Ends and Means
Torture, ignominious torture, as horrible in Algiers as in Budapest.
—Albert Camus, “Discours de la Salle Wagram” (March 15, 1957)
Albert Camus never wavered in his condemnation of terrorism—all forms of terrorism, even the form that is called counterterrorism. He could not accept that the murder of civilians could ever be defended as a legitimate means to an end, no matter how just the end was believed to be. This was the case whether terrorism consisted of placing bombs in cafés, racetracks, casinos, and offices to kill innocent men, women, and children in order to destroy the colonial system in Algeria and create a free and independent Algerian state, or whether it involved executing suspects, slaughtering demonstrators, and napalming suspect villages to ensure that Algeria would remain French. Whether it entailed the planned assassination of police, teachers, farmers, workers, and political opponents—Arab, Berber, or French—by the FLN, or the torture and murder of suspected terrorists and their collaborators—Arab, Berber, or French—by the French army. Terrorism for him could never be considered a justifiable means of self-defense or a legitimate tactic in a war of independence; it was rather a hideous and indefensible crime. Terrorism could never rectify past injustices or effectively counter other terrorist acts. Terrorism could not bring peace. It could only perpetuate itself.
In his political essays on Algeria, Camus repeatedly argues that the ends evoked to justify terrorist means, even if in principle noble or honorable, immediately become dishonorable with the use of ignoble means. To condemn some to die so that others would live as “new men,” to commit unjust acts in the name of justice, to execute “enemies of the people” in the name of the people, to enslave in the name of independence, to torture in the name of democracy and the rule of law—these were for Camus unacceptable crimes, regardless of the ends they were alleged to serve. Ends they in fact never really did serve. Noble ends—independence, justice, equality, freedom—were inevitably transformed into their opposites—enslavement, injustice, inequality, oppression—when terrorism or the counterterrorist repression of terrorism constituted the means used to achieve them.
Violence against civilian populations was thus for Camus illegitimate, no matter who used it, why it was used, and what it was used for. Such violence, which should not be confused with armed resistance and guerilla attacks on military targets, was “fascist,” even if it was being used to combat fascism, unjust, even if it was a part of a struggle against injustice, and equal to or worse than the worst excesses of colonialism, even if its purpose was to destroy colonialism. It was terrorist, even or especially when it was the tactic used to counter terrorism; no justification could be made for it.
Camus acknowledges in his preface to Algerian Reports that his stance against the terrorism of both sides of the war satisfied no one and would undoubtedly be rejected or ignored by both sides in the Algerian War. But he also admits that no position satisfied him either.2 In his last public statement on Algeria, he once again presents a severe critique of colonialism and the unacceptable counterterrorist tactics being used by the French army to reestablish order in Algeria, which naturally made him the enemy of militant defenders of Algérie française. But he also attacks the leadership of the FLN and its equally unacceptable use of terrorism, which of course made him an enemy of the political Left in general and especially those who enthusiastically and uncritically supported the Algerian armed insurrection. His refusal to support either the French or Arab side in the war, to be one of “us” or one of “them,” left him in a political no-man’s land, as isolated as the schoolteacher Daru at the end of “The Guest/Host.”3
A year before Camus published Algerian Reports, Albert Memmi had claimed that such a position was untenable and that “the role of the left-wing colonizer collapses” in what he called “an impossible historical situation.” The result is that “the leftist colonizer… will slowly realize that the only thing for him to do is remain silent [se taire].”4 Which is exactly what Camus did after 1958. As we have seen, Camus’ most severe postcolonial critics find nothing contradictory or impossible about his situation, however, and therefore do not just criticize the political inefficacy of his position but also treat it as a defense of colonialism itself. In doing so, they ignore what Memmi and others on the Left, even if they ultimately chose to support the FLN, did not ignore: that supporting the FLN could not in itself resolve the contradiction of defending the tactics of a brutal and repressive undemocratic nationalist organization in order to achieve independence and freedom for an oppressed people.5
Camus simply rejected out of hand the notion that the FLN could be considered the legitimate representative of the Algerian people because of the nature of the organization itself and the terrorist campaign it had waged against the different civilian populations of Algeria since 1954—not merely against French civilians, which had received the most publicity in France, but against the other Algerian nationalist leaders and groups and innocent Arab and Berber civilians as well.6 But to denounce only the terrorist practices of the FLN, on the one hand, or the indiscriminate bombings of villages and the torturing and murder of FLN suspects by the French, on the other, without immediately denouncing the crimes of the other side and implicating it as well in the escalating violence and terrorism was, he argued, of no assistance in bringing the war to a just end. On the contrary, it had the effect of encouraging and legitimizing further violence and terrorism, thus prolonging the war. This was the main reason Camus consistently rejected both the tactics and goals of both sides.
This is not to say that Camus did not take sides on the general question of the effects of colonialism in Algeria and of the responsibility of the French for the injustices and humiliation suffered by colonized Algerians for over a century. He repeatedly acknowledges in his essays that French colonialism was the principal cause of the misery of the Arabs and Berbers in Algeria, but he also expresses his deep concerns about the fate of all Algerians in an independent Algeria ruled by brutal nationalist dictators. Whatever its political limitations might be argued to be, Camus’ was not the ignoble colonialist position some critics have claimed, however, even if as the war progressed his political perspective was increasingly difficult to maintain and his proposals for peace increasingly unrealistic. In hindsight, his analysis of the long-term effects of terrorism on the Algerian people could be considered prescient and, in fact, less mystified or illusory than the third-world revolutionary zeal expressed by numerous supporters of the FLN.
In his essays, Camus expresses a reluctance to speak about Algeria because of a fear that his criticisms of the criminal actions of either side in the war could provoke or be used to justify the terrorist acts on the other side and thus the murder of more innocent civilians. He acknowledges that this possibility imposes a limit on his political discourse and regrets that it did not impose the same limit on all political discourse and all actions taken by both sides in the war. In his mind, the recognition and acceptance of political limits, that is, of the basic principle that it is not possible to do everything even in the pursuit of the most noble cause, should have made even the most radical factions on both sides rethink their commitments, qualify their support for their respective causes, and at the very least reject the use of terror and all violence directed against innocent civilians. Camus attacks those on both sides who did not recognize or respect such limits, all of those who refused to acknowledge that in order for either side to succeed and defeat the other side, it would mean, as he put it, waging a “total war” against the Algerian people, a war that would destroy the very people in whose name it was allegedly being fought—and this was true whether Algeria would remain French or become independent at the end of the war. Camus did not understand or at least pretended not to understand why it was not obvious to everyone else as well that no cause was worth such a sacrifice.
Camus has nothing but scorn for the romantic and what he considered extremely dangerous praise of violence by intellectuals on the Left (and although he never names him directly in these essays, always using the phrase “Paris intellectuals,” first and foremost Sartre), and he argues that their support for terrorism had devastating effects on both French and Arab Algerians alike. Nothing was less abstract and more real for Camus than the torture and execution of suspects and the collective punishment inflicted on the populations of entire villages, on the one hand, or the massacre of innocent men, women, and children in the streets and cafés of Algiers and the assassination of political opponents throughout Algeria and in France, on the other. Nothing was more destructively political in the worst sense of the term than both terrorism and counterterrorism, for in his view terrorism was destroying the fabric of Algerian society by threatening the lives of all Algerians and turning individuals and entire communities against each other.
Such actions were dangerous and destructive not just for their devastating effects during the war, but because he feared that they would also continue long after the war had ended, no matter which side emerged victorious. He was convinced that terrorism would have the effect of encouraging and justifying in advance future terrorist acts and perpetuate a cycle that would continue long after either Algerian independence or the defeat of the FLN had been achieved. A war fought and eventually won through either terrorism or counterterrorist repression and torture would thus never really be over. More than forty years after Algerian independence, it would be difficult to argue that Camus was wrong in having such fears.
Camus attacks especially severely the “Paris intellectuals” who defended the FLN’s tactics but had no family or friends threatened by terrorist bombs. He claims that not only did these “Parisians” ignore or remain indifferent to the suffering of the poor pieds-noirs, but they were insensitive to the suffering of Arab and Berber Algerians as well, since terrorism especially threatened and took its victims among the Algerian poor, among Arab and Berber Algerians even more than French Algerians. The former, he claimed, were being sacrificed by those who justified terrorism as a necessary means to achieve independence. Algerians were not, in his mind, being liberated by such violence, but rather they were being further enslaved by it; they were not being born again as “new men,” but rather being destroyed.
Camus thus repeatedly denounces the mass reprisal and torture of Algerians by the French and all attempts to legitimize such acts by claiming, as the army did, that they were necessary to maintain the integrity of the French Republic and keep Algeria French. He calls such acts crimes, the responsibility for which he attributes not just to the actual participants in torture and summary executions or the military and political officials who ordered or sanctioned the crimes, but in extension to all the French, including himself, in whose name the crimes were being committed. He argues that it was only in denouncing French counterterrorism that it was possible to have any credibility in condemning the terrorist tactics of the FLN as well: “Only from such a position have we the right and the duty to state that armed combat and repression have, on our side, taken on aspects we cannot accept. Reprisals taken against civilian populations and the use of torture are crimes in which we are all implicated…. We must refuse to give any justification at all to such methods, even efficacy” (preface to Algerian Reports, 114, trans. mod. [893]). As he had done a decade earlier when he rejected the argument that using an atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima could be justified because it shortened the war against imperial Japan, thus saving Allied soldiers’ lives, Camus denounces the killing of civilians to win the Algerian war, no matter which side is responsible for the killings.7
At the same time and for the same reasons as he condemns the torture and the violent repression of Algerians by the French army, Camus attacks what were for him the equally unacceptable acts of terrorism of the FLN against both French and Arab civilians, which he considers to be crimes of the exactly the same nature and order as those committed by the French:
To be both useful and equitable, we must condemn with equal force and in no uncertain terms the terrorism used by the FLN against French civilians and, to an even greater degree, Arab civilians. Such terrorism is a crime that can be neither excused nor allowed to develop…. There should be no way to transform the acknowledgment of the injustices imposed on the Arab people into a systematic indulgence toward those who indiscriminately slaughter Arab and French civilians without regard for their age or sex…. Whatever the cause being defended, it will always be dishonored by the blind slaughter of an innocent crowd when the killer knows in advance that he will strike down women and children.
