page_title: Morea expedition
section_title: Human cost of the expedition
hierarchical_section_title: Morea expedition / Military expedition / Human cost of the expedition
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial for the French officers and soldiers of the Morea expedition fallen at Gialova, Messinia, Greece, in 1828-1832. It was inaugurated on 19 October 2007 by the Ambassador of France in Greece Christophe Farnaud, the Mayor of Pylos Georgios D. Chronopoulos and the General Secretary of the Cultural Association of Pylos «ΤΟ ΝΑΥΑΡΙΝΟ» Georgios D. Poulopoulos Engraved in Greek: Στη γη αυτή της Γιάλοβας Πύλου την περίοδο 1828-1832 έφτασαν θανόντες από θέρμες (ελονοσία) 300 και πλέον Γάλλοι αξιωματικοί και οπλίτες του εκστρατευτικού σώματος του Στρατηγού Μαιζών υπερασπίζοντας την ελευθερία της Ελλάδος - μετά την Ναυμαχία του Ναβαρίνου - όπως μαρτυρεί ο Γάλλος συγγραφέας Ρενέ Πυώ στο βιβλίο του «Ελλάδα γη αγαπημένη των θεών». Αἰωνία ἡ μνήμη. Η Ελλάδα σας ευγνωμονεί. Engraved in French: En l’honneur des Philhellènes officiers et soldats Français du Général Maison morts de la malaria à Gialova – Pylos pendant la période 1828-1832. Que leur mémoire soit éternelle. La Grèce vous en est reconnaissante.
context_page_description: The Morea expedition is the name given to the land intervention of the French Army in the Peloponnese between 1828 and 1833, at the time of the Greek War of Independence, with the aim of expelling from the region the Ottoman-Egyptian occupation forces. It was also accompanied by a scientific expedition mandated by the French Academy.
  After the fall of Messolonghi in 1826, the Western European powers decided to intervene in favour of revolutionary Greece. Their primary objective was to force Ibrahim Pasha, the Ottoman Empire's Egyptian ally, to evacuate the occupied regions and the Peloponnese. The intervention began when a Franco-Russo-British fleet was sent to the region and won the Battle of Navarino in October 1827, destroying the entire Turkish-Egyptian fleet. In August 1828, a French expeditionary corps of 15,000 men led by General Nicolas-Joseph Maison landed in the southwestern Peloponnese. During October, soldiers took control of the principal strongholds still held by the Turkish troops. Although the bulk of the troops returned to France in early 1829 after an 8 month-deployment, the French kept a military presence in the area until 1833.
context_section_description: Despite the brevity of the military operations and the small number of battles, the human cost of the French expedition was extremely heavy: between 1 September 1828 and 1 April 1829, the Chief Medical Officer of the expeditionary corps, Dr. Gaspard Roux, officially reported 4,766 illnesses and 1,000 deaths (numbers confirmed by Doctor Charles-Joseph Bastide, Surgeon-Major of the 16th Line Infantry Regiment).
  Thus, almost a third of French troops were affected by fevers, diarrhea and dysentery, which had been mostly contracted between October and December 1828 in the camps established within the marshy plains of Petalidi, in the mouth of the river Djalova (in Navarino Bay) or in Patras. This epidemic of fever, characterized by a large majority of tertian fevers (occurring every two days), periodic, with a high rate of relapse, dazzling and accompanied by shivering, jaundice, convulsions, headache and neurological and digestive disorders, certainly corresponds to malaria (word that originates from medieval Italian: mala aria—"bad air"; the disease was formerly called ague or marsh fever due to its association with swamps and marshland) which was endemic to the region at that time (it was definitively eradicated in Greece in 1974). The epidemic began during the warm season, on 20 September 1828, marked its peak on 20 October (15 November in Patras), then subsided during the month of November, to completely stop in December 1828.
  Although Doctor Roux recognized the main and deleterious influence of swamps in the spread of the disease, it was not until 1880 that its primary cause, the Plasmodium parasite (a single-celled microorganism), was discovered by the Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran—a French army doctor working in the military hospital of Constantine in Algeria— who observed parasites inside the red blood cells of infected people for the first time (Nobel Prize in 1907). Also, the evidence that female Anopheles mosquitoes, which neither Doctor Roux nor Doctor Bastide ever mention, are the vectors of malaria, came only in 1897 by the Scottish physician Sir Ronald Ross (Nobel Prize in 1902).
  The doctors attributed the disease mainly to the proximity of the focal point of infection in lowlands and marshy places and to the harshness of the transitions in temperatures between day and night, and to a lesser extent, to the intensity of the multiple and arduous works, as well as in the excessive consumption of salted meat, of spirits, and of the muddy and brackish water of the region. The cooler weather of winter, the moving of the men into the fortresses's barracks, the immediate enforcement of strict hygiene and sanitation measures, the arrival of drugs from France, as well as the establishment of three military hospitals in Navarino, Methoni and Patras significantly reduced this loss of life. It should also be noted that the use by Doctor Roux of antipyretic febrifuges such as cinchona powder and quinine, purified for the first time only 8 years before, in 1820, by Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, resulted in most convincing therapeutic results.
  However, the total number of deaths would increase significantly thereafter until the expedition's departure in 1833, especially following some suicides, duels, a few cases of "narcotism" following an overuse of alcoholic liquors, with the explosion of a gunpowder magazine within the fort of Navarino, which cost the lives of fifty soldiers on 19 November 1829, and following the Argos affair on January 16, 1833, which resulted in the death of three French soldiers. The scientific mission will also be strongly affected by malaria fever during the next summer in 1829. The total number of deaths in the Morea expedition is generally estimated, according to testimonies, at around 1,500.
  Subsequently, memorials commemorating these fallen French soldiers were erected by the Greek and French states on the islet of Sphacteria in Navarino's bay (monument erected in May 1890) and in the cities of Gialova (monument erected in October 2007 on the exact site of the camp of Dja
caption: Memorial monument dedicated to the memory of the French soldiers and officers of the Morea expedition who died of malaria in Gialova
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