“Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!”
The post-World War II world in which Albert Camus wrote THE PLAGUE
Lantern Theater Company’s U.S. premiere digital production of The Plague — streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021 — was adapted from Albert Camus novel of the same name. Camus wrote The Plague in 1947, just three years after Paris’ liberation from Nazi occupation. Paris and the world at large were still recovering from the years of war, but there was hope and optimism that the threat of fascism was gone for good. Camus knew that hope could only come true with vigilance and courage.
Back in June 1940, the German army had reached Paris and quickly occupied it, setting up a puppet government, the Vichy Regime. Over the next four years, Parisians were subject to the pressures of fascist occupation — part domestic, part Nazi. German propaganda flooded the radio waves. There was a citywide curfew beginning at 9:00 each evening. Food, tobacco, clothes, and other necessities were strictly rationed. Food, coal, and daily necessities were sent first to Germany, leaving Paris with only the remainders. Rations shrunk with each successive year, and a million Parisians left the city for the French provinces in search of more food and fewer Germans. Not everyone who left, though, had a choice: More than 40,000 French Jews from the Paris area were transported to concentration camps with help from the French police and collaborators.
An organized network of resistance fighters fought back throughout the occupation, and in August 1944 they succeeded in capturing the police headquarters. The following week, Allied forces liberated the city with little fighting; many German soldiers surrendered or fled. The German commanding officer surrendered without carrying out his final order: Hitler wanted him to blow up Parisian landmarks and reduce the city to rubble. The bombs were placed, but never detonated.
The mood of the liberation’s immediate aftermath was one of elation. General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French armed services, led a celebratory parade down the Champs-Élysées on August 26, and Parisians greeted liberating soldiers with flowers and wine. Time’s war correspondent Charles Christian Wertenbaker wrote, “I have never seen in any face such joy as radiated from the faces of the people of Paris this morning.” The euphoria of this moment did not lead to leniency, however — in the months following liberation, more than 8,000 Parisians were convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, and over 100 were executed.
In the years immediately following the war, Paris got back on its feet. Food and heat shortages took months to ease, and tuberculosis continued to ravage the population until those necessities were stabilized. But amidst those hardships, European fascism had been largely obliterated by the end of the war — its interwar popularity all over Europe and in the U.S. was blighted by the memories of privation, cruelty, and devastation it wrought on the world. Some of its most prominent leaders, like Hitler and Mussolini, had died humiliated. While Spain and Soviet-controlled territories continued to be ruled by fascist and communist regimes, it seemed the global threat had ebbed into the high tide of optimism and prosperity promised by post-war freedom and economic boom.
It is in this period of relief, reconstruction, and renewal that Camus wrote The Plague. People saw the world fascism had made, and they rejected it. But the potential for its return — as we see today — was always lurking. In The Plague, Dr. Rieux is making a careful account of the plague that devastated the city, ensuring that the details, the mistakes, and the solutions are not lost in the euphoria of victory. The only way to prevent it from happening again is to remember, before a false sense of security steals and softens those memories.
Related reading: Two Plagues: Biological and Political — Pandemics as metaphor and mirror of political plagues, in life and art
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.
