When “Justice” Makes You Sick
To kill or not to kill? For Albert Camus, the question of justice ultimately rests on this basic question of whether, outside actual battles fought between soldiers during war, taking the life of another human being can ever be justified. Convinced by both his deepest feelings and confirmed by his research that under no circumstances could murder be defended, he not only opposed capital punishment in the restricted, juridical sense of the term but also in a broader sense, which included political assassinations, terrorist acts, and the bombings of civilian targets, whatever the justifications given for them. Camus’ opposition to allegedly “legal” or “justifiable” murder in general could in fact be considered the founding principle of his perspective on politics in general—and thus the basis for his condemnation of the injustices and crimes against civilians committed by both sides during the Algerian War. It is above all a principle that indicates the limits that he repeatedly argued judicial systems, nations at war, and revolutionary political movements needed to respect, no matter how formally democratic and fair the legal system, how just the war being fought, or how legitimate the cause being pursued. Camus strongly believed that murder could never be justified—in the name of either national security, independence, or justice. Murder is always a crime, whether allowed by law and performed under the authority of the State, authorized by military and civil authorities during war, or a part of the resistance to political oppression and the struggle for independence.
The polemical nature of Camus’ opposition to political murder in The Rebel has led critics to treat it primarily as a component of his critique of totalitarianism and as an effect of the cold war on his thinking, a sign of his increasingly militant anticommunism. In fact, his rejection of capital punishment and political assassination predates World War II and is thus not just an important part of his attack on Nazism and Stalinist Russia in particular and revolution in general. It also informs his political perspective on how most effectively to resist colonial oppression in Algeria and radically change colonial society, even before the Algerian War began. Similar to the allegory of the resistance narrated in The Plague, his opposition to capital punishment has multiple sources, implications, and referents. This is because Camus’ stance is not rooted in a political principle as such; rather, it is an expression of what could be called a “moral feeling,” an innate sense of the limits of what human beings individually or collectively have the right to do to other human beings, whatever the legitimacy of the cause being pursued might be—or perhaps especially when a cause is in fact legitimate.
Near the end of The Stranger, after Meursault has been sentenced to death and while awaiting execution, he remembers a story that his mother told him about his father.1 A slightly different version of the story is recounted at the beginning of Camus’ essay against capital punishment, “Reflections on the Guillotine.” The story is related a third time in his posthumously published autobiographical novel, The First Man. In the two novels and the political essay, the story describes the strong reaction of a father to what Camus calls “the most premeditated of murders.”2 But only in “Reflections on the Guillotine” is the story narrated in Camus’ own voice and without the mediation of a fictional character. The mere fact that the story is recounted three times in his writings, and in both his first and last published novels, is sufficient reason to take it seriously. Its political implications in the context of the Algerian War are another.
Camus acknowledges in his essay that the story narrates his own father’s reaction to an especially brutal and repulsive crime that had taken place shortly before his father left Algeria to fight and die in France at the beginning of World War I. An entire family of farmers, including young children, had been slaughtered by a deranged farm worker, who was immediately captured, convicted, and sentenced to be guillotined. Camus’ father, whom he describes in his essay as a “simple, straightforward man,” “a decent man [un honnête homme],” was so horrified and outraged by the crime that he told Camus’ mother that decapitation was too good for “such a monster” (“Reflections on the Guillotine,” 175–176 [Essais, 1021]). Camus’ father felt so strongly that he decided to witness an execution himself “for the first time in his life.”
Camus describes his father’s reaction to what he witnessed in the following terms:
What he saw that morning he never told anyone. My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality hidden underneath the noble phrases with which it was masked. Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.
(175 [1021])
Camus’ father’s silence and uncontrollable physical reaction to the spectacle of the execution speak louder than any words could. They are interpreted by Camus to be the irrefutable sign that this “new murder” or “ultimate justice… is no less repulsive than the crime” (176, trans. mod. [1022]). He argues that justice cannot be considered just if, in punishing a monstrous criminal for a heinous crime, it commits in turn an equally repulsive criminal act.
With the execution of the monstrous murderer, the first murder is supplemented by a second, this one committed by the State under the guise of justice and in the name of the people. Which is to say in the name of all French citizens and thus in his own father’s name as well. His father’s uncontrollable physical reaction to the execution is all the more significant for Camus because his father had been convinced that capital punishment was entirely justified, because of the viciousness of the crime and the innocence of the victims. Had he not been convinced, he would not have wanted to witness the execution in the first place. Justice for the innocent victims of the crime seemed to demand that the monster who had slaughtered an entire family pay for his crimes with his own head. But against his own powerful convictions, after watching the execution, his father felt something very different: disgust.
