Losing France’s Imperial War on Rats

Starting from Hong Kong in 1894, the third bubonic plague pandemic spread rapidly in people, rats, and fleas riding steamships to infect every continent. Around 1900, the Americas, Australia, Madagascar, and many islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans first suffered this old-world disease in one of the Columbian Exchange’s more recent ripples. Historian Myron Echenberg called it a “global medical disaster,” and historian Frank Snowden called it “the first authentically global, or ‘oceanic,’ pandemic,” made by humans through the rapid travel, trade, and colonization of the steamship age.[2] When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the pandemic finished in 1959, plague had killed over fifteen million people—twelve million in British India alone. India also led the case rate with 427 cases per 10,000 people, although French colonies held second and sixth place, with Senegal at 269 cases and Madagascar at 116 cases.[3] While experts stressed the pandemic’s “global” reach, such universalizing language obscured that plague’s impact varied by class and by place. The pandemic particularly threatened those essential imperial nodes—colonial ports—and their poorest inhabitants. This imperial and urban epidemic followed lines of transportation infrastructure, arriving via ocean shipping and gradually moving inland aboard railways. Human movements created new reservoirs of animal infection where they had never existed and slowly shifted bubonic plague from an acute epidemic danger to a chronic endemic one. As an unintended human creation, on a global scale, carrying mortal danger for our species (which disproportionately impacted poor, nonwestern, and colonized people), the third plague pandemic embodies the human-made environments of the Anthropocene.[4]

Plague shot to the top of the agenda in bacteriology, epidemiology, and tropical medicine, yielding famous Pasteurian discoveries: Alexandre Yersin isolated the plague germ, enabling serotherapy, and Paul-Louis Simond showed that rats and their fleas carried human plague, inspiring pest control. Because the plague emergency collided with the “new imperialism” around 1900, managing the mobility of rats, fleas, and plague became integral to maintaining overseas empires. By 1908, health experts worldwide were declaring “war on rats,” often calling for eradicating or exterminating the entire species, with Pasteurians among the most bellicose.[5] French experts including Pasteurian Albert Calmette, science writer Max de Nansouty, and biologist Henry Varigny used the terms “race” (race) and “kind” (gent) to cast rats as humanity’s enemies.[6] Although Bruno Latour brilliantly bared the war metaphors behind French campaigns against disease after Pasteur, the rat war was never merely metaphorical. Its real weapons took real lives, with violent impacts on both rodents and, as this article shows, humans.[7]

Pest control studies show that wars on pests always impact humans, especially among the poor and powerless.[8] The human violence of the rat war fits ecocritic Rob Nixon’s term “slow violence,” a “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”[9] The rat war was rooted in colonial violence and the world wars, for example the use of chemical and biological weapons in pest control and human conflict alike. Rat hunts coevolved with imperial plague-response practices including ratproofing, quarantines, vaccines, inspection and disinfection of buildings and ships, but also planned arson, demolition, and urban segregation, which displaced people. This article tracks the slower human violence often obscured by the faster violence of the war on rats. Inspired by recent human-animal studies, the article places species alongside class and race as a dimension of inequality and intersectionality, to show how French imperial classism and racism inflected a war between species promoted by health experts.[10] In so doing, it brings animal studies and French colonial studies into conversation with histories of science, technology, medicine, and environments.

The rat war spurred rat science, which helped make rats familiar lab animals and deepened understanding of rodent behavior and ecology. Throughout the pandemic, scientists held controversial debates about estimating rat populations, in part to measure the success of extermination. Although one rat per person was a popular notion after 1909, experts never agreed on it. Paris in 1920, with nearly three million people, was home to an estimated eight million rats.[11] Rats’ rapid reproduction and stealthy, nocturnal habits complicated efforts to count them throughout the pandemic. Martin Hart called rat counts “particularly difficult” and Hans Zinsser called them “obviously impossible.”[12] More recent rat studies confirm that counting rats remains a lasting scientific problem.[13] While scientists debated accurate rat counts, human impacts of the rat war too often went uncounted, a typical feature of slow violence.

Studies of human-rat coevolution and cohabitation cast us as “mirror,” “shadow,” or “twin” species, uniquely adaptable, aggressive, expansive, omnivorous, and violent to our own kinds.[14] Rats are at best commensal and at worst parasitic in human society. Their habitat is the margins of our built environment: alleys, attics, basements, dumpsters, and sewers. Although the international scientific community agreed by the 1910s that many rodents (including guinea pigs, prairie dogs, and marmots) carry human plague—and accordingly exterminators caught, counted, and killed rodents of all kinds—rat warriors consistently named and stigmatized the brown rat as their sworn enemy.[15] French experts often repeated the evolutionary story of the brown rat (rattus norvegicus, French rat gris or surmulot, commonly “sewer,” “migratory,” or “Norway” rat), an invasive species from Asia, pushing out Europe’s smaller native black rat (rattus rattus, French rat noir, commonly “ship,” “roof,” or “house” rat) since the 1700s.[16] While this story’s basic biogeography is accurate, its symbolic overtones are chauvinistic and ethnocentric. Nansouty called the brown rat a “nosy and pestilential invader;” Calmette decried its “conquest of the world.”[17] Brown rats were symbolically caught in a common French colonial tangle of dehumanization and exoticism with medicalization and hygienism. Pitched rat phobia concealed the rat war’s human causes, impacts, and victims — the slower human violence behind the faster war with rats.

Fighting Rats in France’s Empire, 1898–1918

Plague called early at France’s Indian Ocean ports in Madagascar (1898), and Réunion and New Caledonia (1899), within the orbit of British plague ports Bombay and Hong Kong, sites of heavy mortality.[18] As plague foci, colonial ports housed the first Pasteur Institutes outside France in the 1890s: Saigon, Nhatrang, Algiers, and Tunis. Similarly, Marseille’s 1905 “Pharo” school of tropical medicine strategically occupied this major Mediterranean port, a reputed gateway for disease.[19] French imperial public health infrastructure grew in tandem with plague response.

In Indochina, as Michael Vann’s remarkable recent work shows, France’s 1902–03 Hanoi rat war failed after almost 645,000 rats caught, foiled by Vietnamese resisters breeding rats for bounty money. French plague response brought Hanoi’s first medical examiner and autopsy services, which enabled doctors to more carefully track and count causes of death. Colonial Médicin-Major Dr. Ortholan noted of plague cases in Tonkin, 1902, that “There appeared to be a trail along the railway line between Hanoi and the Chinese border.”[20] He hinted that imperial pathways were transporting plague, which revisited Vietnam often between 1906 and 1930, as the oldest overseas Pasteur Institutes nervously watched.[21] Yersin himself likely helped the French transmit plague into their protectorate in Cambodia for the first time, where the disease hovered annually between around 100 and 600 cases a year from 1907 to 1927. Ratters caught 246,000 rodents there in a 1919–21 blitz.[22] Cambodian responses to French plague controls were mixed, including both organized and violent resistance, but also some accommodation of French medicine, especially vaccines, by the Khmer elite.[23] In Hanoi and Phnom Penh alike, colonizers scapegoated Chinese people and their districts for plague and targeted them in rat war. This sinophobia followed plague around the Pacific, and “coolie” labor around the world, revealing racism that was later turned against other diasporic and immigrant minorities: Africans and Jews in Paris.[24]

In 1907, plague swept France’s North-African ports: Oran, Constantine, Tunis, Philippeville, Bône, La Calle, and Tenès. The next year, with municipal funds, the Tunis Pasteur Institute oversaw a new “plague service,” which monitored plague using rat necropsy and microscopy. Four rat hunters, inoculated with Yersin’s serum, drew regular wages plus 10 centimes per rat.[25] From 1911 to 1913, for example, the new “rat service” found only one plague infection among almost 8,000 rats caught. Typical rat war weaponry, detailed by science popularizer Max de Nansouty, revolved around poisoned bait: chopped ranunculus (renoncule) roots mixed with fat; meatballs laced with phosphorus, arsenic, or crushed glass; hemlock in milk; and “fried lard rolled in powdered nux vomica” (strychnine). Tunis rat hunters’ arms also included traps, red squill, and the Pasteur Institute’s purpose-bred salmonella called “Danysz” virus.[26]

Danysz virus became a major French biological weapon against rats before World War I. Franco-Polish Pasteurian Jean Danysz (1870–1928) isolated the bacterium salmonella enteritidis in 1893 and bred it as a rodenticide. Similar microbial anti-rodent agents were Azoa, Ratin, Ratite, and Liverpool Virus. As a leading pest control expert, Danysz fought South African rinderpest, Australian rabbits, Portuguese oak parasites, and Russian grain pests.[27] Bacteriologists sought microorganisms that produced virulent, deadly infections in pests, but not in desirable species (although these are social, not biological, distinctions). A British Danysz virus pamphlet claimed it “destroys rats and mice, but is harmless to birds, fowls, domestic and other animals” because “only rats and other mouse-like rodents are susceptible.”[28] One American advertisement promised “rat-free” environments.[29]

Danysz’s 1906 Australian anti-rabbit campaign killed too few animals and raised public outcry about danger for humans and domestic animals. Australian laboratories found that his virus killed more rats than mice or guinea pigs but produced no symptoms in rabbits or birds. Danysz had slightly better luck, killing some of the rabbits he came to exterminate. The Australian Parliament called his methods “a waste of time and money”; both their results and their risks were too uncertain.[30] His attempt to tailor pathogens to species was clever but raised many doubts. By 1910, U.S. public health experts rejected all “viruses” (today bacteria) for their “inefficiency.” Rats were “notoriously resistant” to bacteria, which also showed variable virulence and real human risk.[31]

