Fighting on many fronts. Cross-border epidemic policy torn between military primacy and civil necessity during the War of the First Coalition (1792–1797)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Maren Lorenz
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 520265667

Yet in the 21-century, when ways of infection and pathogenic germs are widely understood epidemic diseases have great societal impact. Already during times of peace, they can impede or even paralyze social interaction and relations, the exchange of goods and information, as well as administrative structures. The necessity to implement – domestic and cross-border – effective measures of prevention and control put governments under immense pressure, regarding their legitimation as well as their efficient and prompt action. Even today economic and social distortions demonstrate how strongly governmental authority depends on direct protection of one’s own population, which requires besides medical staff operational forces of law enforcement. Starting from those premises the research project will investigate the strategies and actions of epidemics control attempted by the various parties of war, civil authorities, and respective local populations affected during the War of the First Coalition (1792–1797). Thus, the macro level of stabilization and justification of sovereignty by military as well as civil authorities will be combined with the (re-)actions of civilians residing in the trans-border study area – here the Lower, Middle and Upper Rhine. Plans and measures for maintaining the military functionality and fitness for action of the troops will be reconstructed as well as those aiming at the health and service capability of the local populations from a social historical, communicational, and procedural perspective. First, the focus will lie on the relevance of health policy regulations, second, the character and significance of scopes of action (agency) of the various actors will be investigated, and third, the study will ask about the respective actors competing interests. The focus on the intersection of frequently emotionalized but still strategic conflicts while at the same time pursuing the common goal of containment of chains of infection, will enable to identify the limits of dichotomous conceptions of health and disease, civil and military (assets), as well as of friend and foe. The study will reconstruct how (partially competing) disease control took place under conditions of war between military and civil domain and what kind of impact this entanglement had on the legitimation of ‘good government’, especially in times of war between absolutistic and revolutionary political systems. Thus, the frequently stated overall assertion of passive acceptance of massive human – above all civilian – losses by governments due to their alleged lesser utility, will be scrutinized. For this purpose, the historic disease of ‘Lazarettfieber’ (hospital fever) will be defined as separate actor (actant) in the sense of the actor-network-theory, who evokes reactions and thus provokes potential conflicts with other actors. The poor containment of the fever epidemic can be used as ‘tracer’ for the interdependence of war, disease, and precarious statehood.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants