Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  The story begins with a Dr. Rieux coming across a dead rat on the second-floor landing of his office, the first of thousands that would be seen over the coming days, but whose significance goes unheeded by the population.

  FRANCINE LEFT FOR Algeria in October in order to resume her teaching. Wanting to maximize his time in the mountains before the winter weather arrived, Camus planned to stay at Le Panelier until the end of November, telling a friend, “After that I will return to Algiers and settle there no doubt, unless something unforeseen happens.” He asked Pascal Pia to book him passage on a steamer that was to leave from Marseille on November 21.

  On the night of November 7, the unforeseen happened. Dubbed Operation Torch, three Allied task forces comprising more than 600 ships and carrying more than 60,000 troops made a surprise landing on the coast of French North Africa, in Algeria and Morocco. Despite some Vichy opposition, the Allies quickly took Casablanca, Algiers, and Oran, and controlled some 1,300 miles of coastline.

  It was a major Allied victory. Radio London spoke with a new confidence. On November 10, the evening broadcast of Les Français parlent aux Français declared, “In the space of five days, a world accustomed for three years and two months to seeing Germany send its armies over the continents and oceans has seen a sudden and abrupt change in the face of things.”

  However, with the Allies now facing southern France across the Mediterranean, Hitler gave the order for the German Army to cross the demarcation line on November 11 and to occupy all of France. Formally, it was a breach of the armistice. Hitler offered his explanation in a published letter to Pétain: “The circumstances being such, I have the honor and the regret of informing you that, in order to remove the danger that threatens us, I am forced, in concert with the Italian government, to give the order to my troops to go through France by the most direct route to occupy the Mediterranean coast.”

  The plague had arrived in southern France. The day of the German invasion, Camus wrote in his notebook: “Caught like rats!”

  Francine was now in Allied-held territory, but Camus was in German-occupied France. They were cut off from each other. There would be no passage, or even any direct mail. In his novel, when the state of plague is declared, the prefect orders the town gates closed. In a draft version of what would become part of The Plague, Camus wrote:

  In short, the time of the epidemic was mainly a time of exile. One of the most striking consequences of the closing of the gates was in fact the sudden separation that it imposed upon people who were not prepared for it. Mothers, children, spouses, lovers who a few days beforehand believed they were undertaking only a temporary separation, who had kissed one another on the platform of a station with two or three remarks, certain of seeing one another again in several days or weeks … all at last found themselves cut off without recourse, prevented from seeing or communicating with one another.

  Stranded, an “exile,” and still weak from TB, Camus had no alternative but to focus on writing. He noted: “Make separation the big theme of the novel.” That general sense of separation was being compounded across France by another, growing symptom of the brown plague: slavery.

  WORKERS FOR GERMANY

  With ongoing offensives in North Africa and the Soviet Union, and defensive installations to build on the western front, the German war machine had enormous and increasing demands for materiel and the manpower to produce it. As the Soviet campaign claimed heavy losses—almost 1.3 million German casualties by June 1942—workers in Germany were drafted to replace them. The support and expansion of the Reich therefore relied more and more on labor from the occupied territories. French prisoners of war were employed in German factories and on German farms, and much of France’s domestic production had been coopted for German needs. Some 275,000 French laborers were building airfields and fortifications on the Atlantic Coast, and another 400,000 worked in French armament factories that supplied the Germans.

  But that was not enough to satisfy demand, or Hitler. He appointed longtime Nazi Party member Fritz Sauckel as plenipotentiary for the mobilization of labor, and gave him the power to secure all available labor throughout German-held lands. In mid-1942, Sauckel and Hitler decided that France could afford to supply an additional 350,000 workers to Germany.

  Sauckel discussed the situation with Vichy prime minister Laval, and proposed to furlough 50,000 French POWs if France sent 150,000 workers to Germany. Laval agreed to the deal and announced the Relève program in late June 1942. It was portrayed as a patriotic volunteer program through which workers could secure the release of fellow countrymen who had been held for two years.

  The response was tepid. Only 53,000 workers volunteered in the first three months of the program, too few to satisfy Germany’s demands. So the Germans asked Vichy to address the shortfall by passing a compulsory labor law that would require able-bodied men to work. Vichy complied by instituting laws in September 1942 that required men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and unmarried women between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, to work at least thirty hours per week. The number of workers sent to Germany tripled in October and quintupled in November relative to that in September, bringing the total to 239,000 in the second half of 1942.

  That was still not enough. German manpower was stretched by reversals on two fronts: the Allied landing on the coast of French North Africa that prompted the occupation of all of France, and therefore tied up yet more soldiers; and more losses and surrenders on the eastern front. In late November, the Soviets’ Operation Uranus encircled 300,000 Axis (mostly German) troops around Stalingrad.

