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Jock McCulloch and Pavla Miller
Pavla Miller
School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (emerita), RMIT University,
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://
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1. Introduction
Jock McCulloch1 and Pavla Miller2
(1) Melbourne, VIC, Australia
(2) School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (emerita), RMIT
University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
References
Baker, Julie J. ‘The Silent Crisis’: Black Labour, Disease, and the Economics and
Politics of Health on the South African Gold Mines, 1902–1930. PhD thesis, Queen’s
University, Ontario, 1989.
Bateman, Chris. ‘Silicosis: 10,000 Gold Miners Getting Set to Sue’. The South African
Medical Journal, Vol. 102, No. 6, 2012, pp. 338–340.
[Crossref][PubMed]
Castleman, Barry. Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, 4th edn. New Jersey: Aspen
Law and Business Books, 1996.
Chirwa, Wiseman Chijere. ‘Aliens and AIDS in Southern Africa: The Malawi-South
Africa Debate’. African Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 386, 1998, pp. 53–79.
[Crossref]
Cowie, R.L. ‘The Five Ages of Pulmonary Tuberculosis and the South African
Goldminer’, The South African Medical Journal, Vol. 76, 18th November 1989, pp. 566–
567.
Ehrlich, Rodney. ‘A century of miners’ phthisis on the south African gold mines. Any
end in sight?’ Presentation at the 25th Anniversary meeting of the Collegium
Ramazzini, held in Carpi, Italy on October 25–28, 2007.
Ehrlich, Rodney, Alex Montgomery, Paula Akugizibwe and Gregg Gonsalves. ‘Public
health implications of changing patterns of recruitment into the South African
mining industry, 1973–2012: A database analysis’. BMC Public Health, Vol. 18, No. 1,
article no. 93, August 2017, pp. 1–12.
Ehrlich, Rodney, Jill Murray and David Rees. ‘Subradiological silicosis’. American
Journal of Industrial Medicine, Vol. 61, No. 11, November 2018, pp. 877–885.
Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
[Crossref]
Hay, Douglas and Paul Craven (eds). Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and
the Empire, 1562–1955. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2004.
Hnizdo Eva and Jill Murray. ‘Risk of Pulmonary Tuberculosis Relative to Silicosis and
Exposure to Silica Dust in South African Gold Miners.’ Occupational and
Environmental Medicine, Vol. 55, No. 7, 1998, pp. 496–502.
Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
[Crossref]
Illife, John. A History of the African AIDS Epidemic. Oxford: James Currey, 2006.
Katz, Elaine. The White Death: Silicosis on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines 1886–1910.
Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.
King, Rina. Silicosis in South African Gold Mines: A Study of Risk of Disease for Black
Mineworkers. TAG/WITS Sociology Research, 1985.
Markowitz, Gerald E. and David Rosner. ‘The Illusion of Medical Certainty: Silicosis
and the Politics of Industrial Disability, 1930–1960.’ The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 67,
Suppl. 2, Part 1. Disability Policy: Restoring Socioeconomic Independence, 1989, pp.
228–253.
McCulloch, Jock and Geoffrey Tweedale. Defending the Indefensible: The Global
Asbestos Industry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Murray, Jill, Tony Davies and David Rees. ‘Occupational Lung Disease in the South
African Mining Industry: Research and Policy Implementation’. Journal of Public
Health Policy, Vol. 32, Suppl. 1, June 2011, pp. S65–S79.
Packard, Randall M. and Dr David Coetzee. ‘White Plague, Black Labour Revisited: TB
and the Mining Industry’. In Crush, Jonathan & Wilmot James, eds. Crossing
Boundaries: Mine Migrancy in a Democratic South Africa, Edited collection of papers
presented at an international conference on ‘Transforming Mine Migrancy in the
1990s’ held in Cape Town, June 1994. Institute for Democracy in South Africa, Cape
Town, 1995.
Packard, R.M. ‘The Invention of the “Tropical Worker”: Medical Research and the
Quest for Central African Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903–36’. The
Journal of African History, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1993, pp. 271–292.
[Crossref]
Packard, R.M. White Plague, Black Labour: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of
Health and Disease in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Phillips J.I., G. Nelson, N. Vorajee, J. Murray, N. Ndlovu and J.C.A Davies. ‘Marikana
Autopsies Highlight Occupational Diseases Amongst Platinum Mine Workers’.
Occupational Health Southern Africa, Vol. 20, No. 4, 2014, pp. 6–12.
Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of
Wealth and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
[Crossref]
Porter, Theodore M. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public
Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
[Crossref]
Proctor, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking
of Ignorance. San Francisco: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Proctor, Robert N. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case
for Abolition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
[Crossref]
Rosental, Paul-André, David Rosner and Paul D. Blanc. ‘From Silicosis to Silica
Hazards: An Experiment in Medicine, History, and the Social Sciences’. American
Journal of Industrial Medicine, Vol. 58, No. S1, 2015, pp. S3–S5.
[Crossref][PubMed]
Smith, Matthew John. Working in the Grave: The Development of a Health and Safety
System on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1900–1939. MA thesis, Rhodes University,
1993.
Steen, T.W.; K.M. Gyi; N.W. White; T. Gabosianelwe; S. Ludick; G.N. Mazonde; N.
Mabongo; M. Ncube; N. Monare; R. Ehrlich and G. Schierhout. ‘Prevalence of
Occupational Lung Disease Among Botswana Men Formerly Employed in the South
African Mining Industry’. Occupational & Environmental Medicine, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1997,
pp. 19–26.
[Crossref]
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common
Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Stuckler, David, Sanjay Basu, Martin McKee and Mark, Lurie. ‘Mining and Risk of
Tuberculosis in Sub-Saharan Africa’. American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 101, No. 3,
March 2011, pp. 524–530.
Tilley, Helen. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of
Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011.
[Crossref]
Trapido, A. An Analysis of the Burden of Occupational Lung Disease in a Random
Sample of Former Gold Mineworkers in the Libode District of the Eastern Cape. PhD
thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2000.
van Onselen, Charles. The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from the
Witwatersrand Mines, 1902–1955. London: Hurst Publishers, 2018.
van Wyk, D. ‘A Review of Platinum Mining in the Bonjanala District of the North-
West Province. A Participatory Action Research Approach.’ Johannesburg: The Bench
Marks Foundation, 2012. Available at http://www.bench-marks.org.za/research/
rustenburg
Zuma, K., E. Gouws, B. Williams and M. Lurie. ‘Risk Factors for HIV Infection among
Women in Carletonville, South Africa: Migration, Demography and Sexually
Transmitted Diseases’. International Journal of STD & AIDS, Vol. 14, No. 12, December
2003, pp. 814–817.
Footnotes
1 For a study of the men’s life conditions see D. van Wyk. ‘A Review of Platinum
Mining in the Bonjanala District of the North-West province. A Participatory Action
Research Approach’. Johannesburg: The Bench Marks Foundation, 2012. Available at
http://www.bench-marks.org.za/research/rustenburg.
3 ‘Media Release: Settlement of the silicosis and TB class action. South Africa—Gold
mining companies’, Johannesburg, 3rd May 2018; ‘Media Release: Court approves
settlement of the silicosis and TB class action’, Johannesburg, 26th July 2019. http://
goldminersilicosis.c o.za/about-the-silicosis-litigation/updates/.
4 Jock McCulloch. South Africa’s Gold Mines and the Politics of Silicosis. James Currey,
2012, p. 52.
5 Paul-André Rosental. ‘Truncating a Disease. The Reduction of Silica Hazards to
Silicosis at the 1930 International Labor Office Conference on Silicosis in
Johannesburg’. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, vol. 58, Suppl. 1, November
2015, p. S9.
7 There is an extensive literature on this topic. Key texts include Theodore Porter,
Trust in Numbers. The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (1996); Mary
Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth
and Society (1998); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, (1990); and Alain Desrosières,
The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (2002).
8 Among key texts in the literature on imperial social formation and circulation of
knowledge are works by Ann Laura Stoler, such as Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic
Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living
Laboratory (2011); Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie
in Colonial Congo (2016); Keith Breckenridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of
Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (2014) and Douglas
Hay and Paul Craven (eds), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the
Empire, 1562–1955 (2004).
10 For an overview of the four main ways of deriving current TB statistics, see
Global Tuberculosis Report 2019. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2019, pp. 26–34.
11 Paul-André Rosental, David Rosner and Paul D. Blanc. ‘From Silicosis to Silica
Hazards: An Experiment in Medicine, History, and the Social Sciences’. American
Journal of Industrial Medicine Vol. 58, No. S1, 2015, p. S4.
