It has merely receded, and the disease could strike again at any time. At the same time, the threat posed by the disease has not been done away with. At the end of The Plague, Camus has his narrator say that ‘there is more to be admired in man than to be despised’. A certain relief and a renewed belief in the power of humanity predominates at the end of the book. After almost a year, the drama ends with the opening of the city gates and the reunification of survivors. Camus describes how human reactions develop in the face of advancing calamity: from initial indifference to denial, desperate attempts to combat the disease and finally to resignation. The city is closed off to the outside world, violence and looting are on the rise, attempts at escape are put down with deadly precision and the inhabitants also start attacking each other. After that, people get purulent wounds and severe bouts of fever. The descent into hell begins with dead rats in the streets. In the book, the city gradually succumbs to another disease: the Black Death. A sizeable percentage of the population lost their lives to it at the time. The city has been affected by disease several times over the course of its history, but the novel is said to be based specifically on the cholera epidemic of 1849.

The story is set in the Algerian city of Oran, then (1940) still a colony of France. Escher attentively read The Plague and other works by Camus. In the current corona crisis, war is a distant concept for most of the affected countries, but other than that the parallels between the book and the bizarre reality of 2020 are striking. The disease itself and its defeat are a metaphor for the fight against the Nazis, the brown plague.

The book was a direct response to the horrors of World War II. French philosopher, journalist, writer and Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote his novel The Plague in 1947.

The pest camus