Despite his reading of history and up-close observation of the outbreak, Rieux fails-or refuses-to acknowledge the disease for what it is. Rieux embodies another theme in the novel-the seemingly endless human capacity for denial, even among well-meaning, knowledgeable experts. Bernard Rieux, who remembers in his growing alarm “the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day.” Camus even quotes Defoe in the novel’s epigraph: “ It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”Ĭamus “read books on the Black Death that killed 50 million people in Europe in the 14th century the Italian plague of 1629 that killed 280,000 people across the plains of Lombardy and the Veneto, the great plague of London of 1665 as well as plagues that ravaged cities on China’s eastern seaboard during the 18th and 19th centuries.” Perhaps more timely now than in its time, The Plague puts Camus’ historical knowledge in the mind of its protagonist, Dr. As Daniel Defoe had done 175 years before in A Journal of the Plague Year-drawing on his own experiences as a journalist-Camus “immersed himself in the history of plagues,” notes the School of Life. Here, Camus relocates a 19th century cholera outbreak to sometime in the 1940s and turns it into the rat-borne epidemic that killed tens of millions in centuries past. It also illustrates the evolution of his philosophical thought: a gradual turn toward the primacy of the absurd, and away from associations with Sartre’s Existentialism.īut The Plague’s primary subject is, of course, a plague-a fictional outbreak in the Algerian “French prefecture” of Oran.

The book incorporates Camus’ experience as editor-in-chief of Combat, a French Resistance newspaper, and serves as an allegory for the spread of fascism and the Nazi occupation of France.

Topping lists of plague novels circulating these days, Albert Camus’ 1947 The Plague ( La Peste), as many have been quick to point out, is about more than its blunt title would suggest.

The pest albert camus