Using this realistic fable, Camus, to whom we lend a metaphorical meaning (the rise of fascism and Nazism, the denunciation of communist totalitarianism), describes all the stages of the rise of evil that affects a society trapped in an epidemic and confined within the walls of the Algerian city, from disbelief to surprise, from reality to panic: the first signs, the threat that is becoming clearer, the general anxiety, the irrefutable evidence. Even when the dead rats start to pile up, it's a harbinger of the medical and health catastrophe.

It is the ideal backdrop for recklessness when danger looms. How would they have thought of the plague that suppresses the future, travel and discussions?' 'They continued to do business, they prepared trips and they had opinions. Our societies are groping their way forward to confront an invisible and devastating enemy, like Oran decimated, in spite of being presented prior to the events as a banal city, bordering on boredom, where one works to get rich. It is like the layer from which the sequence of uncontrollable events is cut out, which no one manages to control, neither in their inexorable course nor in their consequences. The Plague suddenly reveals itself to us as the great novel of the troubled times we are now going through. Those who have only just discovered it or have endeavored to reread it come away stunned by the experience.

And now The Plague, as it is titled in English, is enjoying an unexpected, yet justified comeback. French philosopher and writer Albert Camus published Le Peste back in 1947.

Albert camus the plague pages