COVID-19 and the emotional culture of pandemics: a retrospective and prospective view

Taking fear as the core emotion in the experience of major disasters and echoing French historian Jean Delumeau's classic thesis on the social and cultural construction of coping strategies against it, this article outlines some lessons and prospects from the (complex but also distinctive) regime of experiences and behaviours historically configured in the West when facing severe epidemic outbreaks. The analysis of observations and testimonials reported in various sources (literary works, chronicles, medical treatises, autobiographical records, etc.) on the devastations of plague from the fourteenth century onwards, the different cholera waves in nineteenth-century Europe, or the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, allows indeed identifying the most conspicuous elements of this regime. This set of experiences and behaviours includes - sometimes following a certain chronological order but also coexisting over several weeks, months, or even years - a particular succession and blend of denial, panic, insecurity, uncertainty, mistrust, loneliness, heroism (as well as cowardice), feelings of punishment, scapegoating, hedonistic excesses, discouragement, and even madness and mental derangement. Given the strong emotional and psycho(patho)logical impact of the COVID-19 pandemic according to all major international health organisations and the remarkable recurrence (at least in Western countries) of similar reaction patterns at both the individual and the collective level, it seems reasonable to expect that this traumatic and sudden recovery of the cultural memory of epidemic diseases will have important consequences for our self-understanding as secular risk-managing societies involved in a peculiar and surely growing relationship with fear.