The Myth of Assimilation
There is no reason at all to believe that time cannot succeed in combining the two races. God in no way prevents it; only the mistakes of men could put obstacles in its way.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria” (August 22, 1837)
As for the failure of assimilation, I do not derive any particular joy from it…. However, it is clear that no one expressly desired assimilation in contemporary colonization, not even the Communists. Moreover, and this is the essential thing, assimilation is the opposite of colonization.
—Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized
Assimilation fully realized is quite simply the suppression of colonialism.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Colonialism Is a System” (1956)
Very few today would disagree that assimilation, the proclaimed goal and chief justification for France’s “civilizing mission” in its colonies, was a colossal failure. There is still debate, however, over whether assimilation was simply a cynical, duplicitous fiction that was intended from the start to mask the harsh colonial realities of racism, oppression, and exploitation, or a misguided republican ideal that had a positive effect, no matter how limited, on colonial policy and institutions and that served as a counterforce, no matter how weak, to some of the worst injustices of colonialism. In her study of French colonialism in West Africa, Alice Conklin argues that assimilation in fact was both a destructive ideological fiction and an authentic republican project at the same time. It was the way France attempted “to reconcile its aggressive imperialism with its republican ideals.” Conklin thus disagrees with those scholars who “have too often dismissed the French mission civilisatrice as window dressing,” especially if no attempt is made to understand “the insidious and persistent appeal of colonial ideology.”1
From Conklin’s perspective, assimilation thus served a paradoxical function. As a progressive republican principle that acknowledges, at least in principle, the original, “natural” equality of peoples of different regional, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, assimilation was considered the means of achieving social and political progress and equal democratic rights for all peoples—providing a way for those living under traditional religious and political oppression to enter the modern world and become free citizens. In reality, it was a promise that was never kept and that functioned in the colonies both to mask and justify the oppression of the colonized and the exorbitant privileges of the rich colonizers. Moreover, in colonialist discourse the failure of assimilation was most often not attributed to the laws, restrictions, and practices that made it almost impossible except for a small number of the elite among the colonized to achieve, but rather to the alleged inadequacies and ignorance of the colonized peoples themselves.
The concept of assimilation at the heart of the French colonial civilizing mission was of course rooted in an imaginary hierarchy in which European civilization and European cultures were projected as being superior to other civilizations and cultures and further advanced in the general meta-narrative of progress, with French culture and society, in large part because of the French Revolution and the declaration of the “Rights of Man,” projected (by the French at least) to be at the very summit of that hierarchy. Colonized peoples in general, those to whom the promise of assimilation was made, were because of their culture considered to be behind and thus “inferior to” the French. Through the “civilizing” work of colonialism, this lag would be made up and inferior cultures would in principle be negated, transformed, and raised to a higher level as they were assimilated into French culture and overcame the limitations of their initial conditions. The desire to be French was thus for all intents and purposes assumed in colonialist ideology to be an innate, natural desire on the part of those who had not been born with this privilege, so that making it possible for others to become French was in principle a noble calling. Colonialists could thus see themselves as the missionaries of culture or civilization, spreading the good word of French culture, European civilization, and political progress in the form of democracy among those not fortunate enough to have been born with these gifts.2
If assimilation in reality was a lie, a false promise that was never kept, it was not by chance but because colonialist laws and institutions ensured that there would be two separate and unequal communities in the colonies and that each community would be defined primarily by the colonial relation as either colonizer or colonized.3 As Albert Memmi and others have argued, one of the ways that colonialism in Algeria could have hypothetically ended peacefully would have been if assimilation had been seriously pursued and progressively achieved. To fulfill the promise of assimilation in the colonies would thus also have meant to bring about the demise of colonialism. This in itself explains why, in the history of colonialism, attempts to implement even modest democratic reforms that would have enhanced the mission of assimilation were invariably treated by colonial authorities and powerful colonialist interests as subversive threats to their existence and well-being and forcefully opposed. It also explains why, at the same time, such attempts were considered by progressive elements within the colonizers as well as moderate nationalist leaders among the colonized as an important part of a movement toward emancipation and national independence.
Whatever judgment is made about the limitations and naiveté of his political position during the Algerian War, it cannot be denied that from the time he joined the Communist Party in Algiers in the mid-1930s, Albert Camus firmly believed in assimilation and actively supported reforms that would have facilitated it. This was in part because he felt that the most progressive Algerian nationalist leaders and the majority of Arab and Berber Algerians believed in the promise. But it is also because Camus was convinced that it was only through assimilation that colonial injustices could be eliminated. Some of the first indications of his doubts, not about the principle of assimilation as such but rather about the sincerity of the French government to act effectively to achieve it, appear in his journalistic account of a trip he took in 1939 during a horrible famine through the desolate Kabylia region of Algeria. The trip brutally revealed to him the tragic consequences of the failure of assimilation and convinced him of the necessity of reversing the course of a century of neglect before, as he repeatedly wrote, “it was too late.” All of his subsequent pleas for economic assistance and political reform could be said to grow out of this confrontation with rural misery, which was worse than anything he had ever witnessed in Algiers. If he stubbornly believed that it was not too late for France to reverse its course and begin practicing what it preached, he also demanded that France immediately live up to its responsibilities for the misery French colonialism had caused in Algeria.
