France Tries Next Extraordinary Human Experiment

It took a moment of carelessness for plague to strike the French port city of Marseilles in 1720, despite an edifice of strict health measures. A boat carrying silks from the Ottoman Empire was allowed to skip the usual 40 days’ quarantine to unload its cargo, unleashing an epidemic that wiped out almost half the city’s population and which didn’t fully subside until two years later.

It’s this kind of fear that haunts France’s central planners today as they prepare to lift draconian stay-at-home measures designed to halt the (far less deadly) coronavirus. The lockdown has reached its limit: Public opinion is now against it. Isolation at home has saved more than 60,000 lives, but it has also cratered the economy and infantilized citizens by policing their movement, restricting the purchase of masks and nicotine patches, and banning daytime jogging in the city of Paris. The worry for the state is how to ease measures without triggering a second wave of infections.