By Albert Camus
Edited by Alice Kaplan & translated by Arthur Goldhammer
(Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 224pp £16.95)
Camus: conflicting opinions
Reviewed by Andrew Hussey, Literary Review
For a long time, the accepted wisdom on Albert Camus's
response to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) has been that he was a
coward. This was the view first promulgated by his former friend and rival
Jean-Paul Sartre, who accused Camus of having the 'morality of a boy scout' for
refusing to praise the terrorist actions of the Algerian nationalists, the
Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel
Prize in 1957, Camus famously stated: 'People are now planting bombs on the
tramway of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is
justice, then I prefer my mother.' Since then this impassioned statement has
been held up by generations of anti-colonialists and academic post-colonialist
theorists - including the likes of Edward Said - as proof of Camus's
weak-mindedness and vacillating nature and, by extension, colonial arrogance
towards Algeria, the land where he was born and grew up in the poorest kind of
pied-noir family (pied-noir, 'blackfoot', was the term used to describe French
settlers in Algeria on the grounds that they wore 'black shoes').
Yet, as Alice Kaplan points out in her scholarly and
insightful introduction to this collection of Camus's writings on Algeria,
Camus was not at all the 'sentimental egoist' that his enemies wanted him to
be. He was in fact convulsed in agony over the war that was tearing Algeria
apart. Behind the scenes, he had lobbied to spare Algerian nationalists the
death penalty and publicly advocated a federal Algeria where Arabs, Berbers,
Jews and colons (settlers) could cohabit. This was perhaps a utopian vision but
it was grounded in the reality of the Algeria in which Camus had come to
maturity - a collage of pan-Mediterranean languages, races and religions. The
fatal flaw in this imagining of Algeria is of course that, for all its friendly
overtures to the 'Muslim' or the 'Arab', it is still an overwhelmingly European
view of Algeria as a neoclassical pagan Paradise. This is the Algeria described
by Camus with loving attention to the scenery and the light and with a powerful
nostalgia for a lost (European) antiquity.
The singular importance of Algerian Chronicles is that it
brings together for the first time in English all of Camus's writings on
Algeria, ranging over his early journalism covering the famine in Kabyle in
1939 to his appeals for reason and justice in Algeria in 1958. Beautifully
translated by Arthur Goldhammer, they reveal Camus not so much as a philosopher
(or 'ponderous metaphysician' as Said called him) but as something like a
French George Orwell. Certainly, in all these essays he demonstrates a most un-Parisian
aversion for abstraction and a taste for the concrete detail that reveals the
reality of a situation.
In the weeks before the 1955 massacre at Philippeville (now
Skikda, a port in northeast Algeria), which was a veritable orgy of slaughter
on both sides and a turning point in the war, Camus published two articles in
the left-leaning journal L'Express outlining his thoughts on terrorism and
repression. He argued that since the elections in recent years had been
falsified, the Muslims lived with 'no future and in humiliation'. He did not
excuse terror as a weapon of war but he did understand that, as he put it, 'in
Algeria, as elsewhere, terrorism can be explained by a lack of hope'. Even at
this late stage, Camus wished for a compromise solution in Algeria which would
encourage settlers and Muslims to return to the relatively peaceful innocence
that Camus had known there in the 1930s. The extreme nature of the violence in
Philippeville, however, changed everything. The poet Jean Amrouche, like Camus
a child of Algeria, wrote that Camus's idealism and liberalism were finished:
'The evil is too profound ... No agreement is possible between the natives and
French of Algeria ... I no longer believe in French Algeria.'
Camus desperately tried to argue against this view. After
Philippeville, the French and Algerian communities waited for him to propose a
way out of the impasse. But Camus was now exhausted: 'My days are poisoned,' he
wrote to a friend, 'but Arabs and Frenchmen must find a way to live together.'
However, he was also depressed about the possibility of this happening:
'Algeria is not France,' he wrote again in L'Express, 'it isn't even Algeria,
it is that unknown land which a cloud of blood hides.'
Eventually Camus decided to go to Algeria. He hoped to begin
a dialogue between the warring sides, even perhaps initiate a truce. At a
series of public meetings he tried to engage his audience with the idea of
'humanising the war' - stating that the FLN should abandon terrorism against
civilians. He had, however, severely underestimated the climate of hate. He was
denounced by the FLN for referring to 'Arabs' and not 'Algerians'. By the end
of his stay he was receiving death threats and was a target for kidnapping. FLN
supporters tried to infiltrate his remaining meetings. At his final talk, in a
hall near the Place du Gouvernement, thousands of French Algerians gathered
outside the lecture theatre to chant 'Death to Camus!' His audience was visibly
moved by his plea that all men should be free 'not to employ or submit to
terror'. Political leaders on all sides admired Camus's argument for a truce
but did not see how it could work.
Camus returned to Paris in despair, describing the situation
in Algeria as a 'Munich of the Left-Wing', meaning that the French Left was
reaching compromises with a political force - the FLN - which had no stake in
the universal values of the left. The French Left was indeed generally
sympathetic to the Algerian cause and many intellectuals developed the position
that the only proper response was to participate actively in the struggle. Most
notably, the philosophy teacher Francis Jeanson, an intimate of Sartre,
organised a support network for the FLN in Paris, which led to his arrest and
trial in 1960. A campaign orchestrated by Jean-Paul Sartre produced the famous
'Manifesto of the 121', a petition against the Algerian War signed by prominent
intellectuals of the day. The wider argument ran that the French in Algeria
were now acting like the Nazis had done twenty years earlier in France. As
allegations of torture and murder perpetrated by the French army became widely
known and corroborated it was hard even for moderates to justify the war in
Algeria.
Camus was, however, almost alone among his contemporaries in
understanding that the revolution which the FLN craved was not on the model of
the Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution but something else
altogether: a return to the 'Islamic Empire', a religious totality that Camus
could no more embrace than communism or Nazism. He told his old teacher Jean
Grenier that the Muslims 'are making insane demands for an independent Algerian
government, where the French will be considered as foreigners unless they want
to convert to Islam. War is inevitable.'
For his part, Camus explicitly condemned torture, not only
as an ineffective weapon, creating in its wake more rebels as a response, but
also as a moral degradation of the torturer and the power he represents. There
is no way of turning back or recovering from this position. 'It is better to
suffer certain injustices than to commit them,' he wrote. 'Such fine deeds
would lead to the demoralization of France and the loss of Algeria.' Camus's
nuanced observation soon became a prophecy.
s Alice Kaplan again insightfully points out, after years
of treating him with neglect and derision, many Algerian intellectuals are now
beginning to return to Camus. The trigger for this was the 'black decade' of
the 1990s, when the Algerian government fought a shadowy civil war against
Islamist insurgents. Tens of thousands of Algerians lost their lives in this
bloody conflict. On my last visit to Algiers I also spoke with middle-class
Algerian intellectuals who had been targeted by Islamists precisely for their
'anti-Islamic', pro-European ways. At last, rather than despising Albert Camus
as a coward, there is a new generation of readers in Algeria who are beginning
to understand how he felt: torn between opposing forms of terror, neither of
which promised justice or redemption. Algerian Chronicles is a beautiful and
significant illustration of the complexities of that dilemma.