(115–116 [894])
If actions on both sides are considered crimes, only in the case of the FLN, however, does Camus evoke the cause of the struggle and explicitly acknowledge the legitimacy of the struggle against the injustices suffered under French colonialism by the Arab and Berber peoples of Algeria. But even the recognition of a legitimate cause could not for him and should not for anyone else, he argues, justify in any way the murder of women and children. His condemnation of FLN terrorism is on this general level therefore identical to his condemnation of the crimes of the French, whose cause—the perpetuation of colonialism—he considers unjust and illegitimate. Crimes for him remain crimes, murders remain murders, terrorism remains terrorism, no matter what cause they serve.
The Cult of Violence
Is freedom worth penetrating the enormous circuit of terrorism and counter-terrorism?
—Frantz Fanon, Sociology of a Revolution
Terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence: that is what observers bitterly record when they describe the circle of hate, which is so tenacious and so evident in Algeria.
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Certainly by 1957 and the beginning of the Battle of Algiers, Camus was part of an increasingly small minority of Algerian moderates who continued to argue for a resolution to the conflict that would put an end to colonialism in Algeria but not immediately create a totally independent Algerian state and empower the FLN. If his own proposals for peace could rightly be criticized as unrealistic, even if they do not in my evaluation constitute “a masterpiece of bad faith,”8 his deep concerns about the long-term effects of terrorism and torture and the repressive nature of the FLN and the national revolution for which it was responsible should be taken seriously. In the debate over who was more right about Algeria, Camus or Sartre, for example, until quite recently very few would have said Camus. But forty-five years after independence, the response to such a question would appear to be much less clear than it might have seemed even ten years ago. As right as Sartre was about the systematic, oppressive nature of colonialism, he was nevertheless mystified and in fact dead wrong about the totally liberating, revolutionary effects of the Algerian War (and other anticolonialist struggles) and certainly naïve, perhaps intentionally so, about the nature of the FLN itself.9
There is still debate over whether either terrorism or torture was effective in advancing the cause of either side in the war, but there is sufficient evidence available to make a convincing argument that the cause of Algerian independence was in fact more hurt by terrorism than helped by it. One could also conclude that if France won the Battle of Algiers because of the oppressive tactics the French army used against the civilian population of Algiers and particularly the systematic torture of suspects, it could also be argued that it was also because of torture and other criminal acts it committed that the overwhelming majority of Algerians were driven to support the FLN and French public opinion eventually turned massively against the war.
This, of course, did not mean that both terrorism and torture did not have defenders outside the group of FLN leaders and militants who devised and carried out the terrorist acts or outside of the French government or the army officials who devised and executed the counterterrorist strategy that included the systematic torturing of FLN suspects. In general, those supporting either side’s crimes defended their side’s use of terrorism by projecting the responsibility onto the other side. The FLN thus defended its use of terrorism by evoking the use of torture and the summary execution of suspects by the French, just as the French army claimed it was forced to torture suspects in order to prevent more innocent civilians from being slaughtered in terrorist bombings. While French military leaders claimed that if the French really wanted Algeria to remain French then they would have to be given “carte blanche” and allowed to use all necessary counterterrorist means to accomplish that task, FLN leaders at the same time argued that the French had made the war a total war and that terrorism, no matter how regrettable, was necessary if Algerians were ever to be free. Each side could in fact be said to have been right in the narrow strategic context in which each articulated its justification for either terrorism or torture, and yet each was criminally wrong in a larger ethical context and in terms of both the short- and long-term consequences of their tactics. And tragically wrong in terms of the political, moral, and psychological effects of their use of terror and torture—not only on their victims but on themselves.
Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre were two of the most widely read and influential intellectual supporters of the FLN, and both wrote what could be considered the most elaborate justifications for the armed resistance to colonialism in general and the unrestrained use of violence and terrorism in particular. Terrorism as such is not discussed at great length by either Fanon or Sartre, however, but it is for the most part subsumed within the general problem both do discuss: revolutionary, anticolonialist violence. Both claim that since for over a century colonized Algerians had been the victims of unrestrained, insidious forms of systematic, generalized violence, the use of an equally unlimited counterviolence was necessary for the Algerian people to achieve full independence and create their own national identity. All anticolonialist violence, including the use of terrorism, is thus argued by both Fanon and Sartre not to be the responsibility of those who devised and carried out the terrorist acts, but rather of the colonial system itself, which is considered the ultimate source of all violence, even or especially violence against colonialists themselves.
For example, in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth (“Concerning Violence”), which was originally published in 1961 months before his death, Fanon argues that violence is a constitutive, essential component of the process of decolonization itself. This is first of all because violence is present in the colonies from the very beginning, from the violent conquest and occupation of Algeria and throughout its ensuing long, antagonistic history: “Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together—that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler [du colonisé par le colon]—was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances.”10 With its source outside of itself, revolutionary counterviolence can thus never be questioned because it always increases in proportion to the violence it opposes and that in fact produces it: “The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity…. The development of violence among the colonized people will be proportionate to the violence exercised by the colonial regime being contested” (88, trans. modified [47]). The more violent colonialist oppression, then, the more violent the reaction to it must necessarily be. In this sense, anticolonialist violence can never be excessive or unjustified because it is only the reflection of the colonial violence that gives birth to it.
This means in effect that all violence is the responsibility of and justified by the repressive colonialist system itself. For every action, an equally violent counter-reaction. Fanon also argues that for the colonized, however, anticolonialist violence is also something much more significant: it is in itself already the sign of the colonized’s freedom. The end of the struggle, freedom, is thus already present in the violent means used to achieve it: “Colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence. This rule of conduct [cette praxis] enlightens the agent because it indicates to him the means and the end” (86 [45]). The “circle of hate,” of “terror and then counter-terror, violence and then counter-violence,” can thus be broken only by continually increasing the levels of violence, which will be met with an increase in violence, until the cycle can no longer be contained and explodes, bringing about the birth of a new people and total independence (89 [48]).11
But the way out of the circle is the same as the way into it. It is always more of the same: more terror and violence, even if they now are alleged to serve the liberation rather than oppression of a people. And violence is in fact much more than a way out the circle of colonialist violence, for in Fanon’s view the national revolution represents nothing less than the possibility of the total transformation and rebirth of the colonized as “new men”:
Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon…. [It is] the replacing of one “species” of men by another “species” of men. Without any transition, there is a total, complete, absolute substitution…. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the colonized “thing” becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.
(35–37, trans. mod. [5–6])
Fanon’s argument then is not just that, given the violent repressive nature of the colonial system, the colonized are forced to use unlimited counterviolence to free themselves from the colonial condition; it is also that violence in itself is the creative human force responsible for making out of a colonized “thing” an absolutely “new species” of man. Fanon’s essay “Concerning Violence” is thus no mere strategic political justification for violence and terrorism; it is rather a metaphysics of rebirth and salvation. The truth may not set people free, but for Fanon, violence does.12
If the stakes are indeed absolute and nothing less than the creation of an entirely new species of man, then the means used to achieve this end must necessarily be without limits as well: “The colonized who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this reduced world, strewn with prohibitions, can be put into question only by absolute violence” (37, trans. mod. [7]). It is precisely a project of total violence that Fanon, in his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, proposes for colonized peoples throughout the world, the goal being nothing less than the creation of a “total man”: “Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must discover something different…. Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the total man that Europe has been incapable of having triumph” (312–313, trans. mod. [230]).13 Fanon’s highly romanticized praise of violence and his faith that by means of absolute violence a new “total man” could be created could not of course withstand the test of reality. It has never been clear to me why Camus’ view of the birth of a democratic multicultural Algeria has been generally considered naively idealist, at best the musings of a “beautiful soul” and at worst the cynical vision of a neocolonialist, while Fanon’s cult of total violence and the birth of a new “total man” on the contrary has been taken so seriously by so many.14
When Fanon addresses the FLN’s use of terrorism directly, it is, not surprisingly, in an apologetic mode, at the same time regretting its use and justifying its necessity. He first points out that there exists a double standard in the evaluation of the tactics used by each side in the war and that colonized peoples who take up arms against their oppressors are somehow expected to fight their wars of liberation “cleanly, without ‘barbarity,’” and to “practice fair play,” while “its adversary ventures, with a clear conscience, into the unlimited exploration of new modes of terror. An underdeveloped people must prove, by its fighting power, its ability to set itself up as a nation, and by the purity of every one of its acts, that it is… the most lucid, the most controlled people.” This, he adds, is of course “all very difficult,” and especially during wars of national liberation they constitute unreasonable standards that cannot be met.15
Ultimately, it is in fact the difficulty of the decision and the care and restraint with which Fanon claims it was in each case made by the leaders of the FLN that reveals “that it had no choice but to adopt forms of terror which until then it had rejected”:
No one takes the step of placing a bomb in a public place without a battle of conscience. The Algerian leaders who, in view of the intensity of the repression and the frenzied character of the oppression, thought they could answer the blows received without any serious problems of conscience, discovered that the most horrible crimes do not constitute a sufficient excuse for certain decisions. The leaders in a number of cases canceled plans…. To explain these hesitations there was, to be sure, the memory of civilians killed or frightfully wounded. There was the political consideration not to do certain things that could compromise the cause of freedom. There was also the fear that the Europeans working with the Front might be hit in these attempts.
(55 [38])16
Whether such “hesitations” were sufficient to justify the terrorist acts that were committed would still seem to be a legitimate question, however, especially given the extent of the terrorism and the number of victims, not just among French Algerians but Berber and Arab Algerians as well.
It should be noted that only one of the concerns listed by Fanon is not directly political but rather has to do with a concern for the suffering of the civilians killed or wounded by terrorist acts. But it is not clear that this concern has any more weight for him than the blatantly political concerns of not giving “a false picture of the Revolution” or not alienating “the democrats of all the countries of the world and the Europeans of Algeria who were attracted by the Algerian national ideal” and who actively supported the armed struggle against the French (55–56 [38]). Fanon is not explicitly claiming that any means can or should be used to achieve the glorious end of the revolution, but it would seem that any tactic decided by the FLN leadership after careful reflection and sufficient hesitation is most definitely justified, no matter its actual consequences, because of the “glorious” revolutionary ends it serves.
Whether really restrained in some or most instances and regrettable in others or not, Fanon’s ultimate justification for violence, whether directed against combatants or civilians, is that it has in fact already produced “a new humanity” that had never existed before and would never have been born without bloodshed: “All the innocent blood that has flowed onto the national soil has produced a new humanity, and no one must fail to recognize this fact” (27–28 [10]). The most brutal and criminal acts against civilians during the war could only be justified by such a total, unquestioning faith in the revolution. And Fanon most definitely was one of the most enthusiastic believers in the righteousness of total revolution and the creation of a “new man” through total anticolonialist violence.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a fervent believer as well. He believed in the Algerian national revolution, for “if it triumphs, the national revolution,” Sartre boldly asserts, “will be socialist,” “a complete shattering of all existing structures.”17 And he also believed that third-world revolutionaries, not only Algerians but other colonized peoples struggling to free themselves from colonial oppressors as well, would, when successful, allegedly bring about salvation not only for themselves but also for Europe as a whole. Sartre had faith specifically in the “socialist fraternity” he predicted would emerge when “the last colon is killed, shipped back home, or assimilated” and in the better human being who would be created by means of the violence it was necessary to use to achieve liberation: “We find our humanity on this side of death and despair, they [the colonized] find it beyond torture and death…. Sons of violence, at every instant they draw their humanity from it: we were human beings at their expense, they are making themselves human beings at ours. Different human beings, of better quality” (149–150 [30–31]). It is one thing to argue that the colonialist system itself is the ultimate context and origin of the violence directed against civilians during the war; it is entirely another to mystify the creative power of violence and postulate that a superior form of humanity would be born from it.
Following but perhaps expressing a deeper faith in the redemptive power of revolutionary violence even than Fanon, Sartre argues that the violence that gives birth to and defines them as new and superior human beings is not the responsibility of Algerians themselves, since its origin is not in them at all. Rather, since “colonial aggression is internalized as Terror by the colonized,” “it is not in the first place their violence that grows and tears them apart, but ours returned” (145 [26]). The same violence is thus for Sartre totally destructive when it “ravages the oppressed themselves” (145 [26]), but it is creative and redemptive when directed outward against colonialists. The obvious problem with Sartre’s blanket legitimizing of unlimited violence against colonialists in general is that if the responsibility for all violent actions taken by Algerians in their struggle against the French (Sartre also makes no mention of FLN terrorism used against other Arab and Berber Algerians) can be attributed to the French and made their responsibility, then the FLN and the Algerians themselves are exonerated in advance for whatever they do. And according to this logic, the worse the terrorism actually becomes, the more it reveals the injustices and violence of the colonialist system itself and the more redemptive it is.
Violence also has a therapeutic value for Sartre in that it represents both a self-cure and the crucial step toward “man reconstructing himself” in general:
The colonized cure themselves of the colonial neurosis by driving out the colon with weapons. When their rage explodes, they recover their lost transparency, they know themselves in the same measure as they create themselves… it leads to the progressive emancipation of the fighters, it progressively liquidates the colonial darkness outside them. Once it starts, it is merciless…. The fighters’ weapons are their humanity. For, at this first stage of the revolt, they have to kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, doing away with oppressor and oppressed at the same time: what remains is a dead man and a free man; the survivor.
(148 [29])
The last sentence of the quotation is undoubtedly the most controversial Sartre ever wrote about the Algerian War, since he appears not just to legitimize terrorism as a necessary tactical weapon but also to call for the murder of French civilians as an essential step in the process of liberation.18 When the price of justice and the birth of a “free man” is the murder of other men, women, and children, of anyone who is or can be labeled a colon or claimed to be serving colonialist interests, then no limits can be placed on violence or terror at all. At the very least, this should make one question whether there might not be a better way to give birth to free men and women—especially, as is the case here, when the “dead man” is not an enemy solider but a civilian who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and is murdered as the representative of an oppressive system and thus sacrificed as a sign of oppression.
But if the superiority of the “new man” is inseparable from violence, according to this logic other more moderate, less violent ways of ending colonialism would not be revolutionary and thus produce only ordinary, “old,” and much less free men. In his different essays, Sartre mockingly dismisses all moderate proposals for ending colonialism peacefully, since the Algerian War is presented by him, even more than by Fanon, as an all-or-nothing affair. In a burst of anticolonialist frenzy, Sartre accuses those who protest the terrorism being used against civilian populations in Algeria, those who demand that it cease and that less violent tactics be used in the struggle for independence, of being not just “well-meaning souls [belles âmes]” but “racists” (147 [28]). In an explicit reference to Camus, a year after his death, Sartre mocks “the non-violent” who are “neither victims nor executioners!” (150 [31]) and accuses them of preaching a nonviolence that is in fact protected by the violence of the colonialist system. For those like Camus, who were concerned that the cycle of violence would have devastating long-term effects or would never end, Sartre, on the contrary, knows that “it is the last stage of the dialectic” and reassures his readers that “violence, like Achilles’ spear, can heal the wounds that it has made” (155 [36]). Violence, not time, he thus claims, will heal all wounds. I believe most would agree today that in Algeria (and elsewhere) this has definitely not been the case.19
The Madness of Truth—A Tale of Two Suns
The land is savage and savagery is in the hearts of the men. The rebels burn farms and crops, cut telephone poles, slaughter the herds, assassinate, and castrate. The French army does the same.
