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Camus's The Plague

1947 · Paris (Paris, France)

In 1947 Albert Camus publishes The Plague, the novel of Oran under epidemic quarantine, in which Dr Rieux's unheroic persistence becomes the ethic of the absurd after the war: no metaphysical rebellion, only decency against the bacillus. The book, read across Europe as the allegory of occupation and resistance, is Camus's answer to the questions his Sisyphus essay (whose record stands in the Nihilism timeline) had posed.

Tagged: Existentialism

The Event

Date
1947 (exact)
Era
The Paris Decade; Standard periodization of existentialist history
Location
Paris; today Paris, France
Traditions
Existentialism
Streams
Existentialism
Key figures
Albert Camus
Key texts
The Plague

How the Tradition Tells It

Camus refused the existentialist label throughout his life and called himself an artist, not a philosopher; his work stands in the movement's history by its questions, its company, and its reception, and the record states the refusal on its face.

Connections

Illustration for Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus History Event Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus 1942 the ethic the Sisyphus essay (whose record stands in the Nihilism timeline) called for, enacted

Primary Sources

  • Camus, Albert. La Peste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

Secondary Sources

  • Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.
  • Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.
  • Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2005.

Provenance: HIST-1430; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.

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