Camus built The Plague on an Algerian city's real brushes with epidemic
Albert Camus set his 1947 novel The Plague in Oran, a French Algerian port sealed off by quarantine as rats die in the streets. He drew on a cholera outbreak that killed a large share of the city in 1849. Its heroes are not grand; they simply keep working, saving lives in the name of no ideology.
Oran had real history with disease. Bubonic plague devastated it in 1556 and 1678, and smaller outbreaks came in 1921, 1931 and 1944, though none approached the scale Camus imagines. He moved his story to the 1940s. It opens with rats dying unnoticed, then in heaps. The physician Bernard Rieux sees a concierge die of fever and, with a colleague, recognises plague. Officials deny it, then quibble, then post notices that play it down. Only after deaths mount do they declare an epidemic and shut the town.
Inside the walls, people respond in different ways. Raymond Rambert, a journalist cut off from his girlfriend in Paris, plots an escape through smugglers, while Cottard, a guilt-ridden criminal, grows rich on the black market. Father Paneloux preaches that the disease is God's punishment. Jean Tarrou, a visitor, and Joseph Grand, a humble clerk, join Rieux in treating the sick. By August sentries shoot escapees, looting erupts and funerals become hurried and bare. Given his chance to flee, Rambert stays, ashamed to leave.
The novel's hardest scene is the slow death of a magistrate's young son after an experimental serum fails. It shakes Paneloux, whose second sermon calls a child's suffering a test that demands total faith, yet urges everyone to fight. He dies soon after of an illness that does not match the plague. Tarrou, who has confided his lifelong opposition to the death penalty, dies just as the epidemic retreats. In February the gates reopen, and Cottard, desperate at losing his profits, fires on people from his window before arrest.
Often labelled an existentialist classic, a tag Camus rejected, the book stresses how little individuals control their fate, with a tone critics compare to Kafka's The Trial. The scholar Germaine Brée contrasted its stubborn, undramatic heroism with the glorification of power in André Malraux. Others trace links to Camus's own tuberculosis, and Rieux has become a model of the idealist doctor, inspiring the real French physician Réjean Thomas.
Source: The Plague (novel)
