Described as a meteorological catastrophe, the heat wave that struck France in August 2003 brought the nation to a state of extremity, resulting in nearly 15,000 unanticipated deaths. Yet to frame the crisis in the language of natural disaster misses a crucial point. Privileging temperature over human society and the built environment as the decisive variable in shaping mortality grants a sense of inevitability to the disaster, and thus overlooks the critical role played by a social landscape that was itself ravaged by the heat wave. Significant disparities in mortality -- the disproportional selection of the elderly, the poor, and city-dwellers for death -- indicate patterns of risk that resulted as much from the social ecology of modern France as from the "natural" causes of disaster, calling attention to the intersection of society, nature, and environmental security. The experience of Paris and its environs, which bore the brunt of excess mortality during the crisis, opens a window on issues central to the relationship between science and society, including the historical production of vulnerability, the implications of demographic change for the welfare state, and the sustainability of the built environment in the postindustrial era. Central to this project is an analysis of the political, social, and cultural factors that placed France, and particularly Paris, at such inordinate risk. The heat wave provoked a series of fierce debates over the influence of the August vacation -- viewed by many French as an inherent right of citizenship since its institution in the 1930s -- on the abandonment of the vulnerable and the understaffing of hospitals during the crisis. The project scrutinizes the place of the elderly in modern society by questioning social, political, and scientific representations of the elderly and their effects on social citizenship. A powerful animosity toward air conditioning in modern France -- with roots in resistance to American-style cultural homogenization -- offers another area of inquiry. Finally, the project explores the rise of a voluble discourse of "insecurity" since the 1980s and its role in shaping an urban landscape of vulnerability. Linked to uneasiness around immigration and social disorder, a climate of fear has contributed to an elevation of risk by encouraging many elderly French city-dwellers to remain in their apartments, at heightened danger for heat stroke, but spared from the perceived dangers of urban public space. This project will examine these and other phenomena that played essential roles in the shaping of the 2003 catastrophe via multiple axes of research, including fieldwork in central and periurban Paris and targeted research in archives, libraries, and government collections. Interviews with citizens in hard-hit areas, government officials, epidemiologists, and social scientists, along with close analysis of media coverage of the heat wave as it unfolded and in its aftermath, will illuminate the critical social dimensions of this crisis of environmental health and social ecology.
Intellectual merit There has as yet been no humanistic or social-scientific study of the French heat wave. This project brings the historian's eye to the study of contemporary environmental crisis, thereby adding to a growing body of STS literatures on risk and vulnerability, environmental justice, and the history of the urban environment. By exploring the historical production of social vulnerability over the course of the twentieth century, this project investigates the intersection of an environmental disaster with the local social worlds of urban France. What social factors shape risk in an environmental crisis? How do these conditions reflect the relationship between science, politics, and society?
Broader impact At its most ambitious, this project aims to contribute to the development of a new framework for studying vulnerability that draws on scientific, social-scientific, and humanistic forms of expertise. Disasters often operate as catalysts highlighting existing social, economic, and cultural divides that predispose a society to catastrophe. Ideally, the finished monograph and articles will contribute to policy debates over hazard management, while pointing to the essential need for the adaptation of the modern welfare state to changing social, political, and environmental climates in the postindustrial era.