After the 1907 plague, the French opened rat labs across Algeria in Alger, Oran, Philippeville, Bône, Bougie, and La Calle. Hunters in flea-proof suits used special equipment for killing, transporting, and destroying rats. Algeria’s Pasteur Institute reported catching over 920,000 rats between 1899 and 1924, verifying 185 plague cases, and over 687,000 rats from 1908 to 1930, finding plague 169 times.[32] Though these figures overlap, they roughly convey the rat war’s massive scale. Before World War I’s gas war, fumigation was a pest control weapon of mass destruction, especially on ocean ships. After 1907, the French used north Africa as a test site for poison gas, especially fumigating sewers for rats: more common sulfur dioxide in Algiers and Oran (also Tunisia) and experimental chlorine gas in Constantine. Tests produced dubious results. Fumes rose from drains to foul people’s homes, but also made some rats flee the sewers, increasing chances for human contact and contagion. Pasteurians did not mention the human dangers of inhaling stray fumes or being in the sewers, but by the 1920s, Dr. Raynard of Algeria and Dr. Gobert of Tunisia condemned sewer fumigation.[33]

Officials also tracked rats on ships and frequently fumigated. In July 1921, the Russian ship Kronstadt, amid a fleet of White Army refugees, landed carrying plague at Bizerte near Tunis. Aboard, inspectors found dead plague rats contaminating wheat sacks. Drawn to the grain, rats found food and shelter, which ironically shielded them from fumigation while exposing them to plague. The disease haunted Tunisia and the rest of north Africa through the interwar era.[34] In Morocco, plague killed as many as 10,000 inland amid 1911’s Agadir crisis, before infecting Casablanca and then Rabat in 1912. As plague receded, the French negotiated with Germany, consolidated their Moroccan campaign, and established the protectorate. The Tangiers Pasteur Institute opened in 1913, both fighting plague and staking territorial claims. From then until 1940, plague called often, but never seriously, at Rabat. Casablanca had lasting trouble with the disease because France’s north-African and west-African ports were in close contact. Conakry, France’s main port in Guinée, quarantined ships from infected Casablanca in 1912, and held public rat bounty hunts at 10 centimes per rat in 1908 and 1935. Casablanca may also have passed plague to Dakar in 1914, which, as a colonial capital, broadcast emergency plague instructions across France’s African colonies.[35] French-led rat catching began in Soudan in 1926 and in Bamako in 1942. From 1907 into WWII, the French formed rat and plague services across occupied Africa to capture, count, examine, and kill rats, fleas, and germs.[36]

State rat control depended on private labor through bounty hunts, which attracted the economically powerless—both “the unemployed and many children” in France and colonial subjects across the empire.[37] Colonial doctor-biologist Fernand Noc explained that Martinique plague and rat services began in 1910 while plague hovered over nearby Colombia, Venezuela, and Trinidad. Public bounty hunts prevailed until the Fort de France rat lab opened. Thereafter, workers formed a four-person team, as in Tunisia—including one “laboratory boy” (garçon de laboratoire), chosen from veterans of Calmette’s anti-mosquito campaign against yellow fever the previous year. Hunters used cats and mongooses for the chase, wire-mesh nets to trap, and various deadly weapons: Danysz virus, chloroform, and baits of bread or butter tarts cloaking arsenic, phosphorus, or strychnine. Within two years, the rat service destroyed about 12,000 rats, chemically disinfected Martinique’s buildings with cresol, lysol, and formol, often in 5% solution, and fugimated the sewers of Fort de France and Trinité with sulfur dioxide.[38] The chemical exposures caused by heavy bursts of pesticides and disinfectants were significant, widespread, scattered, and undocumented—characteristic slow violence.

The Senegalese ports were hardest hit during World War I. The 1914 plague took the disease’s swift, deadly pneumonic form, killing over 1,400 in Dakar and perhaps 9,000 in the region. In response, French colonizers fumigated Dakar’s sewers with sulfur dioxide and vaccinated almost 130,000 people across Senegal. Most violently, the French burned or demolished parts of the older city center, targeting African houses with thatched roofs, and created a peripheral Médina or “native quarter” to increase segregation.[39] A 1916 report stated, “the whole indigenous quarter of Dakar was just about evacuated, 3,000 inhabitants were transferred with their baggage, first to the isolation camp, and then directed to the new village.” The French disinfected 280 homes and destroyed 1,594. Meanwhile, “In the interior, entire villages were burned and reconstructed in new locations”—unlike city dwellers, rural victims were not counted.[40] French violence and Senegalese resistance suffused this process of disinfection, arson, demolition, and displacement. Principles of isolation and quarantine, central to emergency plague response, intensified already common calls for segregation in city planning. French colonial urbanism in the 1920s articulated a strong image of the colonial “plague house” (maison à peste) which, far from “rat-proof,” was a rat haven demanding destruction.[41] By 1931, Dakar’s Médina could be called “quartier du Médina-Abattoir,” a name that—given the environmental impacts of slaughterhouses, including reliably attracting rats—clearly suggests the environmental racism and slow violence of colonial urbanism and plague response.[42]

In Saint Louis’s 1917–18 plague, distrust between colonizer and colonized escalated until the Senegalese hid cases and corpses and rose up in violent protest. They decried cremation of bodies without proper ritual, cremation of property, forced evacuations, and soldiers enforcing rigid quarantines. Rebels took a health official hostage and the French declared a state of emergency from August to November 1918. Pitched conflict over plague helped nudge the French toward calming colonial reforms, but rats and disease marched on.[43] Senegal suffered significantly in 1920 with 7,999 cases, and again in 1928, 1930, 1934, and 1944.[44] The French ignored the real causes of epidemic vulnerability familiar from colonial cities worldwide: poverty, crowding, rapid growth, neglect, environmental racism, and colonial resistance. Imperialists delivered infected rats, fleas, and people to the colonies, and then greeted the resulting plague with an extremely heavy hand.

The disorder sown in the colonies soon took root in Paris. During World War I, active soldiers drained Paris’s city services of staff. Street cleaning and trash collection fell behind, and rats swarmed the buffet.[45] At the front, French troops and their terriers battled rats in the trenches, especially by night. Press pieces from advice columns to humor columns depicted rats as foes for French troops on par with the Germans, and portrayed rat-catching as a sport, a source of pocket money, and a grim necessity on the Western Front. One French soldier invented a rat-proof trench bed under a wire-mesh dome.[46] Jean Danysz prepared rat fighting kits that the Pasteur institute shipped to the front, including virus, poison, and carbon disulfide for fumigation.[47] Edmund Russell has shown how pest control and gas war coevolved. While armies first tested chemical weapons against each other on a large scale, they also used them against pests. Chloropicrin (chloropicrine), a broad-spectrum poison that kills animals, plants, insects, fungi, and microbes, was discovered in 1848 and rarely used until WWI, when it became the most common battlefield gas. After the war, the French used it to asphyxiate rats and fleas, and to flush rats from burrows. Today police use it as tear gas to control and disperse crowds.[48] This intimacy with chemical warfare and policing indicates the rat war’s human costs.

The Interwar Era: Plague and the Rat War Reach Paris

Before 1918, French imperial plague response was organized and scientific, but also authoritarian, racist, violent, and consistently unable to stop rats and plague. While plague dogged the colonies and not France, imperialists could claim that plague controls worked (at least for them), or scapegoat colonized people for disease. But after World War I, Paris was flooded with an estimated eight million rats traveling with troops, refugees, or ships carrying materials for reconstruction and thriving in the city’s war-torn disrepair. In 1920, plague spattered northeast Paris and near suburbs with over 100 cases, revealing the capital’s vulnerability.[49] The municipal council budgeted 500,000 francs for rat war in 1920–21 and reformed trash collection with 300 new automobile garbage trucks and restricted pickup hours. The latter policy drew organized protest from almost 5,000 ragpickers, who could not collect and sort refuse unless bins stayed outside overnight.[50] While the council partly met their demands, the public widely scapegoated them for what was known popularly as “the ragpickers’ plague” (La peste des chiffonniers).[51] Paris also opened a rat lab and a public bounty hunt at twenty-five, then thirty, centimes per rat, netting almost 653,000 rats.[52] Imperial rat war came home to Paris, with its bounty hunts, rat science, and scapegoating.

As Paris journalists tallied captured rats, they reflected on the rat war by comparing rats to people. One writer noted, “Rats are as difficult to conquer as the Germans,” linking national war with species war.[53] Using the terms “race” (race) or “kind” (gent), Anglophone and French authors represented rats as aliens, enemies, invaders, immigrants, or “conquerors.”[54] The idea of exterminating whole “kinds,” essential for proponents of race war, colonial war, and genocide, was popular among rat warriors. They supported the dehumanizing imperial ideology of races as separate human “species” that Frantz Fanon deftly dissected.[55] French hunting and dog breeding magazine Le Chenil cheered the nearly 26,000 rats killed in Paris’s second week of rat war, saying “But if there is not a concomitant destruction in the provinces it’s as if nothing has been done.” The editors evoked the common expert call for coordinated global rat war, and called rats “Boches quadrupèdes,” four-legged German scum. They also quoted famed London rat-catcher James Rodwell, who in 1850 declared socialists and communists “rats” as liberalism’s enemies. In interwar France’s brittle political climate, Le Chenil supported “measures of social defense” taken “against rats of all kinds.” The editors spread animalizing and dehumanizing comparisons of humans and animals, hinting that human violence might curb the political Left.[56] French writers connected rat war with World War I, interwar political tensions, and wars of races, species, or kinds.

