Preface. A Voice from the Past

1. Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), vii [Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)]. Here and throughout this book, the first reference given will be to the English translation of the French text being cited, with the reference to the original French edition given in brackets. When an English translation of a text does not exist, the translation from the French is my own. Catherine Camus, whose comments appear only in the American edition of the novel and who describes herself as “neither a writer, nor an academic, nor even an expert on Camus,” but “just his daughter,” gives the following explanation for the thirty-four-year delay in publishing her father’s last work: “In denouncing totalitarianism, and in advocating a multicultural Algeria where both communities would enjoy the same rights, Camus antagonized both the right and the left. At the time of his death he was very much isolated and subject to attacks from all sides designed to destroy the man and the artist so that his ideas would have no impact…. In these circumstances, to have published an unfinished manuscript… might well have given ammunition to those who were saying Camus was through as a writer. His friends and my mother decided not to run that risk…. Between 1980 and 1985 voices began to be heard saying that perhaps Camus had not been so wrong, and little by little the old disputes died down” (vi–vii).

2. “‘You have to choose sides,’ cry those gorged on hatred. Yes! I have chosen. I have chosen my land [mon pays], I have chosen the Algeria of justice, where French and Arabs associate with each other freely.” Albert Camus, “Trêve pour les civils” Truce for Civilians], in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 984. This article originally appeared in the journal L’Express on January 10, 1956, and was part of a series entitled “L’Algérie déchirée” [Algeria Torn Apart].

Introduction. “The Algerian” in Camus

1. This quotation is taken from a statement given by Mohamed Dib at the Centre Culturel Algérien in Paris on March 17, 1995. Cited in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 765 [Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 420].

2. In my opinion, the most complete intellectual biographies of Albert Camus are Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979); Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life; and Patrick McCarthy, Camus: A Critical Study of His Life and Work (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982).

3. For an analysis of the “colonial relation” that in the colonies determines both colonizers and colonized, see Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965) [Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957)].

4. In Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) [Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)], Camus distinguishes nevertheless between the poverty of a family such as his own and complete destitution in the following description of a street in the neighborhood of his fictional double, Jacques Cormery: the “street, which led to the market, was dotted with garbage cans that famished Arabs or Moors, or sometimes an old Spanish tramp, had pried open at dawn to see if there was still something to be retrieved from what poor and thrifty families had so disdained they would throw it away” (139 [132]). Camus’ view of the multicultural Algeria experienced by the poor is perhaps best represented by the neighborhood in which Jacques’ kindly schoolteacher lives: “M. Bernard was facing Jacques in his small apartment in the winding streets of the Rovigo, almost at the foot of the Casbah, a district that overlooked the city and the sea, occupied by small shopkeepers of all races and all religions, where the homes smelled at once of spices and of poverty” (137 [129]).

5. Camus makes this statement in an essay entitled “A Short Guide for Cities Without a Past,” which he published in 1947, in his collection of lyrical essays, Summer [L’été], in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 147 [Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 850].

6. It could be argued that all Algerians, for vastly different reasons and with radically different consequences, suffered from what Jacques Derrida has termed, in describing his own case as a French-Algerian Jew, a “disorder of identity [un trouble de l’identité].” See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14 [Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 32].

7. The idea of “uprootedness” is of course central to the writings of the turn-of-the century extremist nationalist Maurice Barrès. The title of his best-known novel, Les déracinés (1897; Paris: Gallimard, 1988), designates those who are French in name only and who share none of the authentically rooted cultural values that for him constitute the essence of “Frenchness”—all cosmopolitans, “Orientals,” and especially Jews.

8. In his chapter on “The Colonizer Who Accepts [Himself] [“Le colonisateur qui s’accepte”] in The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi analyzes the fervent, exaggerated patriotism of the colonialist, the way he constantly evokes “the qualities of his native land—extolling them, exaggerating them—stressing its special traditions, its cultural originality” (58 [82]), as a justification for his own privileged status in the colonies. But the nationalism of the colon is selective, since he “directs his attention essentially to that aspect of his native country which tolerates his colonialist existence” and rejects all democratic reforms that “would challenge his way of life” and treats them as “a matter of life or death, a questioning of the sense of his life” (62, translation completed [85]).

9. Olivier Todd quotes the testimony of one of Camus’ closest Algerian friends, Charles Poncet, who, in “Dans le sillage de Camus,” an unpublished essay, states that it was only when German troops marched down the Champs-Elysées in June 1940 that “Camus, the Algerian, the man from Algiers, felt ‘truly French.’” Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, 113 [253].

10. Camus himself ironically encouraged such thinking by making provocative statements that challenged the self-righteous conformity of many on the Left, such as the one he made in his response to Francis Jeanson’s harsh critique of The Rebel [L’homme révolté] in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes: “If the truth appeared to me to be on the Right, I would be there” (in a letter addressed to Sartre as “Monsieur le Directeur” dated June 30, 1952, originally published in Les Temps Modernes, no. 82 [1952] and republished in Camus’ Essais, 754). It should be noted that the statement is made in the conditional mode and that, for Camus, “the truth” never appeared on the Right, where, whatever his shortcomings might have been, he never went.

11. Camus, The First Man, 317 [318].

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, “An Explication of the Stranger,” trans. Annette Michelson, in Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 108 [“Explication de L’etranger,” Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 99].

13. See the chapters in both Lottman and Todd on the Sartre-Camus antagonism. See also Germaine Brée, Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972), which staunchly defends Camus; and Ronald Aronson, who in Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) gives a more balanced account of their political differences but is ultimately, I think, more sympathetic to Sartre than to Camus.

14. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus: Of Europe and Africa (New York: The Viking Press, 1970).

15. Michael Walzer, “Albert Camus’s Algerian War,” in The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 137.

16. Edward W. Said, “Camus and the French Imperial Experience,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 174.

17. Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 20. On the same page, Judt defines irresponsibility as “the propensity in various spheres of public life to neglect or abandon intellectual, moral, or political responsibility.”

18. O’Brien is especially critical of Germaine Brée, the leading Camus critic of the 1950s and 1960s, who, he claims, “probably has done more than anyone else to shape ideas about Camus prevalent among English-speaking people,” and he mocks her assertions that the “working-class population of Belcourt,” the poor section of Algiers where Camus’ family lived, was “impervious to the racial barriers that exist in more prosperous middle-class milieux” or that “the Berber and Arab never seemed ‘strangers’ to Camus” (O’Brien, Albert Camus, 5–6). See Germaine Brée, Camus (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 13. It is true that Camus believed that there was less racism and fewer racial barriers among the different groups of the Algerian poor than among wealthy Algerians, mainly because the former lived in ethnically mixed neighborhoods and in much closer contact with Arabs, and each suffered from the same economic exploitation. O’Brien is dismissive of this idea: “A working-class population ‘impervious’ to racial barriers would be an unusual phenomenon. A population which could attain this condition when the barriers were not only ‘of race’ but also of religion, language, and culture, all reinforcing ‘race’… would be unique” (O’Brien, Albert Camus, 6). Camus in fact did believe that Algerians were unique—at least potentially so. O’Brien is certainly right to question Brée’s sweeping claim that Camus’ position on the Algerian War “seems now to have prevailed among Algerians whether of European or Arabic extraction” but is perhaps a bit too harsh in characterizing her evaluation from the perspective of independent Algeria as “a little comic. In 1959, when the statement was first written, it was just wrong” (O’Brien, Albert Camus, 7, referencing Brée, Camus, 5). Brée answers O’Brien in her later book, Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment, in which, criticizing O’Brien’s book, she asserts that there is no excuse “for the lack of serious documentation, the faulty quotations, erroneous statements, and arbitrary inferences that seriously mar an essay in which the author is anxious only to bring his interpretation into line with his own rather schematic view of Western guilt” (151).

19. Edward Said, for example, compares what he claims are Camus’ limitations, which he qualifies as “unacceptably paralyzing,” unfavorably to “the decolonizing literature of the time, whether French or Arab—Germaine Tillion, Kateb Yacine, Fanon, or Genet” (“Camus and the French Imperial Experience,” 185). And even though it is certainly true that Camus, unlike Sartre, would have vigorously opposed the revolutionary zeal of Fanon and Genet and considered their glorification of violence and indifference to its victims to be criminal, his relationship with Kateb Yacine was far more complicated than such a list suggests, even if it is certainly true that they disagreed politically, especially after Kateb supported the FLN. But Camus was in fact very close to Germaine Tillion and repeatedly praises her analyses of the devastation of the Kabyle region and her courageous efforts to bring about an end to the use of terrorism and torture in the war very shortly after his own efforts to produce a civilian truce had failed. If Tillion is considered to have written “decolonizing literature,” then Camus could or should be considered to have done the same. See Germaine Tillion, L’Algérie en 1957 (Paris: Minuit, 1957); and especially Les ennemis complémentaires (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1960). Nowhere is she closer to Camus than in statements such as the following, the first one appearing in a chapter entitled “The Link Between France and Algeria Is Not a Political Fiction”: “France and Algeria are indeed linked today through a double exodus that binds them beyond their will: the ancient exodus of ‘colons’ who came from Europe to which the modern exodus of Muslim workers to mainland France responds” (L’Algérie en 1957, 84). In Les ennemis complémentaires, a title that Camus himself could have used, Tillion states, “French and Algerian—it is not possible to conceive of two populations whose mutual dependence is more certain. We’ve ‘got’ them and they’ve ‘got’ us” (11).

