 Anne de Montmorency, the Conntable who died on horseback at the battle of Porte Saint-Denis at the age of seventy-four (1567) was an exception. The emperor Charles V was an old man when he abdicated at Ghent in 15 55 at the age of fifty-five. His son, Philip II, whodied at seventy-one (1598), had aroused theliveliest hopes and fears amongst his contemporaries at each danger signal during his twenty-year period of failing health. Finally none of the royal families escaped the terrifying rate of infant mortality of the period. A guide to Paris in I722200 lists the names of princes and princesses laid to rest since 1662 in the Val-de-Grace founded by Anne of Austria: they are mainly children a few days, months or years old. The poor endured an even harsher fate. In 1754 an English author could still note: Far from being well-to-do, the peasants in France do not even have the necessary subsistence; they are a breed of men who begin to decline before they are forty for lack of a return proportionate to their efforts: humanity suffers by comparing them with other men and above all with our English peasants.