Off to the countryside! Urban exodus as a crisis

The corona crisis appears first and foremost as a crisis of the city: images from the metropolis of Wuhan (population: 11 million), and later from Milan and New York, have seared themselves into our memory. Many city dwellers took flight and moved to the country. Police barriers were erected in Paris to prevent its inhabitants from leaving the city. And in Germany, where weekend houses in the countryside are less common than in France, federal states such as Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern temporarily prohibited second-home owners from travelling to the country.

Leaving the city when there is a danger of disease is a phenomenon that can already be observed in the Middle Ages. When the plague broke out in Europe in the 14th century, the medical faculty of the University of Paris advised people to flee. Written in October 1348 at the behest of King Philip VI, its letter of advice cited the ancient physician Galen: Cito longe fugas et tarde redeas (“Flee far away quickly and only return late”). However, such a recommendation to flee proved problematic from a socio-political and moral point of view. The city of Venice, for example, was forced to call on its municipal officials, scribes, notaries, and doctors to return in order to maintain order and medical care. Guy de Chauliac, personal physician to the pope in Avignon and one of the most important physicians of his time, describes in his Chirurgia magna (1363) his wish to flee. Quite reasonable from a medical point of view, this wish was not fulfilled by Chauliac, since medical ethics and the fear of being disgraced if he violated them prevented him from doing so.

Medical advice to flee the city also finds its way into the most famous literary depiction of the plague in the Middle Ages: in Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1350), ten young people decide to leave plague-ridden Florence and seek refuge on a country estate in the contado, i.e. on the outskirts of the city, where they while away the time in the beautiful surroundings telling stories. That leaving the city might appear morally questionable is made clear in the Decameron by the fact that the narrators make no small effort to justify their decision. They describe the loss of order and moral decay in the city caused by the plague, and the violence that women in particular have to face. Since all their relatives are already dead, they are only responsible for their own lives, which natural law requires them to preserve.

That fleeing to the countryside can still trigger criticism today is something that the two French writers Leïla Slimani and Marie Darrieussecq have recently discovered. In their ‘quarantine diaries’ published in the newspapers Le monde and Le point during the curfew, they painted an idyllic picture of life in their country houses. The violent reactions that this provoked (Slimani was compared to Marie-Antoinette, who dressed up as a farmer’s wife in the garden of Versailles) sparked a debate on the relationship between economic privileges and the opportunities that people have to deal with crisis.