Camus’ True Country
The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me, one where memories and names are preserved in measured spaces, the other where winds of sand erase all traces of men within immense spaces.
I have had a long affair with Algeria which will undoubtedly never end and which keeps me from being completely lucid…. [Algeria] is my true country.
—Albert Camus, “Short Guide for Cities Without a Past”
Camus refers to Algeria numerous times in his essays as his “true country.” But no matter how emotionally attached he was to Algeria, no matter how lyrically he describes its physical beauty and the generosity of its people, the Algeria depicted in his writings is anything but a political paradise. For as we have seen, in numerous essays from the late 1930s through 1958, Camus consistently denounces the radical separation between the “French” and “Arab” populations of Algeria and the oppression, humiliation, and exploitation of colonized Algerians as unacceptable injustices. It is true that Algeria is frequently represented in his work as a kind of earthly paradise, but even this picture is more complicated and nuanced than it might first appear.
For if Algeria appears in his writings as a nurturing Mediterranean land of great warmth and natural beauty, providing even the most destitute and oppressed Algerians with physical and aesthetic pleasures and momentary escapes from their destitution, oppression, and humiliation,1 it is also depicted in the expanses of the high plateaus, mountains, and deserts of its vast interior regions as a hostile, inhuman land where the poor are engaged in a life-and-death struggle not only against the injustices and oppression of the colonial system but also against the land and climate. These same areas also possess a powerful and stark beauty for those who, like the schoolteacher and his Arab prisoner in his short story “The Guest/Host,” feel they could never live anywhere else.2
The vast expanse of Algerian desert holds an important place in Camus’ work as well, but it is also presented in two radically different ways. As we have seen, in “The Renegade,” the desert is described as a climatic and sociopolitical hell whose unrelenting heat “drives men mad” (35 [1579]).3 It is the site of unrestricted violence resulting from the clash of absolute Truths and competing religions and cultures, with the stakes of the struggle being domination or enslavement, salvation or damnation, life or death. And yet the North African desert is also described in both “The Guest/ Host” and “The Adulterous Woman” as a limitless space of unrestricted freedom, an unstructured, open space inhabited only by nomads, whose meager existence and possessions make them “the lords” of a barren but majestic “kingdom” that is the diametric opposite of the divided, occupied space created by colonialist society. Camus’ true country is thus at the same time both hospitable and inhospitable, nurturing and deadly, earthly paradise and inhuman hell, a complicated, internally divided land impossible to reduce to any one of its conflicting parts.
This land of extremes is also the birth land and homeland of different and at times violently opposed peoples who have ethnic origins and cultural identities as varied as the different geographies and climates of the land itself. Camus’ true country is a country unwillingly shared by, unequally divided up amongst, and from the start violently contested by different peoples. For if, on the one hand, the land’s richness, beauty, and warmth, and, on the other, its barrenness and the harsh living conditions it imposes on its inhabitants both contribute to making Algeria his true country and affective homeland, they are the very same elements that exile him from Algeria and make him (and every other Algerian) also a stranger in his own land.
Camus’ Algeria is the homeland of a hybrid community that has not taken form or been realized as such, a community comprising different peoples who have no common language, culture, or religion but who do share a deep affective attachment to their birth land. This common attachment, which Camus presents as an indisputable fact, means that the attachment of no single individual or group is exclusive or can be privileged over any other. The legitimacy of an individual’s or a people’s claim to the land does not make any other individual’s or people’s claim any less legitimate.
For Camus, what could be called the right to affective attachment was not determined simply by longevity, by how many years, decades, or centuries a national, cultural, religious, or ethnic group could trace or project its own arrival and settlement in Algeria. He refused to accept any claim of a primary or exclusive right to the land based on the notion of a prior or more original possession of the land, any claim that Algeria was exclusively or primarily one national, religious, cultural, or ethnic group’s rather than another’s simply because one people settled there first, before others. To make such a claim would be to negate the history of all those who had arrived after the “original inhabitants” or “founding fathers” and would be equivalent to the chauvinistic claims of the “native French” who affirm their identity as true Frenchmen by tracing their ancestry back to the imaginary original inhabitants of France, “their ancestors, the Gaulois,” and then use that fictive identity as the proof that those arriving in France more recently are not truly French.
Such fantasies of original ancestry or founding fathers are treated by Camus as dangerous nationalist fictions, the very myths that are exploited by racist, fascist, and extremist colonialist movements on the Right and nationalist-revolutionary movements on the Left. Given the ethnic and cultural hybridity of Algeria produced by its highly conflicted colonial history, Camus’ Algeria is a land of cultural differences that no founding myth or nationalist project of unity (and thus exclusion) can effectively negate.
More fundamental and unalienable than any right founded in “first possession,” longevity, conquest, or actual “legal” possession of the land is the aesthetic or affective right of attachment. Unlike nationalist myths, the right of affective attachment is not exclusive to any group, religion, or ethnicity. All Algerians, all the different ethnicities and cultures inhabiting the same land, whether they originally came to Algeria for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, or for both reasons at the same time, have the right to this right. Because no legal documents of residency are necessary to establish such a right, because it is grounded in no economic or political principle of possession or sovereignty, the experience of living in the land and being receptive to its both nurturing beauty and harsh climate constitutes the sole condition for the right to this basic right.
Whatever the strictly political limitations of Camus’ imaginary construct of his true country or the problems with his vision of the Mediterranean in general as a multicultural, transnational site of cross-fertilization between East and West, an open space shared by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religions, cultures, and traditions, a constant of his political essays on Algeria is his opposition to all myths of racial or cultural superiority and the related fictions of a continuous national history and homogeneous national identity.4 Opposed to the economic and political realities of colonial Algeria, Camus in his essays and fictions constructs the image of a community whose identity as a people does not depend on the exclusion or oppression of any of its inhabitants, all of whom have or should have the same right to call themselves Algerians and claim Algeria as their true country. Algerians, no matter their ethnic background, religious affiliation, or cultural formation, no matter where their ancestors originally came from or with which ethnicity or nationality they are identified, are for Camus necessarily mixed. All in one way or another have disordered identities and in some sense are all “métis.”5
Belated “Firstness”
The First Man goes back over the entire route to discover its secret; he is not first. Every man is the first man, and no one is.
—Albert Camus, Carnets III
As we have seen, Camus vowed that he would make no further public statements on Algeria after the publication of Algerian Reports in 1958. During the period of his self-imposed silence and until his death, he nevertheless continued to write about his true country. His writing, however, took the form not of political essays but of an autobiographical novel, The First Man, whose unfinished manuscript was found with his body in the ruins of the automobile accident in which he died. The Algeria he vowed he would no longer speak about publicly or in a political mode, he instead wrote about in a fictional mode. As he had throughout his life, he once again turned to fiction when politics offered only what he felt were unacceptable alternatives, tragic impasses, and increasingly lethal consequences.
In his autobiographical novel, Camus gives his most detailed and elaborate picture of Algeria and his idealized view of the French Algerians who had inhabited it for over a century and whose immanent demise the novel also recounts. In this sense, The First Man could just as appropriately have been called The Last Man. Jacques Cormery, Camus’ fictional double,6 who is described in the novel as “the first man,” cannot, however, in any sense be considered an Algerian Adam, for his “original status” is highly paradoxical. He is not first in any chronological sense, nor is he the originator of the species. Nor is he even unique, since he is described as belonging to a “tribe,” all of whose members are also first men. He is “first” in a land that for generations has been inhabited by others, a land where different peoples with radically different ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, and linguistic and cultural practices have lived together but also apart from and, most often, in conflict with each other. Some Algerian “first men” of course are more recent arrivals in Algeria than others, but because they are all in some sense “first,” none can claim the right to have inhabited the land from the beginning or to have more right to inhabit it than others. None has the right to possess it exclusively. Longevity of habitation is thus no more legitimate a justification for an exclusive claim to the land than conquest, and neither can be evoked to legitimize the rights and privileges of some in order to deny those same rights and privileges to others.
To be an Algerian first man is to live in a land of different peoples so varied in cultural background that, no matter one’s national heritage, language, religion, and culture, it would be impossible to project a natural cultural, religious, or linguistic identity for all. It is to be first in a land where no one is ever really first or where the claim to be first in any absolute sense is blatantly absurd, given the turbulent and constantly changing history of the land, its many conquerors, immigrants, and inhabitants. All first men thus share what could be called “belated firstness”—all are first, but only belatedly, after the fact.
Being first thus does not make any individual or group “Algerian Adams” or “founding fathers,” for all are belated originators of a people who in fact would never grow or mature, “fathers” of a people who had and would continue to have no homogeneous national-cultural identity. Being a first man is thus to be at the same time originator and inheritor of a people who would remain virtual, more an idea or fiction of a people than a political reality. For a first man not only lives as if he had no predecessors, as if roots had little, if any, lasting consequences—both those of his own ancestors and those of peoples and cultures more indigenous or native to the land than his ancestors. He also bequeaths to subsequent generations the condition of “belated firstness,” which is in a sense his only legacy, with all heirs of first men orphans, each generation of first men “lost and found children [enfants trouvés et perdus]” (The First Man, 194 [179]). The “gift” of belated firstness is thus projected both backward onto previous generations and forward onto subsequent generations.7 If being-first were the characteristic of one generation, group, or man alone—or of one ethnicity, national group, culture, or religion—then the mythical first man of that ethnicity, group, culture, or religion would logically be the true and unique Algerian Adam, the founding father of all fathers, the first of the first. His people would be the original, true Algerian people. No such claim is or can be made for any first man in the Algeria depicted in the novel, however—not for Jacques Cormery and certainly not for French Algerians in general. Nor for any other individual or ethnic, cultural-religious, or national group.
Each generation of first men has to reestablish the roots that previous generations had failed to establish or that had been immediately destroyed, roots that remain for each generation, for each people, for all Algerians, always to be reestablished, as if for the first time. The novel’s highly mythologized and tragic account of the struggles of the first French colonizers to Algeria consists of the fragmented, incomplete stories of the inevitably brief lives and then disappearance of each successive generation of first men. It is characterized by the constant lack of enduring traces of any past that would determine the present or give a specific direction to the future:
All those generations, all those men having come from so many different countries… had disappeared without leaving a trace, closed in on themselves. An enormous oblivion spread over them, and in truth, that is what this land dispensed…. [Each one, like his father who died in France in World War I] returned to that immense oblivion that was the definitive homeland [patrie] of men of [this] race, the final destination of a life that began without roots.