20. For a more complete and judicious political interpretation of Camus’ political trajectory, see Jeanyves Guérin, Albert Camus: portrait de l’artiste en citoyen (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1993); as well as the collection of essays he edited entitled Camus et la politique: actes du colloque de Nanterre 5–7 juin 1985 (Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan, 1986). The most interesting study in English of Camus’ political perspective in my mind is Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). See especially chapter 6, “Swimming Against the Tide,” in which Isaac gives a thorough and, I feel, judicious assessment of Camus’ Algerian politics and compares his position on Algeria with Arendt’s on Israel.

1. The Place of the Other

1. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965) [Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957)] describes in great detail the colonialists’ mythical and stereotypically racist portrait of the colonized, which he argues is made up of images that serve as “excuses without which the presence and conduct of a colonizer… would seem shocking” (79 [101]). Images of the colonized’s “often-cited laziness,” for “nothing could better justify the colonizer’s privileged position than his industry, and nothing could better justify the colonized’s destitution than his indolence” (79 [101]); of the colonized as a “weakling” (débile), since “this deficiency requires protection (81–82 [103]); of the colonized as “a wicked, backward person with evil, thievish, somewhat sadistic instincts,” which justifies the colonizer’s “police and his legitimate severity” (82 [104]); of “the colonized’s lack of desires, his ineptitude for comfort, science, progress, his astonishing familiarity with poverty,” which explains why colonizers need to accept the destitution of the colonized and why the colonized should not be pushed into “the disadvantages of civilization” (82 [104]); and finally of the colonized’s “notorious ingratitude,” which calls attention to “everything the colonized owe the colonizers, that all improvements the colonizer has made have been wasted, and that it is fruitless to try to improve the state of the colonized” (82, trans. modified [104]).

2. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus: Of Europe and Africa (New York: The Viking Press, 1970) argues that “despite [Camus’] revulsion from the methods of the repression, his position was necessarily one of support for repression, since he constantly opposed negotiation with the actual leaders of the rebellion, the FLN…. The rejection of negotiation is basic and necessarily implies support for the substance, if not for the details of the methods, of the French government’s policy of pacification…. The regime of ‘free association’ which he foresaw required French military victory over the insurgents” (90–91). As we will see in subsequent chapters, O’Brien’s analysis constitutes a simplification and serious distortion of Camus’ actual position, and his generalizations are often hastily made and lacking in convincing supporting evidence.

3. Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: René Julliard, 1961).

4. For example, Nora interprets the warm greetings he received from pieds-noirs in the following way: “They are ready to smother you in their arms; cordiality in all circumstances, aggressive hospitality, and the outspokenness that you are invited to share are neither Mediterranean specialties, nor borrowings from Islam, as they would have you believe. They are the first philters of an Algerian nationalism. If you give into its warm greetings even just a little, you are immediately incorporated into it, initiated at little cost, devoured, and soon digested” (Les Français d’Algérie, 44). A very different picture of what could be found under the surface of colonialism is presented by the pied-noir writer Jean Pélégri, in Ma mère l’Algérie (Arles: Actes Sud, 1990): “It was not difficult to foresee that one day, at the moment when metropolitan France was washing its hands of it, pieds-noirs would be made scapegoats and held responsible for everything. But I certainly knew… that if they most often manifested an unjust or racist behavior as concerns political rights… they were also often, in private, open, warm, brotherly, and that they had constituted a multicultural and often baroque community, in which could be found all the faults but also all the qualities of Mediterranean peoples: the sense of hospitality, the joy of living, the need to dramatize daily life…. I also knew that under the apparent and official history of Algeria, a history of colonial injustice and inequality, another history was unfolding, that of the daily relations between the pieds-noirs and the Algerians, and this history was just as real as the official one but underground. A history that in spite of the colonial system was made up of meetings, consultations, exchanges, and sometimes tenderness. This was my people.” (71–72). This was Camus’ Algerian people as well.

5. This section heading is intended to recall René Girard’s seminal essay on Camus, “Camus’s Stranger Retried,” in “To Double-Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; originally published in PMLA 79 [December 1964]). Girard’s own retrial of the novel is not concerned, as I am here, with the question of colonialism, however, but rather with setting the record straight as concerns its “Romantic” characteristics and the way in which Meursault emerges from his trial as a hero, with the society that condemns him to death for his crimes in the position of the guilty party. Girard criticizes the opposition he argues the novel establishes between the Self (authenticity) and Others (inauthenticity), which he claims is “the final democratization of the Romantic myth, the universal symbol of the separated ego in a world where almost everyone feels like an ‘outsider’” (22). Girard’s argument is that “the outsider is really inside, but he is not aware of it,” which he claims is what Camus reveals in The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: The Modern Library, 1958), 34.

6. “The colonial relationship which I had tried to define chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable dependence, molded their respective characters and dictated their conduct.” Memmi, 1965 preface to The Colonizer and the Colonized, ix [13–14].

7. Meursault first describes the murder “as it was occurring” and later acknowledges his responsibility for the death of the Arab several times more in the novel, once immediately after he is arrested: “On the day of my arrest they put me in a room where there were already several other prisoners, mostly Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked me what I’d done. I said that I’d killed an Arab, and they became silent.” Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 89, trans. modified [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), 1177]. I have frequently modified this translation to have it conform more closely to the French text. Patrick Mc-Carthy is one of the very few critics who have commented on the importance of this scene in terms of how it reflects the change in Meursault’s place in colonial society after he is arrested: “This is a key paragraph because it reveals the identification between Meursault and the Arab. In a colonial society the prisons will be populated chiefly by the colonized, who will not recognize themselves as criminals of specific crimes but will consider it normal to be in prison. So they welcome Meursault as one of them, even when he tells them he has killed an Arab, they do not ask for explanations because they do not believe in the pseudo-logic of the French state. In this they are different from the judges and akin to Meursault. By sleeping in the same way as they do, Meursault becomes, albeit briefly, an Arab. Thus the pied-noir’s quest for authenticity is realized, but in a paradoxical manner. A prisoner of the state, he shares the condition of the colonized.” Patrick McCarthy, The Stranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 58. I would take exception with McCarthy’s analysis only concerning the brevity of Meursault becoming an Arab, or rather, occupying the place of the Arab in colonial society. As will become clear later in the chapter, in my analysis, when Meursault “becomes… an Arab” and shares “the condition of the colonized,” it is a definitive change of condition for which he pays with his life.

8. Albert Camus, “Preface to The Stranger,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 335–337 [Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 1928].

9. Roland Barthes was perhaps the first critic to question whether Meursault is really condemned by society for not conforming to its practices or overtly challenging them, that is, for being a rebel. Barthes claims rather that it is Meursault’s “opaqueness” that troubles society the most, because it cannot support his foreign and yet at the same time familiar look: “Meursault rebel, society would have fought him; Meursault opaque, that is the world put into question, and society can only reject him with its most intense horror as an object soiled by its own alterity.” In “L’etranger, roman solaire,” originally published in the Bulletin du Club du Meilleur Livre, no. 12 (April 1954); republished in Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 1942–1965 (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 398.

10. In June 1947, Camus wrote in his notebooks “that it is impossible to say whether a person is absolutely guilty and consequently impossible to proclaim total punishment.” Albert Camus, Carnets II: janvier 1942–mars 1951 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 200. In 1957, in “Reflections on the Guillotine,” he challenges the right of society to impose the ultimate punishment on anyone: “Capital punishment is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as the concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder, to be sure, and one that arithmetically pays for the murder committed. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation, an organization, in short, which is in itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence…. Capital punishment… is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared.” Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1961), 199 [Essais, 1039]. He also argues that “every society has the criminals it deserves” (206 [1044]). See chapter 4 for a more developed analysis of Camus’ position on capital punishment and its relation to his perspective on the terrorism and torture used by the opposing sides during the Algerian War.

11. Given what he characterizes as the multiple but inescapable roles of the sun in the novel, Barthes considers The Stranger to be a modern tragedy: “The mixture of the sun and of nothingness sustains each word of the novel: Meursault battles not only against an idea of the world but also against a fatality—the Sun…. Because the Sun is everything here: warmth, drowsiness, celebration, sadness, power, madness, cause, and illumination. And it is this ambiguity between the Sun-Warmth and the Sun-Lucidity that makes The Stranger a tragedy.” Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, 400.

12. The following is the description of the murder in the novel in Meursault’s words: “The whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back…. The heat of the sun was beginning to scorch my cheeks, and I felt beads of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. It was the same sun as when I buried my mother, and just as then, my forehead really hurt and all my veins seemed to be bursting through the skin. Because of this burning sensation that I couldn’t stand any longer, I took a step forward. I knew that was stupid, that I couldn’t get rid of the sun by moving just one step. But I took that step, just one step forward. And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up in the sunlight for me to see. The light shot out onto the steel, and it was as if a long shining blade had penetrated my forehead…. I felt only the cymbals of the sun on my forehead and, less distinctly, the sharp blade of light flashing from the knife still in front of me. This blazing sword ravaged my eyelashes and gouged my suffering eyes…. It seemed to me as if the sky had opened up from end to end to let fire rain down. My entire being tightened and I closed my hand on the revolver. The trigger gave” (75–76, trans. mod. [1168]). In this description, it is the sun, not Meursault, that is the agent of death.