—Jean-Luc Tahon, “En ‘pacifiant’ l’Algérie. 1955”20
Today, the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith and illuminates the whole country; in this light, there is no laughter that does not sound false, no fact that is not made up to conceal anger or fear, no act that does not betray our disgust and complicity. Whenever two French people meet now, there is a dead body between them. In fact, did I say one?…
—Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth
Although it was written before Fanon’s and Sartre’s essays were published and as if anticipating them, Camus’ most compelling response to what could be called the romantic cult of total revolutionary violence is not to be found in his essays on Algeria, but rather in what is perhaps the least understood, most enigmatic of his short stories, “The Renegade.”21 Camus is reported to have ironically described the story both as “the portrait of a progressive Christian” and “the story of a Christian who adopts Marxist ideology” (Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 2044). In his essay on Camus, Edward Said claims rather that the story describes what Camus felt were the pathological reasons for and disastrous effects of a European in the colonies “going native.” As Said puts it, “The Renegade” is the story of a missionary who, “captured by an outcast southern Algerian tribe, has his tongue cut out… and becomes a super-zealous partisan of the tribe, joining in an ambush of French forces…. This is as if to say that going native can only be the result of mutilation, which produces a diseased, ultimately unacceptable loss of identity.”22 Whether the story has to do with what Camus felt were the disastrous results of a progressive Christian—the main character is in fact anything but progressive—“going Marxist,” or of a Frenchman “going native,” as Said claims, Said and Camus do seem to agree that the zealotry, loss of control, and violent destruction of both personal and national-cultural identity of the main character constitute the principal subject of the story.
The “confused mind” in question is that of the zealous convert to the religion of violence, of the true believer who accepts no compromises in his beliefs, of the man who loses his old self and is “born again” in and because of his total commitment to a new Truth and the violence his new faith and total commitment demand from him. Whatever that Truth might be: that of a Marxist revolutionary or “native” believer in the Fetish, or even the Truth of the militant Christian himself, before going anywhere and becoming anything other than what he already was—only more so.
“The Renegade” is, in my judgment, Camus’ most daring piece of writing, the most radically experimental of his experiments in narration from Exile and the Kingdom. Even when compared to The Fall, which is considered by most critics to be Camus’ most original and unconventional narrative text and which was originally intended to be a short story in this same collection, the narrative structure of “The Renegade” is even more complex. As an exercise in “interior monologue,” it reads in places more like a text by Samuel Beckett than any of Camus’ other stories or novels. The first lines of the story resemble passages from Beckett’s The Unnamable:
What mush! What mush! I must get my mind in order. Since they cut out my tongue, I don’t know, it’s as if another tongue has been constantly operating in my skull, something has been speaking, or someone who suddenly falls silent and then it begins again—oh, I hear too many things I however never say, what mush, and if I open my mouth, it’s like the noise of pebbles rattling together.
(34, trans. mod. [1579]).23
Like the voice in Beckett’s novel, the voice of an other has invaded the voice of the missionary-turned-renegade and penetrated the deepest interiority of his interior monologue, so much so that the most interior of first-person interior voices is, in this instance, also the most exterior, alienated, and insane of voices.
This “something” or “someone” who speaks in and as the self is radically alien to the self, but at the same time is also paradoxically deeply within the self, an alien voice speaking as a disordered, confused interior voice, an alien tongue that has usurped the place of the original mother tongue. Mutilated, the tongue continues to speak, even if primarily with words that are “mush.” This otherness or madness of the tongue is at the same time a difference, violence, or madness of or within the tongue from the very start, an otherness that makes the tongue, even the mother tongue, never completely original, never indigenous to the self—not just after mutilation, but before as well.
The “mush” in or of the voice reflects and conveys a disorder or confusion of the mind that it repeatedly attempts and fails to overcome: “Order, an order, says the tongue, and then simultaneously speaks of something else, yes I always desired order” (34, trans. mod. [1579]). The only way for the “confused mind” to compensate for its confusion is to add more mush to the mush already in it, more confused words to the confused words already coming out of its mouth, with seemingly no end to mush or confusion. The intensification and interiorization of violence in the story follows the same process, both the violence of the words said, thought, or hallucinated by the narrator (or by “his” voice, the other in him) and the violence of the world outside. For like confusion, the only way to combat the violence of the deadly struggle for dominance between “civilization” and “barbarism,” Christianity and the religion of the Fetish, seems to be to perpetuate and escalate it. Inside and outside the mind of the missionary/renegade the same confusion, madness, and violence reign. Order and peace appear impossible to achieve once the cycle of confusion, disorder, and violence have begun—that is, from the very start.