French racism and anti-Semitism were ugliest when scapegoating ethnic minorities for plague and likening them to rats just as Paris waged rodent war. Biologist Henry Varigny called Jewish refugees “lice- and flea-infested human vermin of Eastern Europe” and “essentially undesirable physically and morally.”[57] Le Matin editor Louis Forest wrote, “These migrations of rats coming from the East are comparable to those of the humans who often accompany them.”[58] Like sinophobia before World War I, interwar antisemitism scapegoated a minority group known for their diaspora and their work in commerce and finance. Accordingly, some French called the Chinese “the Jews of Asia.”[59] Since the Mongol invasions and Black Death of the high Middle Ages, Europeans had cast both Jews and Asians, alongside plague and the brown rat, as dangerous invaders from the East. Another author wrote, “rats do like the negro: they continue.” For him, so intrepid were both groups with their “nice teeth,” that they would “mock” (se gausser) any unfortunate rumor-mongering journalist (l’infortuné échotier) who “condemns their race to extermination.”[60] Although the author of these nasty words was pessimistic about winning rat wars or race wars, he rearticulated racist images and fears by likening Africans to rats. These claims of “human vermin” echo notorious colonial, genocidal, and fascist rhetoric in striking ways, and illustrate how human war and rat war grew further entangled after World War I. French elites saw the empire “come home” as unexpected colonial, refugee, and rat migration, and new plague risk, and they responded to these imperial boomerangs with racism and dehumanization.

But unlike captured rats—always carefully counted for science and for calculating bounties—contemporaries often neglected the rat war’s human costs, leading some Paris writers to report them carefully. In early September, 1920, just before the public rat hunt opened, at least two Paris newspapers highlighted the human risks of hunting rats with guns.[61] During the hunt, Socialist L’Attaque showed that “rodents are not the only victims” by mourning a rat hunter recently killed by sewer gas.[62] Moderate Le Journal added ragpickers to the rat war’s human “victims.”[63] The editors of nationalist Le Gaulois reprinted a letter to the Prefect of the Seine complaining that public notices encouraging rat war in the Opéra could endanger stagehands, known colloquially as “Opera rats.” While punning playfully, this letter nonetheless reminded readers of the rat war’s human impacts.[64]

The most stringent critic of the Paris rat war’s inhumanity was radical journalist Fanny Clar, a signing member of the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO, the French section of the Workers’ International), and a popular writer on socialism, feminism, and pacificism. Her piece “Poor Rats” compared rat hunts to manhunts, noting “All hunting repulses me, whether of humans or of beasts,” thereby conveying a sense of animal rights or welfare on par with those of humans. She questioned the scientific claim that plague was rat-borne and the purpose of extermination, by asking how plague was receding in September, 1920 while the rat population still grew. Further, she argued, rats had a social-hygienic function: by eating human waste, the “ragpicker rat” helped clean the city.[65] Clar’s defense of rats as allies and victims was rare and radical, but it suggests how others may have questioned the rat war. Soon even colonial doctors were criticizing certain rat war tactics. For example, Algerian Dr. Raynaud was as opposed to bounty hunts as he was to sewer fumigation, condemning them for putting the public, without proper training or equipment, into dangerous contact with rats, plague, and poisons.[66]

After a few years, Paris’s rat war slackened, and many despaired that humans were losing. From 1921 to 1926, sporadic plague licked at Paris’s limits in Bagnolet, Clichy, Clignancourt, Levallois, Pantin, Saint-Ouen, and the Zone.[67] In 1924, the Bibliothèque Nationale brought in three dogs to fight rats.[68] That same year, humor magazine Le Pêle-Mêle told of an 1855 peasant, his farm full of rats, who caught two and fit them with belled collars. The noise worked to rid his area of rats, but where had they all gone? An illustration answered, showing passengers on a crowded Metro train pushing out a pickpocket. Popular slang called pickpockets “Metro rats” (Rats du métro), who the author implied might also be made to wear bells—or dislike the subway’s door-closing bells.[69] The joke worked because the subway was home to both pickpockets and rats—another sign that rat war was failing. A decade later, de-ratting requests to the Paris Police had grown twenty times: from thirty in 1922 to six hundred in 1934.[70] Similar growth characterized investigations (enquêtes) made by the city’s rat lab: from thirty in 1922 to 1,400 in 1933.[71] The situation in the colonies was no better. Pasteurian Édouard Dujardin-Beaumetz reported at a 1928 conference, “In the colonies...most attempts at deratization have only ended in failure.”[72]

Plague reappeared in Tamatave, Madagascar in 1921, and the island peaked at roughly 2,000–4,000 cases yearly from 1933 to 1936, with a high incidence of pneumonic cases as in Senegal.[73] Ironically, the French opened the island’s ports to epidemic plague and then helped it become endemic inland, transplanting rats, fleas, and germs—again via their railways.[74] Plague response was threefold. First, the French opened a rat war, alongside regular garbage collection, sewer cleaning, destroying animal stables and shelters, and purifying plague houses with cresol or arson. Disinfection teams comprised a French police officer overseeing indigenous day laborers (bourjanes) and prisoners. Second, they built isolation camps for the sick and a new research pavilion outside Antananarivo near the Pasteur Institute, pushing to further segregate the city as in Dakar. Third, they enforced quarantines with military force. The combination of isolation camps and military force should be stressed. In 1927, the French restructured the Antananarivo plague service, producing almost 31,000 vaccinations, 451 disinfected buildings, and, twenty years after Constantine, another chlorine gas sewer fumigation.[75] In response, the Malagasy spread rumors that colonizers used plague as a biological weapon, and explicitly protested French disruption of sacred burial practices and use of three experimental plague vaccines (which killed around 1,000 Malagasy in 1930–32, for example). Historian Faranirina Esoavelomandroso showed that Malagasy resistance to French plague response was a powerful spur to Madagascar’s movement for nationalism and decolonization.[76]

Many across the empire asked why France lacked more aggressive anti-rat policy and lagged behind peer nations. In 1930, Dr. Adrien Loir studied anti-rat campaigns outside France. Loir was Louis Pasteur’s nephew, director of Le Havre’s Hygiene Bureau, vice-president of the International Association for the Rational Destruction of Rats, founder of the Ratter Cat Club, and professor at the National School of Colonial Agronomy.[77] He worried that France had nothing like Britain’s annual rat weeks, Germany’s official rat days, Denmark’s International Association, or the systematic use of cats, poisons, and other arms in Belgium, Italy, and Japan. He noted that cities outside France were carefully ratproofing by covering sewer openings and garbage bins, and by educating the public.[78] Loir’s somewhat eccentric personal crusade was breeding cats as ratters.[79] In the 1930s, he argued that cats, rarely used in Europe, could control rats in the colonies. Dakar doctor and colonel J. L. F. Cazanove found European domestic cats “too pampered” to be good ratters, but African wildcats were better because the Senegalese did not house or feed them, leaving them hungry for rats and less docile.[80] Sadly for Loir, dogs, as in the trenches and the national library, are better ratters than cats, which are more fit for mousing.

Loir shows that French experts were also studying techniques for “ratproofing” buildings and ships, which they saw as an “American” innovation, thanks to the U.S. Public Health Service’s aggressive pest control in Hawaii, California, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Philippines.[81] In response, the French gradually ratproofed both artifacts and buildings across their empire. In 1924, for example, Marseille health director Ribot demanded that cambuses (sheds or warehouses) be “ratproof,” while the Algiers Pasteur Institute declared that “sewers should be ratproof.”[82] The term also crept into colonial lawbooks. New 1929 Guyana laws called for ratproof docks and shops, while 1933 Madagascar laws required inhumations and exhumations of plague corpses to use a “ratproof coffin” (tombeau Rat-Proof), contributing to the burial controversy noted above.[83] Practices, procedures, and regulations, as much as material things, could be ratproofed.

The most essential sites for ratproofing were the ports, ships, and buildings in the empire’s waterborne supply chains. Ratproofing knowledge spread through journals in agronomy, civil engineering, medicine, and hygiene. La Technique Sanitaire et Municipale defined ratproofing as “the ensemble of measures taken aboard a ship...to render the life of the rat impossible.”[84] Le Génie Civil added, “whether it concerns a building, a shop, a quay, or a ship, it consists in rendering it uninhabitable for rats.”[85] Le Concours Médical used a similar definition, and added homes, factories, and warehouses to the list of targets.[86] The task was denying rats food, water, shelter, and transportation, which required tweaking material culture in myriad ways: closing gaps and holes to make spaces more airtight and waterproof; replacing porous materials with rigid concrete and steel; and routinizing inspection, cleaning, waste disposal, and disinfection with liquid or gas (extending the slow violence of chemical exposure). This meant smaller manhole cover vents; grating or screening covering ducts, pipes, windows, and vents; mechanical door-closers; and tighter lids for storage and garbage bins.[87] Ships anchored farther from docks to stop rats swimming or jumping aboard. Workers fit cables and ropes with cone- or disk-shaped guards and raised gangways each night to prevent rats climbing aboard. Ideally, all imperial infrastructures would be built, maintained, and operated to repel or exclude rats.

