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If I may be so modest, I have taught Camus' works for many years. As a moralist, Camus believed through goodness, happiness, liberty, justice, and brotherhood we could put meaning in our lives, moment to moment. (I am always amazed at the insistence of liberal academia to label him an existentialist, an epithet that even Camus rejected.)
A courageous man he was in so many ways, yes, but a conservative man as we know the term today, yes and no. The death penalty, for example, was an abhorent idea to him. Yet, he was ultra conservative in the sense that he fervently believed that governments should never interfere with human liberty, i.e., the ability of human beings to make their own choices and thus their own fate.
Well, I didn't plan on responding because I'm shutting down my computer now, but I was compelled to add to your statement.
With best wishes,
Penny

Yet, he was ultra conservative in the sense that he fervently believed that governments should never interfere with human liberty, i.e., the ability of human beings to make their own choices and thus their own fate.

Thank you, Penny, for your analysis. It rings true to Camus for me. Incidently, I agree with Camus on the death penalty. I believe in the death penalty in an ideal world, in a just world -- but in a world where we can't even trust the judiciary with our Constitution, how can we trust it with our lives?

I am always amazed at the insistence of liberal academia to label him an existentialist, an epithet that even Camus rejected.

I know. It's because most of them have only read The Myth of Sisyphus or more likely the CliffNotes version. That one is an express rejection of Heidegger's nothingness - it's what existentialism might have become had not Sartre turned it into an exercise in self-dramatizing and navel-gazing.

The Plague really is a good novel, but it was intended to speak to contemporaries for whom the historical allusions were more obvious then they are in an age when students can't reliably recite who fought World War II. Sartre and Roland Barthes have, in fact, stated that the book is weakened because it lacks direct historical allusion, which I have always suspected was, in fact, a refusal to see it as a mirror for their own activities. In fact, it does not, and its setting, Oran, is not accidental either - French, and yet not France, the characters Camus's contemporaries, and yet not his contemporaries. (I've always suspected it's as close as he felt he could get without a libel suit.)

I don't think it was an allegory at all, although it certainly was heavily metaphorical and broadly allusive to the experience of growing Nazism in his native land. The principal issue for the protagonist is to what degree the impending social catastrophe impels him as a reclusive, reflective individual, to embark on direct action in opposition. It is both a measuring of what individual and collective actually owe one another and what degree that individual may remain withdrawn and still be true to his ethical beliefs with respect to that relation. That is a direct and unflinching statement of the difficulties Nazism represented to the French philosophes of the mid-twentieth century, which Camus answered by joining the resistance early and Sartre, very late. It is little wonder that the latter does not want to see himself in The Plague.