ALBERT CAMUS Algerian Chronicles EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALICE KAPLAN TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER Algerian Chronicles Albertx Camus Algerian Chronicles v translated by Arthur Goldhammer with an introduction by Alice Kaplan The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2013 This book was originally published as Chroniques algériennes, 1939– 1958, by Editions Gallimard, copyright © 1958 and 2002 by Editions Gallimard, Paris Chapter 8 (“Crisis in Algeria”) was originally published, in slightly different form, in Albert Camus, Camus at Combat, copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Introduction and translation copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America library of congress cataloging-in- publication data Camus, Albert, 1913– 1960. [Chroniques algériennes, 1939– 1958. En glish] Algerian chronicles / Albert Camus ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer ; with an introduction by Alice Kaplan. p. cm. Originally published in French: Paris : Gallimard, 1958. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 07258- 9 (alk. paper) 1. Algeria— Politics and government— 20th century. 2. Algeria— Social conditions— 20th century. 3. Algeria— History—Revolution, 1954– 1962. I. Title. DT295.C293 2013 965.04—dc23 2012036100 Contents Translator’s Note ix New Perspectives on Camus’s Algerian Chronicles by Alice Kaplan 1 Algerian Chronicles Preface 23 The Misery of Kabylia 37 1 Destitution 41 2 Destitution (continued) 47 3 Wages 53 4 Education 59 5 The Po liti cal Future 65 6 The Economic and Social Future 73 7 Conclusion 81 contents Crisis in Algeria 85 8 Crisis in Algeria 89 9 Famine in Algeria 93 10 Ships and Justice 97 11 The Po liti cal Malaise 101 12 The Party of the Manifesto 107 13 Conclusion 111 14 Letter to an Algerian Militant 113 Algeria Torn 117 15 The Missing 121 16 The Roundtable 123 17 A Clear Conscience 125 18 The True Surrender 129 19 The Adversary’s Reasons 133 20 November 1 137 21 A Truce for Civilians 141 22 The Party of Truce 145 23 Call for a Civilian Truce in Algeria 149 The Maisonseul Affair 161 24 Letter to Le Monde 165 25 Govern! 169 vi contents Algeria 1958 173 26 Algeria 1958 175 27 The New Algeria 181 Appendix 185 Indigenous Culture: The New Mediterranean Culture 187 Men Stricken from the Rolls of Humanity 197 Letter from Camus to Le Monde 203 Draft of a Letter to Encounter 205 Two Letters to René Coty 209 The Nobel Prize Press Conference Incident 213 Index 219 vii Translator’s Note Algerian Chronicles is a moving record of Albert Camus’s distress at his inability to alleviate the series of tragedies that befell his homeland, Algeria, over a period of 20 years, from 1939 to 1958. Ca- mus collected these reactions to current events in a volume origi- nally entitled Actuelles III. It would no doubt have saddened him to learn that the sources of his heartache— the diffi culty of reconcil- ing Eu ro pe an and non- European cultures, the senseless recourse to violence, the fatal spiral of repression and terror— are once again matters “of actuality,” lending prescience to his original title. After listening to Camus lecture, the writer Julien Green de- scribed him in terms that one might apply to a secular saint: “There is in this man a probity so obvious that it inspires almost immediate respect in me. To put it plainly, he is not like the oth- ers.” This quality of authenticity is unmistakable throughout the pieces collected here. Camus wrote as a moralist, in the noblest sense of the term. In fact, he was a moralist in two different senses. In the French sense, he was a worthy heir to La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, moralistes who exposed the hidden selfi shness in osten- sibly selfl ess action, the hypocrisy in what society, for reasons of its own, hypocritically honors as virtue. But he was also a moralist in the American sense, a writer of “jeremiads,” which, as Sacvan Ber- covitch revealed, are best understood as appeals to the fatherland algerian chronicles to return to the high ideals that it has set for itself and from which it has strayed. Here, it is primarily this second type of moralism that is on display. Camus addresses France, his second home, which he believed had not, in its policies toward Algeria, re- mained true to the founding ideals of its republican tradition— liberty, equality, and fraternity—which for Camus were the po- liti cal virtues par excellence. In this respect, Camus was quintessentially French, but he saw himself not only as a Frenchman but also as a man of the Mediter- ranean, a spiritual heir of Saint Francis who, as Camus put it in an early manifesto on “Mediterranean culture” (included