The Brown Plague and the White Sickness: Fascism and the Crisis of Democracy in Karel Čapek’s The White Sickness and Albert Camus’s The Plague

Abstract

This essay examines two crucial examples of twentieth-century plague writing through a psychoanalytic and political lens, arguing that psychic repression lies at the heart of both Karel Čapek’s play The White Sickness, written on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, published ten years later in 1947 but begun in 1942 during the German occupation of France. I shall argue that the nature of the calamity in both cases is political rather than biomedical: how could fascism triumph in an apparently stable democracy like interwar France or Czechoslovakia?