This is a Plot Summary. A full Study Guide—with chapter summaries, themes, symbols, and more—isn't available yet. Request it, and our expert team will consider adding it to our library.
Plot Summary
Reading Tools
Plot Summary
The First Man is an unfinished autobiographical novel by Albert Camus, left incomplete at his death in 1960 and published posthumously from manuscript. The surviving text covers what Camus planned as the opening portion of a longer work about French Algeria extending through the Algerian War of Independence. The protagonist, Jacques Cormery, is a fictionalized version of Camus, and the narrative moves between Jacques's middle-aged search for his dead father and extended flashbacks to his childhood in the working-class Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers.
The novel opens in autumn 1913 with a wagon carrying Henri Cormery, about thirty, and his pregnant wife Lucie through rain toward a farm near the village of Solférino in eastern Algeria. When Lucie goes into labor, Henri helps her onto a mattress inside the empty farmhouse and rides to the village to fetch a doctor. By the time he returns, the baby has been delivered. Henri names the boy Jacques after the canteen owner who assisted with the birth.
Forty years later, Jacques travels to the small Breton town of Saint-Brieuc. His primary purpose is to visit his old mentor, Victor Malan, who has retired there, but he decides to visit his father's grave first. At the cemetery, he reads the dates on the stone, 1885–1914, and calculates that his father died at twenty-nine, younger than Jacques is now. This reversal shakes him, and he resolves to learn who his father was.
That evening, Jacques dines with Malan, an elderly retired customs administrator who first opened the doors of intellectual life to him. Malan warns that an inquiry forty years after a man's death may yield little but encourages Jacques to visit his mother in Algeria and try. Their conversation is warm: Jacques declares his affection openly, and Malan confesses a fear of dying and a terrible inner emptiness.
On a July ship crossing to Algiers, Jacques falls into reverie. He recalls his grandmother's enforced siestas in the suffocating heat of the small apartment and the games he played with neighborhood friends, especially Pierre, also the son of a war widow. The children's world is one of inventive poverty: jousting on a dry fountain, sharing cheap sweets in cellars, and swimming naked at Sablettes beach. Coming home late, Jacques is caught by his grandmother, who checks his sandy ankles and beats him with a leather whip. His mother, gentle and nearly deaf, offers quiet comfort.
Arriving in Algiers, Jacques embraces his seventy-two-year-old mother on the doorstep of their old apartment. The manuscript shifts the mother's name from Lucie to Catherine without explanation. Catherine remains slender and beautiful but is isolated by deafness and a limited vocabulary. Jacques questions her about his father, but her answers are fragmentary. In a biscuit tin, the family preserves Henri's terse postcards from the front and the shell fragment that wounded him. Catherine remembers that Henri was orphaned young and raised in an institution. Mobilized in August 1914, Henri was shipped to a France he had never seen, fatally wounded at the Battle of the Marne, and died at Saint-Brieuc.
Among the few stories the family preserves about Henri, one stands out. He once attended a public execution at Barberousse prison and returned home livid and vomiting, refusing ever to speak of what he had seen. Jacques, who heard the story from his grandmother as a child, is haunted by recurring nightmares in which he himself is taken to be executed. He recognizes this horror as his father's only clear legacy, a mysterious bond connecting them across death.
In the present, a bomb explodes near the apartment, part of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), a conflict between Algerian nationalists and French colonial rule. Jacques protects an innocent Arab man from an angry worker, then returns to comfort his mother, who refuses his invitation to move to France.
The narrative expands to cover the family's history. Jacques's grandmother, born to immigrants from the Spanish island of Menorca, raised nine children and ruled the household with a stick. After her husband's early death, she moved to Algiers, managing every centime with fierce determination. She had Jacques's shoes studded with nails to extend their life and inspected his soles daily for evidence of forbidden soccer. Jacques's Uncle Ernest, who is deaf and partly mute, works as a barrel-maker. A man of boundless vitality, Ernest takes Jacques swimming on his back, hunts with friends, and performs comic pantomimes at dinner. On one occasion, Ernest beats a fishmonger named M. Antoine who has been courting Catherine. After the beating, Catherine returns to her gray dresses, settling into poverty and solitude.
