Liberté, égalité, fraternité: French Political History and THE PLAGUE
How the political history of France set the stage for Camus’ novel
Streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021, Lantern Theater Company’s U.S. premiere digital production of The Plague was adapted by British playwright Neil Bartlett from Albert Camus’ novel of the same name. While the play does not specify its place or time, the novel from which it springs was from a French writer creating at a time of intense upheaval in the French political and social system. The dichotomy in that history between the freedom of ideals and the political reality serves as a mirror of our own political landscape, and a foundation from which to explore the ways in which the play’s title can refer to both a biological plague and a political one.
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” French for “liberty, equality, fraternity,” is the national motto of France and has its origins in the Age of Enlightenment. This philosophical movement dominated 17th and 18th century thinking in Europe, and focused on reason, sensory perception, and the pursuit of happiness. Its ideals included liberty, justice, and equality; our constitutional government was birthed from this movement, and those ideals also fueled the French Revolution.
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité” was just one of the mottos of the French Revolution, first expressed in a 1790 speech by Maximilien Robespierre. The motto spoke to the core drivers of the revolution — a desire for the general population, struggling in a depressed economy and facing high food prices, to have real equality and justice. But fraternité was not always a part of the trio, and was sometimes styled as “fraternité ou la mort” — “brotherhood or death.” This “you’re with us or you’re against us” mentality, cloaked in the ideals of freedom and enlightenment, would go on to fuel one of the bloodiest episodes in France’s history: the Reign of Terror, led by none other than Robespierre himself. As a member of the post-Revolution Committee of Public Safety, he personally had hundreds of French people arrested, tried, and executed for treason or other actions or words characterized as being anti-revolutionary. In the search for an ideal republic, founded on the principles of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, thousands were executed for not conforming.
Robespierre himself was executed in 1794, and the Reign of Terror ended. By 1799, Napolean was First Consul of France, leading to a fifteen-year reign during which he was crowned emperor in 1804. Napoleon updated the familiar slogan to liberté, ordre public — liberty, public order. Through military invasions and victories, he expanded France’s empire across much of Europe before twice abdicating and being exiled: once in 1814, and again after a brief return to power in 1815.
Over the next century, the political turmoil in France raged and the government swung between a monarchy, a second empire, and two republics. Then, in 1940, the country that just a century earlier had ruled much of Europe was itself occupied. Germany broke through the Allied line in May 1940, and the next month the French prime minister resigned rather than sign an armistice. Philippe Pétain, the new prime minister, readily did so, and became the head of the Vichy government — an authoritarian, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic government that was friendly to Nazi Germany while remaining officially neutral in the war. There is some debate among historians as to whether the Vichy government was a full puppet state of Germany or their own autonomous entity with its own agenda. Whatever the truth, they replaced “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” with “Travail, famille, patrie” — work, family, homeland. About this change, Pétain expressed a particularly authoritarian and nationalist viewpoint:
“Real liberty cannot be exercised except under the shelter of a guiding authority, which they must respect, which they must obey …. We shall then tell them that equality [should] set itself within the framework of a hierarchy, founded on the diversity of office and merits.… Finally, we shall tell them that there is no way of having true brotherhood except within those natural groups, the family, the town, the homeland.”
After France was liberated in 1944, a new government replaced the Vichy one, a return to the republic they had lost in the war — and they brought Liberté, égalité, fraternité back with them. Since then, the words have been enshrined in the French constitution as the official motto, a signal that the French government and people wanted to see themselves in this transformational moment as the descendants of the revolutionaries, and as a people for whom liberties, rights, and community would always be fundamental. At the same time, Napoleon is still valorized in France to this day, with many seeing him as a great leader and tactician rather than a dictator and warmonger.
This dichotomy — pride in domineering, nationalistic leaders alongside the sense of a country’s ideals as good, true, kind, and about the innate dignity of humanity — is present in our own time and place. So too is the “with us or against us” response to challenging the authenticity of those values. It is a key element in the successful creep of authoritarianism and nationalism; populations are won over by assurances that their beliefs are the moral, safe, and righteous ones, and they support leaders who will punish dissent.
Like a plague, the virus of xenophobia and fascism can infect strongly held beliefs, changing them from ideals into tools of oppression. Camus wrote The Plague as France was just emerging from a fascist crackdown on their core values; Neil Bartlett created his adaptation of The Plague as Britain and the United States faced their own crisis of conscience. Camus warned of the plague’s future reemergence; Bartlett sounded the alarm that it was here.
Related reading: “Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!” — The post-World War II world in which Albert Camus wrote The Plague
The Plague was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in July 2021 with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