Supplementing his father’s silence and interpreting his reaction, Camus states that what disturbed his father was not so much the horror of the actual beheading but rather the spectacle of the criminal’s anguish immediately before he was decapitated. His anguish was so strong that it made his father forget the victims of the atrocious crime and transformed the perpetrator of the crime into another pathetic victim—a victim of justice itself. Witnessing the execution thus had the opposite effect from what his father had expected: instead of feeling the satisfaction that would have come from a sense that the victims had received just retribution and that the rule of law had been reaffirmed by the execution, he could not help identifying with the anguish of the murderer before his death and be affected by it. Rather than feeling satisfaction, he was repulsed by what he saw and vomited.
For Camus, his father’s revulsion is in itself the sign that justice in such instances does not serve its principal function, which is “to bring more peace and order into the community,” and that the new murder, “far from making amends for the harm done to the social body, adds a new blot to the first one” (176 [1021]). Camus refers to capital punishment as “a cancer” on the social body, but it is a cancer that society attempts to justify as “a necessity.” He calls it rather an “obscenity” (177 [1022]). It is no wonder, then, that a decent man like his father would be rendered speechless, forget the victims of the original crime, and vomit after he had witnessed “the new murder” the state had committed allegedly in his name and in the name of justice.
A justice that horrifies and disgusts a simple, decent man, a justice that kills in the name of the people, a justice that makes good people forget the injustices and crimes of the past by compounding and perpetuating them is itself not merely unjust and criminal. It is also abject. As it did in the case of the father whom Camus never knew except through the few stories told to him by his mother, but especially through this particular story, Camus felt that it should make us all sick.
In his essay, Camus argues that capital punishment should be vomited out of the body politic, no matter what reasons are given to defend it or under what conditions it is carried out. And this is true not just when executions are decided by dictators, military officers, callous political leaders, or colonial authorities as the means to maintain control, reestablish order, or eliminate opposition, dissent, or revolt. It is equally the case when capital punishment is decided in democratic societies in legally constituted courts of law and used to punish monstrous criminals, or when individuals or groups are targeted by revolutionary groups in order to advance the cause of social justice and national independence. For it makes no difference ultimately whether the death penalty is decided during times of war or peace, or whether the verdict is voted on by a jury in a court of law and carried out according to the rules of a democratic legal system or decided by a revolutionary movement or national liberation front and used as a weapon against foreign conquerors, colonialist oppressors, or innocent bystanders. In all cases, the act itself is revolting; it should always make us as sick as it made Camus’ father. In any case, it can never be justified. It is never just.
Camus firmly believed that any system of justice that punishes criminals by taking their life is unjust; any state or revolutionary party or movement that uses terrorism as the means to achieve its ends in fact perverts those ends, no matter how noble those ends might be. And any intellectual or politician who attempts to legitimize official or unofficial murders, no matter the social or political goals claimed to be served by them, is attempting to hide an “obscenity under a verbal cloak” (177 [1022]). Convinced that no compromise could or should ever be made when it comes to the basic question of life or death, Camus, unlike his father, did not remain silent about this obscenity. Rather he decided to “talk about it crudely” (177 [1022]), and he did so, not just once but three times, in works written at very different moments of his life and in vastly different political environments.3
Except for a brief moment of revolutionary fervor immediately after the liberation of Paris in World War II, when he supported the use of capital punishment in a limited number of cases, Camus consistently argued that there is no acceptable justification for capital punishment—or any other form of calculated murder. His disgust over both the executions themselves and the justifications for them is at the core of all his post–World War II political essays and constitutes the basis for his critique of both communism and imperialist forms of democracy, on the one hand, and his denunciation of terrorism, torture, and summary executions during the Algerian War, on the other. It could be argued that it was primarily his disgust at and refusal to accept all justifications for the murder of civilians during the Algerian War that made it impossible for him to support either side, even the side that had justice on its side.
Premeditated Murder
“I decided to have nothing to do with anything, which directly or indirectly, for good or bad reasons, causes or justifies murder.”
