This paper focuses on a particularly important aspect of hygiene in nineteenth-century Paris: miasmas, especially as they involved the relations between life and death. While scholars such as Alain Corbin have devoted significant attention to the theorization of miasmas in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, the effects of that theorization on contemporary concepts of death, especially in urban space, have passed unnoticed.

The earliest—and in some ways most important—clinical studies on the relations between life and death emerged in the work of pathologist Bichat and his followers Broussais, Buisson, and Legallois. In defining the limit between life and death, this group concentrated on the relations between different organs and the properties of animal tissues, notably “irritability.” Life, for these clinicians, was defined as “the group of forces that resist death,” but the actual nature of death remained unclear.

As the influence of the pathologists faded later in the century, it yielded to miasma theory, which had been growing in importance and sophistication since the mid-eighteenth century. Although miasma theory would give way, in turn, to Pasteur’s concept of microbes, the paradigm shift was less abrupt than is often believed. In the 1860’s and ‘70’s, medical and hygienic theory hesitated between the two approaches, with miasma theoreticians inflecting the reception and understanding of microbes.

This paper demonstrates how miasmas were related to putrefaction and fermentation, arguing that the latter, in particular, enjoyed an ambiguous ontological status as a fundamental process of either life or death. In one of his final lectures (1876), Bernard
could declare that “life is nothing but rotting.” The next year, however, Cadet referred to the “germs of death” released by miasmas.

As this paper shows, the controversies around miasma theory put a profound uncertainty at the heart of nineteenth-century French hygiene: were putrefaction and resulting miasmas manifestations of life or of death? For the numerous influential proponents of the latter view, death was a positive and physical presence, which was especially dense in the urban environment. Thus, in 1868, de Werchin described “the animate death of dead life (fermentation),” spreading from human cadavers and propagating cholera throughout entire populations. The city, from this important if long forgotten hygienic perspective, was a concentration of objective and physically present death.