13. Numerous critics, including O’Brien, have argued that Meursault’s entire trial is a gross distortion of colonial justice, since they claim that a French citizen in colonial Algeria would never have been accused and convicted of a capital offense for killing an Arab. The irony, of course, is that Meursault is not in fact convicted for that crime. In his courageous study of the use of torture during the Algerian War, which includes a discussion of the colonial legal system, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, however, disagrees that a pied-noir would not have been brought to justice for killing an Arab: “From a juridical point of view, nothing distinguishes the public prosecutor of the appeals court in Algiers… from his counterpart in Riom or Aix-en-Provence, and in his celebrated novel The Stranger, Albert Camus… with definite verisimilitude was able to imagine the death sentence and execution of a European for the murder of a Muslim.” Pierre Vidal-Naquet, La torture dans la république (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), 22.

14. In his notebooks, Camus makes the following statement about the novel: “You are never condemned for the crime you think you will be.” Albert Camus, Carnets II, janvier 42 à mars 51 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 29–30. Meursault’s most serious crime in the eyes of the court and society, the one for which he is ultimately convicted, is the crime of not crying at his mother’s funeral, which for the prosecutor makes him a man who “morally killed his mother” (128 [1197]). When Meursault’s defense lawyer asks if Meursault is “on trial for having buried his mother or for killing a man,” the prosecutor replies, “speaking with great vehemence, ‘I accuse the prisoner of burying his mother with a criminal’s heart’” (122, trans. mod. [1194]). The prosecutor also claims that Meursault’s crime is worse than the next crime on the docket, a parricide: “the horror of that crime paled beside the loathing inspired by my callousness” (138 [1197]). Because of what he is, Meursault is thus guilty of a more monstrous crime than even what the prosecutor calls the unimaginable crime of parricide.

15. Assimilation and full French citizenship was possible for a very limited number of assimilated Muslims, but only if they renounced their religious affiliation. The same situation existed for Algerian Jews until 1870, when the Crémieux Decree granted French citizenship to all the Jews of Algeria. For an analysis of Vichy policy toward Jews, see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); and Richard Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (New York: New York University Press, 1996). In terms of the role played by religion in Vichy anti-Semitic laws and the contradictory logic of assimilation in general, see David Carroll, “What It Meant to Be a ‘Jew’ in Vichy France: Xavier Vallat, State Anti-Semitism, and the Question of Assimilation,” SubStance 27, no. 3 (1998).

16. The woman is described in the novel only as “a Moor.” Even though her name is not revealed in the novel, Meursault acknowledges that Raymond revealed it to him: “The moment [Raymond] mentioned the woman’s name, I realized she was a Moor” (40–41 [1148]). In fact, she is the sister of the man Meursault eventually kills. It should be noted again that the murder is itself not either the first or the last violent act in a series of violent acts. The first aggression is committed by Meursault’s friend, Raymond, a French pimp who viciously beats his Arab mistress, with Meursault refusing to intervene; the last act in the series will be committed by the State, with the execution of Meursault. Between Raymond’s aggression and Meursault’s execution, a fight occurs on the beach between Meursault’s French friends and the group of anonymous Arabs that includes Raymond’s mistress’s brother, during which Raymond is stabbed. The murder of the Arab, who is unnamed but identified nonetheless by his relation to the victim of Raymond’s assault, should thus be situated within the entire series of violent acts and not treated as if it were a completely isolated occurrence or as if it were the first time Meursault had any involvement in or responsibility for the escalating violence between the two groups, who recognize each other and are in constant and violent contact with each other.

17. I borrow the term from Etienne Balibar: “I apply the term ‘fictive ethnicity’ to the community instituted by the nation-state. This is an intentionally complex expression in which the term fiction… should not be taken in the sense of a pure and simple illusion without historical effects, but must, on the contrary, be understood by analogy with the person ficta of the juridical tradition in the sense of an institutional effect, a ‘fabrication.’ No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicized—that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community.” Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (New York and London: Verso, 1991), 96 [Race, nation, classe: les identités ambigues (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 130]. Balibar argues that the two principal and often competing means for producing ethnicity are language and race, the latter being what he calls a “second-degree fiction” that “also derives its effectiveness from everyday practices, relations which immediately structure the ‘life’ of individuals” (99 [135–36]).

18. “I do not need to know why Dreyfus betrayed. Psychologically speaking, it is enough for me to know that he is capable of betrayal to know that he betrayed. The gap is filled in. That Dreyfus is capable of betrayal, I conclude from his race.” Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Editions du Trident, 1987), 111–112.

19. Michel Ansky, Les juifs d’Algérie: du décret crémieux à la libération (Paris: Editions du Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, 1950), 88.

2. Colonial Borders

1. Carlier’s essay is included in the collection edited by Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, La guerre d’Algérie: 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004), and is a subtle analysis of colonialist violence that could be contrasted with both Franz Fanon’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s mystifications of revolutionary third-world violence, which are discussed below, in chapter 5.

2. Balibar’s essay was first delivered as a talk at a colloquium entitled “Algérie-France: regards croisés” at the Collège International de Philosophie (with the collaboration of the University of Oran and La Maison des Écrivains), May 18–20, 1995. It was published in Etienne Balibar, Droit de cité: culture et politique en démocratie (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 1998), 73–88.

3. See especially Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1991). Stora argues that “an entire system of subtle lies and repressions organizes ‘Algerian memory.’ And this denial continues to eat away like a cancer, like gangrene, at the very foundations of French society…. For the French, a ‘war without a name’; for the Algerians, a ‘revolution without a face’” (7–8).

4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xx, my emphasis. The emphasis is meant to indicate my own reservations concerning the absolute nature of the break between colonialist and postcolonialist eras and thus over whether the postcolonial era is really the first time that the history of cultures can or should be studied as hybrid rather than monolithic.

5. The Fall, of course, takes place in Amsterdam, a cold, rainy, and culturally overloaded “hell,” a city with mass extermination as part of its recent history, one that represents the diametric opposite of the sun-drenched and culturally deficient Algerian cities of Camus’ other works. In the novel, Jean-Baptiste Clamence describes Amsterdam in the following way: “Holland is a dream, monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke…. We are at the heart of things here. Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life—and hence its crimes—becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle.” Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: The Modern Library, 1958), 13–14 [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), 1482–1483]. Later, he describes the city as “a soggy hell, indeed! Everything horizontal, no relief; space is colorless, and life dead. Is it not universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible?” (72 [1512]).

6. René Lespès, Oran: etude de géographie et d’histoire urbaine (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1938), published as part of the “1830–1930 Collection du Centenaire de l’Algérie.”

7. The category itself of “Native” (Indigène) until 1870 included both Muslims and Jews. In 1872, however, out of a total population of 41,130, Lespès lists 35,834 inhabitants of Oran as being “Europeans,” with only 5,296 considered “Natives,” a decrease of 3,500 from 1866. Lespès explains this change by saying that the number of Europeans was, as he puts it, “in reality 30,534 without Israelites” (103). This is because the Jewish population of the city had moved from the category of “Natives” to that of “Europeans” when in 1870, with the Décret Crémieux, Algerian Jews were granted citizenship and thus full “European status.” But a decree can always be undone, and the Jews of Algeria, who at the start of World War II had been citizens since 1870, would also be the only segment of the population to lose their status as French citizens (and thus as “Europeans”), when the Décret was rescinded by the Maréchal Pétain on October 7, 1940.

8. In 1901, for example, the Muslim population was still only 12 percent of the total population of Oran, while in Algiers it was 21.8 percent. In 1926, the number of Muslims in Oran increased to 17.1 percent; in 1931, to 20 percent; and in 1936, to 23.7 percent of the total population.

9. The term “internal exclusion” (exclusion intérieure) is used by Etienne Balibar in reference to the heritage of colonialism. See especially his essay “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (New York and London: Verso, 1991) [Race, nation, classe: les identités ambigues (Paris: La Découverte, 1997)]: “We must, however, observe that the exteriority of the ‘native’ populations in colonization, or rather the representation of that state as racial exteriority… is by no means a given state of affairs. It was in fact produced and reproduced within the very space constituted by conquest and colonization… and therefore on the basis of a certain interiority. Otherwise one could not explain the ambivalence of the dual movement of assimilation and exclusion of the ‘natives’ nor the way in which the subhuman nature attributed to the colonized comes to determine the self-image developed within the colonized nations in the period when the world was being divided up. The heritage of colonialism is, in reality, a fluctuating combination of continued exteriorization and ‘internal exclusion’” (42–43 [61–62]). See also Suzanne Gearhart’s analysis of the implications of Balibar’s use of this term in “Inclusions: Psychoanalysis, Trans-nationalism, and Minority Cultures,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 27–40.

10. Albert Memmi points out that “within the colonial framework, assimilation has turned out to be impossible.” First, because “the candidate for assimilation almost always comes to tire of the exorbitant price which he must pay and which he never finishes owing.” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 123 [Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 140]. And second, because “even if he agrees to everything, he would not be saved. In order to be assimilated, it is not enough to leave one’s group, but one must enter another; now he meets with the colonizer’s rejection” (124 [140]). Memmi concludes that “assimilation and colonization are contradictory” (127 [143]). The problem of assimilation will be discussed at greater length in chapter 6.

11. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus: Of Europe and Africa (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), chap. 2.