—Tarrou, in The Plague
In “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Camus argues that there is no rational justification for capital punishment, since it is a form of “the law of retaliation” and rooted in “an emotion, and a particularly violent one, and not in a principle. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law…. Execution is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder… the most premeditated of murders” (197–199 [1038–1039]). The only way a state, political party, elected official, judge, or even a legally constituted jury could claim the right to execute criminals or enemies of the state in the name of justice, he further argues, would not simply be when the criminal of a capital crime was “absolutely guilty” of a heinous crime. More important, the decision to execute could be considered legitimate only if society and its political and legal institutions functioned perfectly and were in fact “absolutely innocent.” But since no individual, class, group, government, political movement, or revolutionary elite, even when it represents and acts in the name of the victims of injustice, can ever legitimately claim to be “absolutely innocent,” it follows that no one has the right to murder—no matter what the law allows. On the contrary, “the death penalty, which really neither provides an example nor assures distributive justice, simply usurps an exorbitant privilege by claiming to punish an always relative culpability by a definitive and irreparable punishment” (210 [1047]). If, as Camus claims, “every society has the criminals it deserves” (206 [1044]), a society that murders to punish murderers, a revolutionary movement that uses terror, executions, and assassinations as the means to achieve justice or independence, or even a nation that murders allegedly in order to punish past murders or prevent future ones is not just responsible for the premeditated murders it commits. It is also defined by them, since he argues that murder inevitably leads to more murder, terror to more terror—never the opposite.
Camus was not a pacifist, but in his post–World War II writings he consistently condemns premeditated murder and denounces what he calls the “era of murder” in which “state crimes have been far more numerous than individual crimes…. The number of individuals killed directly by the State has assumed astronomical proportions” (227 [1059]). He claims that faith in absolute principles or ideals always leads not just revolutionary movements, totalitarian states, and imperial or colonial powers but also democratic states to kill innocent civilians with impunity and then to justify the deaths as necessary means to allegedly noble ends. Unquestioned faith, not necessarily or exclusively in spiritual absolutes but in historical or material ideals that have been divinized, thus ends up also justifying or even being responsible for murder:
One kills for a nation or class that has been granted divine status. One kills for a future society that has likewise been given divine status. Whoever thinks he has omniscience imagines he has omnipotence. Temporal idols demanding an absolute faith tirelessly decree absolute punishments. And religions devoid of transcendence kill great numbers of condemned men devoid of hope.
(228 [1060])
For a political and religious agnostic such as Camus, absolute faith in the gods of religion, history, the internationalist revolution, or the nation-state has repeatedly proven to be one of the greatest threats to human life. Camus simply refused to believe in any spiritual or political ideal that had such lethal effects. The principle that human life comes before anything else, even before justice, means that murder is never just and can never be justified.4
Partial Amnesia
For a brief period immediately after the liberation of France at the end of World War II, however, Camus defended the execution of a limited number of French collaborators and traitors. His experience in the French Resistance and the extent of Nazi atrocities and Vichy crimes caused him to accept briefly what in every other context he rejected. It is as if the memory of his father’s story, first published in fictional form in The Stranger in 1942, had been forgotten, or more likely displaced or buried under more gripping memories of horrible crimes and injustices that he could not ignore. His father’s story might even have seemed at that time trivial or irrelevant, given the more powerful memories of Resistance comrades who had been arrested, tortured, deported, or executed in the struggle to liberate France. It is in fact the memory of the suffering of these victims that he argues in numerous editorials should take precedence over all other concerns—even over the repugnance or disgust that he claims he and others would feel when these monstrous war criminals were actually executed. For a brief time, then, all human life did not come for him before justice, but rather the memory of the victims of unforgivable injustices did. As was the case for his father before he witnessed the execution, he believed briefly that the “monsters” who had committed such crimes should pay for them with their own life.
Camus’ acceptance of the death penalty for those responsible for the worst crimes committed during the war also had a specific political justification, for as his editorials for the Resistance newspaper Combat indicate, Camus, like many others on the Left, believed that, given the success of the Resistance, France was on the verge of a socialist revolution. But to carry out such a revolution and for France to remake itself and become a true social democracy, which is what Camus and his colleagues at Combat enthusiastically advocated, France first had to punish the traitors and criminals responsible for the denunciation, torture, deportation, and murder of innocent civilians and Resistance comrades. This group of criminals included officials of Vichy France, members of the French Milice, and opportunistic or ideologically committed collaborators who encouraged and defended the arrest, torture, deportation, or execution of Nazi and Vichy opponents and Jews.5 It is clear from his earliest articles on the purge trials, for example, that Camus felt that too many people had been tortured and murdered to spare those responsible for these crimes. For a brief time he thus argued that capital punishment was justified and, unlike the execution of the “monster” witnessed by his father, that executions could occur without transforming horrible criminals into victims. In numerous editorials for Combat, he presents capital punishment not as the perversion of justice his other writings depicted it as being, but rather as the purest expression of justice—the form of justice necessary to honor the memory of the victims of Nazism and the Vichy State.
