Meet Camille Brunel, French Author and Animal Advocate
By: Annika Wappelhorst
Tags: France, Authors, Portraits, Animals, Vegan

In 2016, went vegan. His first novel “La guérilla des animaux” (The Animal Guerrilla) was published in 2018. It’s a book that a reader will hardly put aside due to its breathtaking pace and its radical main character. The protagonist Isaac is a ferocious, radical vegan activist who undertakes an odyssey around the world to save wild animals in their natural habitats, while purposely killing hundreds and thousands of humans he considers harmful to animal wildlife.

The novel which Camille had been writing over several years was a surprising success for him as a relative newcomer: It has been sold almost 2.500 times, much more than he had expected.

Ironically, soon after the publication of his first novel, radical animal activists attacked butcher shops all over France and mostly destroyed shop windows — it was as if the dystopian way in which Camille’s fictional person carries out his activism had, on a smaller scale, become reality.

Regarding the state of our planet, Camille has a pessimist outlook similar to the one of his character Isaac: The mass extinction of animals and plants as well as global warming are alarming him. Nevertheless, the writer remains hopeful that people will realize the magnitude of the global crisis affecting all species. Numerous readers of his first novel have contacted him and told him it inspired them to follow a vegetarian or plant-based diet — or that they have even become activists.

Camille Brunel’s new novel “Les Métamorphoses” (plural of the word metamorphosis) will be published on August 27, amidst the corona pandemic. Guess what it’s about even though it has been written in the summer of 2019: a global pandemic. The female main character Isis observes the gradual transformation of all her human friends and relatives into animals and has to live with it. The French author wanted to show what an unexpected pandemic would do to peoples’ lives and didn’t expect a worldwide pandemic to affect humanity even before the publication of his novel.

“My strategy [as a writer] is to prepare humanity for the worst-case scenario.”

When COVID-19 hit his home country in March of 2020, Camille picked up his manuscript again and included elements from the actual lock-down situation which he experienced.

Another driving force for his literature is to refute the idea that animals obey their instincts more than humans do. “Every animal is a non-human person” was a crucial realization for him. “Every one of them has emotions, feelings, memory and the ability to communicate.”

The cover of Camille Brunel’s new novel for young adults

“I prefer to speak about the animal advocacy movement instead of the vegan movement. […] The word ‘veganism’ makes people think of a lifestyle. To me, animal activism is a matter of justice — combat for equality.”

His second publication of the year, planned for September 16, is called “Après nous, les animaux” (After us the animals), a novel for young adults in which all humans have died out. The title refers to the French expression “Après nous, le déluge” (After us the flood) meaning “complete indifference to what may happen when one is gone” (definition from the Oxford Dictionary). The scene is set several decades in the future, in 2086, where the only remaining animals on earth are stranded on the Mexican coast. Camille wanted to depict an imaginary world without humans, in which animals are the focal point of the storyline.