Even if the violence and madness in his voice reflects the missionary’s loss of an original “Western” self and results, at least in part, from his “going native,” as Said argues, the desert land where the missionary’s conversion/mutilation takes place has a role to play in his transformation or conversion. The desert is presented as a space of extremes, where blinding light gives way to total darkness, insufferable heat to unbearable coldness—with no transition between totally opposed extremes: “Day is breaking over the desert,” says the voice of the self-proclaimed “dirty slave”; “it’s still very cold, soon it will be too hot, this land drives men mad” (35 [1579]). Pages later, the same missionary/renegade describes the city of salt in the following terms:
as if… they had cut out their white, burning hell with a powerful jet of boiling water just to show that they could live where no one ever could, thirty days’ travel from any living thing, in this hollow in the middle of the desert where the heat of day prevents any contact among creatures, separates them by a portcullis of invisible flames and of searing crystals, where without transition the cold of night congeals them individually in their rock-salt shells.
(42 [1583])
Madness is thus first presented as having an exterior, geographic origin, the result of living on the very limits of human existence, in the most extreme and inhuman of climatic conditions.
There are no shadows at high noon under this sun, and it is as if it were always high noon in the “village of salt” created and inhabited by the people of the Fetish. Except when the sun is totally absent and the darkest of nights prevails. But then too there are no shadows or nuances, only total obscurity. At the extreme limits of life, everything is either insufferably hot or unbearably cold, totally black or totally white, true or false. Everyone is either friend or enemy, believer or heathen, good or evil. Either one of us or one of them. The European outsider comes to the city to conquer and convert its inhabitants, and he in turn is tortured, mutilated, and enslaved as a threat to the truth, religion, culture, and very existence of a people. Those who cannot be enslaved or converted are destroyed.
The most desert of all deserts may drive men mad, and specifically white, European, Christian men striving to impose their Truth and mastery on the land and its inhabitants. But the madness of extremes is not that of the land alone. And it is certainly not exclusively or even primarily that of the fictive indigenous people depicted in the story as inhabiting the city and who are known for their extreme cruelty. For the violence and madness of extremes are already in whiteness, European-ness, Christian-ness, and man-ness themselves, already in the missionary before he arrives in this land of extremes, before he is mutilated, before he is forcibly converted to and becomes the slave of the Fetish, and thus before he “goes native.”
For the missionary/renegade is already violent and mad before becoming violent and going mad in the desert, already devoted absolutely to an absolute Truth before changing beliefs and becoming devoted in the same uncompromising, absolute way to the Truth of the other he had previously combated. There is ultimately no real difference between his original faith in a militant, colonizing form of Christianity that forcibly converts others to its Truth and his forced conversion to the “primitive,” violent religion of the Fetish to whom the missionary-renegade becomes devoted/enslaved. The violence depicted in the story is inherent in ideology and faith in an absolute “Truth” in general, in politics when it is practiced as a religion and religion when it is practiced and imposed on others as a politics. The “something else” that speaks in and through the voice of the missionary-renegade is the madness of extremism in general, of the terror at the heart of both politics-as-religion and religion-as-politics.
The struggle for truth is in fact a struggle for power and the desire for domination of one truth, one civilization, one culture, one god, one religion, one people—in the story, metaphorically one “sun”—over all others. Both the indigenous people of the land and those who come to conquer them and occupy their land are “people of faith.” The missionary, for example, before mutilation, before conversion, before he had “gone native,” “gone Marxist,” or gone anywhere at all, was in the seminary already a true believer, a man who, once he had seized on an idea, “carried it to its end” (37, trans. mod. [1580]).24 He had in fact already developed the following project:
To join up with the most barbarous and live as they did, to show them in their own home, and even in the House of the Fetish, through example, that my Lord’s truth was the strongest. They would insult me, of course, but I was not afraid of insults, they were essential to the demonstration, and by the way I endured them, I’d subjugate those savages, like a powerful sun. Powerful, yes, that was the word I constantly had on my tongue, I dreamed of absolute power, the kind that brings people to their knees, that forces the adversary to capitulate, that converts him in short, and the more zealous, the crueler he is, the more he’s sure of himself, dominated by his own convictions, the more his acquiescence establishes the royalty of whoever brought about his defeat.
(39, trans. mod. [1581–1582])
The logic is that of the clash of civilizations, religions, or ideologies. For only through the zealous, cruel, violent victory over the projected zealotry, cruelty, and violence of the Other can the power of European Christianity and its notions of love, charity, and forgiveness rule and its barbarous and violent superiority over an equally but differently barbarous and violent culture, religion, and Truth be ensured.
The madness of the missionary/renegade’s project of subjugation and conquest of the Other reflects exactly and meets its match in the absolute Other it seeks to subjugate. And no matter how great the missionary claims the differences between good and evil, love and hate, “us” and “them,” Christianity and the religion of the Fetish, and European civilization and North African “barbarity” are, his own madness and cruelty are not in fact the result of his having “gone native,” and thus do not originate in his experiences with the “savage” natives. His madness is rather already that of the West (and Christianity) itself, in both its spiritual and political aspirations to conquer and rule in the name of love and charity; to subjugate in the name of progress, justice, and freedom; to impose its Truth where there is the most resistance to it; to bring the most radically other of all others to their knees. Disorder, violence, and madness are the essence of the project of conquest and domination, but under the cover of the announced desire for order, peace, and reason. Victory can occur only when all others have been subdued, converted, or killed—but given that the violence necessary to subdue provokes a counterviolence, no victory can ever be more than momentary, no conversion more than temporary, no death of one infidel sufficient to prevent the arrival of others.
