Reading Order
La Peste Reading Order
La Peste (The Plague, 1947) by Albert Camus is the companion novel to L'Étranger and the fullest creative realization of Camus's concept of revolt — not the individual revolt of Meursault against the absurd but the collective revolt of a community against a shared catastrophe. The novel describes a bubonic plague epidemic in Oran, Algeria, narrated in the retrospective voice of Dr. Rieux, who organizes the medical response and maintains his work of care without illusion or hope. La Peste is explicitly allegorical — written during the German Occupation of France, it is also a novel about resistance to totalitarianism, the possibility of human solidarity in the face of catastrophe, and the ethics of care without consolation. The novel won the Prix des Critiques in 1947 and is generally considered Camus's greatest novel, both in literary quality and in philosophical depth. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, it became one of the best-selling books in the world.
Where to start
Read L'Étranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe before La Peste — they establish the absurdist framework from which La Peste develops the response of solidarity. La Peste is longer and more novelistically developed than L'Étranger; it requires more sustained reading. Read Camus's essay 'Ni victimes ni bourreaux' (1946) alongside La Peste for the political philosophy that the novel dramatizes.
Complete La Peste Book List
- 1Buy
La Peste
Albert Camus·1947·Start here (after L'Étranger) — the plague allegory; solidarity against catastrophe; read at a sustained pace - 2Buy
L'Étranger
Albert Camus·1942·The founding absurdist novel — read first for the framework that La Peste develops and complicates - 3Buy
L'Homme révolté
Albert Camus·1951·The Rebel — the political philosophy that La Peste dramatizes; read after the novel for the theoretical account - 4Buy
La Chute
Albert Camus·1956·The Fall — the late novel; the counter-position to La Peste's solidarity; read after both earlier novels - 5Buy
Carnets
Albert Camus·1962·Camus's notebooks (published posthumously) — the most direct record of the thinking behind La Peste; essential for the serious reader
La Peste — Frequently Asked Questions
What does the plague symbolize in La Peste?
Camus is deliberately multiple about the symbolism — the plague is simultaneously the literal bubonic plague that kills indiscriminately, the Nazi Occupation of France (which is the most obvious historical referent), a general figure for any totalitarian evil, and (in the philosophical dimension) the absurd itself — the inhuman catastrophe against which human solidarity is the only possible response. Camus resisted reducing the allegory to a single referent; the strength of La Peste as a symbolic novel is that all these meanings coexist without any one of them exhausting the others.
Why is Dr. Rieux the narrator?
Dr. Rieux is the narrator of La Peste but the revelation of this — he has written the chronicle in the third person — comes late in the novel. Rieux is the ethical center: the doctor who continues his work of care without belief that it will succeed, without religious consolation, without political commitment, simply because it is what needs to be done. His narration in the third person is itself a form of his ethics: he suppresses his own voice and his own suffering to give a factual account of the epidemic and the community's response. The late revelation that he is the narrator adds the personal dimension — his wife is dying in a sanatorium outside the city — that the clinical third-person narration suppresses.
Who is Tarrou and what does he represent?
Jean Tarrou is the most philosophically developed character in La Peste — a man who came to Oran before the plague and stays to organize the sanitary teams; he is also the character who most explicitly articulates the novel's philosophy in his conversations with Dr. Rieux. Tarrou represents the secular saint — the person who does good without believing in God, without hope of reward, without ideology, simply because it is right. His backstory (he witnessed his father, a public prosecutor, condemn a man to death, and has spent his life in revolt against all forms of killing) makes him the purest embodiment of Camus's concept of revolt as solidarity.
How does La Peste relate to the French Resistance?
La Peste was written during and immediately after the German Occupation of France (1940–1944), and the plague allegory is unmistakably also an allegory of Resistance. Dr. Rieux and his companions organize clandestine sanitary squads, keep records, maintain solidarity in the face of official incomprehension and popular despair — exactly the activities of the actual Resistance. Camus himself was involved with the clandestine newspaper Combat during the Occupation, and La Peste is in part a memorial to and argument for the ethics of resistance: the choice to act without certainty of success, to maintain solidarity against power, to refuse collaboration.
Why did La Peste become so widely read during COVID-19?
During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, La Peste became one of the bestselling books in the world — sales increased by thousands of percent in France, Italy, and elsewhere. The obvious reason is that the novel's subject matter (an epidemic that isolates a city, kills randomly, and forces communities to respond with solidarity or selfishness) maps directly onto the pandemic experience. But the deeper reason is that Camus's response to the epidemic — maintain care without consolation, do what needs to be done without false hope, find solidarity in shared vulnerability — resonated as an ethical model for the pandemic moment. La Peste is the novel that keeps returning whenever catastrophe arrives.
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