(193–194, trans. mod. [179])
The history of first men is thus a repetitive, cyclical history without a determined chronology or genealogy, one in which each generation starts anew, discovering and reestablishing itself in a land of absent and immediately forgotten ancestors. The destiny of first men is to disappear, to leave behind few if any traces, and then be immediately forgotten. It is history without any lasting familial, ethnic, cultural, religious, or national memory. First men are the nomads of history, not the founding fathers of a specific people or nation. The First Man is thus the story of the life and death of a people without a determined history and who never in fact became a people.
Becoming “French”—From Anonymity to Assimilation
Yes, I have a country: the French language.
—Albert Camus, Carnets II (September 1950)
The sparse, fragmented history of first men is dominated by absence, death, oblivion, and, above all, anonymity. Anonymity is both a threat to and the privilege of each first man and each generation of first men; it is a cruel fate to be struggled against and a modest but ultimately glorious destiny that provides each succeeding generation with the same unlimited possibilities. No generation is encumbered with the weight of previous generations and their legacy and traditions; no first man has a determining familial, national, or cultural identity. What Algerian first men have in common with each other, and with the land itself, is thus not a fictional “biological,” cultural, religious, or national identity, but rather only “the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without pasts,” a common “anonymity, on the level of blood” (194, trans. mod. [180]). They thus share and are defined only by what could be called a “biological” and cultural nonidentity. This is undoubtedly why there are no developed descriptions of grands colons in Camus’ portraits of Algerians in this novel or anywhere else in his work, and why it is only the modest, poor, and destitute of Algeria who are for him the true Algerians and the true first men.
Camus’ Algerians are predominantly modest or extremely poor “French” Algerians of diverse European ancestries who, like the mother of his fictional double in the novel and his own illiterate mother, “did not know the history of France nor what history was” and for whom France itself was “an obscure place lost in a dim night” (67–68 [68–69]). But Camus’ Algerians also include the Arab and Berber “subjects” or “natives” of French Algeria as well, most often referred to in his works, as they were by pieds-noirs in general, simply as “the Arabs”—even though their stories are not told and they are rarely even given a name. Their history is even more obscure than that of the poor French because it is doubly ignored or repressed by colonial society. It is as if Camus’ poor Algerians in general all shared the anonymity imposed on colonized Algerians by the colonial system, as if all had anonymity as their origin and their destiny, whatever the political and cultural differences that separated them from one another. If he was criticized for presenting in The Stranger and “The Guest/Host” Arab characters as anonymous figures, the fate of all first men, like that of Meursault, is to become “Arab.” In any case, for Camus’ Algerians the idea of the French nation remains distant and obscure, while their “native land,” literally “the land of their flesh [patrie de chair]” (193 [179]), constitutes their immediate, concrete, and all-encompassing reality.8
The counterfigure to Camus’ portrait of anonymous Algerians is the well-established, patriotic, middle-class French family, portrayed as being as foreign, unreal, and distant from Jacques’ own family’s experience as is France itself.9 The most exotic of foreigners for Jacques is thus a classmate at the lycée who is a self-identified “true Frenchman”:
His family had a family home in France where he went on vacations… with an attic full of old trunks where they saved the family’s letters, souvenirs, photos. He knew the history of his grandparents and his great-grandparents…. When he spoke of France, he would say “our country,” and he accepted in advance the sacrifices that country might demand… whereas the notion of country [patrie] had no meaning to Jacques… for whom France remained absent.
(207–208, trans. mod. [190–191])
Family photos and fictions of the nation support each other and provide a clear image of who he is and what it means to be French. Jacques, who has no already determined sense of self, no sense of the nation, and no sense of belonging, is not just from a different social class than his French schoolmate, but also of “another species,” “with no past, no family home, no attic full of letters and photos.” Unlike the self-proclaimed “true French,” Jacques’ family members and closest friends are “citizens in theory of a nebulous nation” (209 [192]). National identity for them is anything but a family affair.
If poverty is a “fortress without drawbridges” (145 [138]), first men are all entrapped in their poverty, poor in name, possessions, heritage, and memory. It is above all poverty that produces and perpetuates anonymity and a sense of not belonging to any national chronology or family of names. Poverty also repeatedly interrupts the process of succession, the passing along from generation to generation of family and national identity and cultural possessions and traditions. Not only do first men have names that are immediately forgotten, but the same anonymity also defines both the harsh land where they are born and live and the unformed community of first men to which they belong. They belong first and foremost to a land, not a nation.
Neither the history of first men in general nor the story of the life of one first man in particular has a continuous, coherent, diachronic form, because political and social conflicts, war, poverty, famine, and disease have disrupted the “natural,” ordered, historical chronology that should have led from father to son and from one generation to the next. Fathers invariably die too young to establish any continuity: “The man buried under that slab, who had been his father, was younger than he…. Something here was not in the natural order and, in truth, there was not order but only madness and chaos when the son was older than the father” (25–26, trans. mod. [29–30]). The natural order of succession gives way to the madness and chaos resulting from the premature death of fathers and the gaps in chronology and reversals of generations it produces. Time is out of joint for all first men, who are never completely at home, not just in history in general but in their nation’s, their family’s, and even their own histories as well.