12 Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner. ‘The Limits of Thresholds: Silica and the
Politics of Science, 1935 to 1990’. American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 85, No. 2,
1995, p. 250. See also Paul-André Andre Rosental. ‘Introduction: Why silicosis?’ In
Silicosis: A World History, ed., Rosental, 2017, p 3; and ‘Truncating a Disease. The
Reduction of Silica Hazards to Silicosis at the 1930 International Labor Office
Conference on Silicosis in Johannesburg’. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Vol.
58, No. S1, pp. S6–S14.
14 Phthisis is a Greek word for consumption. Throughout the first half of the
twentieth century, and until more precise and reliable modes of diagnosis became
available in the 1950s, the term was used in South Africa for unspecific wasting lung
disease. Rodney Ehrlich notes that black former gold miners attending the
Occupational Medicine Clinic at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town referred to
silicosis and tuberculosis as ‘phthisis’ well into the twenty first century; he does not
remember a black miner spontaneously offering the term ‘silicosis’. Personal
communication, July 2019.
15 Elaine Katz. The White Death: Silicosis on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines 1886–
1910. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.
21 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Safety and Health in the Mining Industry.
Pretoria, Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs, 1995, pp. 51–53.
22 T.W. Steen et al. ‘Prevalence of Occupational Lung Diseases among Botswana Men
Formerly Employed in the South African Mining Industry’. Occupational and
Environmental Medicine, No. 54, 1997, pp. 19–26; and Jill Murray, Tony Davies and
David Rees. ‘Occupational Lung Disease in the South African Mining Industry:
Research and Policy Implementation’. Journal of Public Health Policy, Vol. 32, Suppl 1,
June 2011, pp. S65–S79.
24 Eva Hnizdo and Jill Murray. ‘Risk of Pulmonary Tuberculosis Relative to Silicosis
and Exposure to Silica Dust in South African Gold Miners’. Occupational and
Environmental Medicine, Vol. 55, No. 7, 1998, pp. 496–502; Rodney Ehrlich, Jill Murray
and David Rees. ‘Subradiological Silicosis’. American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
Vol. 61, 2018, pp. 877–885.
25 Tuberculosis Strategic Plan for South Africa, 2007–2011. Pretoria, South Africa:
Ministry of Health; 2007, cited in David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu, Martin McKee and
Mark, Lurie. ‘Mining and Risk of Tuberculosis in Sub-Saharan Africa’. American
Journal of Public Health, Vol. 101, No. 3, 2010, p. 524.
26 For example, around 40 per cent of the adult male tuberculosis patients in
Lesotho’s hospitals work or have worked in South Africa mines. The Mining Sector:
Tuberculosis and Migrant Labour in Southern Africa. AIDS and Rights Alliance for
Southern Africa, July 2008, p. 2.
27 Stuckler et al. ‘Mining and Risk of Tuberculosis’, p. 529; McCulloch, South Africa’s
Gold Mines, 2012, pp. 85–105. See also R. M. Packard. White Plague, Black Labour:
Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989.
28 See note 7.
29 The diamond and gold rushes of the late nineteenth century, for example, were
associated with the spread of syphilis, followed by the bubonic plague in 1901 and
the Spanish flu in 1918. Howard Phillips. ‘AIDS in the Context of South Africa’s
Epidemic History: Preliminary Historical Thoughts’. The South African Historical
Journal, No. 45, Nov. 2001, pp. 11–26.
30 John Illife. A History of the African AIDS Epidemic. Oxford: James Currey, 2006.
31 Wiseman Chijere Chirwa. ‘Aliens and AIDS in Southern Africa: The Malawi-South
Africa Debate’. African Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 386, 1998, pp. 53–79.
32 Jill Murray, Tony Davies and David Rees. ‘Occupational Lung disease in the South
African Mining Industry: Research and Policy Implementation’. Journal of Public
Health Policy, Vol. 32, Suppl. 1, June 2011, pp. S65–S79; Rodney Ehrlich, Jill Murray
and David Rees. ‘Subradiological Silicosis’. American Journal of Industrial Medicine,
Vol. 61, 2018, pp. 877–885.
33 Rodney Ehrlich. ‘A century of miners’ phthisis on the south African gold mines.
Any end in sight?’ Presentation at the 25th Anniversary meeting of the Collegium
Ramazzini, held in Carpi, Italy on October 25–28, 2007, p. 15.
34 Stuckler et al. ‘Mining and Risk of Tuberculosis’, 2010, p. 524, citing Tuberculosis
Strategic Plan for South Africa, 2007–2011. Pretoria, South Africa: Ministry of Health,
2007.
