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What is a plague? What does it mean to protect your society from such diseases? This was a fraught, even violently debated political, social and moral, more than a medical question in the French Enlightenment, and it marked the literate culture of the Age of Enlightenment. Early on, pandemics and vaccination were understood in radically different ways in England (especially by the Princess of Wales) and in France, still dominated by a view of plagues as divine punishment. In Enlightenment literature, both fiction and nonfiction, the disease is secondary to the experience of the conscious sufferer, or to its sociopolitical consequences. We will approach these issues first via a quick overview of explanations of the plague, then discuss the 18th-century smallpox vaccination debates (one of Princess Caroline’s letters, Voltaire on vaccination in two of his Lettres anglaises, extracts of Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse). We will then consider the hugely influential mid-century debate space within the magisterial Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. Finally, we will pass to late-18th-century texts that inflect culturally, politically and socially the consequences and metaphors of pandemics on the cusp of the Revolution. Texts to be read include Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses and a short essay by Guillotin (the inventor of the guillotine) on the citizen’s experience of illness and contagion in a post-aristocratic, Revolutionary state. This will be a writing-intensive course, focused on close readings of texts in 2 explications de texte (written close analyses of a selected passage). The second paper may be a more extensive study, still based on textual analysis, but which may address a historical context or set of texts that particularly interest the student. This course will be taught in French.