A Frenchman in Malta at the time of Corona

ALAIN BLONDY, Professor at the Sorbonne (Paris IV), has specialized in the Mediterranean world up to the present times. To him writing means retracing the life of forgotten friends. His main historical interest are Malta and the Barbary States. Author of

“January 2020. TV news informed us of the new epidemic in Wu Han, China. Some people were afraid, but we joked: “This virus will be like all the products made in China, it won’t last long!”. Perhaps it is typically French. Beaumarchais used to say: “I hasten to laugh at everything, lest it makes me cry”.

I had just published a biography of tsar Paul I. A singular being, hated by his mother, Catherine the Great, fathered by one of her lovers while she was thinking of getting rid of her husband, tsar Peter III. Paul became emperor when he was 42years-old. He ruled Russia for five years and was murdered by conspirators. The most significent move of his short life was when he proclaimed himself Grand Master of Malta, building palaces and churches for the Order in Saint Petersburg and the surrounding countryside. As a Grand Master, he claimed Malta. As long as the island belonged to the French he was at war with the French Republic, but as soon as the English seized the island, he became the ally of Bonaparte and blocked English trade in the Baltic Sea. English money did the rest.

Paul was killed and his son, Alexander I became again a friend of Great Britain.

I arrived in Malta to rest a little, as I knew that I would have several interviews in March. Some friends visited me and we enjoyed the unusual beautiful weather of the month of February. At the beginning of March, on the 5th, two friends of mine arrived for one week. We were to leave the island on the 12th. On the 11th, we were invited to dinner at a friend’s, limits of Gharghur. Just before leaving home, we received a message on our mobile: from the 12th onward, all flights were cancelled. When we arrived at our dinner, we met a French couple. We told them what was happening. The wife had to go back to Paris to sign a contract but of course couldn’t. For the first time, we realized that the epidemic was for real. We were prisoners.

When we returned back home I decided on containment measures for all of us. A week later, the Maltese Government did the same. During four months of lockdown, we lived in the house or in the garden, to the greatest of pleasures of my ten cats.

One of us was sharing his time between TV and books, the other one between books and sudoku. As for me I could not watch TV: always the same alarming news, from Italy, Spain, France, England and the results of political madness in the United States or Brazil. Then the sterile discussions between medical doctors who knew only a little about this virus and had, however to struggle, without weapons. And last but not least, the stupid debates between politicians. Everywhere, every government navigated almost by instinct, but everywhere, every opposition had better solutions. The sad comedy of political clowns! Even in the face of death, men fail to unite.

At the beginning of May, I was interviewed by one of the French TV channels. I remember it very well. I did not say what the journalist was expecting. I told him that this pandemic will be like the Spanish ‘flu. It will seem to stop at the beginning of summer. Everybody will breathe a sigh of relief and all the precautions taken will belong to the past. People will be craving for life as they knew it before the pandemic and everybody will throw his cap over the windmill, in the crazed manner of Don Quixote. But then, in autumn or later, we shall have a more serious second wave, just as occurred with the Spanish ‘flu of 1919. However the worst will be yet to come. Then, we shall have an economic crisis and a social crisis just as happened at the end of the ‘20s and the beginning of the ‘30s. We shall need an economic plan, even bigger than the Marshall plan. But if the EU does not manage to find a new unity, a new way of common policy, each State will have to choose to sell itself either to the Chinese or to the Americans. I was not interviewed again after that. Cassandra rarely has listeners and nobody wants to spoil their summer.

I utilized my time to work on a new book, the history of privateering from Antiquity to today. It is what Pascal called “di-version”, the way to avoid seeing too awful a reality. The noise of the present was hidden by the furore of the oceans and the seas: the pirates of Pompey, the Sea Dogs of Elizabeth I or the Barbarian corsairs. History has many uses.”

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