Destitution
Drought in the South—famine—eighty thousand sheep die. The entire population scrapes the earth looking for roots. Buchenwald under the sun.
—Albert Camus, Carnets III
In the series of moving articles Camus published in the socialist journal Alger Républicain in 1939 under the title “Misère de la Kabylie” (“Destitution of Kabylia”), Camus describes his trip as “a journey through the suffering and hunger of a people…. Destitution here is not a formula or a theme for meditation. Destitution is. It cries out, and it drives you to despair.”4 In addition to demanding that the French government provide immediate additional emergency supplies to the people of Kabylia, Camus also argues for radical reforms to prevent future droughts or other natural catastrophes from having the same devastating effects. This, he argues, means eliminating the inequities and injustices produced by the colonial system, which greatly exacerbate the effects of natural disasters.
Camus’ pleas were of course ignored, not only for the reason why demands and projects for reform in Algeria had always been ignored and would continue to be ignored until the Algerian War: the general indifference of the population of metropolitan France toward its Algerian colony and the powerful influence on both local and national politics of a small number of grands colons and extremist politicians. In 1939, it was also because France and the rest of Europe faced in Nazi Germany a more immediate and dangerous threat than the destitution in its colonies. Camus argues in his articles, however, that efforts to eliminate the destitution and suffering of the people of Kabylia could not be postponed until France and the rest of Europe countered the threat posed by Nazi Germany. Men, women, and children were dying in Algeria from starvation and disease, and this made the alleviation of their misery and the elimination of its underlying causes as pressing as any threat to national security, no matter how serious.5 The choice before France was thus for him not a choice between defending itself against Nazi Germany or improving the living conditions of the colonized in Algeria. It was rather a question of how to do both at the same time. France, of course, did neither.
Camus argues in these articles that because the ultimate cause for the destitution of the people of Kabylia is the French colonial system itself, it is the responsibility of the French to act decisively and practice what the French apologists for colonization had always preached was the essential component of its “civilizing mission.” In 1939, such a demand for assimilation and democratic rights for all Algerians was in fact more radical than Camus’ critics have generally acknowledged. In any case, there can be no doubt that the grands colons of Algeria realized that Camus represented an enemy to their interests and that effective assimilation of all French subjects in Algeria would bring about the demise of colonialism and thus destroy their exorbitant privileges and the abusive economic and political power they exercised. This is why they continued to oppose even moderate reforms that would have led to the enfranchisement of a slightly higher number of Muslim Algerians.6 It is thus highly ironic that Camus has often been criticized by postcolonial critics for the very same reasons he was criticized by the most zealous defenders of colonialism. Although rarely if ever acknowledged and certainly not analyzed at any length, at the very heart of the confusion and controversies surrounding Camus’ Algerian politics is his very particular perspective on the question of assimilation.
One important difference between Camus’ idea of assimilation and its strictly colonialist sense is that his is not based on the myth of the innate hierarchy of peoples and cultures. On the contrary, assimilation as Camus conceived it is based on the opposite principle: their fundamental equality and respective “grandeur.” He argues that for assimilation to have a chance of succeeding, the dignity, cultural specificity, and, most important, the equality of the different populations, ethnicities, religions, and cultures of Algeria first had to be recognized, both in theory and in practice. This is why he considers evidence of what he claims is a movement toward the “greater independence” of the people of Kabylia to be not an obstacle to assimilation, but rather a positive step in the process: “And how, then, could I not have understood their desire to administer their lives and their appetite to become finally what they profoundly already are: courageous and self-aware men from whom without any false shame we could take lessons in grandeur and justice?” (“Misère de la Kabylie,” 928). Camus’ view is that only a noble, independent, self-aware people could be freely assimilated into the French people; only by remaining itself could it become other. Assimilation thus implies something very different for Camus than for colonialist ideology. Assimilation of Arabs and Berbers does not imply that Arab and Berber cultures and languages and the Muslim religion have first to be rejected for a Muslim to become “French.” His notion rather implies that an Algerian would become French as a Berber, as an Arab, as a Muslim.7 Today, this would be considered a multiculturalist position. In Algeria in 1939, it was considered a subversively anticolonialist position, even though or rather because it championed assimilation, the principle at the very core of French colonialism. And in fact it was.
Under the paradoxical conditions delineated by Camus, only a noncolonized people or a people who had never fully accepted their own colonization but remained “courageous and self-aware” under extremely oppressive conditions could be assimilated freely into another people and culture. In the same way, only a society that did not oppress and subjugate others could freely assimilate others into itself. It is thus only on the basis of anticolonialist principles or ideals that assimilation, the self-proclaimed goal of French colonialism, could occur. And this is why assimilation, the most “idealist” and fictitious of colonialism’s self-justifications, could also be used as a weapon against colonialism itself.