  Germany demanded yet another 250,000 French workers. Laval agreed under the same three-workers-for-one-POW formula. But drumming up sufficient workers was difficult. Laval ordered prefects to undertake a census of all men aged twenty-one to thirty-one. And on February 16, 1943, he established the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO; Obligatory Labor Service), which required Frenchmen aged twenty to twenty-two to go to work in Germany for two years in lieu of their customary military service.

  The eligible young men who received summonses to report for duty faced a terrible dilemma. Should they obey, they would have to leave their families and France, and work for their occupier. Moreover, with the Allies now bombing German factories, and the tide of the war potentially changing, they might be risking their lives in Germany. On the other hand, if they did not obey, they would be outlaws subject to arrest and perhaps convicted to forced labor anyway. The compulsory-labor law, the census, the STO, and the departures of workers for Germany aroused widespread bitter resentment toward Laval and the Vichy regime as so many families, most of whom had suffered some separations or losses already, faced yet more anguish.

  The regime’s deep complicity in the sending of French labor to Germany also provoked the relentless fury of Radio London, whose broadcasts encouraged workers on a nearly daily basis to defy Vichy’s schemes. “Workers and bosses, peasants and bureaucrats, in order for France to live, not a man for Germany!” was the message on January 23. “One’s sacred duty is to do everything to remain on French soil,” said another appeal. “Frenchmen, do not go there!” was a refrain in March. Resistance newspapers echoed the cry. Le Franc-Tireur, published by the movement of the same name, declared: FRENCHMEN! STAND AGAINST SLAVERY.

  MANY MEN DID go to Germany—more than 60,000 in January 1943, almost 80,000 in February, and about 110,000 in March. But many who were summoned did not report for work and went on the run. Those who evaded the STO and the authorities became known as réfractaires. While more than 600,000 French workers were sent to Germany in 1942–43, more than 200,000 became réfractaires. The Resistance took pride in their defiance of the STO; the headline of the March 15, 1943, issue of the Resistance newspaper Libération stated in large bold type:

  LA JEUNESSE FRANÇAISE RÉPOND: MERDE.

  [The French youth answer: Shit.]

  EXILES

  Réfractaires could not return to their homes without risk
ing being caught by the French police. While some tried to cross the Spanish or Swiss borders, and generally failed, most focused on the challenges of finding shelter and food somewhere in France. Unable to obtain a legitimate ration card, many wound up wandering the countryside, looking for work on farms. Successful evasion of the authorities, then, depended upon the assistance given by others.

  By coincidence, one of the most hospitable hideouts for réfractaires and for others trying to stay out of the reach of the authorities was the Vivarais-Lignon Plateau region, where Camus was living. A good distance from any major city, the plateau contained many small villages, such as Le Panelier, in which residences and farms were scattered. It was difficult country to traverse, and villagers could easily spot the approach of any officials. Most important, the local Protestant clergy and townspeople were resolutely committed to sheltering anyone sought by the Vichy authorities or, after the occupation of the southern zone in November, by the Germans.

  The longer Camus stayed in the region, the more he learned of the scope of clandestine activities in the area. In Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Protestant pastors André Trocmé and Edouard Theis inspired their flock of just a few thousand to shelter several thousand Jewish children and adults, as well as escaped prisoners, réfractaires, and members of the Resistance, over the course of the war. One of Camus’s Jewish friends from Algeria, André Chouraqui, lived in a nearby village and was involved with a group called the Oeuvres de Secours d’Enfants (OSE), which ran orphanages and found homes for the children of refugees who had been killed or deported. The two men met regularly and shared Algerian food, and Chouraqui translated parts of the Bible dealing with plagues for Camus.

  At his boardinghouse, Camus met and befriended Pierre Lévy (alias: “Fayol”), a Marseille Jew and member of a resistance group called Combat, to which Pascal Pia also belonged. Fayol and Camus listened to the BBC together, and Fayol and his wife, Marianne, showed Camus how to get letters through to Francine in Algeria via Portugal. Camus received his first reply from Francine in late March 1943, almost six months after the beginning of their separation.

  As the months passed, Camus painted the picture of everyday life in occupied France in his fictional tale of the plague in Oran. The city’s trapped inhabitants were forced to endure shortages and long lines waiting for food, the rationing of gasoline, and temporary power blackouts. Camus also described “isolation camps” that quarantined people suspected of having the disease. Camus knew about the internment camps that held Jews who had been rounded up, and about the deportations. In his notebook, he jotted: “In the chapter on the isolation camps: the relatives are already separated from the dead—then for sanitary reasons children are separated from their parents and the men from the women. So that separation becomes general. All are forced into solitude.”

  Camus did manage to make forays into Paris. On one trip, he shared a section of his novel with Jean Paulhan, who in turn shared it with Jean Lescure, who was interested in putting together an anthology of writings by French authors “concerned with man and freedom.” The subversive volume could not be published in France, so Lescure had the manuscripts smuggled out to Switzerland, including a draft chapter from Camus entitled “Exiles in the Plague” (Les Exilés dans La Peste), and other pieces by Jean-Paul Sartre, André Maurois, Paul Valéry, and Jean Paulhan. The preface to the collection informed readers that these writers were breaking their silence to affirm “the dignity of a conception of man” that, however crushing the military and political defeat of France had been, could not be suppressed. Three thousand copies of Domaine Français were printed and smuggled back into France, wrapped in plain paper, and given away. It was Camus’s first contribution to the literature of resistance, and would be far from his last.

