In the age of climate change and global pandemics how do we remember the victims?  University of Madison, Wisconsin historian Richard C. Keller examines this question through his study of the 2003 heat wave in Paris.  This was the worst natural disaster in French history, claiming some 15,000 lives.  In his book, Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003, Keller explains the myriad ways victims were forgotten and the disaster was misremembered.  From the science of counting the dead to historically rooted antimosities toward marginalized, elderly women, Keller unpacks the causes and consequences of the skewed memory of the 2003 heave wave.  

In 2003 Europe was rocked by a killer heat wave that claimed over 70,000 lives.  Most of the 15,000 deaths in France occurred during the first two weeks in August, the peak summer vacation period.  In the scramble to deflect blame the center-right government cast the tragedy as the result of the selfishness of French citizens.  Rather than care for their elderly loved ones, who died in disproportionate numbers, they opted to indulge themselves in their cherished summer holiday.  Seeking political advantage from the calamity, the left opposition blasted conservatives for their incompetence, inept response and a history of underfunding French healthcare.  Seizing the opportunity for national attention, the media questioned how it was possible for so many to die in a country with one of the best health care systems in the world.  

Looking beyond the blame game of French politics and media sensationalism, Richard Keller draws our attention to the importance of how the dead were counted.  Based on a long established epidemiological method of analysis the victims of the heat wave were aggregated to better determine who was most at risk of dying.  What became clear was that the vast majority of those who died were elderly women.  While this profile of the typical heat wave victim was not wrong, Keller notes, it left out thousands of other victims.  This was tantamount, Keller stresses, to forgetting double the number of victims of Hurricane Katrina or all of those who died in the 9/11 attacks.  

Because the “typical” heat wave victim, according to epidemiological studies, was elderly, age has become the principal narrative of the heat wave. Yet it is only one of many stories of risk and vulnerability during the disaster. One cannot deny the significance of the death toll among the elderly, but a focus on old age per se—even one that attends to the social components of aging as well as the physiological ones—misses a crucial element of the catastrophe. Richard C. Keller, Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003.

Triggered by an article in the newspaper Le Parisien on the national shame of the unclaimed bodies from the heat wave, the media began to delve deeper into the story.  What they found was that many of the victims lived and died in severe social isolation.  These were people who died alone, often in deplorable housing conditions, such as the tiny top-floor apartments under the famous Parisian zinc roof tops that magnified the heat to lethal levels. In contrast to the blame originally heaped on state officials or family members, later media coverage featured how the victims cut themselves off from family, friends and the wider community.  This particular perspective made it easier to blame the victims for putting themselves at risk through their own life choices.  

Through his interviews with concierges, neighbors, and shopkeepers who knew the victims, Keller compiled anecdotal histories which echoed the media coverage of the disaster.  Rather than doing any real soul searching, the interviewees tended to frame the victims as having made unfortunate life choices that contributed to their ultimate demise. Long before the heatwave, the victims had set their own lives on a course with a fatal destination.  Keller describes this retroactive reframing of the life trajectories of the victims as a type of narrative of exculpation that freed the living from any responsibility toward the dead.  The lives of the victims became less memorable because their deaths were foretold long before their ultimate demise.  

Elderly women represented 80% of the victims of the heatwaves.   The attention given to this population had a lasting impact on how the victims were remembered.  In his interviews with those who knew the victims the tendency was to cast the deaths of younger people as the result of other factors, such as alcohol or obesity, rather than the heatwave.  In other cases, respondents sometimes conflated the deaths of some elderly women with the heatwave, even when their deaths occurred outside of this period.  In other words, when we focus on a particular category of victims we may be inadvertently forgetting or misremembering others.  

This narrative of exculpation also obscured the lethal deficiencies of the French welfare state.  Many of the forgotten victims fell through the cracks of the national welfare system and found themselves living on the margins, often in the capital’s most precarious housing.  Tracking down the addresses and visiting scores of these addresses, Keller was shocked by what he discovered.  Temperatures in the top floor, chambres de bonnes, apartments often reached unbearable levels.  Compounding the problem many of these apartments lacked running water or even an elevator.  Located around the city, even in the most prestigious neighborhoods, many of the forgotten who died during the 2003 heat wave became victims of what Keller describes as Paris’ lethal vertical geography.  Built during the 19th century to maximize every inch of living space, the now famous Paris cityscape that draws tourists from around the world, became a lethal Disneyland during the heat wave.  

Elderly and socioeconomically marginalized women were most at risk.  Keller questions whether their precarious existence, and the lack of sympathy expressed toward them in the aftermath of the disaster, could be the result of a long history of hostility toward poor, elderly women in France.  Ever since the bloodletting of World War I and the rise of pronatalists forces in response to the perceived threat of a more fecund German neighbor, elderly, single women have symbolized a nation in decline and in need of rejuvenation.  If these women found themselves pushed to the margins, placed at greater risk during the heat wave, then blamed for their own demise, could this in part be the result of older attitudes in France?

There were a number of concrete preventative measures taken in the aftermath of the heatwave.  Many of these measures, however, were heavily influenced by how the disaster was framed and remembered as a crisis primarily affecting elderly women. Little has been done to address the larger reality of poverty, inequality and social isolation that contributed to the deaths of thousands.  In fact, some of the measures, such as an emergency telephone network created to check on those most at risk, ignored that many who fit this profile don’t own phones.  Moreover, the call to register for this program failed to recognize the reluctance of many possible beneficiaries to self identify as belonging to an at-risk group. 

Preventing future catastrophes like the 2003 heat wave will require a radical reimagining of the Paris cityscape.  Efforts need to be made to find ways to preserve the historical architecture of the capital while mitigating the dangers of particular features like zinc roofs and the tiny apartments underneath that make them a potential death trap during periods of exreme heat.  Political and community leaders need to come together to foster a greater degree of social solidarity.  Doing more together makes it harder to be overlooked and forgotten, a safeguard that will only become more important as temperatures continue to rise in the years ahead.