in the supplementary material to this volume), “turned Christianity from a religion of inner torment into a hymn to nature and naïve joy.” But “nature and naïve joy” could not survive in the climate of “soulless violence” that descended on Algeria, the land of Camus’s birth and the very root of his being. The pieces in this volume trace the increasing effect of this violence, not only on Camus’s allegiances but on the language in which he expressed his and his homeland’s suffering. Abstraction was not Camus’s natural element. In his early re- portage, he indulges in a minimum of economic theorizing to set the stage for his narratives, but the force of his writing lies in his ability to make the reader feel what it is like to eat thistle, to de- pend on capricious handouts, or to die of exhaustion in the snow on the way home from a food distribution center. Although he may on occasion use an abstract and value- laden term like “justice,” what moves him is plain fellow-feeling for other suffering human beings. With almost Franciscan faith he hopes that the example of his own compassion will suffi ce to elicit the compassion of others. Attentive to Camus’s text, the translator senses not only his despair of the situation in Algeria but also his exasperation. The x translator’s note po litical dilemmas of the time were cruel, and no intellectuel engagé escaped from them unscathed. History chose a course different from the one Camus envisioned, but history’s choice has not been so incontrovertibly satisfactory as to rob Camus’s counterfactual alternative of its retrospective grandeur. What we have here is a precious document of a soul’s torment lived in real rather than eter- nal time. I can only hope that my translation has done it justice. And it is not easy to do justice to Camus’s style in English. He is a writer who has fully mastered all the resources of concision, subtlety, and grace that French provides. He can maintain perfect equipoise through a series of long sentences and then punctuate his point with a short phrase intensifi ed by a slightly unusual syn- tax or surprising word choice. To mimic the French structure slavishly is to betray the spirit of the text, which has to be re- thought with the different stylistic resources of En glish in mind. When I think of Camus’s prose, I think of adjectives such as “pure,” “restrained,” and “disciplined.” He never strains for effect, never descends into bathos, and always modulates his passion with classical precision. When this book originally went to press, Camus was feeling desperate about Algeria’s future, yet he concluded that it was still worth publishing the record of his own engagement, because of the facts it contained. “The facts have not changed,” he wrote, “and someday these will have to be recognized if we are to achieve the only acceptable future: a future in which France, wholeheartedly embracing its tradition of liberty, does justice to all the commu- nities of Algeria without discrimination in favor of one or an- other. Today as in the past, my only ambition in publishing this in de pen dent account is to contribute as best I can to defi ning that future.” For us, half a century later, the facts still have not changed, and the future to which Camus hoped to contribute has expanded xi algerian chronicles to include not just France but the entire world. Like Camus, we cannot change the obdurate facts of the past, but we can hope to learn from his unfl inchingly honest account how better to deal with them in charting our own course. —Arthur Goldhammer xii Algerian Chronicles New Perspectives on Camus’s Algerian vChronicles alice kaplan Albert Camus published his Algerian Chronicles on June 16, 1958, just as France was reeling from her greatest po liti cal upheaval since the end of the Second World War. The Fourth Republic had fallen, and when a coup d’état by rebellious French generals in Algeria seemed to be in the offi ng, General de Gaulle was called back to power to save the Republic. In the throes of a national crisis brought on wholly by the Algerian War, Camus gathered his writing on Algeria from 1939, when he was a po liti- cal activist and an all- purpose reporter for Alger républicain, through the 1950s. He added an introduction and a concluding essay called “Algeria 1958.” Yet his book was met, paradoxically, with widespread critical silence. The press file in the archives I am grateful to P. Guillaume Michel at the Glycines: Centre d’Etudes Diocésain for his generous introduction to intellectual life in Algiers in the summer of 2012, and to the Al- gerian scholars who responded to my lecture on the Chroniques algériennes and opened my eyes to new readings of Camus in Algeria today.