[The role of interhuman contacts in the transmission of cholera, epidemics of 1832 and 1854]

By mapping the evidence of excess mortality month by month for cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1854, which were the most deadly and most typical of their kind in France, the authors are able to provide a kinetic description of the propagation of the Asian disease throughout the whole of France. Traditionally it has been assumed that hydric anademia explains, for the most part, the paths taken by the disease and its varying intensity, but the importance of direct interhuman contamination is demonstrated by the similitude between the ways gone along by the propagation and these of the circulation of men and goods. The evolution in the structure and volume of commercial exchanges in the first half of the nineteenth century in France, may account for the fact new areas of propagation of disease appeared in 1854, pointing to an increase in mobility and the opening up of entire regions to trade. Nevertheless, the example of migrants from Paris to Guéret seems to show that the part of "healthy germ-carriers" in the contamination is very slight.