The missionary can thus not really be said to “have gone native.” He has rather gone to the violent extremes of himself and his own culture and religion. And it is because he fails in his attempt at conquest and conversion that he himself is conquered and subjugated by those he attempted to subjugate, converted by those he intended to convert, enslaved by those he attempted to enslave, and mutilated physically by those he intended to mutilate spiritually and culturally. In this way, his desire for power over this fictional “indigenous people,” not of the darkest but of the brightest Africa, is reversed or redirected and becomes, after his forced conversion, a “mad” desire for revenge against the Christian god in whose name he once acted and the missionaries who still act in his name. His goal, after his mutilation and conversion, however, is no more insane or violent than his original goal of subjugation and conversion. The object of his hatred and violence has simply changed, for now he has a score to settle with the new missionary and his previous masters, with his teachers who deceived him, and with “filthy Europe” in general, which he now rejects as absolutely as he once embraced it.25
The struggle for total subjugation and absolute power is depicted in the story as an infinite cycle of revenge. A cycle in which “filthy Europe” sends its missionaries (along with its army and colonizers) to conquer and subjugate the non-European world to prove its own superiority and that of its Truth, only to find that its power is not exclusively its own and that subjugation can be reversed and its power used against it—both by those it has attempted to subjugate and those it has sent to subjugate them. And once the cycle of violence has started, there is no way out of it and no way to put an end to it, only increasingly more violence and increasingly more madness. Unrestrained violence assumes everything into itself, violence producing more violence, madness more madness. Without end.
Because the combat of absolute Truths has as its stakes the total subjugation of the other, it risks the subjugation of the self by the other. The master is as much slave to violence as is the slave in his attempt to reverse his condition. The missionary-renegade in his confusion or madness passes from one extreme to the other, from absolute mastery and conquest to total defeat and subjugation—but only to find mastery again in his enslavement to his new, all-powerful masters: “Lord! But what, which Lord, they are the lords…. They command, they strike, they say they are a unique people, that their god is the true god, and that one must obey. They are my masters, they do not know pity and, like masters, they want to be alone, advance alone, rule alone” (43–44, trans. mod. [1583–1584]). All that matters to this or any other unique, cruel, and powerful people is that they continue to advance on their own, that they continue to rule, that their god or Fetish (religion/ideology) receive total devotion and that they receive total obedience. This is all that matters until they in turn are defeated and converted to another god and subjugated to a different Truth by another “more” unique, violent, cruel, and powerful people. With each defeat/conversion, becoming other, but each time remaining the same, devoted to the same total violence. The choice is then always between total light or total darkness, mastery or enslavement, all or nothing, to possess the other and his god or be possessed by the other and his god. And to be nothing apart from these stark, absolute alternatives. This is the confused mind’s, the renegade slave’s true madness. And the master’s madness as well. It is the madness of Truth and the politics of absolutes in general.
To believe in and be subjugated by the Fetish is thus the same as believing in and being subjugated to an all-powerful Christian God. It is ultimately then neither “to go Marxist,” as Camus ironically suggested, nor “to go native,” as Said has claimed, but rather to believe in and give oneself over to absolute Truth, whatever its form: Christian, Marxist, or that of the Fetish, the Truth of the West or of the East, “ours” or “theirs.” The Fetish in the story is less the religion of the “absolute Other” than a mirror image of the dogmatic truth of “filthy Europe” itself. Both represent the “Truth” of religion when it is practiced as a politics, and of politics when it is imposed and practiced as a religion. The story tells of the madness of the state of violence when “power” constitutes “the malicious principle of the world,” a principle not just to be accepted but also “adored” (53, trans. mod. [1589]). This is the principle of gods, religions, and political ideologies to which one gives oneself totally and thus by which one allows oneself to be totally subjugated and possessed. The madness of absolutes enslaves all those who believe in a truth as the Truth and who choose violence as their master to spread the Truth and ensure that its power be recognized. Of those who use terror to combat the cruelty and terrorism of the other and to justify their own violent conquest and conversion of the other. Of an other who is also always-already a projection of the self.
The missionary/renegade’s “madness” (or the madness of “The Renegade”) is thus the madness of all religious, cultural, and political absolutes, of all those who accept and believe in a truth as the Truth, all those who choose terror over dialogue and acceptance of difference, the struggle for the destruction of the other over the recognition of the other. The world of “The Renegade” is Camus’ vision of sociopolitical hell, his most extreme depiction of pure political/religious terror, one in which power decides everything and where justice is sacrificed for the sake of “the Truth.” Written just before the Algerian War began, it constitutes a nightmarish vision of what would be the madness and unrestrained violence of the war itself. There is perhaps no more powerful literary indictment of what could be called the terrorism of the Truth, whether the Truth is that of religion or politics, than this story. Truth in its extreme form does not set you free; no salvation is born in violence and terror. On the contrary, the Truth mutilates, enslaves, and kills. The Truth is madness itself; the total light of the sun blinds. The Truth is terrorist.