On Albert Camus

Books & the Arts. The Colonist of Good Will by THOMAS MEANEY oward the end of his recent memoir, Jean Daniel, the last surviving friend of Albert Camus and the most distin- guished journalist in France, permits himself an anecdote. It’s the summer ofT 1951, and Camus’s book-length essay The Rebel will soon be published. The writer has taken his mother to a party with friends in Paris. After dancing with several women, Camus leans over and tells his mother that he’s been invited to the presidential palace. She is nearly deaf, so he repeats: “Mother, I’ve been invited to the Elysée!” Madame Camus is silent for a long moment. Then she takes her son’s ear and shouts: “Don’t go, my boy! It’s not for us! It’s not for us!” Camus smiles and gives a shrug to the table. “He didn’t say anything,” recalls Daniel, “but he seemed proud of his mother.” Camus never went to the Elysée, of course. The only palace this son of a cleaning woman ever entered was in Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize, and even then he went with reluctance. For almost any other French intellectual, a humble background like Camus’s might have been a handicap, but for him it was a source of pride. Born in Algeria into the low- est stratum of the pieds-noirs—the French- speaking settlers who had lived on the land for more than a century—Camus was a pure product of the Third Republic. His family MAGNUM PHOTOS received a state pension after his father was Albert Camus photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, circa 1945 killed fighting in World War I. He was a scholarship student educated by charismatic poor enough to feel my desires as demands,” also handing a victory to Egypt’s “new Arab schoolmasters who had whisked him through Sartre declared in his autobiography. This Imperialism” and the USSR’s “anti-Western the standard lycée curriculum. While the rest was not a problem for Camus, whose passions strategy.” There was a deeper dimension to of the French intellectuals made a pastime of often overwhelmed him. the analysis as well. As Camus and Sartre both hating their bourgeois upbringing, Camus But Camus’s outsider status also narrowed understood, the Algerian Revolution was also reveled in his hardscrabble origins. He was his vision. Coming from one of the rougher a French revolution—one that would test the less prone to romanticizing the proletariat quarters of Algiers, he found it hard to feel im- very foundation of the Republic. Could France because he came from it: words like “exploi- plicated in the long history of French colonial finally embrace its Arab and Berber subjects tation” and “subsistence” were gleaned not oppression: his family, too, had felt the heel of with true equality, or would its universalist from revolutionary brochures but from life the grands colons. Camus could never see with credo remain a cover for colonial interests? itself. Whereas his great antagonist, Jean- the same icy clarity as Sartre that colonies For Sartre, it was the latter; Camus thought Paul Sartre, grew up in a family that made are the truth of the metropole. For him, the the Republic still had a chance to redeem itself. him feel “indispensable to the universe,” version of national independence propagated In the Anglo-American West, where Camus described the world of his childhood by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Camus is often revered as a kind of French as one of “gentle indifference.” “I was not which was founded in 1954, spelled a catas- Orwell, his stand on Algeria is typically taken trophe for France, Algeria and the rest of as the sole mark against him. He gets a score Thomas Meaney, a doctoral candidate in his- the West. It meant not only turning Algeria of two out of three: right about Vichy, right tory at Columbia University, is the co-editor over to a group of terrorists and forcing the about Stalinism, wrong about Algerian in- of The Utopian. exodus of more than a million pieds-noirs, but dependence. Yet, as the historian Tony Judt 28 The Nation. September 16, 2013 once argued, to reduce Camus’s views to a he wrote. “People are in a hurry to live, and if score card is not very helpful if you want Books Discussed in This Essay an art were born here it would conform to the to understand his thinking. Judt admired hatred of permanence that led the Dorians to Camus for opting out of the French intel- Avec Camus carve their first column out of wood.” In these lectual obsession with taking an endless series Comment résister à l’air du temps. lyrical essays, the Arabs appear as background of correct “positions” on every issue. In the By Jean Daniel. to the soccer matches, the cramped cinemas, fractious case of Algeria, where his views were Gallimard. 