A pivotal figure is M. Bernard, Jacques's teacher in his final year of elementary school. Passionate and fair, M. Bernard brings learning alive with mineral collections, a magic lantern, and readings from Roland Dorgelès's World War I novel Les Croix de Bois, which move Jacques to uncontrollable tears. M. Bernard nominates Jacques and three classmates for secondary-school scholarships. Jacques's grandmother initially refuses, insisting the family needs the boy's wages, but M. Bernard visits the home and persuades her, then provides daily extra lessons at no charge. Jacques passes the examination, and as the teacher departs after announcing the news, Jacques watches from the window with anguish: He knows that success has uprooted him from the warm world of the poor and thrust him into a world where he must grow up alone.
At the lycée, a French secondary school, the cultural gulf between home and school becomes the novel's central tension. Jacques must write "domestic servant" for his mother's occupation on forms, a designation never spoken at home. He befriends Georges Didier, a bourgeois boy whose family possesses ancestral letters and photos, a heritage Jacques entirely lacks. Jacques thrives academically and at soccer but lives divided: twelve hours in the world of school, a few hours at home where no family member can engage with his intellectual life. At the public library, he and Pierre devour books obsessively. His mother sometimes stands beside him as he reads, running her worn fingers across the page, inhaling the smell of the book, then withdrawing to her chair.
Beginning at thirteen, Jacques works summer jobs at a hardware store and later a ship broker, hating the dark offices but feeling pride when he places his wages on the dining-room table. By his fifth year at the lycée, the child has died and the adolescent has been born: He seizes the whip from his grandmother's hands, ending her physical punishments forever.
Jacques also travels to his birthplace during the present-day conflict. A farmer named Veillard now owns the rebuilt property. No one Jacques finds can tell him anything substantial about Henri. In the old settler cemetery, tombstones are worn illegible. Jacques recognizes that his father, like all the nameless settlers before him, was consumed by the anonymous history of this land, where each person is the first man, born without heritage and forced to create himself without guidance.
The surviving narrative closes with Jacques at forty contemplating the obscure forces that shaped him: a blind, famished ardor for life fed by sensory memories of his childhood, and his recognition that he was born in a land without forefathers or memory. He holds the hope that the same force which raised him from poverty will give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion. Appended notes reveal Camus's plans for the unwritten portions, including further treatment of the Algerian war, Jacques's adult loves, and a final reconciliation with his mother.
The novel opens in autumn 1913 with a wagon carrying Henri Cormery, about thirty, and his pregnant wife Lucie through rain toward a farm near the village of Solférino in eastern Algeria. When Lucie goes into labor, Henri helps her onto a mattress inside the empty farmhouse and rides to the village to fetch a doctor. By the time he returns, the baby has been delivered. Henri names the boy Jacques after the canteen owner who assisted with the birth.
Forty years later, Jacques travels to the small Breton town of Saint-Brieuc. His primary purpose is to visit his old mentor, Victor Malan, who has retired there, but he decides to visit his father's grave first. At the cemetery, he reads the dates on the stone, 1885–1914, and calculates that his father died at twenty-nine, younger than Jacques is now. This reversal shakes him, and he resolves to learn who his father was.
That evening, Jacques dines with Malan, an elderly retired customs administrator who first opened the doors of intellectual life to him. Malan warns that an inquiry forty years after a man's death may yield little but encourages Jacques to visit his mother in Algeria and try. Their conversation is warm: Jacques declares his affection openly, and Malan confesses a fear of dying and a terrible inner emptiness.
On a July ship crossing to Algiers, Jacques falls into reverie. He recalls his grandmother's enforced siestas in the suffocating heat of the small apartment and the games he played with neighborhood friends, especially Pierre, also the son of a war widow. The children's world is one of inventive poverty: jousting on a dry fountain, sharing cheap sweets in cellars, and swimming naked at Sablettes beach. Coming home late, Jacques is caught by his grandmother, who checks his sandy ankles and beats him with a leather whip. His mother, gentle and nearly deaf, offers quiet comfort.