Ratproofing could be pursued with or without rat war. Most experts paired it with extermination. They argued that rat reproduction would erase the fast victories of rat war unless humans did the slower work of removing rat food and shelter, a kind of post-war peacekeeping.[88] When, more rarely, ratproofing served peaceful and preventative purposes, it could avoid animal cruelty and the dangers of rat poisons, which threatened people, pets, livestock, and zoo animals. Ratproofing was more efficient and ecologically-informed than rat hunting. It dovetailed nicely with the interwar modernization of colonial policy captured by Gary Wilder’s “colonial humanism.”[89] Ratproofing shifted emphasis from offense to defense and shifted attention from rat bodies to rat behaviors, habitats, and resources.

The slow decline of Danysz virus is instructive here. The French still used bacterial rodenticides into the 1950s, despite studies as early as 1903 linking them with human salmonella.[90] In an era when food poisoning was more common and less researched, it was hard to trace human outbreaks to rat virus. But in hindsight, this weapon was clearly off target: attacks meant for specific species created collateral damage in others, both human and animal. Salmonella, which sickens mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects, was not as accurate a killer as the Pasteurians had hoped. Considering these biological, social, and technological difficulties, perhaps only the Pasteur Institute’s prestige kept Danysz virus in use through the interwar era—long after Anglophones in Australia, Britain, and the United States abandoned germ agents. Interwar French experts also questioned bacteria’s effectiveness. One concern arose around immunity: rodents that survived infection would become immune, protecting them against future germ attacks. A second concern was danger to humans, which provoked a final, war-weary worry: French experts expressed fear and wonder about germ warfare among humans. Their fear was not only that bacteria might harmfully jump from their intended targets to desirable species, but also that biological weapons might jump social contexts, in a frightening shift from pest control into human conflict. Germ warfare, like gas warfare before it, embodied the entanglements of human war and rat war.[91]

French appropriation of Anglophone ratproofing reveals another imperial strategy: the attempt to make Paris a capital and clearinghouse for international medicine and hygiene. As French experts spread Parisian knowledge through the Pasteur Institute’s global network, they also gathered foreign knowledge by hosting frequent academic conferences, policy summits, and universal expositions. Starting in Paris, 1851 during the cholera years, seven International Sanitary Conferences convened delegates from around the world to craft the first global health policies. During the third plague pandemic, Paris was the leading host, holding five major conferences from 1894 to 1938.[92] These conferences established global public health infrastructure, including Paris’s Office internationale d’hygiène publique (OIHP, International Office of Public Hygiene), which opened in 1907 and folded into the nascent WHO in 1947.[93] The OIHP’s major achievement was the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), from Paris’s 1894 Sanitary Conference. By reworking Jacques Bertillon’s famed list of causes of death in order to globally standardize medical diagnosis and epidemiological records, the ICD helped experts map and count moving ships, people, rats, fleas, and microbes. In 1927, Paris added an Office International des Épizooties (OIE, International Office of Epizootics) to track animal disease.[94] These institutions and infrastructures, at once French and international, sought to shape the playing field for the war on rats, and to protect the empire from competing global flows, for example the British ships and Muslim pilgrims that the French blamed for moving disease.[95]

Paris experts hosted the world’s leading rat warriors during the first and second International Conferences on the Rat in 1928 and 1931. The second meeting, coinciding with the 1931 Colonial Exposition, was entitled “International Conference and Colonial Congress of the Rat and the Plague.” It nearly doubled the first rat congress, including a massive French colonial section, which illustrates the lasting linkages among rats, plague, and colonial ports.[96] In a conference session about deratting Senegal, Dr. Marcel Leger uncovered a key problem for colonial public health: which people could be spared most from plague depended on which groups could be socially controlled. He commented that vaccinated soldiers in Saint-Louis in the early 1920s escaped outbreaks that clustered in less-vaccinated groups such as civilians and Africans. While noting the power of vaccines, he revealed that fighting plague and rats had always involved controlling people—and thereby raised questions of social power.[97] This revelation raises further questions about France’s grip on the empire—i.e. the empire’s survival faced with biological threats like plague and social challenges like colonial resistance.[98] The rat war’s human or social aspects too often remain hidden behind nonhumans: rodents, germs, and infrastructures.

Senegal remained a hot spot for rat war. From 1922–27, the French caught over four million rats there, while plague cases ranged from 400 to 2,700 annually, and stayed “narrowly circumscribed in the maritime zone situated on either side of the Dakar-Saint-Louis railway.”[99] As in Vietnam and Madagascar, plague rode imperial railways. A 1928 campaign in Dakar sulfurated the sewers twice that year, netted an estimated 100,000 rats, and administered 6,500 vaccines.[100] In 1931, the West African Government General budgeted 9.25 million francs for plague prevention and twice that for slum clearance in a massive public works and sanitation program, which one official report later summarized as “destruction and pushing-out [éloignement] of the rat.” Funds paid for: rat- and flea-control; over 82,000 vaccines; showers; an incinerator; plague research; metal grating; ratproofing of grain reserves; cars for plague workers; and an expanded Pasteur Institute.[101] This huge project reflected Dakar’s strategic place in the empire. In 1936, newspaper Le Petit Parisien argued that Dakar’s size, its status as federal capital, and its role as “maritime and aerial transatlantic port on the route to three continents” made it “not a simple African city, but a veritable ‘city of empire’....”[102] In 1938, Minister of Colonies Georges Mandel boasted that Dakar was plague-free, which it was until 1944, when plague caused 571 cases and 512 deaths. Pasteurians caught and tested over 8,000 rats, finding sixty-nine with plague, and debated the port and the Médina as possible sources.[103] But also, echoing debate in Paris, they questioned the effectiveness of extermination. Some suspected that the brand-new chemical DDT, brought to French north and west Africa by American soldiers and the Rockefeller Foundation, had really repressed plague—by killing fleas, not rats.[104] By the 1950s, both the pandemic and the rat war were retreating worldwide with antibiotic drugs ascendant.

Conclusion: The Pandemic Ends, France Loses the War on Rats

Despite its consistent failure, rat war remained in popular demand. Le Figaro complained that Paris’s exposition grounds were insufficiently ratproofed for the 1937 Exposition.[105] Le Petit Parisien reported in 1939 that Paris’s interwar rat war had failed in part because opportunists—as in Michael Vann’s Hanoi—were breeding rats for bounty money.[106] In 1941, Paris journalist Jean Serridos wrote that, despite the “good advice” and “indefatigable research of the men of science” over “a good long time,” France never took “the effective action that is necessary”—meaning rat war, “above all in ports.”[107] Plague was still tied to imperial ships and ports; outbreaks were the anthropogenic outcomes of imperial mobilities and inequalities.

Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague is often read as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France, but it literally tells of plague sieging the French colonial port of Oran. The novel opens in deliberate scene-setting, describing “merely a large French port on the Algerian coast, headquarters of the Prefect of a French Department.” Camus calls it “ugly,” “smug” and “placid,” and this human frailty is the real cause of plague’s violence: “everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits” so that “you go complacently to sleep.”[108] The slow violence of such sclerotic routine leaves people vulnerable to “abnormal” fast violence like plague. Much as Parisians treated plague as a “colonial” problem until it infected Paris in 1920, so Camus’s characters never expect the plague. He tests their intelligence, resilience, resolve, and solidarity in a moral tale about the human causes of suffering during the outbreak.

Camus deftly details the rat war: 8,000 rats caught, a “deratization van” clattering like a machine-gun, and “a systematic extermination of the rat population by injecting poison gas into the sewers.”[109] He also stresses imperial connections to France: Oran as prefectural seat, the long wait for anti-plague serum shipped from France, and repeated reference to plague in Paris “twenty years ago.” Segregated planning of Oran’s “Arab quarter” and “Negro district,” forced quarantine, and disinfection with cresol solution complete the imagery.[110] Camus pays homage to the human victims of plague control (and metaphorically the Holocaust) with haunting images of repurposed streetcars whisking neighbors’ bodies away to the crematorium.[111] Above all, he makes clear that the rat war and related state-medical violence—slow or fast—cannot stop plague.

The Plague usefully bookends the French imperial battle against rats and plague during the third pandemic. Like Dr. Leger, Camus recalls the human factors and social power behind the historical actors’ focus on studying and killing rats, fleas, and microbes, or managing buildings and ships. France’s imperial war on rats was all-too-human—a story of imperialists unwittingly amplifying their own plague emergency with railways and steamships; of tense, international scientific collaboration and competition amid the new imperialism; of Russian refugees from civil war; of Paris ragpickers, pickpockets, and stagehands; of rat-hunters recruited from vulnerable groups including children, day laborers, and prisoners; of rising resistance in Senegal, Madagascar, Cambodia, and Vietnam to often draconian colonial plague responses including arson, bounty hunts, cremation, disinfection, forced vaccination, isolation, and quarantine; and finally, of people displaced by disease, arson, demolition, and segregation.

