This panel explores notions of health, care, and disability in early modern French literature in various contexts and perspectives. The forums of 17^th-century and 18^th-century French have decided to join together to examine one of the fastest-growing sub-fields within French and Francophone Studies – disability. Although much of the exciting research emerging from within the field of Disability Studies comes from scholars of anglophone traditions, we seek to acknowledge the contributions of francophone authors, philosophers, and historians and to contextualize and historicize notions of health and disability in early modern France.

When Michel Foucault published such works as History of Madness (1961) or The Birth of the Clinic (1963), he invited readers to examine the abuses and imbalances of power inherent in modern medicine, as well as to understand how bodies labeled “abnormal” were shunned, or worse eradicated, in the name of modern science and medicine. Although these works have an uneasy and problematic relation to current disability studies, they have served as a foundation for how health, medicine, and disability are understood in French contexts. Furthermore, Henri-Jacques Stiker’s History of Disability (1982) was among the first to seriously consider the lived experiences of sick and disabled individuals, foregrounding some of the major questions to which later scholars such as Lennard Davis and Rosimarie Garland-Thomson would respond.

In the introduction to a recent issue of Esprit Créateur edited by Tammy Berberi and Jennifer Row (“Disabilities Worldmakings, Pasts and Futures”), Berberi writes, “In cultivating material for this special issue, we hoped to build a multilingual and international community around the enterprise of French disability studies and to build upon and expand prior work.” In many ways, this is also the goal of the proposed session. We bring together a group of scholars at various stages of their careers, working in different time periods and addressing questions of health and disability from a variety of perspectives. We begin with a paper by Caitlin Sturrock, a graduate student based in the UK, examining the intersection of gender, class, and disease as it is expressed in the fictional literature of eighteenth-century libertine author Rétif de la Bretonne. Reading his libertine response to the Marquis de Sade, L'Anti-Justine, as a tale not just of an unfortunate sex-worker, but as a woman whose diseased body signifies the ways in which health is determined by class and gender. Moreover, she draws parallels between the deterioration of the heroine's body and the dissolution of the genre of libertine fiction in France. We then move to a presentation by Suzanne Lalonde, Ph.D., a lecturer at Texas Tech University and Independent Scholar. Dr. Lalonde’s contribution presents an unlikely portrait of one of France’s most beloved playwrights, Molière, as an early proponent of disability justice. Using archival research on the author in conjunction with his plays on doctors and illness, she shows how Molière, who was employed by Louis XIV, used irony and exaggeration as tools to shed light on the vast inequalities between the health care received by the nobility at Versailles and what passed for medical care for members of the Third Estate. Our panel ends with a presentation from Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti, Ph.D., currently a lecturer at Stanford. Dr. Vialle-Giancotti’s presentation serves as a nice synthesis for the panel, as it brings together literature of the 17^th- and 18^th-centuries to analyze how aging ages over the course of two centuries in France. She begins with 17th-century moralist François de la Rochefoucauld’s axiom that “Few people know how to be old,” and examines how 17^th-century fiction tends to portray elderly individuals as greedy or lecherous, moving toward the 18^th-century, which provides, she argues, a far less cohesive picture. Ultimately, her observations help us to understand how the concept of aging changes with the rise of modern medicine.