In cities that stopped receiving provisions, accounts circulated of desperate inhabitants forced to burn whatever furniture they had to keep themselves warm. In the port of Marseille on the Mediterranean coast, and at various points along the Rhone and Garonne Rivers, the ice was able to support the weight of laden carts, which places it around 11 inches thick. The rivers, canal network, and ports froze, and snow reportedly blocked roads across France. Animals were not spared either: Numerous livestock froze in their pens, barns, and coops. In the absence of weather forecasting, the authorities had no time to prepare for what became known as “Le Grand Hiver,” and thousands succumbed to hypothermia before measures could be taken to help them. In the following two weeks, snow would fall and thermometers in France would drop to a low of -5☏.
The cold snaps of late 1708 were as nothing to the crash in temperatures that took place over the night of January 5 to 6. French peasants had been hit by poor harvests, taxes, and conscription for the War of the Spanish Succession. The country most affected by the terrible cold was undoubtedly France. than any other within the Memory of Man.” French Freeze Shivering in England, the scholar William Derham wrote: “I believe the Frost was greater.
During the worst winter in 500 years, extreme cold followed by food shortages caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in France alone, froze lagoons in the Mediterranean, and changed the course of a war.
Dawn broke the next morning on a continent that had frozen over from Italy to Scandinavia and from England to Russia, and would not warm up again for the next three months. On January 5, temperatures plummeted-not, perhaps, a surprise in European winter. It happened literally overnight in the first few days of 1709. This story appears in the January/February 2017 issue of National Geographic History magazine.
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