Albert Camus wrote La Peste (The Plague) in 1947. Its literal plot concerns a surprising mid-20th Century outbreak of bubonic plague in the French Algerian city of Oran, but it’s clear enough that the story uses this setting to explore how people responded to the outbreak of fascism in 20th Century Europe, and that the quarantined city of Oran stands in for Nazi-occupied Paris. Camus was in fact living in Oran during the earlier part of the French Occupation, but moved back to occupied Paris in 1943 in order to join the resistance, and played an important role as a journalist with Combat, an illegal resistance newspaper.

One of the central themes of The Plague is complicity. As a member of the resistance, you might in some very real and very important sense be doing what is obviously the right thing, and yet fighting the Nazi occupiers meant putting one’s family and friends at risk through your actions. Even worse, the resistance had to root out spies, which raised the possibility of having to kill a fellow citizen if they couldn’t be trusted. Even killing a Nazi soldier was troubling—for the most part, they had just gotten swept up in everything like anyone else on any side of the conflict.

Camus used the contagion of an illness as a metaphor to think about complicity. We can try our best not to infect others or to bring about their death, but once we have the virus, it’s not really something we can choose anymore. And the “virus” here, more than anything else, is ideology. Those who are “true believers” in some ideology or another—e.g. fascism, communism, anarchism, capitalism—seem to inevitably end up justifying the death of innocents as necessary for the greater good. In his 1951 book L’Homme Révolté (The Rebel), Camus refuses to differentiate between those who murder and those who (merely?) accept and justify the knowable and predictable death of innocents. He writes:

Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in action, can avoid committing murder. […] We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill (p. 4).

For Thursday, I’m asking you to read two selections from The Plague, pp. 139–141 and pp. 260–276. Both are about the two most central of the main characters, Rieux and Tarrou. Bernard Rieux is the town’s most prominent doctor, and ends up at the center of the fight against the plague for this reason. Jean Tarrou is more or less just some guy. He happened to be in town when the plague struck, and so ended up in the quarantine, but he has no real connection to Oran or its people. 

The first selection is about the public health squads that Tarrou proposed and organized. Spread of the disease is worsened significantly when the dead aren’t removed and buried, but of course being a member of the sanitary team meant taking on much more personal risk of illness and death in the service of public health. Tarrou took the lead in this effort.

The second selection is from quite late in the novel. Tarrou, who had never said much about himself or his past, finally opens up to Rieux. A reading note for that section: on pp. 268–9 there are some vague references that were much easier to catch when Camus wrote this in the Europe of 1947. Tarrou says, “I went into politics, as they say.” From the rest of the subtle context clues, it becomes clear that Tarrou means to say that he joined the international Communist party, fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and presumably fighting against German and Italian fascism shortly after. The execution in Hungary mentioned in these pages doesn’t seem to be about any particular event, but is instead about the way that, under Stalin, communism had transformed from a humanistic resistance movement into a political and ideological organization that was perfectly willing to execute those who it believed were spies or traitors to the cause.

Reading Response

For Thursday, please read pp. 139–41 and 260–276 from Albert Camus’s The Plague and complete a response with the following sections:

a. Words: Write down three words you learned (or learned more about) from the reading.
b. Ideas: Write down three ideas or concepts you learned about (or learned more about) from the reading
c. Prompt: Write a short response (100–200 words, minimum 100 words required) to this prompt:

In these selections, what do you think it would mean to be “a hero”, “an innocent murderer”, a “true doctor”, “a saint”, or “human”? (Just focus on one of those terms. The hero is discussed in the first selection; the rest are on pp. 272–274.)