Though the French killed six to seven million rats (that I count here), they lost the war. Even seven million kills would not remove all the rats from Paris, let alone France’s global empire. If there was any victor here, perhaps it was the United States, DDT, or antibiotics. DDT caused even more collateral damage than Danysz virus, as American biologist Rachel Carson famously showed.[112] Fanon found DDT deeply colonial and compared it to Christianity in its power to wipe out opposition.[113] All of this was better news for the American empire than for the French. Pandemic plague exposed the French imperial nation-state’s social and biological fragilities: the crush of colonial urbanization; the cruelty of colonial planning; accelerated motorized transport on land, sea, and soon air; and the vexing global multispecies mobilities that resulted. This was slow violence indeed: time bombs of human, rat, flea, and microbe cargo, shipped around the world on steamships and railways, making this old-world disease pandemic, and making imperialists anxious and vicious, in an under-appreciated aspect of the Anthropocene.

The French not only lost the war because they could not kill all the empire’s rats, fleas, or plague. That was a practical loss. But this was also a moral loss, which brought out the worst in France’s empire: dehumanization, racism, scapegoating, violence, and callous disregard for people affected by biopolitics, public health, urban planning, and military action, all to maintain the empire. The published record holds at least an official rat body count and numbers of people sickened or killed by plague. There is even a surprising (and incomplete) accounting for people displaced from home by the rat war. But those injured or killed by the rat war itself—exposed to disinfectants, sickened by salmonella, asphyxiated by sewer gas, or poisoned by DDT—were not often counted. Dazzled by the fast violence and impressive numbers of plague deaths and rat body counts, it is easy to overlook this slower human violence, although, as Camus shows, we do so at our own peril. This is as true for pandemics as it is for climate change and other signal risks of the Anthropocene: though their nonhuman dynamics are essential, we cannot neglect their human dynamics. Their causes follow the socially powerful, while their impacts and victims follow the socially vulnerable, along lines of class, race, and empire.

1. This essay grew from conference papers at the 2014 Society for French Historical Studies, the 2018 Urban History Association, and the 2019 meeting for 20^th and 21^st Century Francophone Studies, where I developed this research in dialog with Jennifer Boittin, Melissa Byrnes, Catherine Clark, Heloise Finch-Boyer, Shannon Fogg, Sarah Griswold, Michael Mulvey, Minayo Nasiali, Jessica Pearson, Benjamin Poole, and Tasha Rijke-Epstein. Keanu Heydari provided valuable research assistance.

2. Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: NYU Press, 2007), xi; Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society from the Black Death to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 332–33.

3. Myron Echenberg, “Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894–1901,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 432, n9.

4. The Anthropocene is the most recent epoch of the earth’s history, defined by human-made environmental changes such as the ubiquity of plastics and nuclear radiation, or climate change from burning fossil fuels. See: Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (New York: Verso, 2016); Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan, eds., “Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses,’” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2016, no. 2, doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7421; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. On health and disease in the Anthrpocene, see: The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health, “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch: Report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health,” The Lancet 386 (2015): 1973–2028; Katherine Hirschfeld, “Microbial Insurgency: Theorizing Global Health in the Anthropocene,” The Anthropocene Review 7, no. 1 (2020): 3–18.

5. Adrien Proust, La défense de l’Europe contre la peste et la conférence de Venise de 1897 (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1897); A. Dastre, “Questions scientifiques—La peste,” La revue des deux mondes 155 (1899): 676–708; Victor Diard, Mesures prophylactiques, préventives et curatives. Conférence sur la peste bubonique, pneumonie pestueuse et peste noire (black death)... dans le local des Enfants de Béranger le 14 mars 1900 (Paris: La Republicaine, 1900); “La Guerre aux rats,” La Liberté, 14 November 1901; Emil Zuschlag, Le rat migratoire et sa destruction rationelle (Copenhagen: Bagge, 1903); Max de Nansouty, “La guerre aux rats,” La revue du mois (1904): 228–31. The “war on rats” solidified globally in 1908, see: “The War On Rats,” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 2455 (18 January 1908): 167; “The Campaign against Rats,” The Spectator 18 January 1908; “To Exterminate Rats,” Japan Weekly Mail, 18 January 1908; “A World-Wide War to Exterminate the Rat,” The New York Times, 16 February 1908; Albert Calmette, “Déclarons la guerre aux rats!” Revue du mois no. 28 (10 April 1908): 432–44; “La guerre aux rats,” La nature 36 (1908): 106; “The Society for the Destruction of Vermin,” The Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (15 April 1908): 124–25; “A World-Wide War on Rats,” Current Literature XLIV, no. 5 (May 1908): 559; George Gaulois, “The World War on Rats,” Scientific American 124, no. 6 (5 February 1921): 105, 118–19; Gabriel Petit, “Le problème mondial du rat,” Recueil de médicine veterinaire CIV, no. 3 (March 1928): 152–58.

6. Nansouty, “La guerre aux rats,” 230; Calmette, “Déclarons la guerre aux rats!” 433–36; Varigny, “La question du rat,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (3 Sept. 1920), 1–2.

7. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). On rats and war: Jonathan Burt, Rat (Animal) (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 13, 83.

8. On pest studies, see: Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); James E. McWilliams, American Pests: the Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Robert Argenbright, “Lethal Mobilities: Bodies and Lice on Soviet Railroads, 1918–1922,” Journal of Transport History 29, no. 2 (2008): 260–76; Colin Jerolmack, “How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals,” Social Problems 55, no. 1 (2008): 72–94; Clapperton Mavhunga, “On Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game,” Social Text 106, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 151–76; Mavhunga, “Mobility and the Making of Animal Meaning: The Kinetics of ‘Vermin’ and ‘Wildlife’ in Southern Africa,” in Making Animal Meaning, ed. Linda Kalof and Georgina Montgomery (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 17–43; Dawn Day Biehler, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).

9. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.

10. Kari Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” differences 21, no. 2 (2010): 1–23; Weil, Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

11. The reference to eight million rats is in: “L’invasion grise,” Le Matin, 18 August 1920; “Peau de rat,” L’Opinion, 2 October 1920, 370; “200.141... et la Chasse Continue!” Le Petit Journal, 10 December 1920.

12. Martin Hart, Rats, trans. Arnold Pomerans (London and New York: Allison & Busby, 1982), 48; Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (New York: Bantam, 1971), 204.

13. John T. Emlen, Allen W. Stokes and David E. Davis, “Methods for Estimating Populations of Brown Rats in Urban Habitats,” Ecology 30, no. 4 (Oct., 1949): 430–42; David E. Davis, “The Characteristics of Global Rat Populations,” American Journal of Public Health 41 (Feb. 1951): 158–63; David E. Davis, “The Relation Between Level of Population and Size and Sex of Norway Rats,” Ecology 32, no. 3 (July, 1951): 462–64. See also: Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), 15–20; Jerry Langton, Rat: How the World’s Most Notorious Rodent Clawed its Way to the Top (New York: St. Martin’s. 2007), 54–55.

14. Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History, 145; Burt, Rat, 7; Sullivan, Rats, 2; Robert Hendrickson, More Cunning than Man: A Social History of Rats and Man (New York: Kensington, 1998), 17.

15. Guinea pigs, see: E. Klein, Studies of Bacteriology and Etiology of Oriental Plague (London: Macmillan, 1906). Ground squirrels, see: W. C. Rucker, Plague Amomng Ground Squirrels in Contra Costa County, Califiornia (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909). Marmots (specifically the Siberian marmot or tarbagan), see: Report of the International Plague Conference (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1912); Wu Lien-Teh (G. L. Tuck) and The Hulun Taotai, “First Report of the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service,” The Journal of Hygiene 13, no. 3 (October, 1913): 237–90. By 1955, Pasteurian Georges Girard counted 186 distinct rodent species that carried plague fleas: see Girard, “Plague,” Annual Review of Microbiology 9 (1955): 253–76, at 263–64.

16. Norbert Lallié, “Les rats et la peste,” La Revue de Paris 18, no. 1 (1911): 777–96; Louis Forest, “Propos d’un Parisien: Le chemin des rats,” Le Matin, 1 September 1920; Frédéric Bordas, “La prophylaxie de la peste et la destruction des rats,” La téchnique sanitaire et municipal (December 1920): 283–86; Henri Violle, La Peste (Melun: Imprimerie Municipal, 1921). See also: Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History; Hart, Rats; Sullivan, Rats; Langton, Rat; Burt, Rat; Hendrickson, More Cunning Than Man.

17. Nansouty, “La guerre aux rats”; Calmette, “Déclarons la guerre aux rats!”

18. Alexandre Lasnet, “Aperçu sur la fréquence de la peste dans les colonies françaises au cours des dix dernières années,” Annales de médecine et de pharmacie coloniales 27 (1929): 5–19, Madagascar on 8, Réunion on 12. On New Caledonia, see: Christiane Terrier, Nouméa Nouvelle-Caledonie 1900: Colons, Canaques, Coolies (Ville de Nouméa, 2014), 168. See also: Echenberg, Plague Ports; Christos Lynteris et al., eds., Plague and the City (London: Routledge, 2018).