When a small minority of people have the privileges of full citizenship and the overwhelming majority have only limited rights; when the culture, language, and religion of one community are recognized and those of other communities ignored or denigrated; when the most productive land has been taken away from the people who previously farmed it and given to others to exploit; and when laws applying to all communities are made by one community alone, are radically different for each community, and are applied more severely to the other communities than to the community making and enforcing the laws, then there is no way assimilation can succeed. Nor, from a strictly colonialist point of view, was it ever really supposed to succeed.8
For if Arab and Berber Algerians had in fact been allowed to become “French,” that is, if all Algerian “subjects” had the freedom to become full French citizens equal to and with the same rights as all other French citizens without having to give up their religion, language, and culture, and if the majority then ruled in an authentically democratic state, then the colonial relation, as we have seen and as Memmi and others have argued, would have been destroyed, and there would no longer have been any colonized or any colonizers. And with the end of colonialism in Algeria and the overwhelming majority of ten Arabs and Berbers to one French, it would be not difficult to imagine that this demographic fact alone would have led to Algerian independence—although in a different form, with very different consequences for all of the different ethnic and religious groups in Algeria and with different nationalist leaders than when independence was actually achieved in 1962 after eight years of horrible war.9 When the promise of assimilation was no longer believed in by moderate nationalist leaders, when the majority of the colonized no longer had any interest in becoming French, and as French colonialists continued to do whatever they could to prevent assimilation, then an armed struggle for national independence became the only alternative to colonialism. Camus’ political essays on Algeria recognize this basic fact and use it to support radical reforms in Algeria, to prevent the worst from happening.
Independence
We had been victims of a myth. In their turn, [the pieds-noirs] had been victims of a long mystification. They had been told for more than a century that Algeria, a French department, was only the prolongation of metropolitan France. They believed it. When the hour of truth rang, for them as for us, they felt betrayed. Thus, they fought bitterly to make this aberrant fiction last.
—Ferhat Abbas (1981)
Even though Camus’ pre–World War II series of articles on Kabylia are well known and acknowledged even by his most severe critics, it would most likely surprise most of those critics to discover that he continued to attack colonial injustices in the immediate postwar period, when he was editor-in-chief of the Resistance journal Combat. Colonialism in Algeria and European imperialism in general were for Camus never peripheral issues, neither before, during, nor after World War II. On the contrary, he was one of the very few voices in the immediate postwar period, when most of France was concerned only with rebuilding itself after the devastation of the war, to raise the issue of colonial injustices in Algeria. Camus argues in various essays that it is not only illogical and incoherent but profoundly unjust for the French, who had just regained their own independence and freedom, to continue to deny the same rights to Muslim Algerians, especially given that “hundreds of thousands of Arabs have spent the past two years fighting for the liberation of France.”10 For Algerians to have fought for the liberation of France during the war only to return to Algeria to discover that nothing had changed and that they and their families continued to be denied the rights of citizens was for Camus both the height of hypocrisy and a formula for disaster. He was right on both counts.
For him, the basic political issue was simple: freedom and justice could not be for some but not for others. In an article months earlier, Camus argues that France could not continue to have two different or even opposed policies concerning democracy, “one granting justice to the people of France and the other confirming injustice toward the Empire” (Combat [October 13, 1944], 71 [253]). His postwar essays provide ample evidence that he was in fact militantly anticolonialist, not just in terms of Algeria but also as concerns the entire French empire—in fact, as concerns all empires, including the rapidly expanding Soviet and American ones, and even in terms of what he feared was also an emerging Islamic empire. In another article, for example, he calls for “a policy of emancipation” in French Indochina: “Indochina will be with us if France leads the way by introducing both democracy and freedom there. But if we hesitate at all, Indochina will join forces with anyone at all, provided they are against us” (Combat [March 29, 1945], 183 [467]). France, of course, did not just hesitate but refused to implement policies of emancipation in its principal colonies, and thus independence in Vietnam and Algeria was achieved by other, more violent means and at a horrible cost in human lives—as Camus in 1945 predicted would be the case.
Camus’ most developed analysis of the injustices of colonialism in his editorials in Combat is contained in the series of articles entitled “Crisis in Algeria,” which he wrote after a trip through Algeria in April 1945 during another horrible famine. The series was published in Combat in May and June of 1945, immediately after the riots and massacres at Sétif and Guelema, which resulted in more than a hundred French deaths when demonstrations celebrating the end of World War II turned into riots. French men, women, and children were killed; some were savagely mutilated. In retaliation, thousands of Algerians were massacred by French civilians and the police.11 The massacre of Arab Algerians by French authorities and civilians nine years before the organization of an armed insurrection by the FLN is considered by many to be the undeclared beginning of the Algerian War. Camus was one of the very few French journalists at that time who attempted to analyze and explain the cause of the riots and who defended the rights of Arab Algerians in an atmosphere of intense racist hatred and demands for revenge—on the Left as well as the Right.12
In the “Crisis in Algeria” series, Camus demands both that Algeria not be forgotten in the euphoria of the liberation of metropolitan France and that “the Arab people” of Algeria need to be recognized by the French:
To begin with, I want to remind the French people of the fact that Algeria exists…. I want to point out that the Arab people also exist. By that I mean that they aren’t the wretched, faceless mob in which Westerners see nothing worth respecting or defending. On the contrary, they are a people of impressive traditions, whose virtues are eminently clear to anyone willing to approach them without prejudice. These people are not inferior except in regard to the conditions in which they must live, and we have as much to learn from them as they from us.
