The Plague

What the book bears witness to

Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 and grew up poor in Algiers. He worked as a journalist, joined the French Resistance during the German occupation and edited its newspaper Combat. The Plague, published in 1947, is set in the Algerian port of Oran in an unnamed year of the 1940s, when rats begin to die in the streets and then people begin to die of bubonic plague. The city is closed off from the outside world for months.

The novel is narrated, as the last pages reveal, by Dr Bernard Rieux, who has chosen to write a chronicle of the epidemic in a deliberately plain, objective style, as a witness. He records what happened to the people around him: Jean Tarrou, a visitor who organises volunteer sanitary teams; Raymond Rambert, a journalist trapped in the city who tries to escape to the woman he loves; Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest who preaches that the plague is God’s punishment; Joseph Grand, a modest clerk who spends his evenings perfecting the first sentence of a novel; and Cottard, a man who thrives on the disorder.

Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He died in a car accident in 1960.

What it shows

It shows how a community responds to catastrophe. At first the authorities deny what is happening, reluctant to use the word plague. When they act, the measures are slow and bureaucratic. Ordinary people adjust, then suffer, then grow numb. Separation from loved ones outside the city becomes, for many, the plague’s worst pain.

It shows a range of moral responses. Rambert at first sees the plague as none of his business and tries to escape, but eventually stays to help, deciding that it would be shameful to be happy alone. Paneloux’s first sermon tells the city it deserves its suffering; after he watches a child die in agony, his second sermon is far less certain, and he chooses faith without explanation. Cottard, who feared arrest before the plague, finds in the general misfortune a kind of relief and profits from smuggling. Grand, the least heroic figure, keeps working on the sanitary teams without fuss, and Rieux suggests that he is the true hero of the story, because he did the good he could without any idea of being a hero.

It shows the work of Rieux and Tarrou, who fight the plague knowing they cannot defeat it. Rieux says that what matters is not heroism but doing one’s job, which for him is healing the sick. Tarrou, who has spent his life refusing to accept any killing, even by legal execution, tries to be what he calls a saint without God.

It shows that the plague does not end because of anything the doctors do. It recedes, as mysteriously as it came. The city celebrates. Rieux, listening to the celebrations, reflects that the plague bacillus never dies, that it can lie dormant for years, and that a day may come when it returns.

The questions it leaves

The novel was widely read as an allegory of the German occupation of France, in which the plague stands for the occupation and the sanitary teams for the Resistance. Camus encouraged that reading, but the book also works on a more general level. The plague stands for any evil that falls on people without reason: illness, war, tyranny, death itself.

It leaves the question of how to live in what Camus elsewhere called the absurd, a world that does not answer the human demand for meaning. Paneloux tries to find meaning in suffering and finds it harder than he thought. Rieux finds no meaning in it and fights it anyway. The novel does not choose between them, but its sympathy lies with those who act.

It leaves the question of what counts as heroism. Camus resisted grand gestures. The novel’s moral centre is a kind of everyday decency: doing the necessary work, refusing to side with the forces that kill, and recording the truth.

What it changes in how you see others

The book changes how one sees ordinary people in a crisis. It suggests that the person quietly doing their job, without seeking recognition, may be doing more good than the person who makes speeches. Its sales rose sharply around the world in early 2020, during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as readers recognised in it the denial, the closures and the long days of their own experience.

It changes how one sees those who profit from disaster or deny it. Camus does not condemn them simply; he shows why they act as they do. But the novel is clear about which side to be on.

And it changes how one sees the end of a crisis. The plague returns. Institutions that relax once the immediate danger passes, and forget what they learned, are unprepared when it comes back. The site’s idea page When Small Risks Become Normal traces a related danger in organisations.