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').
