The Black Death, which appeared in Marseille in 1347, arrived in Paris the following year. In five years, this epidemic was to decimate a third of the European population. In Paris, it was 80,000 dead: at the height of the disease, 500 people died every day at the Hôtel-Dieu, at the foot of the Notre-Dame cathedral. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the plague regularly returned to wrest its tribute: 25,000 died in Paris in 1562. In the 19th century, it was cholera: 22,000 victims in the capital in 1832, 24,000 in 1849, 11,000 in 1854. Each time, under the cathedral vaults, Parisians prayed to the intercessor saints against epidemics, Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, and even more so the Virgin Mary, asking her to intercede with her Son in order to end the illness.
In these times when medicine was in its infancy and basic hygiene, there was no better weapon to fight contagion than to turn to God. Votive Mass for Epidemic Times Hinted
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