An unsigned editorial of this type that appeared in Combat during the period in which it was still being published clandestinely refers to the members of the French Milice as “rotten branches [that] cannot be left attached to the tree [but] have to be lopped off, reduced to sawdust, and scattered on the ground…. Courts-martial would be pointless, moreover. The Milice is its own tribunal. It has judged itself and sentenced itself to death. Those sentences will be carried out.”6 In such extreme cases, justice would thus be unproblematic and did not even need explicit laws, courts, judges, or juries to be implemented. This is because “the Milice has placed itself outside the law. It must be made quite clear that each militiaman, in signing his enlistment papers, is ratifying his own death sentence” (4 [128]). Justice for those so egregiously outside the law—not the law of the Vichy State, of course, but the higher law of justice itself—is thus argued to transcend any specific legal code. The perpetrators of the crimes know that their own acts judge them and by their crimes they have in fact already sentenced themselves to death.
Camus justifies his support of capital punishment for French collaborators found guilty of crimes of torture or murder not by legal or political arguments, but rather through emotional arguments and by describing in minute detail the atrocious nature of their crimes. It is as if the descriptions of the crimes themselves dictated the appropriate punishment. For example, in one of the earliest editorials he published in Combat after the liberation of Paris, Camus describes the discovery in Vincennes of the bodies of thirty-four Frenchmen who had been grotesquely tortured and mutilated: “We learn of comrades who had their guts ripped out, their limbs torn off, and their faces kicked in. And the men who did these things were men polite enough to give up their seats on the subway…. Who in such circumstances would dare to speak of pardon?… It is not hatred that will speak out tomorrow but justice itself, justice based on memory” (“The Age of Contempt,” Combat [August 30, 1944], 20–21 [157–158]). Such “unbearable images” (20 [157]) rule out the possibility of restraint, mitigation, or pardon of any sort; they demand rather immediate, absolute justice, a justice dictated by the images of the atrocious crimes themselves and the memory of their victims.
In an untitled article written on the establishment of a High Court of Justice to judge Maréchal Pétain, Pierre Laval, and other prominent members of the Vichy government, Camus also expresses his support for the most extreme form of punishment for the crime of treason they committed: “If there are some cases in which our duty is not clear or justice is difficult to define, in this case we take our stand without hesitation. The voices of the tortured and humiliated join with ours in calling for justice of the most pitiless and decisive kind.”7 In numerous signed editorials, Camus presents the choice faced by the High Court and in fact by all French to be the choice between being on the side of victims or on the side of perverse torturers and executioners. And when the alternative is presented in this stark way, there is clearly no choice at all, no real judgment to make of guilt or innocence, since justice is obviously on the side of the victims and out of respect for them needs to be as harsh and pitiless as the crimes themselves.8
But even during this period, when Camus repeatedly argues that “the purge is necessary,” he also urges that the principle of proportion be respected: “The point is not to purge a lot but to purge well. But what does it mean to purge well? It means to respect the general principle of justice without failing to make allowances in individual cases” (Combat [October 18, 1944], 77 [264–265]). If the principle of justice in such cases has to be “proportion,” it would seem to be an extremely difficult if not impossible task, even under ideal conditions and even for the fairest, best-intentioned judges, prosecutors, and juries, to find a just proportion between, on the one hand, the memory of the suffering of the victims that would seem to demand the quickest and harshest form of punishment for those responsible and, on the other, the general repulsion that is felt by decent people when even a monstrous criminal is executed.
Camus leaves no doubt, however, that in such ideal circumstances at least he feels the decision to execute those guilty of the worst crimes would be just:
We know full well that on the day the first death sentence is carried out in Paris, we will feel repugnance. At that moment we will need to remember the countless other death sentences imposed on men who were pure and will have to recall so many cherished faces now buried in the ground and so many hands we once loved to shake. When we are tempted to prefer the generous sacrifices of war to the dark duties of justice, we will need to remember the dead and the unbearable image of those whom torture turned into traitors. As hard as that will be, we will know then that pardons cannot be granted.
(Combat [October 21, 1944], 82 [275]).
