The heat came down upon France like a sentence pronounced by an indifferent court. I write this from Paris, where the sky is a hard, cloudless enamel and the thermometer rests at twenty-four degrees in the shaded street, a mercy here, when only a few leagues south the land lies prostrate under forty and more. The newspapers call it the hottest day since men first thought to measure such things. I call it what it is: the slow, methodical revelation of how a society is built, who stands in the shade and who is delivered to the sun.
Go and look, as I have always insisted one must go and look. Walk out beyond the boulevards into the fields where the wheat stands scorched, struck by what the meteorologists, with their dry poetry, name the hairdryer effect, a wind that does not cool but bakes, that passes over the grain and leaves it brittle as the bones of the poor. The harvest withers. And the men who must labour in it do not have the privilege of withering indoors. They are the masons, the roadmenders, the pickers bent double in the orchards, their shirts black with the salt of their own bodies. The heat does not negotiate with them. It enters the lungs, it thickens the blood, it stops the heart in the afternoon as surely as a blade.
And the water, which should be deliverance, has become an executioner. Forty have drowned since last Thursday: forty mothers' sons gone down into the cool green promise of the river and the sea. The Prime Minister recites the figure as one recites the weather itself, a thing that simply is, beyond the reach of policy or blame. But nothing is beyond blame. I have spent my life proving it. The drowned did not die of water. They died of a city that offers no other refuge from the furnace, of an order that builds its pleasures for the few and leaves the many to seek their relief in the only element that will have them, and then takes its toll in corpses.
Heredity and environment: these were always my instruments, the twin engines that grind the human animal between them. And what is a heatwave but the environment made visible, made sovereign, stripping away the comfortable fiction that man is the master of his condition? The same lesson is being taught, at this very hour, upon the water of the world.
In the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow throat of commerce, eleven thousand sailors lie stranded, abandoned to the caprice of admirals and presidents. The United Nations now sends its ships to pluck them out; Oman opens a temporary corridor through the danger; and an American secretary, one Rubio, declares that no nation may charge a toll for passage, even as the rumour spreads that Iran intends to do precisely that, to make a tollhouse of a deathtrap. Observe the machinery: first they make the waterway too perilous for any honest vessel, and then, having manufactured the danger, they propose to sell the cure. It is the oldest commerce in the world. It is the commerce of every slum landlord I ever put into a novel.
But there is, in the news of this day, a sound I had almost despaired of hearing: the sound of a conscience asserting itself against power. The American Congress, both its chambers, has voted to rebuke its own President over his war with Iran, to demand the withdrawal of his soldiers should the people's assembly withhold its blessing. The measure is largely symbolic, they tell us, as if symbols were nothing. I, who once flung a single word – J'accuse – across the front page of a newspaper and shook a republic to its foundations, I know what a symbol is worth. It is the first crack in the wall. It is the moment when the men who govern remember that they are watched, that there is a ledger, that history keeps accounts and settles them.
This city understands such accounts. Today Paris opens the doors of the Panthéon to Marc Bloch – soldier, scholar, historian, a Jew of the Resistance murdered by the Gestapo in 1944, his body thrown into a common grave. Now the Republic carries his bones into the temple of its great men, and even the politicians of the far right, who would once have spat upon his name, crowd forward to claim a share of his glory. There is something in this that turns the stomach and lifts the heart at once. The truth-teller is always honoured too late, and always by the very heirs of those who killed him. Yet he is honoured. The record is corrected. The dead man wins, in the end, the argument the living silenced.
I wish I could write that the lesson had spread. It has not. In the Sudan, at El Obeid, the great powers warn of atrocities they call imminent, that obscene word, which means a thing is certain and not yet prevented. And we learn that the British, who knew, who held the intelligence of approaching slaughter in their hands, chose instead to cultivate their friendship with the merchant-princes of the Gulf. They weighed a genocide against a contract and found the contract heavier. Meanwhile a commission of the United Nations declares that in Gaza the killing of children has become not the accident of war but its method, a charge the accused dismiss as a libel. I make no judgement here that the documents do not support. I only set down the facts, side by side, in the cold column where they belong, and let the reader feel the weight of them.
And to remind us that cruelty wears every coat: in Texas, eight men are sentenced to four hundred and fifty years between them for a riot against the immigration police, in which an officer was shot. The numbers are theatrical, the sentences a kind of pageant. Justice, when it becomes spectacle, has already begun to rot.
Even the great engines of money felt a tremor today. In New York the index of the technological exchanges fell more than two parts in a hundred, the fever of the artificial-intelligence stocks breaking at last, the contagion spreading to Tokyo and Seoul. The speculators discover, as they always rediscover, that paper fortunes are built upon the same sand as everything else men build.
So the day closes. The sun goes down over Paris no cooler than it rose, twenty-four degrees and a sky of merciless clarity, while to the south the fields crackle and the rivers swallow the unwary. The furnace and the conscience – these are the two great forces I have watched at war all my life. The furnace is winning the afternoons. But the conscience, that stubborn cracked bell, still rings somewhere: in a congressional vote, in a coffin borne into the Panthéon, in a single accusing word set down by a man who refuses to look away.
It is not enough. It has never been enough. But it is not nothing, and a writer who tells you it is nothing has stopped doing his work.