12. In equally inflammatory language, Césaire claims that the “very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century” has “a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon [un Hitler qui s’ignore, qu’Hitler l’habite, qu’Hitler est son démon].” Césaire further asserts that the crime for which the white European cannot pardon Hitler is “not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. John Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 14 [Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955), 12].

13. See chapter 6 for a more developed analysis of Camus’ editorials on Algeria for Combat, all of which are included in Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006) [Camus à Combat : éditoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus 1944–1947 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002)]. At the time of the massacre of Arab Algerians in Sétif by French Algerians, the Communist newspaper L’Humanité called the demonstrations against colonial rule reactionary riots and “the provocation of Hitlerian agents.” Quoted in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 378, but not included in the abridged translation of his work, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

14. In The Rebel as well, Camus claims that the “crimes of the Hitler regime, among them the massacre of the Jews, are without precedent in history, because history gives no other example of a doctrine of such total destruction being able to seize the levers of command of a civilized nation.” Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 184 [L’homme révolté, in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 590]. After discussing the Nazi destruction of the rebellious town of Lidice and the execution of all its male inhabitants, Camus adds the following in a footnote: “It is striking to note that atrocities reminiscent of these excesses were committed in colonies (India, 1857; Algeria, 1945; etc.) by European nations that in reality obeyed the same irrational prejudices of racial superiority” (185 [590]).

15. The events of the war that touched the citizens of Oran most directly were undoubtedly the British destruction of the French fleet in the port of Mers-el-Kebir, located on the outskirts of Oran, and the abolition of the Décret Crémieux by the Vichy government, which retracted the citizenship of all Algerian Jews.

16. Barthes’ article, “‘La peste’: annales d’une épidémie ou roman de la solitude,” was originally published in February 1955 and has been reprinted in Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 1942–1965 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 452–456.

17. In his response to Camus’ objections to his critique, it might be surprising to those familiar only with Barthes’ later work that he acknowledges that his own position on realism is the opposite of Camus’: “As for me, I believe in it [historical realism]; or at least… I believe in a literal form of art where plagues are nothing other than plagues, and where the Resistance is all of the Resistance…. You ask me in name of what I find the morality of The Plague insufficient. I make no secret of it; it is in the name of historical materialism” (Oeuvres complètes, 479).

18. See again chapter 6 for a discussion of these editorials.

19. Camus dramatizes the limits of legitimate resistance and whether the murder of innocents can ever be justified in his play “The Just” [“Les justes”], in the contrast between the positions of two terrorists, Stepan and Kaliayev, who are planning to assassinate the Russian Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovitch. Kaliayev describes his commitment to the revolution in the following terms: “Revolution—yes!… but revolution for the sake of life—to give life a chance…. We are killing to build a world where there’ll be no more killing at all. We must accept our role as criminals, until finally everyone on earth is innocent.” Albert Camus, “The Just,” in Caligula and Other Plays, trans. Henry Jones (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 174–175 [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 322]. Kaliayev initially does not carry out the plan to throw a bomb into the carriage of the Grand Duke because the Duke’s young niece and nephew are accompanying him. Dora defends his decision by saying that “killing the Grand Duke’s niece and nephew won’t prevent a single child from starving. Even in destruction, there is an order, there are limits” (186–187, trans. mod. [338]). For Stepan, commitment to the revolution must be total, which means being willing to sacrifice innocent children to the cause of the revolution: “There are no limits! The truth is that you don’t believe in the revolution. No, you don’t believe in it. If you believed in it totally, completely, if you were sure that by our sacrifices and our triumphs we will succeed in building a new Russia, freed of tyranny, a land of freedom that will gradually spread over the entire world… how could the death of two children be given any weight? You’d feel justified in doing everything, completely everything” (187, trans. mod. [338]).

20. One of the articles Camus wrote on Algeria for Combat in 1945 is entitled “It Is Justice That Will Save Algeria from Hatred.” Camus at Combat (May 23, 1945), 214–217 [528–532]. After acknowledging that “democratic elements were in the minority” in Algeria and that “the Vichy regime found its warmest supporters in Algeria” (215 [528]), Camus refers to the recent massacres of Arab civilians by the police and pieds-noirs vigilantes and asserts that “despite the repressive actions we have just taken in North Africa, I am convinced that the era of Western imperialism is over” (216 [531]). When he wrote this in 1945, Camus was either overly optimistic, prescient, or both.

21. Albert Camus, “The Minotaur, or Stopping at Oran,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 116 [Essais, 818].

22. The description of the disposal and destruction of the dead bodies in The Plague is the element of the novel that most directly evokes the details of the horror of the war and specifically the Nazi “final solution”: “The first step was to bury the dead by night, which obviously permitted a more summary procedure. The bodies could be piled on top of each other in larger and larger numbers in the ambulances…. The bodies were hastily dumped into pits and had hardly settled into place when the spadefuls of quicklime began to sear their faces and the earth covered them over anonymously in holes that were dug increasingly deeper. Shortly afterwards, however, it became necessary to look elsewhere to find still more space. By a special urgency measure the denizens of grants in perpetuity were evicted from their graves and their exhumed remains dispatched to the crematory ovens. And soon the plague victims also had to be taken to the crematorium…. Near dawn, at least during the first few days, a thick, nauseating cloud hung low upon the eastern districts of the town…. An elaborate system of vents for diverting the smoke had to be installed to appease [the inhabitants]. Thereafter only when a strong wind was blowing did a faint odor coming from the east remind them that they were living under a new order and that the flames of the plague were taking their toll each night.” Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), 177–179, trans. mod. [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 1363–1364]. See Shoshana Felman, “Camus’ The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 93–119. Felman argues that the novel is an allegory not of political plagues but of the limits of historical discourse and thus the impossibility of representing the plague (for her, the Holocaust) as such: “The allegory seems to name the vanishing of the event as part of its actual historical occurrence. The literality of history includes something which, from inside the event, makes its literality vanish. Camus’ testimony is not simply to the literality of history, but to its unreality, to the historical vanishing point of its unbelievability…. The Plague (the Holocaust) is disbelieved because it does not enter, and cannot be framed by, any existing frame of reference (be it of knowledge or belief)” (103).

3. Exile

1. “The Rolling Stone” [“La pierre qui pousse”] and “The Artist at Work” [“Jonas ou l’artiste au travail”] are the exceptions, for the former takes place in Brazil and the latter is set in Paris and recounts the double exile of an artist unsuccessfully trying to balance the demands of his personal and public lives, of his society and his art. Jonas’ last painting testifies to his divided state: “the canvass completely blank, at the center of which Jonas had simply written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read ‘solitary’ or ‘solidary.’” Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 158 [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), 1654]. The Fall was also originally intended to be a short story in the collection.

2. The narrator of the story, speaking from or through the perspective of Janine, conveys her reservations by describing the bus as being “full of Arabs pretending to sleep, shrouded in their burnooses…. Their silence and impassivity began to weigh upon Janine; it seemed to her as if she had been traveling for days with that mute escort. And yet the bus had left only at dawn” (5 [1560]).

3. In his portrait of “the colonizer who accepts [himself],” a good model for which could be found in Camus’ portrait of Marcel, Albert Memmi argues that “accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a nonlegitimate, privileged person, that is, a usurper [s’accepter comme colonisateur, ce serait essentiellement s’accepter comme privilégié non légitime, c’est-à-dire comme usurpateur]…. How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune.” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 52–53 [Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 76–77].

4. In his preface to Algerian Reports, Camus warns against “condemning the French of Algeria as a group” and gives what he calls the history of the men of his family: “Being poor and free of hatred, [they] never exploited or oppressed anyone. But three quarters of the French resemble them.” Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1961), 119 [Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 897]. However, in The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) [Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)], Camus also acknowledges that “in this country of immigration, of quick fortunes and spectacular collapses, the boundaries between classes were less clear-cut than between races” (203 [186]). He also qualifies somewhat the attitude of the poor working-class French Algerians toward other ethnic groups, especially in terms of their struggle to stay employed: “Unemployment, for which there was no insurance at all, was the calamity they most dreaded. That is why these workers… who in their daily lives were the most tolerant of men, were always xenophobes on labor issues, accusing in turn the Italians, the Spaniards, the Jews, and the Arabs, and finally the whole world of stealing their work…. It was not for the mastery of the earth or the privileges of wealth and leisure that these unexpected nationalists were contending against other nationalities; it was for the privilege of servitude” (257 [236–237]).

5. “But [Janine] liked his courage in facing up to life, which he shared with all the French of this country” (6 [1560]).

6. It is suggested that Marcel’s openly expressed racism is another source of conflict in the couple, since Janine responds to his racist remark by telling him to stop.

7. Janine’s reaction to her husband’s racism highlights once again her increasing distance from him and manifests an irony of which Marcel is not capable: “Janine was not thinking of anything, or perhaps of that victory of the cooks over the prophets” (15 [1565]). When Marcel also quibbles over the price a young Arab demands for carrying his trunk and expresses his belief in what is described as “the vague principle that they always asked for twice as much in the hope of settling for a quarter of the amount.” Janine is described as being “ill at ease” after hearing him say this (16 [1566]).