War
Waves of Arab and French Algerians, dressed in smart shining colors, straw hats on their heads, red-and-blue targets you could see for hundreds of meters, went over the top in droves into the fire, were destroyed in droves, and began to fertilize a narrow stretch of land…. Each day hundreds of new orphans, Arab and French, awakened in every corner of Algeria, sons and daughters without fathers who now have to learn to live without guidance and without heritage.
—Albert Camus, The First Man
Since the lives of first men leave few if any traces after them, their deaths have no meaning, even or especially when they die heroically for their own country. Or for a country that is not their own. As was the case for Camus’ own father, his fictional double’s father is one of the million and an half “French” soldiers who died anonymously in World War I, leaving behind only a meaningless inscription on a tombstone in a forgotten cemetery in mainland France. Whether they are legally citizens of France or colonial subjects of the nation for which they die, the corpses of Algerians are described as in the epigraph above as adding nothing to France’s history but only fertilizing its soil (69–70 [70]). Thousands of Algerians died in France “pour la patrie” but far away from their true country, giving their life for a fatherland that was at the same time and to very different degrees, depending on whether they were French citizens or native subjects, not theirs (or their fathers’ or mothers’) at all.
The history of first men is predominantly a history of conflict and war. In World War I, they are among the millions of soldiers slaughtered mechanically and dying anonymously on the battlefields of France. But since they are Algerian, their history is also defined by daily violence and fighting in both declared and undeclared colonial conflicts, which are presented in the novel as being different from the wars fought between established states or nations. Colonial conflicts are characterized less by military battles between armies than by massacres, atrocities, and acts of individual vengeance committed against both soldiers and civilians. Part of Jacques Cormery’s sparse family narrative is the story he is told of his father’s experience fighting in Morocco and being deeply disturbed after witnessing the grotesque effects not of an act of war but of vengeance: “[The first sentry’s] throat had been cut and that ghastly swelling in his mouth was his entire sexual organ…. A hundred meters further on, this time behind a large rock, the second sentinel was displayed in the same position” (65 [66]). In colonial conflicts, it is as if there are no limits imposed on violence, as if everything is permitted. It is as if such wars were fought by armies not just with the desire to defeat the enemy army but also out of a desire for personal and collective vengeance, which allowed for and even encouraged a form of violence beyond the violence of war itself. It is as if in colonial conflicts one was not just permitted to kill enemy soldiers but obliged to punish them after death. As if victory in battle was not the exclusive or perhaps even the primary or ultimate goal of such wars at all—as if the total destruction and humiliation of the other, even after death, in fact were.10
How is it possible to understand such acts? How should one react to a violence not just of war but outside and beyond war? The novel poses these questions, which were central to the debates surrounding the Algerian War in particular and which continue to be debated today in terms of ongoing conflicts and wars, but gives no single or definitive answer to them. Rather, in the novel Camus gives voice to two diametrically opposed positions concerning such excessive violence and atrocities. The first voice is that of Cormery’s father, who on finding the bodies of the castrated sentries denounces those responsible for such outrages and accuses them of not being men (65 [66]). The second voice is that of one of Jacques’ former schoolteachers who fought in Morocco with his father and who explains that he disagreed with Jacques’ father and told him that “for them [the Moroccans], that is how men should act, that we were in their homeland, that they were using any and all means” to defend it (65 [66]). For the teacher, the mutilation of the sentries’ bodies was a condemnable act, but still understandable. For Jacques’ father, it was incomprehensible, for no end could justify such means, no ideal could legitimate such atrocities, no defense of a homeland or struggle for independence could ever be considered just or even human if it depended on and legitimized such grotesque, inhuman acts. The problem the novel raises through this clash of opposed voices is thus not only the relation of ends and means but also what it means to remain “human” in the midst of war, especially an anticolonialist struggle for national independence. Remaining human for Jacques’ father means above all that there have to be limits imposed on actions, even or especially in war, and that not everything is or ever should be possible, no matter the legitimacy of the cause being pursued or defended.
The emotional exchange that the novel describes between the two men (between Jacques Cormery’s two fathers, the anonymous, dead father and one of the replacement schoolteacher fathers who at various moments supplemented the missing original) has to do with a question that every modern war, but especially anticolonialist wars of national independence, have raised: whether “inhuman acts” can ever be justified—either against enemy soldiers or innocent civilians. The debate is of course far from irrelevant today.
Responding to his friend’s “explanation” of the Moroccans’ acts, Jacques’s father protests:
Cormery’s face took on a stubborn look. “Maybe. But they’re wrong. A man doesn’t do that.” Levesque [his future son’s future schoolteacher] said that for them, there were certain circumstances in which a man had to be allowed to do anything [and destroy everything]. But Cormery had shouted as if crazed with anger: “No, a man restrains himself. That’s what a man is, or otherwise…” Then he calmed down. “As for me,” he said in a low voice, “I’m poor, I came from an orphanage, they put me in this uniform, they dragged me into the war, but I restrain myself.—“There are Frenchmen who don’t restrain themselves,” said Levesque. “Then they too, they aren’t men.” And suddenly he cried out: “Filthy race! What a race! All of them, all of them…” And then white as a sheet, he went into his tent.