For Camus, the memory of the victims must ultimately triumph over and negate the repugnance that would be felt when executions occurred. Memory alone in such instances must determine what is just; repugnance, on the other hand, must be overcome or simply forgotten—assuming, of course, an uncontrollable reaction such as his father’s could ever be overcome, ignored, or forgotten.
Thus Camus, even though he admits he has “no taste for murder” and that for him “the human person embodies all that we respect in the world,” supported the death penalty for particularly atrocious war crimes. But only if justice is “prompt,” if “all prosecution for crimes of collaboration end at some fixed date. We want the most obvious crimes to be punished immediately, and then, since nothing can be done without mediocrity, we want the errors that so many Frenchmen have indeed committed consigned to carefully considered oblivion” (Combat [October 25, 1944], 89–90 [288–289]). It soon became clear to Camus that in fact the opposite was in fact occurring: justice was most often rapid and severe for lesser crimes and painfully slow and indulgent for the greater crimes committed by Vichy officials and important industrialists. In Camus’ own terms, justice was anything but proportional, which meant it could not be considered just. In reality, it very quickly began to disgust him.
Even if he continued to evoke the memories of the victims of Nazi and Vichy crimes, Camus’ partial amnesia concerning his father’s story—partial because he also continued to evoke his personal dislike of murder and the repugnance that he claimed all would feel when collaborationist criminals were executed—did not last very long. By the summer of 1945, Camus had changed his position on the necessity for the purge after he had been repeatedly confronted with its grotesque reality: “There can no longer be any doubt that the postwar purge has not only failed in France but is now completely discredited. The word ‘purge’ itself was already rather distressing. The actual thing became odious…. The failure is complete” (Combat [August 30, 1945], 249–250 [594]). In an earlier editorial, Camus had already attacked the trials for producing only “absurd sentences and preposterous instances of leniency. In between, prisoners are snatched from their prisons and shot because they were pardoned…. [Judges] will go on handing out death sentences to journalists who don’t deserve as much. They will go on half-acquitting recruiters with silver tongues” (Combat [January 5, 1945], 163–165 [430–432]). The moment for a higher, moral form of justice rooted in the need to respect the memory of the “pure victims” of Nazism and the Vichy State, a “pure justice” demanded by their silenced voices and carried out in their name, had thus passed very quickly. But the obligation to honor the memory of the victims remained, even if in reality it proved to be a difficult, if not impossible, obligation to meet. Nothing in fact could make up for the suffering and loss of life of the victims—and, adding to the injustice, by making victims of criminals, their memory was obscured rather than honored.
In one of his many exchanges with François Mauriac, the conservative Catholic writer and fellow résistant, Camus summarizes his differences with Mauriac in the following way:
Whenever I used the word justice in connection with the purge, M. Mauriac spoke of charity…. Some of us reject both the cries of enmity that reach our ears from one side and the tender solicitations that come to us from the other. Between these two extremes, we are searching for the just voice that will give us truth without shame…. This is what allows me to say that charity has no business here.
(Combat, “Justice and Charity” [January 11, 1945], 168 [439])
The “just voice” Camus claims he and others at Combat were searching for, however, was certainly not to be found in the purge trials, which revealed rather only partial or contradictory “truths” about the responsibility of both those who were executed and those who were not. The purge trials succeeded only in becoming increasingly “odious.” And if “charity had no business” in them, justice was largely absent from them as well.