  One passage read:

  They felt the profound sorrow of all prisoners and exiles which is to live with a memory that serves no purpose. Even the past, of which they thought incessantly, had only the taste of regret. For they would have wished to be able to add to it all that they regretted having left undone while they might have done so, with the man or woman whose return they now awaited—just as in all their activities, even the relatively happy ones, in their lives as prisoners, they tried vainly to involve the one who was absent. Impatient of the present, hostile to their past, and cheated of their future, they were like those whom man’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.

  It would be four years before most French readers could encounter such a passage (in Camus’s novel). But for all those who had suffered because of the plague—the millions separated from their families or from their homeland by the German invasion, by the chaos after the collapse of the country, by the demarcation line, and by the invasion of the southern zone, or having been taken prisoner, interned in camps, sent to Germany to work, or deported, or whose family members were so exiled—Camus’s words would resonate with the memories of their heartache.

  In the third year of occupation, however, great unknowns remained: How could towns and the country in general get rid of the plague? And when would the infection end?

  CHAPTER 12

  BROTHERS IN ARMS

  Plague. All fight—and each in his way. The only cowardice is falling on one’s knees.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, Notebook IV

  THE ALLIED LANDINGS IN ALGERIA AND MOROCCO CREATED THE opportunity for the Free French forces in North Africa to join with them to try to rout the Germans and Italians from the continent altogether. De Gaulle ordered Col. Philippe Leclerc, a bold, charismatic commander who had proven his talents in the African desert, to advance from Chad through Libya to link up with the British in Tripoli. Taking numerous Italian-held forts and towns on their 1,300-mile trek, the French then joined up with General Bernard Montgomery’s British 8th Army to force the Germans out of Tunisia. In late March 1943, Gabès, Tunisia, became the first French city in North Africa to be liberated and reoccupied by Free French troops.

  The propaganda value of the French conquests was priceless. De Gaulle went on the BBC to boast: “With the victory of our Chad troops, the enemy has seen rise, once again, the flame of the French war that he had believed extinct in the disaster and the betrayal, but which has not ceased for a single day to burn and grow larger under the breath of those who did not despair. For them, this victory is not only a brilliant feat of arms, it is also one of the harbingers of this new France—a hard and proud France that is being built in this trial.”

  While North Africa was securely in Allied hands, France proper remained under the Nazi grip, which only tightened as the tide of the war turned against the Germans elsewhere. De Gaulle believed that the time to rally metropolitan France toward resistance had arrived. He sought to rouse the French youth in particular:

  Certainly, it is on the youth of France that the suffering of the country weighs most heavily. Physically, it is they especially who lack all of which our country has been stripped. Of ten boys and girls living at home, nine do not eat enough to satisfy their hunger. Morally, they feel, more cruelly than their elders do, the humiliation of their families and their country. What inspires anger and disgust in their twenty-year-old souls is the presence of the enemy, forced labor, repression … But you, you are the sons and daughters of a great nation …

  The enemy is there, with its strength, its police, its propaganda. He is there, defiling our soil, poisoning our air, dishonoring our homes, outraging our flag. He is there, half-defeated, trying to compensate for the victories he is lacking by the oppression of unarmed people. Youth of France, it is now or never to do anything that can be done to hurt the invader, while waiting for the power to destroy him. It is up to you, especially, who bears the hard and great duty of the war. It is you that the enemy aims for first, he who, right now, wants to mobilize you to work to his profit. Do everything to escape him, and if that is impossible, to deceive him, to ruin him, to disappoint him. Group yourselves with discipline into the resistance organizations that are the Fighting F
rance from within. Follow instructions …

  Young men, young women of France, courage! This is the hour of greatest effort. It is at this cost that the chains will fall, that the prison will open, that the sun will reappear. It is at this cost that you will find the joy of being in the world, the passion to live and to give life, the right to sing and laugh, the pride of being free in a glorious country. Listen to your heart. It contains the future of France!

  “MARCHAL,” THE COMMUNIST FRANC-TIREUR

  Monod also thought that the time had come for more direct action. Grand speeches and articles in newspapers were not going to make the Germans leave. If the Resistance was going to be of any military significance in expelling the occupiers, it needed not only to expand in scale but also to have more of its members take up arms. Thanks in large part to the STO, the ranks were indeed growing. But if Monod himself was going to have a more significant influence, he had to join a group that was committed to armed resistance. He would be taking a dangerous step, as the consequences for resistants had been expanded under Kommandant Oberg’s command in Paris to include their families. In a published notice, the senior SS officer and police leader had declared: