**In English**
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Long before the Coronavirus pandemic, we find fictions of the epidemic in 20th century French literature, whether in Joseph Delteil (the plague) in the 1920s or in Albert Camus (the plague) and Jean Giono (the cholera) at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. These novels, which revolve around an epidemic, pose a number of historical, moral, health or aesthetic questions that the pandemic from which we emerge has naturally made more pressing: that of the place of disease, medicine and caregivers in society, that of forced immobility and movement, that of anxiety and exacerbation of vital instincts in times of crisis, that of our relationship with animals and the environment in which we live, and that of the role of art: "What is the use of poets in these times of distress?" (Hölderlin). Contemporary literature since Le Clézio (smallpox, in La Quarantaine, in 1997), taking over from stories of the AIDS crisis, is delving in its own way into these vital questions in various novels about different diseases, whether in Patrick Deville (plague and cholera) or Paule Constant or Adrien Absolu (Ebola fever), with an approach which diverges from the numerous detective and science-fiction novels dealing with the same subject.