(65–66, trans. mod. [66–67])
Albert Camus was most definitely the son of his fictional double’s father. He did inherit something from the father he never knew (and the father he recreated in his novel): his disgust at “inhuman acts” and his refusal to justify them under any circumstances. No matter the cause or the ultimate goal, no matter the injustices already suffered or the inhuman, criminal acts already committed by the enemy, Camus, as we have seen, repeatedly argues in his political essays on Algeria that there needs to be limits placed on all actions, that all men have to restrain themselves, that everything is not and should not be possible. For if men do not restrain themselves, they lose their humanity and become part of a “filthy race”—no matter which side of the struggle they are on, no matter their “race,” religion, or nationality. Without such restraints, all war becomes total war, and the mad vision expressed in “The Renegade” becomes in fact an accurate description of reality.
Both voices—the father’s voice, which expresses disgust and unequivocal condemnation of the mutilations, and the schoolteacher’s voice, which expresses the desire to understand and extend responsibility for such acts to both sides in the conflict—are components of what could be called the double voice Camus uses in this novel to address the issues of terrorism, counterterrorism, and colonial violence in general. The sentiments both voices express are part of the complex of contradictory sentiments he himself frequently expressed in his own voice and in his own name in his political essays on Algeria. And, as in the novel, the voice that condemns such atrocities invariably has the dominant, although not exclusive, role. There is invariably another voice in Camus’ voice that recognizes and understands acts committed in defense of a homeland or as part of a struggle against injustice, even if this voice never silences or even dominates the condemnatory voice or attempts to justify unjustifiable acts that reveal the fundamental inhumanity of both sides in such conflicts. Camus claims in his preface to Algerian Reports that he admires, but from afar, those who have such devotion to the cause of justice that they are willing to do anything, even sacrifice their own family, for the cause. But, as he puts it in words very close to those he attributes to his fictional father in the novel: “I am not of their race.”11
But what exactly is meant by “race” in this context, and who is really the “filthy race” denounced in the novel by Jacques Cormery’s father? Who are “all of them?” Even from the father’s perspective, the “filthy race” is composed not just of the actual perpetrators of the acts he denounces, that is, the Moroccans who killed and then maimed the French sentries as part of their struggle to liberate their homeland. Or by extension all Moroccans, all Arabs, all Muslims, all colonized. “All of them” is rather all of those men, in this context French and Arab alike, who either commit such acts or justify them before or after the fact. All those who are not “men enough” to “restrain themselves,” even if they are convinced that their cause is just—or especially if in fact their cause is just. The words attributed to Jacques Cormery’s father during a military campaign in Morocco set a limit on what “a man” can or should do. They set an absolute limit on violence and terror—whether during a declared war among established nations or a war fought by a colonized people against its oppressors and in the name of national independence and justice. To be “human” is to accept limits, and, first and foremost, the limits of the political, so that no atrocity of this type can ever be justified. There can perhaps be victory, but there can be no justice without such an acceptance of limits.
No matter how oppressed and victimized those using such tactics are, no matter how legitimate and just their defense of their homeland might be, Jacques’ father’s words deny anyone the right to commit such acts. Camus attributes these words to his fictional double’s father, a simple, unsophisticated, barely literate man who considers all atrocities of this sort to be the work of men who are not really men. A man who turns white with rage when he witnesses atrocities, just as he became physically sick when he witnessed the execution of a monstrous mass murderer who he had previously been convinced deserved to die for his crimes. There are things a father cannot stomach. Nor can the son: neither Cormery, the fictional son, nor Camus himself.
These words, or words very much like them, are also Camus’ first and last words on the subject of terrorism as well. Although they are not his only words. What Jacques Cormery and Albert Camus himself seem to have inherited from his/their father is their revulsion against acts of capital punishment, unrestrained violence, and all forms of calculated murder—whether strictly personal acts of revenge, planned military or paramilitary actions against civilians, or executions “legally” decided in courts of law. As we have seen, Camus argues in both The Rebel and “Reflections on the Guillotine” that for him it makes no difference whether acts of terror are sponsored and carried out by revolutionary movements in the name of national independence or by the state in the name of law and order. They are the acts of “a [filthy] race” of men of all national, ethnic, cultural, and “racial” backgrounds. Of both Europeans and non-Europeans alike, men of different political movements and parties, men from the Left as well as the Right, following different ideologies and pursuing different goals, whether just or unjust, but through unacceptable means. All nations, armies, police forces, governments, and religions can belong to “this race” when they exceed the limits of “the human,” when they join the race of believers in absolute Truth, the race of both terrorists and counterterrorists alike.
In the same section of the novel (but in its discontinuous fictional chronology, occurring fifty years later), the exact words, “filthy race [sale race]” (75 [74]), reappear, in this instance screamed by a pied-noir worker after witnessing the effects of a terrorist bomb in the streets of Algiers. His words and the threat they contain are directed at an Arab worker who in fact had nothing to do with the bombing but simply happened to be in the area when the bomb exploded and wounded or killed the people waiting at a tramway stop. “You’re all in it together, all you fucking sons-of-bitches,” screams the French Algerian worker at the Arab Algerian. And then to show who he means by “you,” after he has been restrained from attacking the Arab worker, he yells, “We should kill them all” (75 [74–75]). This overtly racist response to terrorism accuses not the fanaticism of specific individuals and political and military groups on both sides of the conflict for creating the climate of terror of which the bombing was a part, but one side, one “race,” one people alone. It accuses this people of being “inhuman” and makes “them all,” all “the Arabs,” uniquely responsible for the violence of the war and for all acts of terrorism. At the same time, it legitimizes in advance any response the French might make to such terrorism, no matter how extreme, unjust, criminal, and inhuman it would be. Thus it represents the mirror image of the terrorism it claims to abhor, and it perpetuates and increases terror by justifying mass murder as a response to murder, even advocating genocide, the murder “of all of them.” Terrorism, because it refuses to accept limits, has the murder of “all of them” as its ultimate, undeclared goal.