19. Pasteur Institute founding dates are frequently unclear because Institutes often operated informally years before formal inauguration, and dates given in various sources may mark either moment. See: Marcel Vaucel, “Les Instituts Pasteur Outre-mer et à l’étranger,” Revue de l’enseignement supérieur 11 (1964): 109–22; Ilana Löwy, “Yellow Fever in Rio de Janeiro and the Pasteur Institute Mission (1901–1905): the Transfer of Science to the Periphery,” Medical History 34, no. 2 (April 1990): 144–63; Anne-Marie Moulin, “Patriarchal Science: The Network of the Overseas Pasteur Institutes,” in P. Petitjean, C. Jami, and A.M. Moulin, eds., Science and Empires, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 136. (Dordrecht: Springer, 1992) 307–22; Kim Pelis, “Prophet for Profit in French North Africa: Charles Nicolle and the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, 1903–1936,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71, no. 4 (1997) 583–622; Annick Guénel, “The Creation of the First Overseas Pasteur Institute, or the Beginning of Albert Calmette’s Pastorian Career,” Medical History 43, no. 1 (January 1999): 1–25; John Strachan, “The Pasteurization of Algeria?” French History 20, no. 3 (2006): 260–75; Michael A. Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 155–88; Myron Echenberg, “Pestis Redux.”

20. Michael Vann and Liz Clarke, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), rat body count 96, medical examiner 170–71, Ortholan quote 174. For more on railways spreading plague, see: William C. Summers, The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910–1911: The Geopolitics of an Epidemic Disease (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

21. Situation de l’Indo-Chine de 1902 à 1907 vol. 2 (Saigon: Imprimerie Commerciale Marcellin Rey, 1908), 131; Dan C. Cavanaugh, “Some Observations on the Current Outbreak in the Republic of Vietnam,” American Journal of Public Health 58, no. 4 (Apr. 1968): 742–52.

22. Arnaud Tarantola, “Human Plague in Cambodia: A Critical Review of Historical Data Found in the Literature,” Technical Note, Pasteur Institute, April 2011, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4288.6649, rat number p. 8; case number p. 9; Sokhieng Au, “Indigenous Politics, Public Health and the Cambodian Colonial State,” South East Asia Research 14, no. 1 (March 2006): 41.

23. For Cambodian responses, see: Au, “Indigenous Politics, Public Health and the Cambodian Colonial State.”

24. On sinophobia in Hanoi and elsewhere, see Vann and Clarke, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt, 127–95, 207–09; on Phnom Penh, see Au, “Indigenous Politics, Public Health and the Cambodian Colonial State.” Sinophobia and disease scapegoating are common themes in plague studies of the Pacific: Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, And Deviance In San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Guenter B. Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); James C. Mohr, Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Christos Lynteris, “Skilled Natives, Inept Coolies: Marmot Hunting and the Great Manchurian Pneumonic Plague (1910–1911),” History and Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2013): 303–321. See also Echenberg, Plague Ports, 304–05; Snowden, Epidemics and Society, 334–36.

25. Ernst Conseil, “Recherches sur la peste en Tunisie pendant l’année 1908,” Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis (1909), 91–92.

26. Rat numbers can be found in “Service de la peste,” Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis (1911), 41; (1912), 140; and (1913), 57. Rat weapons information is in A. Billet, “La peste dans le département de Constantine en 1907,” Annales de l’Institut Pasteur (1908): 658–81, esp. 677–81; and Nansouty, “La guerre aux rats.”

27. Danysz’s career background is at the Pasteur Institute website: https://www.pasteur.fr/infosci/archives/dan0.html. Varieties of rat virus can be found in in Milton J. Rosenau, “The Inefficiency of Bacterial Viruses in the Extermination of Rats,” in Walter Wyman, ed., The Rat in Relation to Public Health (Washington: Government Printing Office: 1910), 179–204.

28. The War Against Rats: Danysz Virus (London: Danysz Virus Limited, Sussex House, 1908).

29. “Rat-Free Warehouses Packing Plants and Cold Stores by the Use of Danysz Virus,” Cold Storage and Ice Trade Journal 37 (March 1909): 57.

30. Brian Coman, Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia (Text Publishing, 2010), 76–80; “Experiments with Cultures of Bacilli for Rat Destruction,” Australian Medical Gazette vol. 26 (20 February 1907): 100; E. Angas Johnson and W. J. P. Giddings, “Rabbit Destruction—Dr. Danysz’s Experiments,” in Records of the Proceedings and Printed Papers of the Parliament, Volume 2, 2^nd session, 1907, 1315–1320, quote 1320.

31. Milton J. Rosenau, “The Inefficiency of Bacterial Viruses in the Extermination of Rats.”

32. For 1899–1924, see: Lucien Raynaud, “La peste en Algérie,” Archives de l’Institut Pasteur d’Algérie 2, no. 3 (September 1924), 352 and 355. For 1908–1930, see: Paul Witas, “Le rat et la peste en Algérie: La dératisation à Alger,” in DeuxieÌme Confeìrence international de rat, 232–49, at 233.

33. “La peste à Oran,” La Croix, 1 October 1907; Dr. Sandras, “La situation sanitaire à Oran au point de vue de la peste,” La semaine médicale 27, no. 42 (16 October 1907): 492. Billet, “La peste dans la département de Constantine en 1907,” 678. On Tunisia, see: Benoît Gaumer, L’organisation sanitaire en Tunisie sous le Protectorat français (1881–1956) (Québec: Presses Université Laval, 2006), 40–47.

34. Barthélemy, “Epidemie de peste à bord du navire de guerre Russe ‘Cronstadt’ en rade de Bizerte au mois de juillet 1921,” Archives des Instituts Pasteur de l’Afrique de Nord, Volume 1 (1921): 447–67, esp. 448–50; Edouard Bloch, “Les Épidémies Tunisiens de la Peste,” Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis (February 1930): 66–77; Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 20; Jonathan Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London: Hurst & Co., 2015), 326 n84; Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 105. I’m grateful to Josh First for discussing this case with me.

35. Ellen Amster, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 126–31; Francisco Javier Martínez, “Translating Pasteur to the Maghreb,” Dynamis 36, no. 2 (2016): 285–91, and “Double trouble: French colonialism in Morocco and the early history of the Pasteur institutes of Tangier and Casablanca (1895–1932),” Dynamis 36, no. 2 (2016): 317–39; and Martínez, “‘L’année de la peste’: santé publique et impérialisme français au Maroc autour de la crise d’Agadir,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 44, no. 1 (2014): 251–73, https://journals.openedition.org/mcv/5635; Robert Pollitzer, Plague (Geneva: WHO, 1954), 36.

36. Journal officiel du Soudan français (15 May 1926): 194; (15 January 1927): 59; and (1 May 1942): 161; Journal officiel de la Guinée française (1 April 1908): 173–74; (15 February 1910): 87, 91, 94; (15 April 1910): 204–17; (1 October 1912): 553; (1 September 1914): 576–77; and (15 April 1935): 222; Pollitzer, Plague, 34–38.

37. “Les chasseurs des rats,” Le Pêle-mêle, 12 December 1909, 6.

38. Fernand Noc, “Prophylaxie de la peste et destruction des rats à la Martinique,” Journal officiel de la Martinique, 6 May 1911, 204–05; Noc, “Prophylaxie de la peste: Notions pratiques,” Journal officiel de la Martinique, 7 September 1912, 463–65.

39. Mortality figures come from Pollitzer, Plague, 37–38 and Ann Clare Cooper, Public Health, the Native Medical Service, and the Colonial Administration in French West Africa (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2010), 95–96. On French plague response, see: Raymond F. Betts, “The Establishment of the Medina in Dakar, Senegal, 1914,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41, no. 2 (April 1971): 143–52; Elikia M’Bokolo, “Peste et société urbaine à Dakar: l’épidémie de 1914,” Cahiers d’Études africaines 32, nos. 85–86 (1982): 13–46; Liora Bigon, “A History of Urban Planning and Infectious Diseases: Colonial Senegal in the Early Twentieth Century,” Urban Studies Research (2012): 1–12.

40. Alexandre Kermorgant, “Épidémie de peste qui a sévi à Dakar et au Sénégal d’avril 1914 à février 1915,” Bulletin de l’Académie nationale de médecine (20 August 1916): 126–33, quotes 128 and 133, respectively.

41. The term “Plague houses” is in Georges Barthélemy, “Dakarois, gare à la peste,” Les Annales Coloniales (31 July 1922): 1; and in Paul Gouzien, “Urbanisme et Hygiène muinipale aux Colonies,” La technique sanitaire et municipal (April 1926): 84–86, 91–96. Both sources are heavily pro-segregation.

42. Jules Léon Franck Cazanove, “Le Problème du rat dans le territoire de Dakar et dépendances,” in DeuxieÌme Confeìrence international de rat (Paris: Vigot, 1931): 95–146, abattoir quote 133.

43. Kalala Ngalamulume, “Plague and Violence in Saint-Louis-du-Seìneìgal, 1917–1920,” Cahiers d'Eìtudes Africaines 46, no. 183 (2006): 539–65; David Nelson, “Defining the Urban: The Construction of French-Dominated Colonial Dakar, 1857–1940,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 225–55.

44. Pollitzer, Plague, 37–38.

45. Dr. Dujardin-Beaumetz, “La dératisation: Rapport sur la dératisation au nom de la commission spéciale,” Annales d’hygiène publique, industrielle et sociale ser. 5, vol. 1 (1923): 124–44.