(Combat, 199–200 [499])
As in his essays before the war, recognition of the existence of “the Arab people” means recognizing Arab Algerians as a people different from but equal to the French—except in terms of the horrible conditions in which most are forced to live. Refusing to accept the indifference, if not racist hostility, of both metropolitan French and French Algerians toward people they generally considered, especially after Sétif, only as a “faceless mob,” Camus warns of increased violence if their traditions are not respected, their virtues not recognized, and immediate steps not taken to radically improve social, economic, and political conditions in Algeria. As was the case after he had published similar articles in 1939, it was a warning few in France took seriously.
In his postwar articles for Combat, Camus argues that the French should be especially sensitive to the injustices suffered by Algerians for a very particular reason: “We cannot remain indifferent to their suffering, because we have experienced it ourselves. Rather than respond with condemnations, let us try to understand the reasons for their demands and invoke on their behalf the same democratic principles that we claim for ourselves” (201 [501]). His position on Algeria is thus the same as on Indochina: the colonized have the right to the same freedoms and the same justice as colonizers. Nothing could be more obvious for him than this simple democratic principle, and yet nothing could be further from the reality of colonialism.
It is clear from reading his postwar articles that Camus’ position on assimilation had changed, in large part due to the fact that the moderate Algerian nationalist leaders he respected no longer believed in the promise themselves. Camus argues that it was the war itself that had drastically changed the thinking of moderate Algerians, and he disputes what he characterizes as a self-serving, hypocritical French government claim that 80 percent of Algerian subjects still desired to become French citizens. Even if this might have been true before the war, he argues that it is no longer the case in 1945, and “the primary responsibility for this is ours” (“Natives of North Africa Estranged from a Democracy from Which They Saw Themselves as Excluded Indefinitely,” Combat [May 18, 1945], 207 [514]). The dashed hopes of Algerians at the end of the war, when their social and political conditions did not improve and when violence against them in fact increased with the horrible massacres at Sétif and Guelema, were for Camus the signs that a majority of Algerians no longer believed they would ever be granted citizenship and treated as equals of the French. He recognized the serious consequences of the continued hostility of the colons to all reforms, the increasing violence of the most reactionary forces among Algerian colonialists, and the growing disappointment of the Arab and Berber moderates who had once believed in assimilation but were being forced by French policy to search for increasingly militant means to achieve freedom. Acknowledging the dangers of this increase in repression and violence, he considers not just the actual perpetrators of the crimes against innocent civilians but also French colonial policy in general to be responsible for the violence.
Given the general hostility among French colonialists to democratic reforms in Algeria, Camus uses a rhetorical device also found in a number of his other political essays: not a rhetorical question but rather what could be called a rhetorical “choice.” In this case, it is the choice he claims the French need to make between colonialism and democracy. To choose the continuation of colonialism would mean that France acknowledges that it considers “Algeria to be a conquered land whose subjects, stripped of all rights and burdened with additional duties, would be forced to live in absolute dependence on us” (208 [515]). To choose democracy for Algeria, on the contrary, would mean that France “attributed to its democratic principles a value universal enough that it could extend them to populations for which it had responsibility” (208, trans. mod. [515]). Camus openly acknowledges that the choice is more rhetorical than real, since it is not still to be made by the French but is a choice that they have already made. For the citizens of the French Republic, in principle, although in the colonies not in practice, had long before already chosen democracy. This choice of democracy was then reaffirmed in the Resistance and at the end of the war in the restoration of the French Republic: “Having chosen, and so that its words would have a meaning, it was obliged to follow the logic of its decision to the very end” (208, trans. mod. [515]). The “logic” of the choice of democracy demands that all Algerians be given the same rights and protections under the law as other French citizens. In practical terms as well, Camus claims this is the only reasonable political alternative to the increasingly oppressive nature of colonial Algeria and the violence it provokes among the colonized.
Camus provocatively calls for the “reconquest” of Algeria this time, however, not through military means and in order to subdue a rebellious or resistant native population, but rather through authentic radical reforms that would guarantee the same freedoms for all Algerians and ensure that the entire population participated fully in society and with equal rights. That this would mean the end of colonialism did not of course escape him, for in another article in the same series he declares that he is “convinced that the era of Western imperialism is over” (“It Is Justice That Will Save Algeria from Hatred” [May 23, 1945], 216 [531])—a proclamation that was just a bit premature as concerns French Algeria.
Camus also acknowledges that the fundamental problem in Algeria was not just that the Arab and Berber populations of Algeria no longer believed in the possibility of their assimilation into French culture and economic-political life. Even more serious was the fact that they also no longer believed in democracy itself, especially given the grotesque form in which it had always been presented to them in the colonies: “But the Arabs seem to have lost their faith in democracy, of which they were offered only a caricature. They hope to achieve by other means a goal that has never changed: an improvement in their condition” (Combat [May 18, 1945], 210 [518]). The caricature of democracy that colonized Algerians are offered in Algeria makes “democracy” itself the problem, not the solution, for it is French democracy that is responsible for the denial of basic democratic freedoms to the overwhelming majority of Algerians. Democracy could thus be said to be paradoxically at the same time the cause of and solution to colonial injustice. Which means that the struggle to put an end to injustice in Algeria must take the form of a struggle both with and against democracy in the name of democracy.