Camus is thus forced to admit “that it is probably too late now for justice to be done” and that the purge trials in general are examples only of “sick justice [justice infirme]” (Combat [January 5, 1945], 165 [432]). He will soon conclude that justice is always infirm when murders are committed in its name, even to punish murderers, and it is precisely in reference to his opposition to such “infirm justice” that Camus explains why he signed petitions to save the lives of two of the most notorious fascist literary collaborators, Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet (the former was nonetheless executed immediately after his trial in February 1945; the latter’s death sentence was commuted, and he was eventually released from prison in the amnesty of 1950). Camus’ reason for signing both petitions was the same: he felt nothing but disdain for both Brasillach and Rebatet and considered their writings and actions to be criminal. But he also admits that he held the death penalty in greater horror than he did these two notorious literary anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators.9
The purge trials could be said to represent a turning point in Camus’ relation to politics in that they vividly recalled his father’s disgust with State murder. During the Algerian War, he would be harshly criticized for not supporting the FLN in spite of its use of terrorism against innocent civilians. He was attacked especially brutally in the press after he declared in Sweden a day after receiving the Nobel Prize that if he was forced to choose between justice and defending the life of his mother, he would choose first to defend his mother. Even though the statement was taken by many of his opponents as a sign of his colonialist sympathies and a defense of France’s war strategy and right to continue to colonize Algeria, in fact it expresses rather his conviction that priority should always be given to protecting human life, to the life of his own mother, of course, but the life of all other Algerian civilians as well. Individual lives had to come before ideals, whatever the legitimacy of those ideals might be. There would not and could not be justice if the opposite were true, since no end could ever justify terrorist means. No ideal could legitimate murder, not even freedom and certainly not justice, for, as he learned in the purge trials, justice can never be total or “pure” without becoming unjust.10
For Camus, the failure of justice in the purge trials was thus both a sign and a cause of the impending failure of France to “remake itself” as a social democracy after the war. As he put it, “a country that fails to purge itself is preparing to fail to remake itself. The face that a nation wears is that of its system of justice” (Combat [January 5, 1945], 165 [433]). And the face of justice the French nation wore immediately after the Liberation was not just that of “confusion,” but also the opposite of the impossible ideal of pure justice Camus evokes in his articles. It was, on the contrary, much closer to what his father had experienced when he witnessed the execution of a monstrous murderer before World War I: it was the face of infirm justice that would make any decent person sick. And during the Algerian War, given the systematic use of torture and summary executions to combat terrorism and reestablish order, the face of justice worn by the French nation would only become increasingly impure, infirm, and even grotesquely monstrous.
Thou Shall Not Kill
Absurdist reasoning admits that human life is the only necessary good…. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must still be alive.
—Albert Camus, The Rebel
“We live in terror,” wrote Camus in “The Century of Fear,” the first of the series of articles he published in Combat from November 19 through November 30, 1946, under the general title “Neither Victims nor Executioners” (Combat, “The Century of Fear” [November 19, 1946], 255–276 [604–643]). When he made this claim in 1946, World War II of course had already ended and Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had been defeated. Soldiers were no longer dying in battlefields throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, and civilians were no longer living in fear for their lives in the cities that each side had targeted at different moments of the war. Camus’ Resistance comrades and other political opponents of Nazi Germany and Vichy France were no longer being arrested, tortured, summarily executed, or deported to concentration camps to live and die under atrocious, inhuman conditions. Jews were no longer being deported to death camps and exterminated by the millions. Nazi oppression, torture, deportation, and mass murder were still painful memories of the recent past, but they were no longer part of daily experience. The terror of which Camus speaks in these editorials thus no longer had Nazi Germany as its unique cause.
Nevertheless, Camus insists in these articles that a reign of terror was continuing after the war because even if “fear can’t be considered a science, there is no question that it is a method [une technique]” (257 [609]). And moreover, terror works by silencing opposition, preventing dialogue between opposing sides, and forcing people to choose one side or the other in an ideological battle that each side of the conflict presents as being between freedom and enslavement, justice and injustice, Good and Evil. The method in the madness of terror is to create a world divided between “us” and “them,” the just and the unjust, friends and foes, true believers and heretics or renegades, a world in which each side is convinced it has justice and truth (God) on its side.
The primary source of postwar terror is ideology, or rather all of the “deadly ideologies” continuing to struggle for hegemony after the defeat of fascism. Ideologies are “deadly” for Camus first of all because he claims they have already been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of victims who have in one way or another been considered enemies of or at least obstacles to the realization of political goals or ideals. And second, they are “deadly” because ideologies deaden the sensitivity and receptiveness of those committed to them and thus have the effect of transforming living human beings into what he calls robotic “abstractions.” “There is no way,” Camus argues,
of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology. The long dialogue among human beings has now come to an end…. A conspiracy of silence has arisen and continues to spread, a conspiracy accepted by those who quake in fear… and encouraged by those who find it in their interest to do so…. For all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.
(258–259 [610–611])
It ultimately makes no difference which side of the ideological battle one is on, since the nature of the battleground itself is the problem, so serious a problem that Camus claims that the destruction of the conditions for dialogue among opposing positions through terror constitutes a threat to the future of the human community as a whole. And it is the absence of dialogue and the treatment of all opposition and dissent as treasonous and of all who disagree as mortal enemies that he claims lays the groundwork for the legitimization of murder and is thus the deadly product of a general climate of terror.
