Albert Camus’ warning to 2017

A French novel published 70 years ago about an outbreak of plague is a timeless warning about fascism.

At the end of 2016 there were two big news stories about rat populations on the rise in Paris and Tokyo. The stories made me think of the beginning of classic French novel The Plague, which begins with swarms of rats dying on the street.

10 June 1947 marks 70 years since the publication The Plague, Camus’ classic allegory of the fascist occupation of France written during and just after WWII. The anniversary comes the day before France goes to the polls with the extreme-right one of the strongest parties.

Algerian writer and French resistance member Albert Camus (best known for The Outsider, his classic story of alienation) wrote one of the most compelling books about facism while in hiding up in the mountains with a Huguenot community in the French Loire (incidentally, my uncle was one of the other people hiding out there).

Published in 1947, the book is about an outbreak of plague in the Algerian town of Oran, but it is from start to finish an allegory for Occupied France under the Nazis.

First, nobody wants to believe the first signs of plague, even as swarms of rats die in the streets. When the plague strikes you see those who help, and those who turn their back on their fellow man.

In the end, the protagonist doctor watches the town celebrate and reflects that:

“There is more in man to admire than to despise.”

Most powerful of all, though is the doctor’s warning in the last lines that the end of the plague was not a definitive victory against fascism/plague, but one that would have to be fought again “against this terror and its indefatigable weapon”.

Then follows the last line, one of the most important in French literature and European history:

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled.

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Something to reflect on as France itself goes to the polls in 2017…

Albert Camus in Chambon-Sur-Lignon. Biographers dispute whether he was there for health reasons or hiding from the Gestapo there, like many Jews were at the time.

Further reading:

Read more about Albert Camus in the Algeria entry of my world literature book review.

First edition of La Peste, published on 10 June 1947