THE PLAGUE (La Peste)

Novel by Albert Camus, 1947

The longest and most ambitious of his fictions, Albert Camus's novel The Plague is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It is certainly an artistic tour de force: a vividly realistic account of a harrowing imaginary event. It tells the story of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran and is set in the 1940s, which is also when it was written. Published as La Peste in 1947 (The Plague, 1948), when the recent end of World War II was still fresh in everyone's mind, The Plague made painful but compelling reading, so nightmarishly real were its descriptions of the terror and suffering inflicted by the imaginary plague. Inevitably—and no doubt intentionally—such a novel would invite an allegorical interpretation.

In 1947 it seemed obvious that the story was intended as an allegory of the brutal German occupation of France during the war and of the heroic French opposition to it by the resistance. That interpretation was natural enough, since Camus had been a resistance hero himself, with his polemical articles in the clandestine newspaper Combat, and had, moreover, declared publicly that the original inspiration for his novel had been the panic and frustration he experienced in 1943 when he was alone in central France and suddenly discovered that all communication with his family in Algeria had been cut off because of the war.

Subsequently, however, readers of the novel began to find other themes in it in addition to that specific wartime allegory. It was noticed, for example, that the novel emphasized the dire human consequences of isolating those infected by the plague and the even graver distress that followed the isolating of the whole city from contact with the rest of the world. Those observations seemed to point to the urgent human need for community and to human helplessness before the random violence of nature as significant themes of the novel and to a broader interpretation of the symbolism of the plague as a more universal evil that would include war in general, as well as imprisonment and political oppression of every kind.

From these concepts it was a short but logical step to seeing The Plague as a veiled allegorical depiction of the German concentration camps, detailed knowledge of whose horrors were beginning to emerge from eyewitnesses during the last days of the war, even as Camus was composing his novel. Oran under siege by the invisible menace of the plague, as described in Camus's novel, has striking similarities to the extermination camps of the Holocaust, with their piling up of dead bodies, their shattered families, their squalid living conditions, their brutal mistreatment, and the ever present menace of death. The plague is, in fact, as uncomfortably apt a symbol for the horrors of the Holocaust as it is for the harsh realities of the German occupation of France.

The Plague has numerous passages describing the heroic efforts of ordinary citizens, against impossible odds, to ease the suffering and control the epidemic. The central figure, Dr. Bernard Rieux, who risks his life every day fighting the plague, is shown as exhilarated by the satisfaction he feels at finding himself equal to his heroic task. The plague has given his life meaning. Yet on balance, The Plague is a bleakly pessimistic novel. Human beings in adversity are rarely shown to be noble or courageous. Most are selfish, corrupt, or paralyzed by fear. Though friendships and alliances are formed to combat the infection, they prove ephemeral, and Camus is at pains to show that ultimately each human being is isolated and alone. When the plague appears over, Rieux is left with the empty feeling that his life no longer has any purpose. The novel's closing sentence is especially despairing, reminding readers that the plague is never over but lies dormant for years or even centuries until one day "it will awaken its rats, and send them to die in a happy city."

—Murray Sachs