In the novel, Jacques rescues the Arab worker from the angry French crowd and in this instance prevents or at least delays the escalation of violence. This is exactly what Camus initially hoped his own and other moderate voices on both sides of the war would be able to do after armed conflict broke out in Algeria and the violence against civilians had escalated on both sides. Instead, as we have seen, each side continued to justify its own use of terrorism and its own crimes and acts of revenge by referring to the terrorism, atrocities, and crimes of the other side. Each decided to go beyond what “men” should do in order to respond to the terrorism of the other side. Each side, in Cormery’s father’s words, showed itself to be “a filthy race.”
A particularly grotesque terrorist act is described in the novel by a farmer who refuses to move off his farm, even though he realizes his resistance to what he sees as the inevitable departure of the French is fruitless: “Life in that region had become intolerable. You had to sleep with a gun. When the Raskil farm was attacked… the father and his two sons had their throats cut, the mother and daughter raped over and over, then killed” (179 [167]). Camus clearly sympathizes with the small pieds-noirs farmers who were the victims of such atrocities, and he gives voice in this novel to their anguish and concerns for the safety of their families. Neither in this novel nor elsewhere does Camus justify the oppressive and what he calls equally criminal actions of the French army and extremist colons, however, but he clearly wants what he considers the legitimate fears of modest pieds-noirs to be taken seriously and for civilians, all civilians, to be protected from terrorist acts.12
Because of his deep concerns for the safety of French Algerians, Camus was never able to move beyond the contradiction of advocating peace and justice for all communities in Algeria, on the one hand, but refusing all direct negotiations with the FLN, on the other. Of wanting French and Arab civilians to be protected from harm, but refusing to approve of the French army’s tactics and the crimes it committed, which the army and successive governments claimed were necessary to counter the terrorism of the FLN and protect the civilian population of Algeria. The novel proposes no way out of the dilemma, no political solution that could end the violence and the escalating cycle of terrorism. It rather narrates, before the fact, the last days of the French community of Algeria, anticipating an end that had not arrived by Camus’ death, but did occur not long after it.
The Origin of Violence and the Pursuit of Justice
It is not necessary to agree with all of their analyses or conclusions to acknowledge that Fanon and Sartre were not wrong to attack the systematic oppression and violence of colonial society or to defend the right of colonized Algerians to struggle against the French in order to institute an independent Algerian state. But this does not mean that one is obliged to accept their claim that the violence of the colonialist system itself, because it predates and is thus considered the origin of the violence directed against the French, legitimizes and excuses in advance all terrorist actions taken by the colonized in their struggle for independence and justice. What is most problematic and dangerous in their arguments is that they both make total violence, and thus terrorism, a virtue, the necessary means not just to independence but to the birth of “new men.” What should already be clear is that Camus’ “first man” is the antithesis of the “new man” of Fanon and Sartre.
Unwilling or unable to support a political solution that would end the war by legitimizing terrorism, that is, by either recognizing the FLN or defending the repressive, criminal counterterrorist tactics of the French army, Camus, as if acknowledging the impasse his own political stance was unable to break out of, through the voices of different fictional pieds-noirs characters in The First Man, situates the violence of colonialism as well as the counterviolence of the Algerian struggle for independence within a historical process of long, even mythical, duration. For the violence associated with the struggle for independence is presented both as directly growing out of colonialism and at the same time as not being entirely specific to the colonial era alone, but part of a longer, repetitive historical cycle, one whose ultimate origin is in the land itself.
For example, explaining why he is staying on his farm after the region has been evacuated by the French army, a pied-noir farmer admits he knows he will not succeed in defending his farm, but he prefers to “croak” on his land rather than abandon it. This is a position he knows will be generally misunderstood in Paris and by the French in general. He claims, however, that it will be understood (although not necessarily accepted) by other Algerians, especially Arabs. And because of this “understanding,” he projects a different outcome to the conflict than the victory of either side: “We were made to understand each other. As stupid and brutal as we are, but with the same blood of men. We’ll kill each other a little more, cut off each other’s balls and torture each other a bit. And then we’ll begin again living together as men. The land [le pays] wants that” (181, trans. mod. [168–169]). And it is clear that for the farmer, only Algerians, both French and Arab, understand they are of the same human species and that what the “land wants” is that they continue to live together “as men,” that is, as human beings who understand and accept the limits of what men can and should do. The problem also is how to know what the land wants and how to reconcile what it wants—whatever that might be—with what men want and to which they have the fundamental right: freedom and justice. And even more, how to reconcile the farmer’s right to continue to farm the land that is legally his under French law but that had originally been taken from Arab farmers. What the farmer says the land wants and what different Algerians themselves want most often constitute diametrically opposed desires.