Arriving in Algiers, Jacques embraces his seventy-two-year-old mother on the doorstep of their old apartment. The manuscript shifts the mother's name from Lucie to Catherine without explanation. Catherine remains slender and beautiful but is isolated by deafness and a limited vocabulary. Jacques questions her about his father, but her answers are fragmentary. In a biscuit tin, the family preserves Henri's terse postcards from the front and the shell fragment that wounded him. Catherine remembers that Henri was orphaned young and raised in an institution. Mobilized in August 1914, Henri was shipped to a France he had never seen, fatally wounded at the Battle of the Marne, and died at Saint-Brieuc.
Among the few stories the family preserves about Henri, one stands out. He once attended a public execution at Barberousse prison and returned home livid and vomiting, refusing ever to speak of what he had seen. Jacques, who heard the story from his grandmother as a child, is haunted by recurring nightmares in which he himself is taken to be executed. He recognizes this horror as his father's only clear legacy, a mysterious bond connecting them across death.
In the present, a bomb explodes near the apartment, part of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), a conflict between Algerian nationalists and French colonial rule. Jacques protects an innocent Arab man from an angry worker, then returns to comfort his mother, who refuses his invitation to move to France.
The narrative expands to cover the family's history. Jacques's grandmother, born to immigrants from the Spanish island of Menorca, raised nine children and ruled the household with a stick. After her husband's early death, she moved to Algiers, managing every centime with fierce determination. She had Jacques's shoes studded with nails to extend their life and inspected his soles daily for evidence of forbidden soccer. Jacques's Uncle Ernest, who is deaf and partly mute, works as a barrel-maker. A man of boundless vitality, Ernest takes Jacques swimming on his back, hunts with friends, and performs comic pantomimes at dinner. On one occasion, Ernest beats a fishmonger named M. Antoine who has been courting Catherine. After the beating, Catherine returns to her gray dresses, settling into poverty and solitude.
A pivotal figure is M. Bernard, Jacques's teacher in his final year of elementary school. Passionate and fair, M. Bernard brings learning alive with mineral collections, a magic lantern, and readings from Roland Dorgelès's World War I novel Les Croix de Bois, which move Jacques to uncontrollable tears. M. Bernard nominates Jacques and three classmates for secondary-school scholarships. Jacques's grandmother initially refuses, insisting the family needs the boy's wages, but M. Bernard visits the home and persuades her, then provides daily extra lessons at no charge. Jacques passes the examination, and as the teacher departs after announcing the news, Jacques watches from the window with anguish: He knows that success has uprooted him from the warm world of the poor and thrust him into a world where he must grow up alone.
At the lycée, a French secondary school, the cultural gulf between home and school becomes the novel's central tension. Jacques must write "domestic servant" for his mother's occupation on forms, a designation never spoken at home. He befriends Georges Didier, a bourgeois boy whose family possesses ancestral letters and photos, a heritage Jacques entirely lacks. Jacques thrives academically and at soccer but lives divided: twelve hours in the world of school, a few hours at home where no family member can engage with his intellectual life. At the public library, he and Pierre devour books obsessively. His mother sometimes stands beside him as he reads, running her worn fingers across the page, inhaling the smell of the book, then withdrawing to her chair.
Beginning at thirteen, Jacques works summer jobs at a hardware store and later a ship broker, hating the dark offices but feeling pride when he places his wages on the dining-room table. By his fifth year at the lycée, the child has died and the adolescent has been born: He seizes the whip from his grandmother's hands, ending her physical punishments forever.
Jacques also travels to his birthplace during the present-day conflict. A farmer named Veillard now owns the rebuilt property. No one Jacques finds can tell him anything substantial about Henri. In the old settler cemetery, tombstones are worn illegible. Jacques recognizes that his father, like all the nameless settlers before him, was consumed by the anonymous history of this land, where each person is the first man, born without heritage and forced to create himself without guidance.
The surviving narrative closes with Jacques at forty contemplating the obscure forces that shaped him: a blind, famished ardor for life fed by sensory memories of his childhood, and his recognition that he was born in a land without forefathers or memory. He holds the hope that the same force which raised him from poverty will give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion. Appended notes reveal Camus's plans for the unwritten portions, including further treatment of the Algerian war, Jacques's adult loves, and a final reconciliation with his mother.
Related Titles
By Albert Camus