Camus’ anti-ideological stance is rooted not in the belief that there exists an alternate form of politics that would be in itself completely pure or nonideological, as is most often the case with those who are militantly “against ideology.” It is rather based on the conviction that because life has precedence over politics, politics cannot be allowed to determine life. This means that the first and most fundamental obligation of political activists is not to defend their own position or tactics but rather to defend life, or, as Camus puts it, “to save bodies,” to keep living human beings from becoming corpses, sacrificed to one ideological ideal (or plague) or another. The chief problem for him after the war is thus how to continue to be involved in the struggle against injustice and oppression without committing, encouraging, or further legitimizing murder:
The world that people like me are after is not a world in which people don’t kill one another (we’re not that crazy!) but a world in which murder is not legitimized. We are therefore living in utopia and contradiction, to be sure, since the world we live in is one in which murder is legitimized, and we ought to change it if we don’t like it. But it seems that it can’t be changed without running the risk of committing murder. Murder thus leads to murder, and we will continue to live in terror either because we resign ourselves to it or because we seek to eliminate it by means that replace one form of terror with another.
(Combat, “Saving Bodies” [November 20, 1946], 260 [614]).
No ideology and no form of political action thus escapes from this fundamental contradiction, since if actions taken to eliminate injustice risk producing further injustices, if attempts to destroy the world in which murder is legitimized lead to and end up justifying additional murders, then a rejection of ideology, political activism, and perhaps even politics in general would seem to be the only way to avoid murdering in the name of eliminating murder and replacing one form of terror with another.11
However, Camus’ response is not acquiescence, passivity, or indifference, since he rejects them as responses to what for him is the fundamental contradiction of politics itself. An awareness of the risk of murder implied in any militant political action that attempts to radically change society does mean, however, that no commitment to justice can ever be total, that is, exclusively political in nature. In both his postwar journalism and The Rebel, Camus repeatedly comes back to the same question: “Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in action, can avoid committing murder…. We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill the other before us, or to consent to having him be killed. Since every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether and why we have to cause death.”12 Passivity is rejected because to decide not to act “amounts to accepting the murder of others” and to allow murder to retain what Camus calls “its privileged position” (5 [415]). In the political realm, you are damned if you act and damned if you don’t. And yet one still senses in all of Camus’ writings a fundamental imperative to act—but always within limits, always with the means to any end judged on their own rather than being justified by the ends they allegedly serve. If the means are not just, with the ultimate test being whether they are in themselves murderous or lead to and justify murder, then the ends they serve can never make them just.
To refuse either to live passively in a world where murder is legitimized or to agree that murders have to be committed and thus innocent lives sacrificed in order to eliminate murder may be utopian, but Camus claims it is to choose “relative utopia” over what he calls the absolute utopias constituted by both Marxist and capitalist ideologies: “It is a much lesser degree of utopia, however, to ask that murder no longer be legitimized. What is more, the Marxist and capitalist ideologies, both of which are based on the idea of progress and both of which are convinced that application of their principles must inevitably lead to social equilibrium, are utopias of a much greater degree. Beyond that, they are even now exacting a very heavy price from us” (Combat, “Saving Bodies” [November 20, 1946], 261 [615]). Camus clearly feels that the cost of “progress” in either Marxist or capitalist terms is too great a price to pay. For if human life must always come first and thus if murder can never be legitimized, then “progress” must always be judged first and foremost in terms of its immediate human costs. And when innocent lives are sacrificed, progress itself is illegitimate and neither progressive nor just.13
I would consider his refusal to legitimize murder—whether in the form of capital punishment, political assassination, terrorism, or counterterrorism—as the founding principle of Camus’ critical perspective on politics, both his increasingly militant anticommunism and his refusal to defend the use of terrorism in the cause of national liberation in Algeria or torture and murder in France’s counterterrorist strategy. In fact, even Camus’ militant opposition to Communism had Algerian roots, as his experience as a Communist Party member in Algeria in the mid-1930s had already distanced him from the Communist International. By the time he was excluded from the Algerian Communist Party, he was already a critic of the Party’s internationalist ideology and what he claimed was its blind faith in revolution, which he felt was the principal reason for its neglect of the actual plight of the Arab and Berber populations of Algeria and its refusal to support moderate Algerian nationalists and their demands for reforms. He was already at that time unwilling to put the project for an international proletarian revolution to be realized in an ill-defined future before the immediate problems of destitute Algerians in the present.
