Albert Camus and Political Violence

John Foley

In this chapter I argue that in L’Homme révolté Camus identifies what he considers the two conventional interpretations of political violence, the revolutionary and the bourgeois, and finds them both morally indefensible. However, through a close consideration of the relevant texts, I believe it is possible to identify a series of criteria which characterize, for Camus, legitimate political violence. This alternative account is not, as is sometimes alleged, a recipe for political quietism. Finally, I suggest that his discussion of political violence is as relevant now, in the contemporary era of technically advanced violence, as it was when first formu- lated. In L’Homme révolté Camus identifies two conventional ways of inter- preting political violence, “bourgeois” and “revolutionary” – both of which he considers fatally problematic.1 He defines the “bourgeois” account of political violence as simply the refusal to recognize one of the terms of the dilemma highlighted by political violence. This res- ponse judges all forms of direct violence morally impermissible, but finds it acceptable to sanction the varied forms of violence which are enacted daily on the stage of world history (E, 575).2 The second interpretation, the “revolutionary” interpretation of political violence, is premised on the belief that violence is necessary – necessary to the point of making history nothing but “une seule et longue violation de tout ce qui, dans l’homme, proteste contre l’injustice” (E, 575). Camus probably had in mind here arguments such as that advanced by Mau- rice Merleau-Ponty in his Humanisme et Terreur, which sought to justify revolutionary violence on the basis that, since the world is per- vaded by violence, “la violence révolutionnaire doit être préférée parce qu’elle a un avenir d’humanisme”.3

1 I would like to thank Joe Mahon of the Department of Philosophy at NUI Galway, for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 In an interview with Pierre Berger, Camus reiterates the point, claiming that one of the essential themes of L’Homme révolté “est la critique de la morale formelle qui est à la base de l’humanisme bourgeois” (E, 739-40). 3 Humanisme et Terreur: essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 116.

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Camus’s observations deserve our close attention, not because they are especially complex or innovative, but because they indicate quite clearly that the ideas regarding the relative legitimacy of particular acts of political violence developed in L’Homme révolté, Les Justes and elsewhere constitute neither a philosophy of necessary, humani- zing or cathartic violence, nor, more importantly, do they comprise a defence of the political status quo, on the grounds that political violence could potentially precipitate a deterioration, rather than an amelioration, in the general welfare of society. This latter charge, as we shall see, is more often than not brought against Camus when his writing on political violence is given any attention at all. In contrast to these two conventional views of political violence, Camus proposes an alternative limited defence of political violence which he illustrates by reference to the “military wing”4 of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, one-time political rivals, and ultimately political victims of, the Bolsheviks. We shall see that Ivan Kaliayev, Socialist Revolutionary and “meurtrier délicat” of L’Homme révolté and Les Justes, is at the heart of Camus’s ideas about legitimate political violence. But Kaliayev was only one of a number of such “scrupulous assassins”, whose distinctive spirit is perhaps best sum- med up by another Socialist Revolutionary, Maria Spiridonova, who in 1906 assassinated General Luzhenovsky for his brutal treatment of the peasants in the Tambov province of Russia, and who, during the 1917 revolution, was “the most loved and the most powerful woman in all Russia”.5 By September 1918, however, Spiridonova was impri- soned in Moscow, from where, refusing to answer the charges brought against her or to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, she published an open letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Protesting against the grotesquely violent regime that the

4 Boevaya Organizatsiya. For a first-hand account of the group, which included Ka- liayev, see Boris Savinkov, Souvenirs d’un terroriste (Paris: Champ Libre, 1982). Camus was probably introduced to the Socialist Revolutionaries by Nicolas Lazaré- vitch, whom he met through the Groupes de Liaison Internationale in the late 1940s, and who co-edited a selection of related writings in Camus’s Espoir series at Galli- mard: N. Lazarévitch and Lucien Feuillade (eds), Tu Peux Tuer cet Homme: scènes de la vie révolutionnaire russe (1950). 5 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997 [1919] ), 214. The term “scrupulous assassin” is used by John Cruickshank in his Introduction to Caligula and Other Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 26.