46. “La chasse aux rats,” L’Intransigéant, 10 October 1915; “La chasse aux rats,” L’Image de la guerre, 1 December 1915, n.p.; “Au rat!” Le Gaulois, 11 December 1915; “Les sports sur le front: la chasse aux rats,” Le Miroir, 26 December 1915; “L’heure des rats,” L’Intransigéant, 4 February 1916; “La prime,” Le Pêle-Mêle, 9 July 1916, 7. The rat-proof bed is in Basil Clarke, “M. Poilu as I Know Him,” in The War: Illustrated Album de Luxe, edited by J. A. Hammerton, vol. 8 (London: Amalgamated Press Ltd., 1917), 2704–05.

47. “La guerre aux rats dans les tranchées,” Le Matin, 2 November 1915.

48. Russell, War and Nature, 3–4, 49, 81, 83.

49. Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, Les Chemins de la peste: Le rat, la puce et l’homme (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003), 68, 141, 237; Colin Jones, Paris: The Biography of a City (New York: Viking, 2005), 405; Michel Signoli, D. Chevé, and A. Pascal, eds., Peste: entre épidémies et sociétés (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2007), 146.

50. “Le nouveau régime de l’enlèvement des ordures ménagères et la destruction des rats,” Le Matin, 5 September 1920; “Les chiffoniers sont victimes...de la guerre contre les rats,” Le Journal, 25 September 1920.

51. Michael Prazan and Tristan Mendès France, La maladie n° 9: Récit historique d’après le Journal officiel du 3 décembre 1920 (Berg International, 2001); Jean Héritier, “La peste de chiffonniers,” L’Histoire no. 51 (December 1982): 97–99.

52. 653,000 rats in Conseil Municipal de Paris, Rapport No. 146 (1921), 3. On the rat lab, see Office International d’Hygiène Publique, Bulletin mensuel vol. 16 (1924), 77; Première Conférence internationale du rat (Paris-Le Havre, 16-22mai 1928): Documents réunis et publiés (Vigot frères, 1931), 165; Louis Giorgi, “Un danger: au laboratoire de rats,” Le Temps, 5 Sept. 1932; Henry de Varigny, “Revue des sciences,” Journal des débats 144, no. 264 (22 Sept. 1932), 3; Geneviève Bardot, “Pour une semaine du rat,” Le monde illustré (11 August 1934), 656; L’illustration no. 4753 (7 Apr. 1934), 397–98; Roger Simonet, “Les sciences: Le laboratoire des rats,” Ric et rac no. 319 (20 Apr. 1935), 2; P. Lacroix, “Le laboratoire de rats, à Paris,” Le concours Medical (8 Sept. 1935), 2540.

53. Forest, “Propos d’un Parisien.”

54. “Une Croisade”; “L’invasion grise”; Nansouty, “La guerre aux rats,” 230; Calmette, “Déclarons la guerre aux rats!”; Varigny, “La question du rat”; Pierre Mille, “La peste à Dakar,” Le Petit Journal, 12 June 1914; Abel Manouvriez, “Les livres: Le Roman des Rats par Robert Goffin,” Ric et Rac no. 434 (30 June 1937): 5. Anglophone sources: Edward Nelson, “The Rat Pest,” National Geographic 32, no. 1 (July 1917): 1–23; M. A. C. Hinton, Rats as Enemies of Mankind (London: British Museum, 1918).

55. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 1, 5, 94; see also Homi Bhahba’s preface, xiii.

56. “Au rat! Au rat!” Le Chenil (23 Sept. 1920), 86–87; James Rodwell, The Rat! And Its Cruel Cost to the Nation (London: Reynell and Weight, 1850), 15.

57. Henry de Varigny, “La question du rat.”

58. Forest, “Propos d’un Parisien.”

59. Michèle Guillon and Isabelle Taboada-Leonetti, Le triangle de Choisy: Un quartier chinois à Paris (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 11; Anne Raulin, “Minorités intermédiaires et diasporas,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 7, no. 1 (1991): 163–69; Gilbert Étienne, “La Chine et les Chinois de l’extérieur,” Relations internationales no. 141 (2010): 99–109.

60. “Une Croisade,” Les annales politiques et littéraires (1920): 225; for context, see Mavhunga, “On Vermin Beings.”

61. “Une nuit de chasse aux rats,” Le Petit Journal, 9 September 1920; “Nos échos,” L’Intransigéant, 10 September 1920.

62. “Le paradis des rats,” L’Attaque, 2 November 1920.

63. “Les chiffoniers sont victimes,” Le Journal, 25 September 1920.

64. “Les petites doléances,” Le Gaulois, 1 October 1920.

65. Fanny Clar, “Feuilles au vent: Pauvres, Rats!” Le Populaire: Journal Socialiste du Soir no. 867 (9 Sept. 1920), 2; Fanny Clar, “Feuilles au vent: La peste s’en va,” Le Populaire no. 878 (20 Sept. 1920), 2.

66. Raynaud, “La Peste en Algérie.”

67. For Clignancourt, see: James Cannon, The Paris Zone: A Cultural History 1840–1944 (London: Routledge, 2015), 5–6 (for 1921); Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere (New York: NYRB Classics, 2004), 176 (for 1925); M. Aucuy, “La propriété urbaine et le logement,” Revue d’économie politique 49, no. 3 (1935): 1157–76, at 1168; Geneviève Bardot, “Pour une semaine de rat” (1926 Zone plague); Ed. Joltrain, “La peste à Paris (1917–1937),” Bulletin de l’Académie Nationale de Médecine (15 December 1936): 601–15; “History of Bubonic Plague in Paris,” The Lancet (30 January 1937): 277–78.

68. “Les ratiers de la Nationale,” Le Petit Parisien, 22 September 1924.

69. “Les rats n’aiment pas le grelots,” Le Pêle-Mêle, 9 November 1924, 7. On Métro rats, see: “Les tribunaux: Les ‘rats’ du Métro,” La Presse 2 May 1908; “Les ‘rats’ du Métro,” Le Petit Parisien, 15 November 1917; “Tient-on enfin les insaisissables ‘rats’ du Métro?” Le Populaire 14 November 1929; “Les ‘rats’ du Métro,” L’Humanité, 8 July 1935; Marc Augé, In the Metro (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 124.

70. Police deratting requests appear in Frédéric Bordas, Louis Jacques Tanon, and Raymond Neveu, “Le rat reservoir de virus et laboratoire de prohylaxie de la peste,” in Première Conférence International du rat (Paris: Vigot, 1928), 163–68, at 166; see also Geneviève Bardot, “Pour une semaine de rat.”

71. Paul-Emile Cadilhac, “La protection de Paris contre la peste: La guerre des rats,” L’illustration no. 4753 (7 April 1934): 397–98, rat lab investigations on 398.

72. Edouard Dujardin-Beaumetz, “Comment une ville peut se défendre contre les rats” in Première Conférence International du rat (Paris: Vigot, 1928), 105.

73. Pollitzer, Plague, 44–46.

74. Sixte Blanchy, “Contribution de l’histoire à la compréhension de l’épidémiologie de la peste à Madagascar,” Histoire des sciences médicales 29, no. 4 (1995): 356–57.

75. R. Oudinot, “Hygiène colonial,” Le mouvement sanitaire (1929): 40–42; Dr. Fonquernie, “Fonctionnement du service de la peste au bureau municipal d’hygiène de Tananarive en 1927,” Annales de médicine et de pharmacie coloniales 27 (1929): 85–94; Letonturier and Thiroux, “Le rat et la peste à Madagascar,” in 2° Conférence international et congrès colonial du rat et de la peste. Paris, 7–12 octobre 1931 (Paris: Vigot, 1931), 78–87; Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 269–70.

76. Faranirina Esoavelomandroso, “Résistance à la médecine en situation coloniale: la peste à Madagascar,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 36, no. 2 (Mar.-Apr., 1981): 168–90.

77. Pieter G. Janssens, Marc Wery, and Sonia Paskoff, Adrien Charles Loir: Pasteurien de première génération (Brussels: Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, 2000). See also: “Déclarations d’associations,” Journal officiel de la République Française (16 December 1928), 13116.

78. Adrien Loir: “La destruction des rats en Allemagne et en Belgique,” Le mouvement sanitaire (1930): 113–22. For more on Loir’s work across Europe, see: Louis Bahr, “La lutte contre les rats,” Vers la santé (July 1928): 245–50; Pierre Vasseur, “L’Organisation méthodique de la lutte contre les rats en Danemark,” Les cahiers de la santé (25 March 1935): 15–20.

79. Adrien Loir, Le chat, son utilité (Paris: J-B. BaillieÌre et fils, 1930); Loir, “Le chat ratier,” Premiere Conference International du rat (Paris: Vigot, 1928), 169–76; Loir, “Le chat ratier,” La terre et la vie: revue d’histoire naturelle fondée en 1931 3 (1933): 408–15.

80. “La lutte contre le rat par le chat dans les colonies,” L’Agronomie coloniale 22, no. 181 (January 1933): 1–6.

81. A. Chantemesse and E. Mosny, eds., Traité d’Hygiène vol. 15 (Paris: Baillière, 1911), 421; Paul Gouzien, “Urbanisme et Hygiène municipal aux Colonies,” La technique sanitaire et municipal (April 1926), 84–86, 91–96, “ratproof” on 84; Gabriel Petit, “Cinq milliards à gagner chaque année en ‘dératisant’ la France,” Je sais tout no. 267 (March 1928): 8–12; Bahr, “La lutte contre les rats,” 250; “La Croisade de la dératisation,” L’Hygiène sociale year 2, no. 16 (10 June 1929): CXXVI (126); A. Veran, “Le rat prolifique plaie d’Egypte de Paris,” Le Petit Parisien, 22 July 1939.