The chief issue for Camus in 1945 was not whether the French should still work for democracy in Algeria but rather how best to work for it. He was convinced that if nothing was done and conditions continued to worsen that the violence would also increase—which is exactly what occurred. In Camus’ view, though, neither France nor any other nation could claim to be a true democracy if it remained a colonial or imperialist power and subjugated and oppressed other peoples. No true democracy could deny to others the very freedoms it claimed for itself, but no true democracy had the right to impose by force their religion, culture, language, laws, or political system on another people either. Imperialist forms of democracy were thus for him no better than other forms of imperialism.
For Camus, the definitive sign that assimilation had finally been rejected by Arab Algerians was that the moderate nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas, who was erroneously blamed by French authorities and the press for the riots and massacres at Sétif, had rejected it. In a courageous and moving tribute to Abbas, Camus argues that even though Abbas had understood that a “politics of assimilation” had no chance of succeeding, at the same time he and the group he had founded, Les Amis du Manifeste (The Friends of the Manifesto), continued to occupy a middle ground between political extremes and had not yet been won over to the cause of what Camus calls “pure nationalism.” After having “turned his back on assimilation,” Abbas, Camus claims, “is calling for Algeria to be recognized as a nation linked to France by ties of federalism.” The fundamental principle of the manifesto “takes note of the failure of [French] assimilation policy and the need to recognize an Algerian nation linked to France but distinctive in character” (“Arabs Demand a Constitution and a Parliament for Algeria,” Combat [May 20–21, 1945], 212–213 [522–525]). Even though he does not explicitly support Abbas’s nationalist-federalist position in this article, Camus does not criticize it either. In the essays he writes during the Algerian War, it will in fact be the position Camus himself maintains, even long after Abbas has abandoned it.
Camus points out that if the policy of assimilation was indeed doomed, it was once again not Algerian Arabs but the French administration and powerful colonial interests that had condemned it to death, through a long history of broken promises and repressive actions taken against moderate nationalists such as Abbas. To answer legitimate demands with “imprisonment and repression,” which was what the French had done to Abbas after the massacres at Sétif, was, in Camus’ words, “stupidity, pure and simple” (214 [527]). Democratic France continued to fight against democracy in Algeria and considered any demand for equal rights for all Algerians to be a threat not just to its colonial investments but to the very existence of the French Republic. For Camus, nothing could have been more stupid and dangerous than this. Nothing could have been less democratic and more likely to fail and encourage the emergence of leaders more militantly nationalist than Abbas. Camus was one of the very few French political journalists at the time to acknowledge the importance of Abbas’s ideas, to defend them as a moderate, reasonable response to colonial injustices, and especially to consider them both Algeria’s and France’s best hope for a peaceful and just resolution to the increasingly violent conflicts such injustices provoked.
Given the continued mutual respect and admiration they felt for each other, in the midst of the Algerian War Abbas joined Camus in January 1956 in an “Appeal for a Civilian Truce.” And after the escalation of French repression soon after the appeal had failed, Abbas fled Algeria for Egypt, where he publicly announced his support of the FLN and agreed to serve as president of the GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic) from September 1958 until August 1961. Camus had to have clearly understood at that moment, if not before, what Abbas’s decision meant for his own hopes that a compromise could be achieved among moderate Algerian forces on both sides: if the moderate nationalist leader he most respected had not only joined the FLN but had also agreed to preside over its provisional government, then there were no longer any moderate nationalist leaders left in Algeria with whom to enter into dialogue and form an alliance.13 For the same reasons, the number of moderate pieds-noirs initially capable of forming such an alliance, always small in number, was also rapidly decreasing as the cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism continued. Camus’ search for a moderate “third way” to resolve the Algerian conflict, at least after 1956, was increasingly desperate and unrealistic. But it was not procolonialist.14
Life or Death?
France, we see, continues on. But behind it, Algeria dies.
—Albert Camus, “L’Algérie déchirée,” L’Express (October 1955)
Ferhat Abbas and the Oulemas joining the FLN was a sign that should have made [Camus] reflect…. It is symptomatic that Camus speaks of “Arabs,” then of “the Arab people,” but never of the Algerian people…. That is his error. It escapes him that [the Algerian nation] is being formed in the fight against French occupation.
—Jeanyves Guérin, Albert Camus: portrait de l’artiste en citoyen
Approximately a year before he went to Algiers to support the “Appeal for a Civilian Truce” organized by a group of his closest friends, Camus agreed to write a series of editorials on Algeria for the journal L’Express, in what would turn out to be another fruitless attempt to influence public opinion on Algeria. He also had a specific political goal as well: to facilitate the return to power of the moderate socialist leader Pierre Mendès-France, who Camus felt was the only politician who had a chance of ending the Algerian War in a way that would be fair to all Algerians.15 Camus wrote for L’Express from May 1955 until February 1956, when he stopped writing, it having become clear that the Appeal for a Civilian Truce was having no effects on the escalating violence of the war and because Mendès-France had been thwarted in his attempts to become prime minister. The editorials have a double emphasis: an insistence on the increasing gravity of the situation in Algeria (amidst what Camus claimed was the general indifference of the metropolitan French) and the desperate hope that a moderate and just resolution to the increasingly violent conflict could still be found. Camus repeatedly states that it is the “last chance” for a peaceful solution to the conflict before the violence veers completely out of control and makes any compromise impossible. Once again, the “last chance” was repeatedly missed by both sides.