35 Global tuberculosis report 2019. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2019. Figure
2.5: ‘Countries in the three high-burden country lists for TB, TB/HIV and MDR-TB
being used by WHO during the period 2016–2020, and their areas of overlap’, p. 24;
and Table 2.4: ‘The three high-burden country lists for TB, TB/HIV and MDR-TB being
used by WHO during the period 2016–2020’, p. 25.
36 Murray et al. ‘Occupational Lung disease in the South African Mining Industry’, p.
70.
38 Chris Bateman. ‘Silicosis: 10,000 Gold Miners Getting Set to Sue’. The South
African Medical Journal, Vol. 102, No. 6, 2012, pp. 338–340; Judgement 2019,
1/p37/#60; p. 42/#69.
42 Republic of South Africa, The High Court of South Africa, Gauteng Local Division,
Consolidated Case Number 48226/12, 13 May 2016.
43 Interview with Richard Spoor, Convention Centre, Cape Town, 23 October 2014.
49 Barry Castleman. Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, 4th edn. New Jersey: Aspen
Law and Business Books, 1996; Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale. Defending the
Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008;
Robert N. Proctor. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case
for Abolition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
50 Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: The Making and
Unmaking of Ignorance. San Francisco: Stanford University Press, 2012.
51 See, for example, Michael Atkin. ‘The Biggest Lung Disease Crisis since Asbestos:
Our Love of Stone Kitchen Benchtops is Killing Workers’. ABC news, Updated 10 Oct
2018, 5:02pm, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-10/stone-cutting-for-kitchen-
benchtops-sparks-silicosis-crisis/10357342.
52 There are, however, several unpublished histories. See, for example, Harold Jack
Simons. Migratory Labour, Migratory Microbes. Occupational Health in the South
African Mining Industry: The Formative Years 1870–1956. Unpublished manuscript,
1960; Julie J. Baker. ‘The Silent Crisis’: Black labour, Disease, and the Economics and
Politics of Health on the South African Gold Mines, 1902–1930. PhD thesis, Queen’s
University, Ont., 1989; and Matthew John Smith. Working in the Grave: The
Development of a Health and Safety System on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1900–
1939. MA thesis, Rhodes University, 1993.
53 Katz. The White Death; Packard. White Plague, Black Labour. See also Randall M.
Packard. ‘The Invention of the “Tropical Worker”: Medical Research and the Quest
for Central African Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903–36’. The Journal of
African History, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1993, pp. 271–292; Randall M. Packard & David
Coetzee. ‘White Plague, Black Labour Revisited: TB and the Mining Industry’. In
Jonathan Crush & James Wilmot eds. Crossing Boundaries: Mine Migrancy in a
Democratic South Africa. Edited collection of papers presented at an international
conference on ‘Transforming Mine Migrancy in the 1990s’, Institute for Democracy in
South Africa, Cape Town, 1995; Jock McCulloch. South Africa’s Gold Mines and the
Politics of Silicosis. Oxford: James Currey, Oxford, 2012. See also Charles van Onselen.
The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from the Witwatersrand Mines,
1902–1955. London: Hurst Publishers, 2018.
The first gold mines were opened on the East Rand in the late 1880s.
The mines were concentrated on a single geological deposit around
Johannesburg and were distinguished by their depth, scale and the size
of their workforce. The deposits were low grade: it took three tons of
ore to yield one ounce of gold.1 The narrow seams made mechanisation
difficult and so the mines relied on a massive workforce. Those features
encouraged the dominance of a few mining houses which, because of
their importance to employment, foreign exchange and state revenue,
wielded great political influence. Although some small mines persisted,
within twenty years ownership was concentrated into the hands of six
giant mining and finance companies. By contrast, at the beginning of
the twentieth century, the British coal mining industry consisted of
over 1000 individual companies which competed against each other for
share of a finite market. The South African mining houses provided the
structure for the mobilisation of capital, and by pooling resources and
expertise they lowered operating costs and spread risk across the
industry as a whole.2 Until 1940, the most influential mining group was
Rand Mines Limited and its London parent, the Central Mining and
Investment Corporation. After the Second World War, the development
of the Free State goldfields saw Anglo American South Africa Ltd
(AASA) become dominant.3 The industry-wide restructuring of the mid-
1990s produced a smaller number of focussed gold mining companies,
leaving only AngloGold, AvGold, GoldFields, Rand Gold and the
remnants of Johannesburg Consolidated Investments.