8. Edward Said was certainly right to insist on the crucial importance of the descriptions of the Algerian landscape in Camus’ fictions and the way these descriptions raise fundamental political issues related to colonialism, even if I would argue that the question of how these descriptions relate to colonialism is much more complex than Said acknowledges in statements such as the following: “What I want to do is see Camus’s fiction as an element in France’s methodically constructed political geography of Algeria… the better to see it as providing an arresting account of the political and interpretative contest to represent, inhabit, and possess the territory itself…. Camus’s writing is informed by an extraordinarily belated, in some ways incapacitated colonial sensibility, which enacts an imperial gesture within and by means of form, the realistic novel, well past its greatest achievements in Europe.” Edward Said, “Camus and the French Imperial Experience,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 176. Said further asserts that Camus’ “novels and short stories narrate the victory won over a pacified, decimated Muslim population whose rights to the land have been severely curtailed. In thus confirming and consolidating French priority, Camus neither disputes nor dissents from the campaign for sovereignty waged against Algerian Muslims for over a hundred years” (180–181). It should already be clear that one of the purposes of the present analysis is to show how Camus in fact most definitely did “dispute and dissent from the campaign for sovereignty” in Algeria, in both his political essays and fictions—and nowhere more dramatically than in “The Adulterous Woman.” The effectiveness of his dissent can certainly be debated, but not its existence. Said is thus wrong about both the realist form and the political implications of Camus’ story.

9. “It is accurate to say, therefore, that Camus’ narratives lay severe and ontologically prior claims to Algeria’s geography” (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 183).

10. Camus uses practically the same language in The First Man to describe the feelings of the young Jacques Cormery, in a very different setting, when he spends the day hunting with his uncle Ernest and his friends: “Staggering under the sun, his master, and so, for hours without end on a land without boundaries, his head lost in the unremitting light and the immense space of the sky, Jacques felt himself to be the richest of children” (111 [106]).

11. This double, contradictory title was carefully chosen, for before deciding on it Camus considered and then rejected a number of other titles, such as “In the Snow,” “The High Plateau and the Condemned Man,” “The Law,” and “Cain.” To complicate things further, as Derrida points out, “‘Hostis,’ in Latin means guest but also enemy.” Jacques Derrida, De l’hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 12.

12. In De l’hospitalité, Derrida speaks of what he calls “absolute hospitality,” a hospitality that is not governed or limited by the rules or conventions of “conditional hospitality” but rather offered without conditions and with no expectation of reciprocity. Absolute hospitality is not the hospitality offered to “the foreigner” with a name and identity papers but rather to what Derrida calls “the absolute other”: “The difference… between the foreigner and the absolute other is that the latter might not have either a name or a family name; the absolute hospitality I would like to offer him assumes a break with hospitality in its conventional sense, with conditional hospitality, with the law or pact of hospitality…. Absolute hospitality demands that I open my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (endowed with a family name, a social status, etc.) but to the unknown, anonymous, absolute other, that I give him (a) place [je lui donne lieu], that I let him come in, that I let him arrive and have a place in the place that I offer him, without demanding from him either reciprocity… or his name” (29).

13. In his notes for the Pléiade edition of Camus’ literary texts, Roger Quilliot reveals the external source for the opening scene of the story. He quotes El Aziz Kessous, Camus’ friend from the time they were in the Algerian Communist Party together, who indicates that in a much-publicized incident in the 1930s a Muslim union member underwent similar inhumane treatment at the hands of a French gendarme. The incident was widely reported in the leftist press and much discussed, especially by those affiliated with the Communist Party in Algeria. Recruiting cards were even printed by the Communist Party, showing a Muslim attached by rope to a man on horseback. Because Camus, “at that time about twenty years old, was already an activist in the political party that he would soon abandon,” Kessous claims that he “must have seen this document that was widely circulated in the groups he frequented” and taken by everyone as an “image of inhumanity” (Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 2049).

14. Being French gives him an economic superiority, for example, for no matter how modestly he lives, Daru is rich compared to the starving Algerian families to whom he gives food during the drought: “Faced with such poverty, he who lived almost like a monk in his remote schoolhouse, nonetheless satisfied with the little he had and with the rough life, had felt like a lord with his white-washed walls, his narrow couch, his unpainted shelves, his well, and his weekly provision of water and food” (88 [1612]).

15. Among the first eight victims of the initial insurrection organized by the FLN on November 1, 1954, was a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher named Guy Monnerot, who had volunteered to teach in Algeria. His wife was seriously wounded but survived the attack.

4. Justice or Death?

1. After he has been sentenced to death, Meursault thinks constantly about public executions and remembers a story his mother repeatedly told him about his father. “I blame myself for not having given more attention to accounts of public executions. One should always take an interest in such matters. You never know what can happen…. During these moments, I remembered a story Mother used to tell me about my father. I never knew him. The only precise thing I knew about this man was what Mother had told me: he had gone to see a murderer executed. The idea of going made him sick. But he did it anyway and, after coming home, he vomited a good part of the morning. Because of that my father disgusted me a bit. But now I understood; it was such a natural reaction.” Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 136, 138, trans. mod. [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), 1202–1203]. In The First Man, Jacques Cormery questions his mother about his father but learns almost nothing from her, not “even this detail that had made such an impression on him as a child, had pursued him throughout his life and even into his dreams… even that he had learned from his grandmother.” Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 81 [Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 79–80]. The story is told in more detail in his autobiographical novel, which also emphasizes the disturbing effect of the story on Jacques: “On the night he heard the story, Jacques himself, when he was lying huddled in on the side of the bed to avoid touching his brother, with whom he slept, choked back his nausea and his horror as he relived the details he had heard and those he imagined. And throughout his life those images had followed him even into his sleep when now and then, but regularly, a recurrent nightmare would haunt him, taking many forms, but always having the one theme: they were coming to take him, Jacques, to be executed” (82 [80–81]).

2. Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1961), 199 [Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 1039].

3. In The Plague, a similar story is told from a slightly different perspective. One of the main characters involved in fighting the epidemic, Tarrou, who early in the novel admits that he “is horrified by death sentences” (Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert [New York: Vintage Books, 1948], 125, trans. mod. [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 1321]), later explains why. He tells the story of his own father, who, as a prosecuting attorney, was frequently involved in capital cases and on one occasion invited his son, aged seventeen, to hear him plead such a case: “I realized he was demanding the death of this man in the name of society and demanding even that his head be cut off. Not exactly in those words, I admit. ‘This head must fall,’ was the formula. But the difference in the end was slight. And the result was the same, since he obtained the head he asked for. Only of course it wasn’t he who did the actual job…. Nevertheless, he had to, as is the custom, be present at what’s politely termed the prisoner’s last moments, but what would be better called the most abject of assassinations” (248, trans. mod. [1422]).

4. Mohammed Harbri, in his groundbreaking work Le F.L.N.: mirage et réalité (Paris: Editions J.A., 1980), describes the project of the FLN in the following terms: “One obsession drove the founders of the FLN:… independence could be won only through war…. They condemned pell-mell Ferhat Abbas, the Oulémas, and the Algerian Communist Party, and later the centrists, not because they were hostile to independence but because they believed in achieving it by successive steps…. Motivated by a messianic vision of an equalitarian society, they had an absolute faith in ideas” (117).

5. The French Milice was a paramilitary organization created in 1943 by Vichy Secretary of State Joseph Darnand to support German actions taken against the French Resistance and aid in the arrest and deportation of Jews.

6. Unsigned editorial, “Outlaws” (Combat, underground, no. 56, April 1944), in Camus at Combat : Writing 1944–1947, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4 [Camus à Combat : éditoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus 1944–1947 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 128]. Lévi-Valensi acknowledges in a note that not all scholars agree that Camus was the author of this article, but she herself is convinced that it should nevertheless be attributed to him because of “the mix of irony and seriousness is frequent in Camus’s writing” and because the attack on “outlaws” is similar to another article he wrote and signed (3 [126]).

7. Albert Camus, untitled editorial (Combat, November 2, 1944), in Camus at Combat, 97 [303]. As Herbert Lottman points out, when Pétain was eventually brought to trial after the war, Combat, like Camus, had changed positions and opposed the death penalty for him in the following terms: “First of all because one must resolve oneself to say what is true, that any death sentence is a denial of morality, and then because, in this particular case, it would give this vain old man the reputation of a martyr, according him a new status in the minds even of his enemies.” Combat (August 2, 1945), cited in Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 349.

8. Camus insists that only the families of the victims have the right to speak of pardon: “I see for our country two ways unto death (and there are ways of surviving that are no better than death): the way of hatred and the way of pardon. One seems to me as disastrous as the other. I have no taste for hatred…. But pardon seems no better to me, and in today’s circumstance it would look like an insult. In any case, I am convinced that it is not up to us. If death sentences horrify me, that is my business. I shall join M. Mauriac in granting open pardons when Vélin’s parents and Leynaud’s wife tell me that I can. But not before. Never before.” Albert Camus, “Justice and Charity” (Combat, January 11, 1945) in Camus at Combat, 169 [440–441]. François Mauriac was the well-known conservative Catholic novelist and fellow member of the French Resistance who wrote for Le Figaro and with whom Camus had an extended polemical exchange over the death penalty. Vélin (André Bollier) was Combat’s printer, who committed suicide rather than be captured by the Gestapo. René Leynaud was a poet and close friend of Camus and an early contributor to Combat; he was captured by the French Milice and executed by the Germans in June 1944, immediately before the liberation of Paris. Camus published a moving tribute to him in Combat on October 27, 1944 (90–92 [290–294]).