A little more torture along with from time to time a few castrations and murders would seem to constitute the basis for the form of “living-together” that the farmer claims has always characterized the history of the different peoples inhabiting Algeria, a history that began well before the arrival of the French. And “what the land wants,” he claims, the land will eventually get. Alternating between murder, torture, castration, and peacefully living together, what the land really wants seems to be more of the same history: that of a divided community built on relations of both extreme violence and unlimited hospitality. A community of brothers who are also enemies and in constant combat, but who remain “equals” in dignity and grandeur, even if it is precisely social, political, and economic equality and respect that colonialism denies to those who are not allowed either to be French or even to affirm that they are Algerian. What the land seems to want is the continuation of a history that is shown in the novel to be rapidly coming to an end.13
But the words of a fictional pied-noir farmer should not be taken as directly expressing Camus’ own thoughts or political beliefs. They are not his own words but those of a fictional character in a novel, and they in fact give the opposite but potentially as dangerous a justification for violence as Fanon and Sartre. They also represent the opposite position from the one Camus took in numerous essays, since they serve to explain away the violence of the war and seem to ignore the responsibility of both the colonial system in general and French, Berber, and Arab Algerians in particular for it. The farmer who refuses to leave his land and yet has no hope of actually succeeding in defending it accepts the increased violence of the war as if it were not just a violent reaction to the inequalities and injustices of the French colonial system itself, but more the repetition of an original, precolonial violence, that of the struggle of all inhabitants with a land that “refused to be occupied and took its revenge on whatever it found” (190 [176]). The revenge of the land against its inhabitants is thus presented by him as being directed not just at its most recent conquerors and exploiters, the French colonizers, but also at its previous Spanish and Ottoman conquerors, and even its Arab and Berber inhabitants as well, against all those who at any time attempted to conquer, occupy, cultivate, and possess the land and make it exclusively their own. But even if this personification of the land does not legitimize a total war against oppressors, it also does not justify the colonialists’ occupation and exploitation of the land and its inhabitants either.
But the struggle against an unforgiving, hostile land is one thing, and the history of the violence of different peoples against each other is entirely another. If the FLN and their supporters have an interest in presenting all violence as originating in the colonial system, pieds-noirs on the contrary have an interest either in ascribing it to revolutionary fanatics or criminals (the FLN were typically called “bandits” by the pieds-noirs) or in situating the violence between colonizer and colonized, even the crimes committed during the war by both sides, within a longer cycle of violence. To inscribe colonial violence within a history of long, even infinite duration means that the first scene of violence—whether of conquest, settlement, revolt, or war—is never really the first, for there always exists a prior scene of violence against which to react and that can then be used to justify one’s own violent actions.
As the old pied-noir doctor from Jacques Cormery’s native village admits, “we shut them up in caves with their whole brood…. They cut the balls off the first Berbers, who themselves… and so on all the way back to the first criminal—you know, his name was Cain—and since then it’s been war; men are abominable, especially under a ferocious sun” (191 [177]).14 The problem is thus never really the first violence or the origin of violence, since the first crime and the first victim of violence are mythical and outside of history. This means that no subsequent injustice or murder can be considered original, nor can it be justified on the basis of a prior injustice or murder. For there is always another injustice, another murder, another violence, prior to the previous one, a prior victim before the murderer and a prior murderer before the victim. This abyssal history of violence exonerates no one but also makes no one and no one act entirely responsible for inaugurating the cycle.
This history thus makes it impossible to refer to a prior act of violence as the justification for the present or next act of violence. Rather than be an excuse for the continuation of violence, the reference to the mythical origin of violence should rather be seen as placing the responsibility for each terrorist act primarily on the shoulders of those who plan it, commit it, or justify it. In such a scenario, innocence can never be legitimately claimed for one’s own terrorist acts because of the guilt of others for prior terrorist acts.
The extension of the history of colonialism into the entire geographical history of the land and even into religious mythology and the biblical story of Cain and Abel thus does not have the effect of denying, mitigating, or legitimizing the horrible violence, crimes, and terrorism of the war itself. Or the responsibility of specific groups, political parties, and individuals for particular injustices, crimes, and terrorist acts. On the contrary, it highlights that responsibility all the more by refusing either side the right to first martyrdom, the “privilege” of first victimhood, and thus any justification for the violence and terror it inflicts on innocent civilians. If there is no Algerian Adam, there is also no original sin. The only way the cycle of terrorism can be broken is if both sides recognize that there is in fact no unique origin of violence, no first murder, and no first murderer, and therefore no first or pure victim. The cycle of terror and violence can be stopped, but not by more terrorism nor more counterterrorism, both of which only perpetuate it. The victory of one side at any one moment in such a cycle of violence and terrorism would not necessarily indicate then that the cycle of violence and terrorism had effectively ended. In fact, it would indicate that it had not.
Terrorism takes its victims among the innocent, and that is what Camus was unable to accept and felt should not be accepted by anyone. In a scene from The First Man that brings the war once again close to Jacques Cormery’s family, his mother is petrified by a terrorist bomb that explodes in the street below her apartment:
The explosion resounded at the very moment Lucie Cormery came back into the room. It sounded very close, enormous, as if it would never stop reverberating. It seemed that they had long since stopped hearing it, but the bulb in the dining-room light was still shaking behind its glass shell. His mother had recoiled to the back of the room, pale, her dark eyes full of a fear she could not control, and she was unsteady on her feet. “It’s here. It’s here,” she kept saying.
