Preliminary Programme

The explosion of the Grenelle gunpowder manufactory in 1794 during French Revolution is well known : hundreds of people died because of the explosion and many others were badly injuried. This was one of the worst industrial accidents France ever knew. The revolutionnary government reacted quickly enough to bring support to the victims, mobilizing every surgeons and physicians in the neigborhood.
Immediatly after the blast, it is interesting to focus upon the organisation of medical care at a time where everything must be controled by the Comité de Salut Public. The mention in medical reports of nervous disorders must be emphasized. Moreover those disorders could have led to work unability and indemnities.
Studying the process of clinical exams and medical classification at that time is the first aim of my paper. Then we will ask from the medical point of view what this accident taught us during the nineteenth century. Is this dramatic explosion the beginning of a new way of medical care for injuried victims ? Is this case relevant to emergency medication and medical insurance during the nineteenth century in France ? (Show less)

The archives of the Sun Fire Office insurance have been often used to study the formation of fixed capital in order to map the development of industrialization in Britain. Until now there has been no special focus on the claims of the insured entrepreneurs after fire damages in order to recover reimbursement. These claims only constitute a small number of cases (500, half in London) in respect to the whole insurance policies (more than 40 000 policies for London at the end of the XVIIIth century). Nevertheless these records provide an interesting sample of individual claims related to production, which allows us to sketch out artisans' and entrepreneurs' activities. Two factors seem to have played a prominent part in the burst of fires in the workplace : on the one hand, equipments like furnaces or boilers and vats required by various productions such as brewers, dyers or sugar houses, on the other hand the multiplication of buildings for storage stimulated by an increasing commercial activity, which multiplied stocks of inflammable materials. At this stage, our aim would be to raise assumptions from these archives, as they challenge our perception of risk in industrializing Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century by revealing a landscape where factories were still an exception: fire hazards seemed as much related to the rise of workshop activities located in a dense urban environment than to the use of new processes, especially in the case of London. Whereas the compensations always relate to goods, tools and premises (with their rebuilding), a few cases provide insight into the lives of the insured people, either because neighbours will apply to the Sun Fire Office, or because some workers will be so much ruined or injured that they can no longer earn their living. The Sun Fire Office appears as a multifunctional institution (combining emergency rescue, economic compensation and social support) that helped the collective perception of risk in town. (Show less)

In 1732, the archbishop of Paris launched a official souscription. Priests were in charge of levying funding for helping out the victims of the Hotel-Dieu's fire. Half a century later, the great fire of Paris' main hospital , 1772, was no longer compensated by quest, acknowledging the new part played by the French State, its local administration and local bodies in the management of major accidents. Why so? Focusing on original Paris and Marseile documentation, the paper aims at understanding the role of parishes in actively compensating for accidents occuring to the poor at an individual and collective level. Drawing on official regulations as well as individual vestriesn the paper will compare different practices in England and France in delineating how the concept of accident and its compensation evolved from the beginning of the Counter-reformation to the French Revolution, and contrast with London practices. (Show less)