Fig. 12.—Saint Michel terrassant le Dragon. Miniature d’un livre d’heures du quinzième siècle.
Bibliothèque de M. Ambr. Firmin-Didot.
CHAPITRE PREMIER
I
SAINT MICHEL DANS LES TEMPS PRIMITIFS.
n remontant le cours des âges, on trouve dès la plus haute
antiquité les traces certaines de la croyance aux esprits, bons
ou mauvais, inférieurs à Dieu, mais supérieurs à l’homme.
Les juifs, héritiers des saines traditions, et les autres peuples,
qui avaient emporté, en se dispersant, quelques lambeaux plus
ou moins défigurés des révélations primitives, ont attribué à
ces mêmes esprits une large part dans la lutte incessante du bien contre le
mal; comme nous, ils ont pensé et ils pensent encore que les anges veillent
sur les hommes, que les démons s’acharnent à leur perte; bien plus, d’après
une découverte récente faite en Assyrie, le grand combat livré au ciel dès
l’origine du monde n’était pas ignoré des anciens. De tout temps on a placé à
la tête des célestes phalanges un chef invincible, personnification vivante de
la vérité, de la justice et de la fidélité, ennemi à jamais irréconciliable du
prince des ténèbres et des mauvais génies rangés sous son empire, ami des
âmes et défenseur des droits de Dieu.
Ces croyances furent altérées et mélangées de grossières erreurs en
Égypte, en Chaldée, chez les Assyriens et les autres nations infidèles; mais
les juifs, instruits par les prophètes, ne s’écartèrent pas sur ce point des
traditions de leurs ancêtres; au témoignage de Daniel, ils admirent
l’existence d’un ange, dont le nom signifiait dans leur langue la majesté
incomparable de Dieu, et désignait une mission spéciale: Michel, c’est-à-
dire, qui est semblable à Dieu. Ils le reconnurent pour leur génie tutélaire,
leur chef dans les combats, leur guide et leur conseiller; ils lui donnèrent le
titre de «prince,» de «grand prince;» et, si l’on s’en tient aux règles de
l’exégèse usitée chez les Hébreux, il est permis de croire que la Synagogue
lui attribua la plupart des faits merveilleux consignés dans les livres saints, et
accomplis par le ministère des anges. D’après ces interprétations, saint
Michel fut regardé comme l’intermédiaire des révélations du Sinaï; c’est lui
qui mit à mort les nouveau-nés des Égyptiens, pour hâter la fin de la
première captivité et l’acheminement vers la terre promise; c’est lui qui
sauva le trésor du temple de la cupidité des Séleucides et infligea un terrible
châtiment à l’impie Héliodore (fig. 13). Il faisait sans doute partie de
l’ambassade qu’Abraham reçut sous le chêne de Mambré; Moïse l’entendit
lui adresser la parole dans le buisson ardent; Ézéchiel le vit peut-être sous le
voile énigmatique du tétraphorme. Il fut, en un mot, le principal messager du
Seigneur dans ses rapports avec le peuple élu; il prit part à tous les actes
destinés à exalter ou à humilier, à défendre ou à punir la famille d’adoption,
«la nation domestique de Dieu,» selon l’expression de Tertullien.
Les juifs ne pouvaient ignorer le combat dont le récit a été gravé sur les
monuments chaldéens, et que saint Jean nous a dépeint avec des couleurs si
vives dans son Apocalypse; ils savaient que saint Michel avait reçu la
mission de combattre Satan, de s’opposer à ses projets et de défendre les
âmes contre ses séductions. Une tradition, célèbre autrefois en Israël, vient
jeter sur ce point une lumière éclatante. On racontait qu’une altercation
s’était engagée entre les deux antagonistes, à la mort de Moïse; saint Michel
fit enlever par un ange le corps du grand législateur et alla l’ensevelir dans
une vallée du pays de Moab, afin de le soustraire au culte des Hébreux qui
n’auraient pas manqué de lui rendre les honneurs divins. Le démon,
souhaitant avoir les restes de Moïse en sa puissance pour faire tomber le
peuple de Dieu dans l’idolâtrie, voulut mettre obstacle au dessein de
l’Archange; mais
Fig. 13.—Le châtiment d’Héliodore. Fragment de la peinture à fresque de Raphaël dans une des salles
du Vatican. Seizième siècle.
III