(74 [73–74])
Choosing to defend his mother before (not instead of) justice meant defending her against the possibility of being blown up inside her own apartment or in the street below. It meant recognizing her fears and anguish, and the fears and anguish of others like her, as legitimate; it meant that it was necessary to find other ways of achieving justice than the killing of her and other civilians as the means to an allegedly redemptive end—even an independent Algeria and the birth of new men.
As we have seen, after 1958 Camus refused to speak publicly or publish further essays on Algeria because of what he claimed were the potential consequences of political discourse in a generalized context of terror:
Terrorism as it is practiced in Algeria greatly influenced my attitude…. In my case, if I am aware that in criticizing the course of the rebellion, I risk giving a good conscience to those who for the longest time and in the most brazen way are most responsible for the Algerian drama, I never cease fearing that by pointing out the long series of French mistakes, I may, without running any risk myself, provide an alibi for the insane criminal who may throw his bomb into an innocent crowd that includes my family.
(preface to “Algerian Reports,” 113, trans. mod. [Essais, 892])
This statement reflects Camus’ total lack of confidence in politics to bring about a just resolution to the war and marks his retreat from public political involvement in Algeria. But as his autobiographical novel demonstrates, he never actually stopped writing about Algeria. He simply wrote in a fictional rather than political mode, a fiction that was also his autobiography and the story of the end of “his tribe,” the story of the last first man.
The End
Camus’ novel of the life of a first man and an anonymous people of first men was never completed. Even had he not died in an automobile accident at the age of forty-six, it could be argued that the novel never could have been—never should have been—completed. For as Camus suggests in one of the entries in the “Notes and Sketches” that are included at the end of the novel, it is a novel that logically needs to remain unfinished, since its project—to “snatch this poor family from the fate of the poor, which is to disappear from history without a trace. The Speechless Ones” (300, trans. mod. [293])—could not in any case be successfully realized and completed without giving the anonymous “poor family” a name, a history, a legacy, and thus “saving it,” but, at the same time, ending its anonymity and transforming it into the opposite of what it was: a family without (a) history. Such a history could not be written without deforming or destroying the family’s true dignity and value, its deep anonymous links to the land and to the other anonymous, speechless men and women of Algeria. The novel thus could not have succeeded except by failing; it could not leave a written chronology of this imaginary family and the fictional people to which the family belongs without making them less anonymous and giving them an identity, a history, a future, by making them a people. Without placing them at a distance from and even opposing them to the fiction of an Algeria of anonymous first men.
In the notes included in The First Man, however, Camus sketches out an incomplete conclusion of sorts for the unfinished life of the first man, as well as expresses the impossible, contradictory autobiographical project of the novel as a whole. The “conclusion” has the form of an impossible utopian wish or plea, perhaps even a prayer, but one that can never be answered or fulfilled. It is not clear to whom the plea is addressed, but it is made through and in terms of his mother, who of course was absolutely powerless to grant such a demand and who would never even be able to read or understand it:
Give back the land, the land that belongs to no one. Give back the land that is to be neither sold nor bought…. And he cried out, looking at his mother and then the others: “Give back the land. Give all the land to the poor, to those who have nothing and who are so poor that they never even wanted to have and to possess, to those in this land like her [his mother], the immense herd of the wretched, most of them Arab and a few French, who live and survive here through stubbornness and endurance, with the only pride that is worth anything in the world, that of the poor, give them the land as one gives what is sacred to those who are sacred, and then I, poor once more and definitively, cast into the worst of exiles at the very end of the earth, I will smile and die content, knowing that under the sun of my birth are at last reunited the land I loved so much and she and those others whom I revered.” (Then shall the great anonymity become fruitful and envelop me also—I shall return to this land.)
(318–319, trans. mod. [320–321])15
This impossible, hopeless wish or plea is rooted in despair. The end is near, and it is clearly too late for such wishes to be fulfilled—or even still made. And in colonial Algeria, it was perhaps always too late, no matter when such pleas for justice were made, always too late for them to be responded to and acted on. And who or what could ever have responded to such a plea in the first place?
Buried in the notes of an unfinished novel and without a clear place in that novel, this plea constitutes what could be called the last words of the first man. But they are also the last words of an imaginary community of Algerians, of a people who existed not in reality but in Camus’ fictions and in his deepest aspirations for Algeria and Algerians. Camus’ last gift, his last testimony to his “true country” and the Algerians he imagined inhabiting the “land of his flesh,” thus tells the impossible story of a people emerging out of, living in, and then once again destined to return to anonymity and to be forgotten. Words that lead to silence. The end of the first man, and of the novel The First Man as a whole, narrates in this way the end of colonialism in Algeria and tells the story of a people without a story or with one destined to be immediately forgotten in history. Whatever else he previously wished for Algeria, whatever he struggled for but failed to achieve, by the time he wrote these lines Camus himself could do no more than express his own desire for this anonymous end for himself and for the fiction of an Algerian people, “the immense herd of the wretched, most of them Arab and a few French,” he felt he belonged to and to whom he hoped until the end of his own life he could help bring justice.