Category: Class Conflict

• The Cholera Riots (1831)

  This theory held that cholera was not simply a disease but a deliberate government or elite plot to kill off the poor. As cholera spread across Europe in the early 1830s, peasants, workers, and urban crowds in multiple countries accused doctors, officials, and local authorities of poisoning wells, tainting food, and using hospitals as sites of murder or dissection. The documented record strongly confirms that these accusations were widespread and that major riots broke out in places such as Russia, Prussia, France, Britain, and elsewhere. What remains unproven is the plot itself; the importance of the theory lies in how widely it was believed and how closely it tracked class distrust, quarantine measures, and fear of the medical state.