The Paris cholera #epidemic of 1832 killed at least 18,000 people in 5 months (~80,000 in rest of France). Nobody knew what caused the disease. Politics, cultural anxieties, and social injustice (then as now) all exacerbated the crisis. 1/n
In the nineteenth century, #pandemics spread a bit more slowly than they do today. Cholera "reached" European Russia in 1830, moved across central Europe (Hegel died of it in 1831), then appeared in Britain, France, USA. It may have inspired Poe's "Mask of Red Death." 2/n
The first Paris deaths in the 1832 cholera #epidemic were in late March. Already by mid-April, gravediggers couldn't keep up with the numbers of dead and artillery horses were drafted to pull the hearses. 3/n 
Despite a few high profile deaths (including prime minister Casimir Périer), cholera in 1832 Paris was overwhelmingly a disease of the poor. In crowded inner city districts (Paris had those, then) people died in the streets. The stench was awful. 4/n
The well off, in contrast, seemed largely immune. So secure was he with that knowledge, that the heir to the throne took a page from Napoleon Bonaparte's playbook--he visited the sick and dying, then made sure a large painting recorded the scene. 5/n
* Gros, _Napoleon Visiting the Plague House at Jaffa_; Johannot, _ The duc d'orleans visits the sick at the Hotel Dieu_
Today we know that the cholera bacteria is water-borne and carried in bodily fluids. The poor neighborhoods of Paris had no sanitation, all drank from the same water source. People who lived there got sick. The rich did so with far less frequency. 7/n
Elites in the 1830s attributed the socially differentiated effects of the Paris cholera #epidemic to poor people's alcohol consumption, or their general tendency to self-destructive revolutionary fevers.
Working people, in contrast, had their own theory for why their families were dying of cholera while elites went largely untouched. Somebody must have poisoned the well! (In a later outbreak, authorities refused to test water for fear of apparently validating that rumor) 9/n
Just two years earlier, a revolution had chased Louis XVI's brother from the throne. His distant cousin Louis Philippe became "king by revolution" (?!). He even embraced the revolutionary flag! 10/n
But hopes for constitutional monarchy & liberal progress proved short lived. Louis Philippe became famous as the bourgeois king: a successful property developer and one of the richest men in France, he especially used his position to benefit his children. academic.oup.com/ahr/article-ab…
Honoré Daumier "First bleed him, then purge him, then give him an enema" (comment on how the July Monarchy treated poor cholera victims) 12/n
Grandville's "The Ministry Attacked by Cholera Morbus" shows government officials vomiting coins; and suffering a diarrhea of "civil lists" (the part of the budget that went to the king's own household) 13/n
The "Haussmannization" of Paris in 1850s-1860s (wide boulevards, displaced working classes) made later cholera outbreaks much less severe. But the fundamental lesson of how to deal justly with a disease that seems to prefer some populations to others has yet to be learned.