Camus’ unwavering conviction was that Algeria and France in general, but more important, Arab, Berber, and French Algerians in particular, could never be separated from each other. As he put it in his “Appeal for a Civilian Truce,” “French and Arab solidarity is inevitable, in death as in life, in destruction as in hope” (Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 135 [Essais, 994]). The problem for him then was not whether but how best to create a society based on this solidarity. In spite of the increasingly deep political divisions that were greatly exacerbated by the war, Algerians in Camus’ mind still had no choice, since, as he repeatedly put it, “in Algeria French and Arabs are condemned to live or to die together.”16 He could not believe that the overwhelming majority would not choose life over death.
Even during the worst moments of the war, Camus continues to describe French and Arab Algerians as being part of the same “Algerian family.” This is a family, though, with no common ethnic or cultural background but constituted rather through a long history of living together/apart on the same land, in close proximity to but also radically separated from each other for more than a hundred years. Somehow this divided family had survived in spite of the economic inequalities, racial prejudices, and sociopolitical injustices suffered by the overwhelming majority of its members under the colonial system. Camus stubbornly persisted in the belief that this divided, dysfunctional family still had a chance of being reunited—or rather of being truly united for the first time—if the violence against civilians could be stopped and a dialogue begun between moderates on both sides of the conflict.17
Camus depicts the war in his editorials not as a political struggle for autonomy and national independence, but as a family tragedy, which explains (but not justifies) its unlimited violence: “All of the same tragic family whose members cut each others’ throats in the middle of the night, without recognizing each other, groping about in the dark in a mêlée of blind men…. Soon Algeria will be populated only by murderers or victims. Soon, only the dead will be innocent” (“Trêve pour les civils” [Truce for Civilians], L’Express [January 10, 1956] [Essais, 983]). As the war continues to escalate, every Algerian, Camus claims, using the same terminology he used in his 1946 series of articles for Combat, “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” is being transformed into either a victim or a murderer—or both at the same time. Only the murderers on one side or the other could emerge victorious in a total war of this type, with the result that the Algerian people as a whole would be the victims of a war allegedly being waged in their name, no matter which side ended up winning.
Camus’ last political essays constitute a desperate plea to end this tragic cycle of terror. But at the same time, at his moments of greatest despair, he also seems resigned to accepting the inevitability of the tragedy. There is no evidence in these editorials, however, that he ever contemplated supporting the only practical solution to the war: direct negotiations with the FLN. A number of Camus’ pieds-noirs friends on the Left did accept the inevitable in the hope that French Algerians would be able to live in an independent Algeria ruled by the FLN. But Camus never did. This does not make him a supporter of colonialism, but it does help explain why his last political essays seem the most pessimistic and at times bitter and have been generally considered even less relevant to the resolution of the war than his earlier writings.18
A Last Cry for Peace
Whatever the ancient and deep origins of the Algerian tragedy, one fact remains: no cause justifies the death of the innocent.
—Albert Camus, “Appeal for a Civilian Truce” (January 22, 1956)
On January 22, 1956, Camus traveled to Algiers to support the movement organized by several of his closest Algerian friends and deliver a speech published under the title “Appeal for a Civilian Truce.”19 Increasingly ignored by Parisian intellectuals and treated as a despised enemy by Algerian colons, only the FLN seemed to take the appeal at all seriously. But even if the motives of the FLN for doing so could very well have been primarily opportunistic, it is clear that the appeal, while not advocating national independence, tilts much more in that direction than in the direction of the continuation of colonialism in Algeria and the politics of proponents of Algérie française.20 It was the latter in fact who threatened Camus’ life and disrupted his talk, screaming threats such as “Death to Camus!” “Mendès-France to the gallows!” and “Down with the Jews!” outside the meeting hall where he spoke. These extremists understood what a civil truce would have meant to their cause. The FLN did as well, which is why it allowed its members to participate in the appeal and, without Camus’ knowledge, provide security for him while he was in Algiers.21
With abundant evidence of the hatred and divisions separating the different sides obvious immediately outside the meeting hall, Camus nevertheless states in his speech that his goal that night is “not to divide but unite,” to “bring together all Algerians, French or Arab, without their having to give up any of their convictions” (“Appeal for a Civilian Truce,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 131 [991]). Camus insists that his speech has “nothing to do with politics,” since he admits he is not a politician but rather a writer who has “devoted a part of his life to serving Algeria” and even more important, someone who was living “the Algerian calamity as a personal tragedy… incapable of rejoicing over any death whatsoever” (131–132 [991–992]). For Camus, what links the people assembled in the hall and by extension the great majority of those living in Algeria, what makes them all Algerians, is precisely their sorrow over the loss of innocent lives—regardless what justification is given for either the terrorist or counterterrorist acts responsible for the deaths. To be Algerian in his sense is to perceive the war as a tragedy for all Algerians because of the death of innocents, whatever one’s political position is or whatever the eventual outcome of the war would be.22
Camus proposes in his speech no specific political solution to the war and no formula for creating an Algerian state afterward. He offers no vision of a hypothesized social or political unity that could be discussed and debated in the hopes of an eventual agreement, given that neither side recognized the political legitimacy of the other side and he himself did not support the FLN or its demand for immediate and complete Algerian independence. More political debate would only lead to the continuation and escalation of the war; an appeal to the sorrow of the Algerian people could, on the contrary, produce a civilian truce, which he argues would itself be a sign of unity and could serve as the basis for further dialogue.23
Camus argues that no matter how horrible the threat of violence all Algerians had to face, no matter how outrageous and unacceptable the injustices suffered by civilians on both sides of the war, no matter how increasingly evident the signs of hatred of each side for the other were, something fundamental was still shared by Algerians on both sides of the war, and this was what allowed him to speak as an Algerian both to and for other Algerians. What was shared was not something that is in its essence political, not a common idea of the people, the community, or the nation, for the differences between the political visions were irreconcilable, and the war was being fought precisely to determine which side’s political vision would prevail and determine the future of Algeria. After 130 years of colonial oppression and two years of constantly escalating violence against civilians on both sides, it would not be an exaggeration to say that most no longer shared any common political ideal at all.
