How Albert Camus wrote “The Plague”

What can we learn from the analysis of the original manuscripts on the making of literary masterpieces? A lot, more than testimonies, notebooks or confessions, they are the proof in deeds of the mistakes, the choices, the deep intentions of the writer. The original manuscript of The Plague by Albert Camus is no exception to the rule. To better understand how this novel, which saw its sales take off again during the coronavirus crisis, became what it is today, let’s dive into the meanders of the bluish ink of Albert Camus. Never satisfied with this novel, Camus never suspected that it could become the popular classic it is, and the 3rd best-selling title of Editions Gallimard, after The little Prince and The Stranger.

Read the epidemics of the past and respond to the absurd

Camus is 25 years old when germinates in him the idea, probably inspired by Antonin Artaud, to write a novel around an epidemic. At this time, he has not yet written The Stranger and Europe is not yet invaded by the Nazis. Camus, who lives in Oran, Algeria, documents extensively on the great plagues of history, and reads the essential novels of epidemics, as Anaïs Dupuy-Olivier, Curator at the BNF, specialist in the Camus fund points out: “Camus seeks at the same time to be, by reading historical and medical works, very precise on the scientific level, but he wants to give a literary form, and wants to make this chronicle of the plague a true novel.”

Two years later, Camus treated his tuberculosis in the Massif Central. Driven by the good reception of its “Cycle of the Absurd”, which contains The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula, Camus begins to write a second cycle which responds to the absurd, to go beyond it: that of “La Révolte”. The writer testified on the radio in the 1950s: “The notions of absurdity and revolt are concepts experienced for me. Basically, I am talking about what everyone knows. And I have tried in effect to extract from the revolt the elements of an attitude that is not not an attitude of pure destruction, of pure nihilism. I am interested in it as far as it is possible to overcome it. “

Anaïs Dupuy-Olivier, curator at the BNF, continues the analysis of the genesis, from the written traces that remain : “During the year 1941, he begins to put in writing his ideas, plans of the novel which he progressively bars, lists of characters, scraps of sentences, drafts which are often very crossed out, which are written, we can see it very quickly, without application, we can see that it is a thought in the making. “

Resist and fight the brown plague

The Allied landing in North Africa and the entry of the Germans into the South zone prevented him from returning to Algeria, to his home: “Like rats!” he exclaims in his Carnets, and a few pages later, at the beginning of 1943: “I want to express by means of the plague the suffocation from which we have all suffered”.

“The Separated”, “The Prisoners” are titles that he successively abandoned. The novel of an epidemic in Oran clearly becomes an allegory of resistance to Nazism, “the brown plague”. Camus lists the reactions of a community to a plague: the heroism of everyday life, the reinvention of love, the profiteers of the black market, despair, the struggle. Albert Camus says it precisely in an editorial by Combat he reads for the radio in 1944: “The task of the Men of Resistance is not over. Now is the time for joint effort. “

Get back to work, over and over

Camus is 30 years old when he finishes a first version of what has become The Plague. He is not happy with it. As Anaïs Dupuy-Olivier analyzes, from the multiple corrections visible on the original manuscript of The Plague : “Albert Camus went back on what he had written: by annotating, by crossing out words which seemed to him unsuitable, by adding notes in the margin …” For three years, he logs on a second version: characters disappear, seven chapters are deleted, ten added. He goes from a juxtaposition of points of view to a unique narrator, Dr. Rieux, who questions us about the meaning of existence. Albert Camus thus confided in the RDF : “I worked quite deeply on the composition of this book and on the other hand I worked so that this composition was invisible. I immediately thought that there were in short two styles: one which would have concerned precisely individual actions, and the other, on the contrary, which would have concerned collective tragedy, the establishment of the scourge. “

“All this is sleeping and I am trailing in inertia.” Camus to his friend Francis Ponge

Meanwhile, in Paris, monopolized by journalism, Camus became editor of the resistant newspaper Combat. 1946: he puts an end to The Plague, without joy. “I have the idea that this book is totally missed, that I sinned by ambition and this failure is very painful for me. I keep it in my drawer, like something a little disgusting.”

In 1959, Albert Camus returned to the painful loneliness of the writer in an interview for French television: “A writer works alone. He is judged in solitude. Above all, he judges himself in solitude. It is neither good nor healthy.” And so he ended up giving the manuscript to Gallimard, who published the book in June 1947.

The success of bookstores is immense. This is the first time for Camus, who says … “Bewildered”. Albert Camus spoke to the RDF in 1950: “Those of my books that pleased me expressed poorly and did not look like me.”

Translated into dozens of languages, the cycle of “The Revolt” is part of the Nobel’s choice to award him his famous prize for literature, 10 years later.

“What we learn in the midst of the plagues is that there is more to admire in men than to despise.” he writes in The Plague. While showing the human capacities of solidarity, of combat, Camus alerts to never forget the lessons of the trials: _ “_ The bacillus of the plague never dies or never disappears.”

Discover other episodes from our video collection dedicated to the secrets of masterpieces by analyzing their original manuscript:

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