Reappraisals (16 page)

Part Two

THE POLITICS OF INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT

CHAPTER V

Albert Camus: “The best man in France”

Albert Camus died in a car accident in France, on January 4, 1960, at the age of forty-six. Despite the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded him just three years before, his reputation was in decline. At the time of the award, critics fell over one another to bury its recipient; from the right, Jacques Laurent announcing that in awarding the prize to Camus “
le Nobel couronne une oeuvre terminée
,” while in the left-leaning
France-Observateur
it was suggested that the Swedish Academy may have believed it was picking out a young writer, but it had in fact confirmed a “premature sclerosis.” Camus’s best work, it seemed, lay far behind him; it had been many years since he had published anything of real note.

For this decline in critical esteem, Camus himself was at least partly to blame. Responding to the fashions of the day, he had engaged in philosophical speculations of a kind to which he was ill-suited and for which he was only moderately gifted—
The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942) has not worn well, for all its resonating aphorisms. In
L’Homme Révolté
(1951) Camus offered some important observations about the dangers of lyrical revolutionary illusions; but Raymond Aron said much the same thing to vastly more devastating effect in
L’Opium des intellectuels
, while Camus’s naive, almost autodidactic philosophical speculations exposed him to a cruel and painful riposte from Sartre that severely damaged his credibility with the
bien-pensant
intellectual Left and permanently undermined his public self-confidence.

If his literary reputation, as the author of
L’Étranger
and
La Peste
, was thus unfairly diminished in contemporary opinion by Camus’s unsuccessful forays into philosophical debate, it was his role as France’s leading public intellectual, the moral voice of his era, that weighed most heavily upon him in his last decade. His editorials in the postwar paper
Combat
had given him, in Aron’s words, a singular prestige;
¹
it was Camus whose maxims set the moral tone of the Resistance generation as it faced the dilemmas and disappointments of the Fourth Republic. By the late fifties this burden became intolerable, a source of constant discomfort in Camus’s writing and speeches. In earlier years he had accepted the responsibility: “One must submit,” as he put it in 1950.
²
But in the last interview he ever gave, in December 1959, his resentful frustration is audible: “I speak for no one: I have enough difficulty speaking for myself. I am no one’s guide. I don’t know, or I know only dimly, where I am headed (“
Je ne sais pas, ou je sais mal, où je vais”
).
³

Worst of all, for Camus and his audience, was the dilemma posed by the tragedy of French Algeria. Like most intellectuals of his generation, Camus was bitterly critical of French policy; he condemned the use of torture and terror in the government’s “dirty war” against the Arab nationalists, and he had been a vocal and well-informed critic of colonial discrimination against the indigenous Arab population ever since the thirties (at a time when many of the Parisian intellectuals who would later distinguish themselves in the anticolonial struggle knew little and cared less about the condition and needs of France’s overseas subjects). But Camus was born in Algeria, the son of impoverished European immigrants. He grew up in Algiers and drew on his experiences there for much of his best work. Unable to imagine an Algeria without Europeans, or to imagine indigenous Europeans of his milieu torn from their roots, he struggled to describe a middle way; in his words, “
Une grande, une éclatante réparation doit être faite . . . au peuple Arabe. Mais par la France toute entière et non avec le sang des Français d’Algérie.”
⁴
As France and Algeria alike grew ever more polarized over the issue, Camus’s search for a liberal compromise came to seem forlorn and irrelevant. He withdrew into silence.
⁵

In the years following his death Camus’s standing continued to fall. Most people living in metropolitan France were unconcerned by the fate of Algeria and its various communities, Arab or European; as for the intellectuals, their interests in the sixties and seventies were so far from those which had moved Camus as to make him an object of scorn, condescension, and, finally, neglect. He was overtaken by the radical and increasingly intolerant politicization of a younger generation, by the self-lacerating
tiers-mondisme
of the later Sartre and his followers, by the “anti-humanist” vogue among scholars, by new fashions in literature, and, most of all, by a decline in the status of the writer. Looking back on his own time in the sixties as founder/editor of the
Nouvel Observateur
, Jean Daniel would recall “quickly discovering that it was among the human sciences—history, sociology, ethnology, philosophy—that one had to look for the equivalent of the
littérateurs
who, in my youth, had served as
maîtres à pensér
.”
⁶
In the world of Barthes, Robbe-Grillet, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault, Camus was
dépassé
. Not that he was unread:
L’Étranger, La Peste,
and
Caligula
were established texts of the lycée and university curricula, as they were (and are) on the reading lists of millions of students abroad. Albert Camus had become, in his own lifetime or very shortly thereafter, a worldwide “classic.” And this, too, was held against him.

It was thus at first sight rather curious to find him once again in the headlines, his last, unfinished novel a major publishing coup upon its belated appearance in 1994, thirty years after it was written.
⁵
Over 200,000 copies of
Le premier homme
have now been sold. To be sure, this renewal of interest does not come out of the blue. In the seedy, corrupt public atmosphere of the dying Mitterrand era, a clear moral voice has been sorely lacking, as more than one French commentator has glumly observed. Moreover, the French have become grimly aware of the decayed and neglected condition of their literary heritage; Albert Camus was one of the last of an era of great French writers, a link to the world of Roger Martin du Gard, Jules Romains, Gide, Mauriac, and Malraux. One reviewer,musing on the success of
Le premier homme
, wondered whether the French weren’t “celebrating the myth of a brilliant life, transformed by accidental death into a destiny, a sign from beyond the grave, a reproach from the days when French literature counted for something....”
⁷
There is truth in this view, but to appreciate the contemporary impact of Camus we need to look a little further.

Camus’s rejection of violence, of terror in all its forms, reduced him to impotent silence at the height of the Algerian civil war and rendered him inaccessible to the generation that followed. But by the late seventies, with nothing but blood and ashes to show for their support of revolutionary repression in Europe, in China, in Cuba, and in Cambodia, French thinkers had swung around to a point of view remarkably close to that of Camus—though usually without acknowledgment: It was one thing to repeat Camus’s warning that “
il est des moyens qui ne s’excusent pas,
”
⁸
quite another to admit he had been correct all along. The so-called New Philosophers, such as André Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Lévy, did not rehabilitate Camus, but they contributed significantly to the process whereby those who once scorned him for his “moralizing” obsession with responsibility have themselves now lost all favor. They have been discredited by their casual resort to future history to justify present crimes, and by the ease with which they asserted that others must suffer for the sins of their own fathers. The lucidity and moral courage of Camus’s stand shine through today in a way that was not possible in the polarized world of 1958: “As for me, I find it disgusting to beat the other man’s breast, in the manner of our judge-penitents.”
⁹