9. In a letter Camus sent on January 27, 1945, to the novelist Marcel Aymé, who had written to Camus to ask him to sign a petition to de Gaulle to spare Brasillach’s life, Camus reluctantly agreed to sign the petition for the following reason: “I have always been horrified by the death penalty, and I have judged that as an individual the very least I could do is not participate in it, even by abstention…. This is a scruple that I suppose would make the friends of Brasillach laugh. And as for him, if his life is spared and if an amnesty frees him as it probably will in one or two years, I would like him to be told the following as concerns my letter: it is not for him that I join my signature with yours, it is not for the writer, whom I consider to be worth nothing, nor for the individual, for whom I have the strongest contempt.” Cited in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 374. Only a part of the above quotation is given in the English translation, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 200.

10. During a discussion with students a day after having received the Nobel Prize, Camus was repeatedly interrupted by an Algerian student who questioned his commitment to democracy and justice in Algeria. In reply, Camus made the following controversial and oft-misunderstood remark: “I have always supported a just Algeria, where the two populations must live in peace and equality. I have said and repeated that we have to bring justice to the Algerian people and grant them a fully democratic regime…. I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn a terrorism that is practiced blindly, in the streets of Algiers, for example, and which one day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice” (Le Monde, December 14, 1957; Essais, 1881–1882). If Camus had said “innocent civilians” in general rather than his own mother, perhaps he could have avoided the confusion to which his statement gave rise and given his political opponents one less weapon to use against him. In any case, he was astounded by the hostile reaction to his words.

11. The character from The Plague who expresses ideas closest to the ideas Camus expresses in this essay is Tarrou, who describes how he became a political activist in order to oppose the society in which he lived, which he claims was based on the death sentence. He soon discovered that his own revolutionary political movement (clearly the Communist Party) also had to “pronounce death sentences. But I was told that these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be…. Until the day when I was present at an execution—it was in Hungary—and exactly the same vertigo that had taken over the child I had once been obscured the eyes of the man I was…. I’ve never been able to sleep well since then. The bad taste remained in my mouth…. And thus I came to understand at least that I had had the plague all those long years in which, however, I’d believed with all my soul that I was fighting it. I learned that I had indirectly contributed to the deaths of thousands of people; that I’d even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only lead to death…. So that is why I resolved to reject anything which, directly or indirectly, for good reasons or bad, has anyone killed or justifies that anyone be killed” (250–254, trans. mod. [1423–1425]).

12. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 4, trans. mod. [L’homme révolté, in Essais, 414].

13. Jean-Paul Sartre considered Camus’ critique of Marxism to be hopelessly idealistic and ultimately irrelevant, the musings of a “belle âme” who had retreated from politics and was criticizing history “from above.” In his response to Camus’ reply to Francis Jeanson’s attack on The Rebel in Les Temps Modernes, Sartre derisively asks if “the Republic of Beautiful Souls [belles âmes] had chosen [Camus] to be their principal prosecutor.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 82 (August 1952), reprinted in Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 97. After acknowledging that because Camus “had hundreds of times denounced and combated with all his force the tyranny of Franco and the colonial politics of our government,” he had acquired what Sartre calls “the relative right to speak of Soviet concentration camps” (106); he nevertheless attacks Camus for being “hostile to history” (113) and for considering it “the madness of others”: “You didn’t dream of ‘making History,’ as Marx said, but in keeping it from being made” (116). For a presentation of the Camus-Sartre polemical exchange and break, see Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography, 495–507; Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, 305–310 [555–572]; and Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 131–154.

5. Terror

1. When I read a draft of a much shorter version of this chapter at a colloquium on Camus at Cornell University, I prefaced the paper by reading the following statement made by Hanna Nasir, then president of Birzeit University, after a terrorist attack on Hebrew University: “There is no way that one can consider justifying the latest attack on the Hebrew University campus. More precisely, it is unacceptable to justify such attacks. Targeting the lives of innocent civilians, whether they are enemies, or from a different religion, or from a different race, is intolerable from a moral and religious point of view…. We should in no way respond to our oppressor’s barbaric attacks with similar actions…. The most apt definition of terrorism refers to acts that involve the killing of innocent civilians; there is a wide gap between resistance and terrorism, and one should not be confused with the other. What is worrisome is that we may, due to the great pain we are facing from the occupation, begin to justify terrorist acts. We all live the tragedy and devastation of this occupation…. Despite all of this, we should not allow ourselves to kill our occupier’s innocent civilians, even when they kill our own…. What concerns me most, is that in our just struggle towards liberation and freedom, we should never turn a deaf ear to our conscience nor should we ever lose our internal integrity or our own humanity.” This statement originally appeared on August 10, 2002, in the Arabic-language Palestinian daily Al Ayyam, published in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority.

2. Albert Camus, “Preface to Algerian Reports,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1961), 111 [Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 891].

3. Jeffrey Isaac argues in a similar vein that Camus “defended a vision of coexistence informed by a universalist conception of the human right to be free from torture, persecution, and murder, and of the political right to citizenship in autonomous political communities…. As a pied noir who honestly acknowledged his hybrid identity and refused to adopt a mythic, hyperinflated identity as a ‘true’ Frenchman, Camus seemed genuinely caught in the middle; and as a writer he sought, without denying his irreducibly pied noir attachments, to occupy the no-man’s land between the antagonists, the ground of minimal common humanity that might support dialogue and mutual recognition.” Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 194–195.

4. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 39, 43 [Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 65, 68–69]. In his 1965 preface to The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi further explains that his “model for the colonizer of good will was taken in particular from a group of philosophy professors in Tunis who were my colleagues and friends. Their generosity was unquestionable; so, unfortunately, was their impotence, their inability to make themselves heard by anyone else in the colony. However, it was among these men that I felt the most comfortable” (xv [19]). Memmi considered Camus also to be in this category.

5. In Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), Jean-François Lyotard describes the heated debates that occurred during the Algerian War among the members of Socialisme ou Barbarie, the radical Marxist group to which he belonged at the time, over whether they should support the FLN in its armed struggle. Even though they were militant anticolonialists, the FLN also presented problems, “given their radical critique of Soviet-style bureaucracies” and their “refutation of political and trade unionist organizations… for being impediments obstructing the free development of popular struggles…. During those years I came to the conclusion that the only position that had a chance of being correct was hopelessly contradictory. Yes, the Algerians have the right, even the duty, to become free and be recognized as a free community with its own name and equal to others—so we must accept their struggle. Nevertheless, that struggle has no chance of instituting any of the principles of worker democracy, and it will not fail to produce a new class society under the control of bureaucratic military leadership—so why should we give our support to the coming of power of new exploiters?” (26–27). Lyotard makes similar comments in “The Name of Algeria,” in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 168 [La guerre des Algériens: écrits 1956–1963, ed. Mohammed Ramdani (Paris: Galilée, 1989), 36]. Camus’ criticism of the FLN was in certain respects similar to the radical syndicalist position of Socialisme ou Barbarie, but unlike those on the radical Left like Lyotard who chose to support the armed struggle of the Algerian people for independence in spite of the FLN, Camus denounced the FLN’s use of terrorism both because of its human costs and because he also considered the terrorist means being used to achieve independence to be a sign of the kind of society Algeria would become with the victory of the FLN. Perhaps the greatest difference in their positions is that Lyotard, while supporting the struggle for independence, describes a political opposition to the FLN based on class analysis; Camus, while he would have agreed that colonial “injustices were so flagrant” that they had to be immediately resolved, remained skeptical of all revolutionary promises of independence and opposed on moral grounds the terrorist means being used to achieve a form of independence that would bring to power the “new exploiters” responsible for them.

6. On February 18, 1957, Mouloud Feraoun, who was executed at the end of the war by the OAS, the reactionary French-Algerian secret army, after meeting in Algiers with Emmanuel Roblès, a close friend of Camus’ who had recently spoken with him in Paris, wrote in his journal that Camus “believes that the FLN is fascist and that the possibility of the future of his country being in the hands of the FLN was strictly speaking unthinkable.” Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1955–1962 (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 204. Roblès, who was editor of the “Collection Meditéranée” in which Feraoun’s journal was published, added the following note to Feraoun’s comment: “Camus’s opinion was more nuanced. He thought that a fascist tendency within the Front risked taking it over.”

7. Olivier Todd, for example, claims that “on August 8, 1945, Camus was one of the few French editorial writers to express his horror after America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.” Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 204 [Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 381]. Camus’ editorial in fact denounces both the savagery of the action and the way it was presented in the media: “The world is what it is, which isn’t much. This is what everyone has known since yesterday, thanks to the formidable concert that the radio, newspapers, and news agencies have unleashed on the subject of the atomic bomb…. American, British, and French newspapers have poured forth a steady stream of elegant dissertations concerning the future, the past, the inventors, the cost, the peaceful uses and military implications, the political consequences, and even the independent character of the atomic bomb. We can sum it all up in a sentence: the civilization of the machine has just achieved its ultimate degree of savagery. A choice is going to have to be made in the fairly near future between collective suicide and the intelligent utilization of scientific discoveries. In the meantime, one has the right to think that there is something indecent about celebrating in this way a discovery that has been put to its first use by the most formidable destructive rage that man has exhibited for centuries. In a world that has torn itself apart with every conceivable instrument of violence and shown itself incapable of exerting any control while remaining indifferent to justice or even mere human happiness, the fact that science has dedicated itself to organized murder will surprise no one, except perhaps an unrepentant idealist.” Albert Camus, Combat (August 8, 1945), in Camus at Combat : Writing 1944–1947, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 236 [Camus à Combat : éditoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus 1944–1947 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 569–570].

8. Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 214. Aronson uses this phrase to characterize the Lauriol Plan for dividing Algeria into different areas controlled by different populations, for which Camus in one of his last essays on Algeria offers support. Aronson describes the plan as a “neocolonial scheme” and argues that “in this way Camus claimed to serve justice as well as his own people, while actually serving neither. It was, of course, impossible to end colonialism and leave existing French rights intact, a fact that Camus never faced” (214). Even though I do not agree that Camus “never faced” this fact, it is true that the Lauriol Plan did not adequately face it. Jeffrey Isaac, on the other hand, even though he acknowledges that “the Lauriol Plan was doomed to failure by the furious pace of events” and that “Camus’s position was quixotic, pleading for morality at a time when war was the spirit of the day” (Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, 204), defends Camus’ interest in the Lauriol Plan. For no matter how quixotic, Isaac nevertheless presents the Lauriol Plan’s (and Camus’) intentions in a generally positive light: “The Lauriol’s repudiation of the principle of unitary sovereignty, and its acknowledgment of multiple layers of genuine authority and political membership resonates with the localism and anarchism that was at the heart of Camus’s political vision. Yet given the balance of forces in Algeria, France, and the world, the kind of creative, conciliatory politics of peace and justice envisioned by Camus had little chance of political success” (204).

9. In Le temps qui reste: essai d’autobiographie professionnelle (Paris: Stock, 1973), Jean Daniel includes a previously unpublished interview with Jean-Paul Sartre that took place on January 13, 1958. In the interview, Sartre argues that “it is necessary to dissimulate” when doing politics, for “otherwise, one is a ‘beautiful soul,’” which is, of course, the term he and others at Les Temps Modernes frequently used to describe Camus. Sartre acknowledges that for him involvement in politics in general and being a political journalist in particular meant having “to keep certain things silent.” The example he gives is the FLN massacre of villagers at Melouza, an atrocity that Sartre claims was a serious political mistake to denounce, because in denouncing it or other crimes committed by the FLN, he claims that he, Daniel, and others had “served the enemy,” that is, colonialist France (251). When Daniel strenuously objects and insists that because of such atrocities those who support Algerian independence on the contrary are obliged to question the FLN, Sartre rejects all such criticism: “Whatever else the FLN is, it exists, it is the Algerian revolution. You have to take it as it is” (252). Near the end of the interview, however, Sartre laments that even he, one of its strongest supporters, had lost all contact with the FLN militants he once knew and even with Frantz Fanon: “It’s awful, there’s no longer any contact. They have all disappeared, just like at certain moments the Communists. That Fanon, who used to come to see me all the time, doesn’t even write me any more. They are all in the machine. It grinds them up” (255). Camus, unlike Sartre, could never support a machine that “grinds people up.”

10. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 36 [Les damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1970), 6].

11. By defining the violence produced by the colonialist system as a form of terror, Fanon can thus treat the violence used by the colonized against the colonial system as a form of counterterror. This does not mean, however, that Fanon thinks that the results of violence are the same on both sides, since each side has completely different resources: “From the moment the native [le colonisé] has chosen the methods of counter-violence, the police reprisals automatically call forth reprisals on the side of the nationalist. However, the results are not equivalent, for machine-gunning from airplanes and bombardments from the fleet go far beyond in horror and magnitude any answer the natives can make” (89 [48]).

12. Fanon describes other beneficial “cleansing” effects of violence as well: “The colonized’s violence unifies the people…. Violence is in practice totalizing and national. It follows that it entails within itself the liquidation of regionalism and of tribalism…. At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the colonized from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (94, trans. mod. [51–52]). Violence is also claimed to be the ultimate weapon against dictators or any other form of a “living god”: “When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation, they will allow no one to set themselves up as ‘liberators.’ They show themselves to be jealous of the results of their action and take good care not to place their future, their destiny, or the fate of their country in the hands of a living god. Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decisions. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification. From now on the demagogues, the opportunists, and the magicians have a difficult task…. The attempt at mystification becomes, in the long run, practically impossible” (94–95 [52]). Fanon, of course, died soon after writing these words and thus did not see the results of Algerian independence and the military coup d’état.

13. After hearing on the radio that Algerian rebels had massacred a number of small farmers, Mouloud Feraoun takes the opposite position from Fanon on the allegedly salutary effects of violence and its essential role in the birth of “new men”: “They [the farmers] were machine-gunned, their farms were burned, because they were the enemy, and for nothing else…. These people who coldly kill innocents, are they liberators? If yes, do they have the slightest idea that their ‘violence’ will call forth the other ‘violence,’ legitimize it, hasten its horrible appearance…. Are they knowingly preparing to massacre ‘their brothers?’ In admitting even that they are bloodthirsty brutes—which doesn’t excuse them but rather pleads against them, against us, against the ideal they claim to defend—they should think about sparing us, thus about not provoking repression. Unless liberation means something for them very different from what we understand by the term. We once believed they wanted to liberate the country with its inhabitants. For the moment they are in the process of doing away with its inhabitants. Perhaps they estimate that this entire generation of cowards that proliferates in Algeria first has to disappear and that a truly free Algeria must be repopulated with new men who have not experienced the yoke of the secular occupier. Logically such a point of view is defensible. Too logically, alas. And one thing leading to another, suspicions to shady compromises, and shady compromises to betrayals, we will all end up by being declared guilty and executed on the spot.” Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1955–1962 (entry of March 9, 1956) (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 91. At the very end of the war, Feraoun was “executed on the spot” not by FLN liberators but by members of the reactionary terrorist French secret army, the OAS.

14. Albert Memmi characterizes Fanon’s portrait of the colonized in the following way: “Like many other defenders of the colonized, he had in him a certain dose of revolutionary romanticism. The Colonizer was the complete bastard; the colonized, the integrally good man. As for most social romantics, the victim remains intact and proud within the oppression that he endures while suffering but without being harmed. And the day that oppression ceases, the new man has to immediately appear. But, and I say this without any pleasure, what decolonization precisely shows us is that this is not true.” Albert Memmi, “Note on Frantz Fanon and the Notion of Inadequacy,” in Dominated Man: Notes Toward a Portrait (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 87 [L’homme dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 66].

15. Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (London: Earthscan Publications, 1965), 24 [Sociologie d’une revolution (Paris: François Maspero, 1972), 6–7; originally published in 1959 as L’an V de la révolution algérienne]. Fanon claims that the FLN, “at the time when the people were undergoing the most massive assaults of colonialism, did not hesitate to prohibit certain forms of action and constantly to remind the fighting units of the international laws of war” (24 [6]). This is undoubtedly true, but overall neither side respected the “international laws of war,” which would in principle mean that the actions of neither side can be defended.

16. This is close to the dilemma faced by the terrorists in Camus’ play The Just: whether to bomb the carriage of the Archduke, knowing that innocent children are in the carriage with him. Camus is, of course, on the side of those who do not just hesitate for a moment but actually refuse to kill innocents in all situations.

17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (New York: Routledge, 2001), 139 [in Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 20].

18. In her preface for the 2002 re-edition of Fanon’s text, Alice Cherki argues that Sartre’s preface “distorts the preoccupations and tone of Fanon…. Above all his preface radicalizes the analysis of Fanon on violence. In effect, Sartre justifies violence, while Fanon analyzes it and does not promote it as an end in itself but sees it as a necessary step. For this reason Sartre’s preface at times has the appearances of an incitement to criminality” (11). The issue may not be whether either promotes violence as an end in itself, but rather that both see violence as redemptive, the means to “salvation” in the form of the birth of “new men.”

19. In “On Violence,” Hannah Arendt harshly criticizes what she calls the “irresponsible grandiose statements” of Fanon and Sartre: “Sartre with his great felicity with words has given expression to the new faith. ‘Violence,’ he now believes, on the strength of Fanon’s book, ‘like Achilles’ lance, can heal all the wounds it has inflicted.’ If this were true, revenge would be the cure-all for most of our ills. This myth is more abstract, farther removed from reality, than Sorel’s myth of a general strike ever was. It is on a par with Fanon’s worst rhetorical excesses….No history and no theory is needed to refute this statement; the most superficial observer of the processes that go on in the human body knows its untruth.” Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 122. See Jeffrey Isaac’s discussion of Arendt’s essay in chapter 6 of his Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, “Swimming Against the Tide.” Isaac argues that Arendt “reject[s] the effort to ideologize this reality [that of the Third World], to offer a grand historical scheme in terms of which all postcolonial struggles make sense and all political agents can be deemed progressive or reactionary. Like any grand ideology, Third Worldism grossly oversimplifies political reality, and it offers its proponents a false comfort about their own righteousness. The connection between such righteousness and an authoritarian attitude toward dissent and disagreement is not fortuitous” (192).

20. This testimony was originally published in Les Temps Modernes (May–June 1958) and later in Vidal-Naquet, Les crimes de l’arméé française: Algérie 1954–1962 (Paris: Maspero, 1975).

21. All references will be to Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1957) [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962)]. The complete title of the story, which is not given in English, is “The Renegade or a Confused Mind” [“Le renégat ou un esprit confus”].

22. Edward W. Said, “Camus and the French Imperial Experience,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 178.

23. The following is from The Unnamable: “This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says, too old perhaps and too abased ever to succeed in saying the words that would be its last, knowing itself useless and its uselessness in vain… is it one?… It issues from me, it fills me, it clamors against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know.” Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 307.

