A Plague of Silence: Social Hygiene and the Purification of the Nation in Camus's La Peste

Abstract

This essay examines Albert Camus's use of plague as an allegory for imperialist occupation and of medicine as a model for political struggle. It reveals that the plague allegory naturalizes evil and universalizes suffering while minimizing collaboration in the interests of imagining a unified resistance. Typifying postwar attempts at national reconciliation, La Peste embraces the republican ideals of equality and solidarity through an assimilationist narrative that collapses social distinctions, denies ethnic diversity, and silences the specific oppression of Jews in occupied France and of Arabs in colonial Algeria. Drawing on historical research as well as contemporaneous writings by Frantz Fanon, the essay problematizes Camus's idealization of medical practice in Vichy France and colonial Algeria and critiques the representation of the Western doctor as the ideal witness and diagnostician of social ills. It reads Camus's pathologization of political crises as a response to his precarious position as a pied noir.