The Plague

The Plague (La Peste, 1947) is Albert Camus‘s second novel and the book that made him an international figure. It tells, in a sober, chronicle-like style, of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran, a dull commercial port on the Algerian coast, in the 194- (the year is withheld), a city, as the narrator notes, “ugly and without pigeons or trees or gardens”, whose citizens are absorbed in business and pleasure, and who “get through the days in a state of ordinariness”. The book follows the course of the epidemic from the first dead rats to the closing of the city’s gates, the long months of sealed-off suffering, and the final reprieve, through a group of characters who respond in different ways. It is at once a realistic story of a medical emergency, a philosophical meditation on suffering, evil and solidarity, and an allegory of the experience of France under the German Occupation (1940–44), in which Camus himself took part as an editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat.

In April, the doctor Bernard Rieux, coming out of his surgery, steps on a dead rat on the landing. Soon, thousands of rats stagger out of cellars and sewers to die in the streets; then the concierge of Rieux’s building falls ill with a fever and dies, and more cases follow with swollen glands, high fever and delirium. The doctors, led by Rieux and the older Dr Castel, gradually recognise the disease; the municipal authorities, reluctant to cause panic, delay, then, under pressure from the prefect, declare an epidemic. On the order of the government, the town is closed (the gates sealed, no one allowed in or out), and Oran enters a period of exile, in which the citizens are cut off from the world and from loved ones: Rieux’s wife, who had left for a sanatorium in the mountains, will die there; the journalist Raymond Rambert, a Parisian who had come to write an article, is trapped without his lover; the old asthmatic who counts peas from one pot to another; the clerk Joseph Grand, a modest municipal official who is writing a novel and cannot get beyond the first sentence, which he revises endlessly (“One fine morning in the month of May, an elegant young woman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne”); the shady Cottard, a failed suicide who thrives on the plague, as the police have no time to arrest him, and who becomes rich on black-market goods; the Jesuit Father Paneloux, a learned and austere preacher; and Jean Tarrou, a mysterious visitor who keeps a notebook and, from the beginning, offers to organise volunteer sanitary squads. Rieux accepts; the squads become the centre of resistance.

As the plague spreads through the hot summer, the narrative moves like a procession of scenes: the cemetery, where the dead are buried in common graves, then burned; the quarantine camp in the stadium; the hospital, where the doctors, with their inadequate serum, can do little; the theatre, where the Opera company performs Orpheus and Eurydice and the lead singer, playing Orpheus, collapses on stage, dying of the plague, in front of the horrified audience. Paneloux preaches his first sermon in the cathedral to a crowded congregation: the plague is God’s punishment for the sins of the city; the faithful should accept the scourge and repent, for “this same plague that is killing you is working for your good and points your path”. Then comes the death of the child of the magistrate Othon, which Rieux, Paneloux, Tarrou and Castel watch together in the hospital — a long, agonising scene of a boy suffering in convulsions, whom the new serum cannot save. Rieux, rebelling, turns to the priest: “Ah, that child, anyhow, was innocent, and you know it as well as I do!” and says: “I shall refuse until my dying day to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” Paneloux, shaken, preaches a second sermon, this time using “we” rather than “you”: we must either believe everything, or deny everything; and the plague, which seems to us a cruelty, calls for a fiercer faith, for “the sort of faith that accepts what we cannot understand”. He dies soon after, refusing medical treatment, his file marked “doubtful case”.

The relationship between Rieux and Tarrou forms the centre of the novel. On an evening in late summer, they leave their work for an hour of friendship and take a swim in the sea, side by side in the moonlit water. It is a sudden moment of grace in a world of suffering, and the narrator says that no one could dissuade them from it. Tarrou tells Rieux his story: the son of a prosecutor, he had once heard his father demand a death sentence and had been horrified; he has since devoted himself to the fight against the death penalty and all “pestilences” — “I decided to refuse everything that, directly or indirectly, kills or justifies killing”. He has never had peace since. Asked what, then, is his way, he says that it is to be a “saint without God”, a question of “sympathy” and “common decency”. Rieux replies that he doesn’t feel the same call to heroism or sanctity: “What interests me is being a man.” The doctor, who believes only in doing his job, says that “the only means of fighting a plague is common decency” — “What’s that?” — “I don’t know what it is in general. But in my case I know that it consists in doing my job.”

Rambert, the journalist, who has repeatedly tried to escape the city to rejoin his lover in Paris, by approaching smugglers and officials, finally decides to stay: “It may be shameful to be happy by oneself”, and he joins the sanitary teams. Grand, the clerk, catches the plague but survives, to the astonishment of Rieux, and resumes his sentence. Tarrou, in the last days, as the epidemic declines, is infected, and dies after a long struggle, with Rieux and his mother at the bedside — a death that seems especially unjust, as it comes just before the end. Rieux learns the same evening that his wife has died in the sanatorium. Then the gates are opened; the crowd, in a delirium of joy, celebrates; trains arrive; Rambert is reunited with his love. Cottard goes mad when the plague ends and the police come for him, and fires at the crowd from his window. At the very end, Rieux reveals himself as the narrator of the chronicle, which he wrote “to bear witness in favour of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise”. The last paragraph warns that “the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests… and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

Camus began the book in 1941, in the mountains of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he was recovering from tuberculosis, and finished it in 1946, after the Liberation. It was an immediate success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It has been read in different ways: as a thinly veiled allegory of the German Occupation, with the plague as Nazism, and the volunteers as the Resistance (Roland Barthes objected that this made evil a natural force and left out the political); as a philosophical novel on the absurd, in which the stoic doctor embodies the revolt Camus had described in The Myth of Sisyphus; and as a moral tale of solidarity, in which heroism is simply the effort to do one’s work well and to relieve the suffering of others. Its description of quarantine, isolation, fear and denial has made it newly read during pandemics, notably in 2020.

In conversation

• The child’s death — Rieux and Paneloux at the bedside.
• “Common decency” — fighting plague by doing one’s job.
• The swim — an hour of friendship in the sea.