Every day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of they “observe their actions”. At each of the town gates there will be an observation post at the end of each street sentinels. The gaze is alert everywhere: “A considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance”, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most absolute authority of the magistrates, “as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion”. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.
It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the “crows”, who can be left to die: these are “people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices”. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Each family will have made its own provisions but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers and other residents meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death.
The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.įirst, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant.
“Panopticism.” In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A.
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