The plague of 1720 and migration in Martigues (France) in the 17th and 18th centuries

One-off events such as wars or epidemics can change the structure of populations, by encouraging the mobility or causing the death of certain categories of people. They can also lead to a demographic slump, made up for by the arrival of new migrants. The town of Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône, France) provides an example of this kind of local population renewal. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its population was partially renewed after the plague of 1720. To measure the effect of the plague as a disruptive event, data on the surnames of people born in Martigues before and after the epidemic of 1720 were collected and analysed. After a delicate stage of lemmatization of the surnames, three categories of names were distinguished: those present before 1720 and which disappeared from Martigues after the plague; those absent before 1720 and which appeared afterwards; and surnames that were continually present in Martigues, but whose frequency in terms of the number of births per year could be contrasted between before and after 1720. The surname data for these three categories is compared with the list of names of the victims of the plague, which makes it possible to envisage a possible reason for their disappearance. In addition, the frequencies of surnames in the 18th century in the Bouches-du-Rhône department and in France in the 19th century make it possible to locate the possible destination of people whose surnames disappeared after 1720, as well as the probable origin of the surnames of people arriving after 1720. This study helps us to understand how the impact of an epidemic crisis can affect the evolution of a population on a local scale. The surname method used here indicates that the plague caused an exceptionally large renewal of approximately 50% of the stock of surnames, and thus of the population bearing those names. It also shows that fertility declined significantly among individuals whose surnames were already present among those who died of the plague. Finally, the results demonstrate that population renewal was achieved primarily through immigration, mainly from neighbouring municipalities.