What Camus claims nevertheless still unites “French” and “Arab” men and women, what they continue to have in common despite their differences, and thus what makes it still possible for him to appeal to them collectively, are two sentiments: “love of our common land and anguish” (133 [993]). Camus does not address at great length Algerians’ love of a common land, for in the midst of the horrors of war this most likely would have had divisive effects. It is rather the anguish of an entire people that is the principal subject of his appeal: “anguish faced with a future that is closed off a little more every day, anguish faced with the threat of a deteriorating struggle, of an economic disequilibrium that is already serious and getting worse every day” (133–134 [993]). He considers this common anguish the sign that on some level even the most militant factions on each side realize that the war cannot be allowed to continue to escalate and increase the number of innocent victims on each side. The common anguish of Algerians is also a sign of what could be called an affective consensus that FLN terrorism against French civilians, French torture and summary execution of civilian suspects, and the indiscriminate bombing of suspected FLN villages should be immediately stopped. Camus thus directs his appeal to that part of even the most militant members on both sides that he states still “will not indulge in murder and hatred and that dreams of a happy Algeria” (134 [993]). If he addresses the Algerian people primarily as a people of anguish, it is because during the war it is only their anguish that continues to link them to each other, that remains the last but most profound sign that those on both sides still believe that what he calls a “happy Algeria” is possible.
Because of the anguish that he claims is a constitutive part of every Algerian, Camus argues that it is still possible to agree at the very least that innocent human lives should be spared and that the protection of innocent civilians should come first, before any other principle or goal. On this basic point, as we have seen is the case in many of his post–World-War-II political essays, he simply asserts that there is not and cannot be any disagreement over this principle—life has to come before politics (and even justice). For, if it does not, if the ends of ideology justify the means of political (and military) action, then terrorism, unlimited violence, and total destruction are the inevitable consequences.
But Camus does not just speak of a common anguish; he also addresses his comments to it: “It is to this anguish we want to address ourselves, even and especially of those who have already chosen sides” (134 [993]). The anguish Camus claims is felt by all Algerians, especially the anguish resulting from the loss of relatives, friends, and loved ones, a deep anguish that no act of revenge, no form of terrorism, no ultimate military or political victory, and no success in achieving specific political goals could ever negate, diminish, or give meaning to, this anguish is for him the sign that there already exists a consensus that the violence and terrorism against civilians on both sides should be stopped and that political differences could eventually be overcome. Based on their common experience of anguish, the different communities could finally begin to work together for common goals.
Anguish is a deeply personal, solitary feeling of loss; one person’s anguish is not another’s. But one person’s anguish can be recognized, even if not directly felt, by others, and in this way it can be shared, even if not experienced in the same way. Anguish has nothing, however, to do with the anger felt by crowds and mobs after a terrorist act has been committed or the mass hysteria that is publicly displayed in demonstrations and acts of collective outrage and revenge. Anguish is rather a feeling shared even more deeply and intimately with others because it does not justify revenge, since revenge cannot address or alleviate it. Anguish is the sign that something other than the struggle for and achievement of specific political ends is at stake in the struggle for justice, even at the most extreme and violent moments of war and revolution. Anguish indicates that the loss of family members, friends, and comrades can never be compensated for and thus never justified, whether in victory or defeat.
To recognize and address the anguish of others is also to recognize and address them as equals on a deep emotional level, regardless of whether they are friend or enemy, good or bad, one of us or one of them. To address anguish is to recognize the suffering and the right to anguish of others; it is to address others in terms of their losses and to acknowledge that their anguish is of the same nature and intensity as one’s own. Private anguish that is recognized and addressed could become the basis, Camus argues, not of a specific political solution to the war, but rather of a general acceptance of the limits of what should and can be done in the name of the opposing causes defended by each side. The recognition of the anguish of others would be the first step in ending terrorism, the torture of suspects, the indiscriminate bombing of villages, and summary executions. But without such an acceptance of limits and with the continued denial of the right to and recognition of the anguish of those on the other side, the violence and terror inflicted by each side on the other side (and on factions on its own side) would not just continue but escalate. In terms of anguish, there can be no such thing as “collateral damage,” since all damage to self and others is fundamental and of the same value and significance.