In an article he wrote for Combat soon after the liberation of France, after serious divisions among the communist and noncommunist elements of the Resistance had surfaced, Camus first reaffirms Combat’s position that “anti-Communism is the first step toward dictatorship”: “We vigorously reject political anti-Communism because we know what inspires it and what its unavowed aims are” (Combat [October 7, 1944], 62–63 [237–238]). He then asserts that his colleagues’ and his own differences with their communist Resistance comrades are not rooted in opposed social visions or goals, but rather in the unwillingness to accept what he calls communism’s faith in dialectical history and “political realism”:
Most of our comrades’ collectivist ideas and social programs, their ideal of justice, and their disgust with a society in which money and privilege occupy the front ranks, we share. But as our comrades freely recognize, their adherence to a very consistent philosophy of history justifies their acceptance of political realism as the primary method for securing the triumph of an ideal shared by many Frenchmen. On this matter we very clearly differ. As we have said many times, we do not believe in political realism. Our method is different.
(63 [238–239])
The differences of “method” between Camus and communists (and later, his polemical exchanges with communist fellow-travelers and advocates of third-world revolution such as Sartre) would in fact be exacerbated during the cold war, when he in fact would become a militant anticommunist and critic of revolutionary movements.
It would be difficult to deny that Camus felt that the most deadly and thus dangerous form of “the plague” in postwar Europe was its Stalinist strain, although that was certainly not its only form. He continued to denounce another form, which was represented by dictatorship in Franco’s Spain and about which Camus repeatedly wrote in Combat in order to call attention to the oppression of the Spanish people and criticize those democracies, especially the United States, that continued to support Franco (and other dictators throughout the world) for strategic reasons—that is, following what could be called democratic political realism.
The ultimate basis of Camus’ political agnosticism and his determined opposition to all messianic, redemptive forms of politics could thus be argued in the final analysis to be neither an ideological or abstract ethical principle. It is rather a deep and at times uncontrollable feeling of revulsion at the spectacle of capital punishment, disgust not just at the sight but also even at the thought of legalized or politically legitimated murder. The thrice-repeated story of his father’s rejection of the sick justice he witnessed in Algeria before World War I delineates the ultimate limit of the political for Camus, the line that he repeatedly argues no society or political movement should ever cross, a limit determined by the respect for human life that makes it impossible to ever justify murder.
For only when this primitive, abject, and fundamentally antidemocratic act against others is itself vomited out of the body politic, only when capital punishment in all its forms, including terrorism and counterterrorism, political murder, and the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets during war, is treated as a crime by those on both sides, only when all religious and political justifications for the murder of others are considered unacceptable means to any end did Camus think that justice would finally be served. Only when human life in the present is defended before ideals or promises of justice in the future could a society rightfully claim to be free, independent, and democratic. To choose to defend his mother before justice was thus not to choose “French Algeria” before “Muslim” or “Algerian Algeria”—it was rather to choose human life before an ideal or promise of justice that legitimated terrorist acts against not just his own mother but all other innocent civilians as well, whether French, Arab, or Berber, Catholic, Muslim, or Jewish.
From the end of World War II until his death, Camus in both his literary and political texts repeatedly grappled with the contradictions of his anti-ideological position, struggling to reconcile his refusal to legitimize murder with an activist, socially responsible politics and, in each instance, to find a “third way” that would be able to effectively oppose injustices without supporting the deadly means used in revolutionary struggles for national independence—or the counter-revolutionary and counterterrorist means used against them. During the Algerian War, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, this proved to be an increasingly difficult if not impossible position to maintain.
It is important to recognize, however, that Camus developed his uncompromising position against terrorism and all other forms of premeditated murder not during and because of the Algerian War, but well before it began: in pre–World War II Algeria, because of his experiences in the Algerian Communist Party; during World War II, because of his experiences in the French Resistance; and in the immediate post–World War II period, because of his eventual disgust at the purge trials and sick justice. His rejection of capital punishment in all its forms affects the judicial practices of democracies as much as the terror used by totalitarian states, the repressive counterterrorist activities of imperial, colonizing powers as much as the terrorist acts of revolutionary movements of national liberation. The problem Camus faced especially during the Algerian War was how to make such a position politically effective. That he did not succeed in doing so does not, however, mean that he was wrong to have made the effort or that such a position should be considered irrelevant today. On the contrary, it may be more necessary to take his attempts (and failure) seriously today than ever before. For only the most fanatical ideologue would really ever choose to defend an ideal—even justice, independence, freedom—before defending (or at the sacrifice of) his own mother or other innocent victims. Only those totally indifferent to the anguish and suffering of others—even of those guilty of monstrous crimes—would praise rather than vomit at the sight of sick justice and any form of terrorism whatsoever.