82. Ribot, “Le rat dans le cambuse,” Le movement sanitaire (1924): 317; Raynaud, “La Peste en Algérie,” 354, 360.

83. J. Bohec, “Hygiene and Prophylaxie: Ratproofing,” Le concours medical (October-December 1938): 2671–74; Journal officiel de la Guyane française 111, no. 8 (23 February 1929): 145; Journal officiel de Madagascar 49, no. 2483 (18 November 1933): 1024–28, “tombs” on 1027–28.

84. “L’hygiène dans l’entretien du navire,” La technique sanitaire et municipal (August 1937): 196–99, quote 198.

85. “La dératisation dans les ports et à bord des navires,” Le génie civil 62, no. 3 (January 1938): 66–67, quote 66.

86. Bohec, “Hygiène et prophylaxie: Ratproofing.”

87. Bohec, “Hygiène et prophylaxie: Ratproofing”; Cadilhac, “La protection de Paris contre la peste”; Gouzien, “Urbanisme et hygiène municipal aux colonies”; “L’Hygiène dans l’entretien du navire”; “La dératisation dans les ports et à bord des navires.” For an American forerunner, see: Robert Creel, “The Rat: A Sanitary Menace and an Economic Burden,” Public Health Reports 28, no. 27 (4 July 1913): 1403–1408.

88. Bordas, “La lutte contre la peste,” 286; Bahr, “La lutte contre les rats,” 248; André Lacote, “La lutte contre les rats dans l’habitation,” La technique sanitaire et municipal (November 1933): 334–37.

89. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Raymond Betts, Uncertain Dimensions: Western Overseas Empires in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

90. Lionel Handson and Herbert Williams, “Account of an Epidemic of Enteritis cause by the ‘Liverpool Virus’ Rat Poison,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2499 (21 November 1908): 1547–1550; Rosenau, “The Inefficiency of Bacterial Viruses in the Extermination of Rats,” 194 for 1903 date; Robb Spalding Spray, “An Outbreak of Food Poisoning Probably due to ‘Rat Virus,’” Journal of the American Medical Association 86, no. 2 (1926): 109–11.

91. For French virus use, see: Robert Regnier and Roger Pussard, “La destruction des Rongeurs par les virus. [La lutte contre les campagnols],” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale, 5ᵉ année, bulletin n°50 (octobre 1925): 746–54; and “La destruction des rongeurs par les virus (Suite et fin),” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale, 5ᵉ année, bulletin n°51, (novembre 1925): 854–63. For expert critiques and germ warfare, see: Gédéon (alias), “Sur...le gril: Système D,” Le Populaire, 28 March 1933, 2; H. Velu, “La guerre microbienne est-elle réalisable?” Recueil de médecine vétérinaire vol. CXI (1935): 822–52; “La possibilité de provoquer artificiellement des épidémies de bactéries pathogens chez l’ennemi,” Le génie civile (28 March 1936): 309; G. Fischer, “La destruction des rats: Le danger d’utiliser le virus,” Le concours médical (4 October 1936): 2841–44. On rejecting “virus,” see Pollitzer, Plague, 564; On pest control and germ war, see Russell, War and Nature, 68, 118, 134–35, 174, 177–78, 196–97, 206–10.

92. N. Howard-Jones, The Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences, 1851–1938 (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1975); W.F. Bynum, “Policing Hearts of Darkness,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 15 (1993): 421–34; Juan B. Mateos Jiménez, “Actas de las Conferencias Sanitarias Internacionales (1851–1938),” Revista española de salud pública 79 (2005): 339–49; Mark Harrison, “Disease, Diplomacy and International Commerce: The Origins of International Sanitary Regulation in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Global History 1 (2006): 197–216; Valeska Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–1894,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 453–76; Bernard Hillemand and Alain Ségal, “Les six dernières conférences sanitaires internationales de 1892 à 1926 prémices de l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (O.M.S.),” Histoire des Sciences Médicales XLVIII, no. 1 (2014): 131–38; Hillemand and Ségal, “Les six Conférences sanitaires internationales de 1851 à 1885 prémices de l’organisation mondiale de la santé,” Histoire des Sciences Médicales XLVII, no. 1 (2013): 37–43.

93. Howard-Jones, The Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences, 93–98; “Office International D’Hygiène Publique,” The British Medical Journal, 2, no. 3747 (29 October 1932): 802–03.

94. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 85, 113–14; Cornelia Knab, “Infectious Rats and Dangerous Cows: Transnational Perspectives on Animal Diseases in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Contemporary European History 20, no. 3 (August 2011): 281–306.

95. On blaming British and Muslim movement for disease, see: Proust, La défense de l’Europe contre la peste, introduction, V–XI; Forest, “Propos d’un Parisien”; Varigny, “La question du rat”; Dr. Laumonier, “La peste: histoire et traitement,” Bibliotheque scientific des écoles et des familles no. 69 (1897): 1–36; Albert Calmette, “La peste d’Oporto,” Revue d’hygiène et de police sanitaire no. 21 (1899): 963–82; Hugh S. Cumming, “The International Sanitary Conference,” American Journal of Public Health 16, no. 10 (October 1926): 975–80.

96. Première Conférence international du rat (Paris: Vigot, 1928); DeuxieÌme Confeìrence international du rat (Paris: Vigot, 1931).

97. Geìneìrale Maroix, “Note au sujet de la deìratisation à Saint-Louis du Seìneìgal en 1920–1921,” in DeuxieÌme confeìrence international du rat, 156–58, Leger’s comment on 158.

98. On imperial survival, see: Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

99. Dr. Cazanove, “La Peste au Sénégal (1924–1927),” Annales de médicine et de pharmacie coloniales 27 (1929): 20–33, quote 20; see also Pollitzer, Plague, 38.

100. Drs. Sorel and Armstrong, “La lutte preventive contre la peste dans la circonscription de Dakar et dépendances durant l’année 1928,” Annales de médicine et de pharmacie coloniales 27 (1929): 64–72. See also R. Oudinot, “HygieÌne colonial.”

101. “La peste au Sénégal,” Le Temps, 14 April 1931; Gouvernement Général de l’Afrique Occidentale Francaise, Budget spécial des grands travaux et dépenses sanitaires sur fonds d’emprunt 1931 (Goree: Imprimerie du Gouvernement Général, 1931), 27, 32–33, 117. See also: Vol. 1932, pp. 33, 38, 219; Vol. 1933, pp. XXVI, XLI, 225, 244; Vol. 1934, pp. XXXV, XL, 195, 214; Vol. 1935, pp. XLIV, XLIX, XLVIII, 195, 218; Vol. 1936, pp. XL, XLVI, 211, 234, 248. Official report quote from Vol. 1935, p. XLVIII. Overview of the whole sanitation project in Journal officiel de la République française: Lois et décrets 71, no. 206 (1 September 1939): 10951.

102. “Dakar en 1935,” Le Petit Parisien, 11 January 1936.

103. Pollitzer, Plague, 37; Cooper, Public Health, plague cases and rat numbers at 168; Mandel boast in Journal officiel de la République française, 10951. See also: Myron Echenberg, “‘Morts Pour la France’; The African Soldier in France During the Second World War” The Journal of African History 26, no. 4 (1985): 363–80; Denise Bouche, “Dakar pendant la deuxième Guerre mondiale. Problèmes de surpeuplement,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 65, no. 240 (1978): 423–38.

104. Leo Kartman, “A Note on the Problem of Plague in Dakar, Senegal, French West Africa,” The Journal of Parasitology 32, no. 1 (February 1946): 30–35; David E. Davis, “The Control of Rat Fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis) by DDT,” Public Health Reports 60, no. 18 (4 May 1945): 485–89; Marie-Paule Laberge, “Les instituts Pasteur du Maghreb: la recherche médicale dans le cadre de la politique colonial,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 74, no. 274 (1987): 27–42, Rockefeller DDT on 36. For more on DDT, see: Echenberg, “Pestis Redux,” 441; Cooper, Public Health, 170–72; Pollitzer, Plague; Russell, War and Nature.

105. Georges Rotvand, “Le dératisation de l’exposition,” 21 January 1938.

106. A. Veran, “Le rat prolifique plaie d’Egypte de Paris,” 22 July 1939.

107. Jean Serridos, “Mort aux rats!” Le Petit Journal, 25 June 1941.

108. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert, 1st ed., 3rd printing (New York: Knopf, 1957), adjectives on 3, “bored” on 4, “sleep” on 5. For more on the novel, see: Macs Smith, “What Dies in the Street: Camus’s La Peste and Infected Networks,” French Forum 41, no. 3 (Winter 2016): 193–208; Colin Davis, “Camus’s ‘La Peste’: Sanitation, Rats, and Messy Ethics,” The Modern Language Review 102, no. 4 (October 2007): 1008–20; John Krapp, “Time and Ethics in Albert Camus’s The Plague,” University of Toronto Quarterly 68, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 655–76.

109. Camus, The Plague, rats on 15–16, sewers on 48, van on 52.

110. Camus, The Plague, Paris plague on 33–34, Arab quarter and Negro district on 76, “cresylic acid” on 81.

111. Camus, The Plague, 161.

112. On Carson, see Nixon, Slow Violence, preface, X–XII.

113. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 7.