The only way to address the anguish of others, to speak of and to their anguish, is with the voice of anguish itself, that is, in a conditional, I am tempted to say, “literary,” voice that is not entirely one’s own, since no one can pretend to actually speak directly for or as the anguish of another. In any case, this is the voice Camus claims he would like to use: “If I had the power to give a voice to the solitude and anguish in each of us, that is the voice with which I would address you” (140 [998]). The voice of anguish cuts through the clash of ideologies and political, religious, and cultural differences, or the claims and justifications made by each side against the other, some more legitimate than others but all ultimately limited in the face of such anguish. Moreover, addressing and expressing their common anguish, it recognizes the responsibilities of both sides for the unjustifiable loss of innocent lives. To evoke such a shared voice, one that links Algerians together in terms of what separates them from and opposes them to each other, is in itself, if not the beginning of a particular form of dialogue, at least the sign of its possibility. Without such a shared/divided, conditional voice and the mutual recognition it implies, extremist politics and terror would continue to triumph and constantly increase, to the detriment and increased anguish of all.
Camus in his speech stubbornly refuses to abandon his conviction that “on the same land, one million Frenchmen established for a century, millions of Muslims, both Arabs and Berbers, settled in for centuries, and several strong and vibrant religious communities” could not, as he puts it, continue to “live together at the intersection of routes and races where history had placed them” (136, trans. mod. [995]). That shared history, Camus also argues, should not, however, be evoked as the justification either for continued French colonial domination and oppression or for the expulsion of French Algerians from Algeria. It is, rather, the sign of the possibility, up to then unrealized, of equal relations among the different peoples and cultures of Algeria. For Camus, the obvious cultural differences among the different populations constitutes not the justification for conflict but rather the basis for their living together in peace: “Our differences ought to help us rather than oppose us. As for me, here as in every other domain, I believe only in differences, not in uniformity” (136 [995]). To speak to and with the voice of anguish is also then to speak to and with the divided voice of cultural and political differences as well.
To believe in differences rather than uniformity is most definitely not to believe in the indivisible unity of a French Republic that includes Algeria as an integral part of itself but excludes the overwhelming majority of Algerians from citizenship. Nor is it to believe in the birth of “new men” through terrorism and a new and totally independent Algerian state composed of a unified Muslim people and with a single language, religion, and culture. It is not to believe in any political or religious ideology that considers difference to be a sign of inferiority or a threat to orthodoxy; any ideology or movement that legitimates injustices, crimes, terror, and war on the basis of a innate religious-cultural identity that defines and thus separates one group from other groups, one ethnicity from other ethnicities, one people from other peoples. It is rather to vigorously oppose colonialism and the oppression of the great majority of Algerians in the name of the integrity and grandeur of the French Republic and the fictional unity and identity of the French people. But it is also to reject the political program of the FLN and the fictive identity of the ethnic-religious Algerian state it is proposing, especially given the means being used to achieve it. Recognizing and speaking to/with the anguish of others thus means above all recognizing others’ differences and their right to difference. It means recognizing their worth, equality, and right to life—and their right to anguish over the loss of life.
Camus’ plea for a civilian truce thus turns both colonialism and the brutal anticolonialist war of national liberation on their heads, by making the radical differences among peoples living on the same land the principal reason for their reconciliation, the sign of a shared cultural nonidentity, of an “identity” experienced in terms of otherness, not sameness. Camus’ “Appeal for a Civilian Truce” acknowledges the fundamental role of cultural differences within Algeria (and France)—within the Algeria that Camus imagined already existed in the anguish of Algerians and underneath the horror of terrorism and that he argues it is still possible to (re)create once terrorism, torture, and summary executions have ended. His is the dream of an Algeria in which political, cultural, and religious differences would play a constructive rather than destructive role—an Algeria in which past injustices would not serve as the justification for present or future injustices. Where the recognition of the suffering and anguish of others would peacefully unite rather than violently oppose peoples with different languages, cultures, and religions—peoples who nevertheless shared in spite of all their antagonisms and bloodshed both their anguish and their profound attachment to the same land. The failure to create such a multidenominational, multicultural society in Algeria was of course devastating for all Algerians, but, as Ferhat Abbas argues in one of his most pessimistic postwar statements, it could also be a sign of the impossibility of the project being realized anywhere: “If Algeria, and in a more general way, North Africa, was not capable of realizing a synthesis between the Muslim East and a renewed Christian West, then no other part of the world could hope to succeed” (Autopsie d’une guerre, 159). It would at the very least appear to be true that such a synthesis has not yet been achieved today, that the struggle even to find a peaceful and equitable coexistence between East and West is still a difficult, ongoing struggle.
Camus’ “modest proposal” for a civilian truce was thus anything but modest. But when the French continued to torture and execute terrorist suspects, and then when the FLN once again began using terrorist bombs against civilian targets, it was clear that the appeal had been made in vain. Anguish was not listened to or addressed in the continued furor and folly of war, or if it was recognized, it was only “our” anguish and not “theirs,” which meant that anguish was used as the justification for more violence rather than as the basis for dialogue and peace. Camus’ pleas for a civilian truce clearly failed and turned out to be irrelevant to the last years of the war and its eventual outcome. One can only speculate what would have happened had Algerians gained their independence through earlier negotiations and before the escalation of terrorism and torture that characterized the Battle of Algiers in 1957. But any such speculations would necessarily have to acknowledge the role played by Camus in offering the possibility, no matter how unlikely, of an earlier and much less bloody resolution to the armed conflict and an end to colonialism in Algeria. For that is indeed what his plea advocated.24