In a 2004 book, the great French historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, quoted a letter written by Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné. Madame de Sévigné, as she is often called, was a prolific correspondent in the Paris of Louis XIV, the Sun King.
Madame de Sévigné wrote her letter on July 24th, 1675. In it, she lamented how “the behavior of the sun and of the seasons has completely changed.” To Le Roy Ladurie, it was a remarkable passage, for indeed the climate of France was cooling in 1675. Madame de Sévigné’s letter seemed to indicate that the keenest observers, at least, could perceive the change.
Yet the letter meant something rather different than historians of climate change have assumed. The difference strikes at the heart of one of the foremost challenges of studying the past to better understand climate change, or indeed any of today’s most pressing concerns.
In the late seventeenth century, the Sun slipped into a prolonged period of low activity, a grand solar minimum that would later be named after a solar astronomer, Edward Walter Maunder. Meanwhile, a spate of explosive volcanic eruptions had lofted sulfuric gases into the stratosphere. There, they reacted with water to form aerosols, particles that reflected incoming solar radiation.
Owing in large part to these forces, a period of natural climatic cooling known as the Little Ice Age would enter a particularly cold stretch in the late seventeenth century. The cooling was modest by the standards of present-day warming, and it didn’t affect every part of the world.
But just like today, gradual climatic trends triggered and reflected short-term weather extremes. In some years, and in some regions, cold snaps accompanied with nighttime frost, the seventeenth century equivalent of today’s searing heat waves, interrupted even the summer. Diverse evidence, including the growth rings in trees and the weather observations recorded by diarists, tells us that the people of France endured an especially cold year in 1675.
We now define climate change as a long-term shift in average weather (the weather you can expect) and weather variance (the weather you can get). Global warming, for example, has both broadly warmed where you live, and made it more likely that you’ll experience a heatwave that would have been impossible when you were younger.
This way of thinking about climate change emerged gradually and depended, in part, on the emergence of statistical thinking (which allowed scientists to think about averages and variance) and the quantification of long-term weather data (primarily through the global expansion of weather stations equipped with new instruments).
By the middle of the twentieth century, climatology had transformed itself into the study of climate change as we define it today.
With that in mind, you can see why Madame de Sévigné’s letter seemed so striking to La Roy Ladurie. Here was a seventeenth century Parisian who both articulated a thoroughly modern understanding of climate change, and identified a genuine cooling trend, the cold stretch associated with the Maunder solar minimum.
No surprise, then, that in a landmark 2008 article, another renowned historian, Geoffrey Parker, consulted Le Roy Ladurie’s book to argue that Madame de Sévigné’s observations about the changing seasons were directly tied to her experience of a summer cold snap that was characteristic of the Little Ice Age.
“We suffer horribly from the cold and have the fires lit” Madame de Sévigné lamented, according to Parker. It was no surprise. After all, Parker wrote, 1675 was “a year noted by climatologists as one of the coldest on record.”
Parker had set out to prove that the Little Ice Age caused worldwide, synchronized suffering. It was a claim he would later expand in his 2013 book, Global Crisis. In that book, Parker wrote that perhaps a third of the world’s population succumbed to disasters that climate change had set in motion.
It wouldn’t make much sense that a relationship so grand in scale would entirely escape the notice of seventeenth century observers. Even those not armed with our statistical tools and weather data should have sensed that weather patterns had changed in disastrous ways.
Enter Madame de Sévigné’s letter. Here was proof that global cooling caused worldwide suffering, and some elites, at least, recognized the connection.
One morning, a couple weeks ago, I sat down to review proofs of the first chapters in my forthcoming book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean. The book provides an environmental history of the solar system, and the chapters I reviewed explore different dimensions of the Sun’s shifting influence on Earth.
I, too, had used the passage in Madame de Sévigné’s letter as a vivid example of how Europeans perceived the Little Ice Age, and I relied on Parker’s interpretation.
Yet although I’d read that passage many times while teaching, now something about it struck me as a little odd. Would the summer really be so cold, I wondered, that Madame de Sévigné’s household would light a fire and huddle around it? It seemed possible, but this morning it felt just unlikely enough that I decided to consult Madame de Sévigné’s letter myself.
I soon discovered that Madame de Sévigné’s quote about the cold really dated to February 6th, 1671. In July 24th 1675, it turned out that Madame de Sévigné actually sweltered through a heat wave. After complaining that the behavior of the Sun and seasons had changed, she wrote that it was “so extremely hot” that she chose to sleep outdoors that night.
Madame de Sévigné’s references to weather were, in fact, complaints about conditions we might expect today: a cold snap in winter, and a heat wave in summer!
It was easy to think otherwise, because historians read her letters while assuming, first, that she’d write about Little Ice Age conditions, and second, that the Little Ice Age was a period of extreme global cooling. It was, in fact, a much more subtle and complex phenomenon, owing in part to its causes.
Small shifts in solar output have a multidimensional but overall moderate impact on Earth’s climate. Volcanic eruptions can induce more short-term cooling, but the cooling effect of each eruption fades quickly. It also varies from region to region, owing in part to the uneven distribution in the stratosphere of the aerosols created by explosive eruptions.
The nature of the solar and volcanic causes, or forcings, responsible for the Little Ice Age meant that, in Frace, you could definitely have very hot summer weather even during the coldest stretch of the Maunder Minimum.
Although Madame de Sévigné’s observations were not initially what historians assumed, they remain historically significant.
A further reading of her letters revealed to me that, on July 19th, 1675, she attended a ceremony in which the shrine of Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, was exposed “to put a stop to the continual rains we have had, and to obtain warm and dry weather.” After the ceremony, the weather grew hot in Paris. But it cooled down in Provence, in southeastern France. In July 24 Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, who lived in Provence.
It was while remarking on the regional temperature difference that she marveled at the change in the seasons. But in her view, this change had happened because of the ceremony at the shrine, five days earlier. Far from a general comment on the Little Ice Age climate, Madame de Sévigné articulated a common belief that prayer and religious ritual could change the weather.
Madame de Sévigné’s remarks therefore reflect how European elites evaluated their efforts at weather control during a spate of extreme weather. And although this weather did not include a cold snap, the same sources we use to identify cold periods in the past also tell us that the Little Ice Age increased the variability, or in other words the unpredictability, of weather in parts of Europe.
“[The letter] may not reflect a modern understanding of climate change, but it does reveal how Europeans grappled with and struggled to adapt to extreme weather during one of the chilliest phases of the Little Ice Age.”
The letter, therefore, is both less straightforward and more interesting than either Le Roy Ladurie or Parker assumed. It may not reflect a modern understanding of climate change, but it does reveal how Europeans grappled with and struggled to adapt to extreme weather during one of the chilliest phases of the Little Ice Age.
And above all, the letter teaches us that environmental historians need to be careful when attempting to perceive the influence of climate change on the past. It is all too tempting for even the most experienced historians to see what they expect to see, and what they expect to see is often the extreme climatic changes that we, unfortunately, experience today.
Yet all too often, the past has a stranger, subtler but more interesting story to tell. A story in which we might yet read something of our own fears and desires.
Feature Image: “Grignan, Madame de Sévigné (bis) 02” by Celeda is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
