Historian Patrick Boucheron links the Black Death to our own pandemic, and to #MeToo
In a wide-ranging interview with Le Temps, the French historian discusses his latest essay, Peste noire, and the intellectual debts that shape how he reads the present.
Patrick Boucheron will be in Geneva this October to discuss his latest essay, Peste noire, which revisits the medieval epidemic and draws numerous parallels with how societies managed covid-19, according to Le Temps.
The Swiss newspaper interviewed the French historian twice: once in writing last April, when he was aboard a French Navy helicopter carrier sailing from Rio to Cayenne to teach history to 600 naval officers, and again in person at the recent Livre sur les quais festival in Morges. 'It wasn't my world, but it interested me. It was a real experience of strangeness,' he told Le Temps of the shipboard assignment.
Boucheron, a university professor who also appears on radio and on theatre stages to make audiences think about how history is written and how it shapes our collective imagination, told Le Temps that he is drawn to whatever lies outside his own world. 'The world has become too risky, too uncertain, for us to be content talking only with people we already know agree with us,' he said.
Pour un homme de ma génération, ma chance historique c'est de vivre #MeToo... ça m'a ouvert les yeux.
Patrick Boucheron, to Le Temps
In the interview he also looks back on the figures who taught him to maintain a critical relationship with the present, according to Le Temps, though the newspaper's account does not specify who they are.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