153 pp. Paper €11.70. the cool-limbed girls, the blue terraces over- complicated, and where the course of the war looking the bay. Yet later in that same year, threatened to turn every statement into a The Burden of Responsibility Camus began his career as a reporter on the weapon for the belligerent forces on all sides, Blum, Camus, Aron, and the Alger Républicain, the new left-leaning paper Camus believed the most responsible move French Twentieth Century. in the city. In his first signed piece, he boards By Tony Judt. for an intellectual was, very often, to remain Chicago. 196 pp. Paper $17.50. a prison ship in the harbor of Algiers: silent. It was this sort of moral stoicism and I see three Arabs hanging from a intolerance of illusions that Judt had in mind Algerian Chronicles porthole, trying to catch a glimpse when he titled his book championing Camus By Albert Camus. of Algiers. For their comrades, this is The Burden of Responsibility (1998). Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. a foreign land in what has become a Edited by Alice Kaplan. foreign world, but these three, peer- et his silences were never just that. Harvard. 224 pp. $21.95. ing through the rain, are still search- Remaining silent was one of the ing for a part of themselves. I am not many political positions that Camus The Invention of Decolonization proud of my presence in this place. chose to take. He was one of the The Algerian War and the fiercest, most partisan polemicists Remaking of France. Here Camus confronts the dark corner of By Todd Shepard. inY the history of French journalism— his pied-noir playground; he could be Marlow Cornell. 288 pp. Paper $24.95. a vocation, Daniel says, he rated “the most describing a slave steamer in Heart of Dark- beautiful in the world.” When intellec- ness. One of the prisoners asks him in Arabic tuals in favor of Third World liberation taken as proof of his refractory nativism, his for a cigarette. “I know that it’s against the movements refrained from condemning the determination to protect the pied-noir com- rules,” Camus reports. “But what a ridicu- Soviet invasion of Hungary, Camus was as munity at all costs. But Camus’s stubborn- lous response that would be to a man who quick to call them out as they were to jab ness seems more attributable to his faith in is simply asking for a sign of fellow-feeling, at his Algerian omissions. If Camus was what has been called “colonial humanism.” a human gesture. I do not answer.” To pity something more than a generator of strong This was a new strategy of rule developed the prisoners, he decides, would be childish. opinions, it was because, like so many of his by France in the interwar years, when, as Camus can only knock his head against his generation, he excelled at casting his partic- historian Gary Wilder writes, “care became own inadequacy: “The only purpose of this ular struggles as the struggles of humanity a political instrument for the colonial state.” piece is to describe the singular and final fate at large. In this sense, Camus also embodied Whereas France’s longstanding mission civil- of these prisoners, who have been stricken the contradictions of the French nation- isatrice had justified economic exploitation from the rolls of humanity.” state, which stressed an exclusive, histori- on racialist grounds, colonial humanism de- Camus’s most determined effort to take up cally grounded identity for its citizens that it fended its more subtle management of indig- the cause of Algerian Arabs and Berbers came claimed was available to all its subjects. The enous populations on the basis of providing the following year. Three years after Orwell crisis in Algeria, for him, did not stem from native welfare and economic development. set out for Wigan Pier, Camus lit out for the the fact of the French presence, but rather “The most obvious crisis afflicting Algeria is highlands of Kabylia in northeast Algeria, from the form it took. an economic one,” Camus declared in 1945. where he collected information for a series As Alice Kaplan notes in her fine introduc- Strikingly, it is on this question of economic of blistering exposés of French policies. In tion to Algerian Chronicles, superbly translated justice—not the flashier debates over anti- towns like Tizi-Ouzou and Michelet, Camus by Arthur Goldhammer, Camus “believed totalitarianism and terrorism—that Camus found children fighting with dogs over scraps that equality and justice would be enough and the postwar history of Algeria still have of garbage and families envying the diet of to break the cycle of poverty and violence.” something to say to us.

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