24. Hannah Arendt defines “ideology” in the following terms: “It is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the ‘idea’ is applied…. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same ‘law’ as the logical explanation of its ‘idea.’” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 469. Arendt calls the totalitarian application of ideology “the tyranny of logicality” (473).

25. The original French is “sale Europe,” which in the English translation becomes “lousy Europe” (36 [1580]). Here as elsewhere, I have modified the translation in order to retain the violence of the language of the story, which the English translation tends to mitigate.

6. Anguish

1. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1–2. “They were continually undertaking—or claiming to undertake, as the case may be—civilizing measures on behalf of their subjects that appeared to make democracy and colonialism compatible. However misguided, self-deluding, or underfunded—indeed because they were all these things—these claims merit our attention. As an enduring tension of French republicanism, the civilizing ideal in whose name the nation of the ‘rights of man’ deprived so many people of their freedom deserves to be better understood” (10). But Conklin also questions “why it took a country with as strong a republican tradition as France so long to see the discrepancy between ideal and reality, between ends and means. Racist assumptions about Africans, the spoils the empire yielded, and the prestige it bestowed upon la grand nation are only half the answer. Equally to blame was a civilizing ideology that was never only racist in content…. If the empire endured as long as it did, it was in part because French racism often worked hand-in-hand with more progressive values” (256).

2. Conklin convincingly argues that the “mission” to civilize and liberate grew out of the logic of the French Revolution itself: “While the savagery of most New World inhabitants was attributed to environmental factors, the barbarism of Asians and Arabs was defined in terms of oriental despotism and ignorance. To civilize them would thus mean not only mastering nature and encouraging commercial exchange but also liberating them from political tyranny and superstition. In the end, however, these differences in no way altered the general conclusions of the French. By the time of the French Revolution, it was simply taken for granted that the entire non-Western world was in need of French civilization…. Such a reworking and expansion of the definition of France’s responsibilities as a colonizer was in the logic of the Revolution, which saw itself as remaking French society and, in the process, receiving a mandate to transform all humankind…. The French had a special obligation to be generous toward those different from themselves and even to make them French.” Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 16, 18.

3. See once again Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 91 [Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 112]: “Colonization creates the colonized just as we have seen that it creates the colonizer [la colonisation fabrique les colonisés, comme nous avons vu qu’elle fabriquait les colonisateurs].”

4. Albert Camus, Chroniques algériennes: actuelles III (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), reprinted in Albert Camus, Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 909.

5. In “The Guest/Host,” a drought and famine of the same type and magnitude are described: “It would be hard to forget the destitution, the army of ragged ghosts wandering in the sun, the plateaus burned to a cinder month after month, the earth shriveled up little by little, literally scorched, every stone busting into dust under one’s foot. The sheep then died by thousands and even a few men, here and there, without it always being noticed.” Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 87–88 [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), 1612].

6. In 1937, Camus drafted a “Manifesto of Intellectuals of Algeria in Favor of the Violette Project” on behalf of his fellow members of the “Maison de la Culture.” The Blum-Violette Project would have given the right to vote to approximately sixty thousand Muslim Algerians, but because of the political influence of rich colonialists, even though it was cosponsored by Léon Blum, the project never came to a vote. The manifesto reads: “Considering that culture cannot live where dignity dies and that civilization cannot prosper under laws that crush it; that one cannot speak of culture, for example, in a country where 900,000 inhabitants are deprived of schools and civilization, and when it is a question of a people diminished by an unprecedented form of destitution and harassed by laws of exception and inhuman codes; Considering as well that the only way of restoring their dignity to the Muslim masses is to allow them to express themselves;… Considering finally that far from harming the interests of France this project serves them in the most positive way to the extent that it displays to the Arab people the face of humanity that should be that of France;… For all these reasons and for the good of culture and the popular masses to which the future of Muslim culture is closely connected, the following have decided to appeal to intellectuals of this country to indicate with their signature their support for the Violette Project, considered as a step in the integral parliamentary emancipation of Muslims, and to declare with all their force and conscience that a project they consider a small part of the work of civilization and humanity should be that of the new France.” The manifesto was originally published in Jeune Méditerranée, the monthly bulletin of the “Maison de la Culture” of Algiers, no. 2 (May 1937); reprinted in Essais, 1328–1329. Camus would remain faithful to the principles proclaimed in this manifesto for his entire life.

7. In the section of his essay “Algeria 1958” entitled “The New Algeria,” Camus explains why he supports the Lauriol Plan for an Algeria federated with France, which is, he claims, similar to but more original than the Swiss model: “Algeria… offers the very rare example of different populations overlapping in the same territory. Hence it is essential to associate without fusing together (since federation is to begin with the union of differences), not different territories, but communities with different personalities.” Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1961), 149 [Essais, 1016]. Camus also acknowledges that the recognition of the relative autonomy of different Algerian communities that the Lauriol Plan would guarantee would necessitate a radical change in the French Constitution, something he feels is long overdue: “Contrary to all our practices, contrary above all to the deep-rooted prejudices inherited from the French Revolution, we should thus have sanctioned within the republic two equal but distinct categories of citizens. From one point of view this would mark a sort of revolution against the regime of centralization and abstract individualism resulting from 1789, which in so many ways, now deserves to be called the ‘Ancien Régime’” (151 [1018]).

8. Nowhere are the basic inequalities that result from exploitation and segregation and function as impediments to assimilation more evident, Camus claims, than in education: “The people of Kabylia will have more schools the day the artificial barrier that separates European education and indigenous education will have been eliminated, the day when finally, on the benches of the same school, two peoples capable of understanding each other will finally begin to understand each other…. If assimilation is truly desired, if it is desired that this so worthy people become French, it is necessary not to start out by separating them from the French. If I have understood correctly, that is all they are asking for…. It is up to us to tear down the walls separating us from each other” (Essais, 923). Without the destruction of the colonialist walls separating the different populations of Algeria in the schools, assimilation would remain only a broken promise. Camus insists that this does not have to be the case.

9. Ferhat Abbas wrote in a similar vein about the advantages of French schools for those Arabs and Berbers fortunate enough to have access to them and how a vast improvement in education could have produced a very different path toward independence: “School was our chance. It alone was emancipatory…. School was also a remedy. It can attenuate the violence of antagonisms and heal wounds. It is at the doors of the school where the reconciliation of the races is forged, prejudices fall, hatreds are extinguished, and friendships formed…. What would have happened to Algeria if the schooling of the ‘natives’… had been generalized? How would Algeria evolved if, by example, we had been able to be mayors, judges, prefects, high-ranking bureaucrats, superior officers, without having been obliged to renounce our religion? I say simply that the Algerian War would not have occurred. It is probable that Algeria would have become, one day or another, an independent country. But without bloodshed, without the death of hundreds, thousands of innocents, without racial hatred. It would have detached itself from metropolitan France just as a ripe fruit detaches itself from a tree: naturally.” Ferhat Abbas, Le jeune algérien (1930) suivi de rapport au Maréchal Pétain (Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1981), 20–21.

10. Albert Camus, “Crisis in Algeria” (May 13–14, 1945), in Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 200 [Camus à Combat: éditoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus 1944–1947 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 500].

11. Historians agree that the figure of 1,500 Algerian deaths given by the French administration is much too low, while the figure of 40,000 deaths given by the FLN is most likely inflated. Most place the number of deaths resulting from the French retaliation to be between 6,000 and 10,000, but some still argue the true figure could be even higher.

12. For example, Mohammed Harbi argues that the chief lesson drawn by Algerians from the massacre of May 1945 was that “the idea of a multiracial society had not withstood the test. The gulf between the Algerian people and the European minority was growing so large as to be impossible.” Mohammed Harbi, Le FLN: mirage et réalité (Paris: Éditions Jeune Afrique, 1980), 30.

13. In a postindependence work, Abbas continues to expresses ideas very close to Camus’ and acknowledges that the means of achieving independence in Algeria could have been very different: “Throughout the entire century of colonization men rallied to protest the condition of the colonized and to demand their emancipation in the name of the lessons they had received from France. This is to say that the history of the last half-century could have been written differently. ‘Revolution by law’ was not a utopia…. In opposing every political change, the colon made it impossible.” Ferhat Abbas, Autopsie d’une guerre: l’aurore (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1980), 14. In another chapter, he comments on the departure of the pied-noir community after independence: “No one, neither Camus, nor members of the Church, nor liberals, nor resistance fighters thought for one instant that Algeria was going to lose its French inhabitants. This exodus resulted from a spiral of reactive violence provoked by the French of Algeria themselves. Fascists, stray soldiers, congenital racists, and ‘Arab Eaters’ all joined together to ruin the last chances for European populations in a new Algeria” (126).

14. Jeanyves Guérin argues that Camus, at least until after he had come to Algiers in 1956 to support his friends in their attempt to bring about a civilian truce, had not realized how little support there was for moderate solutions to the war or that his friends in the Truce Party “represented scarcely more than themselves. Camus clearly overestimated their number and influence. From Paris, he did not see (or did not want to see) that the war had pushed the poor whites over to the extremist side. His friends were off on their own and, like him, condemned to ineffectiveness. A few men of good will cannot influence the course of history.” Jeanyves Guérin, Albert Camus: portrait de l’artiste en citoyen (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1993), 241.

15. See Paul-F. Smuts, ed., Albert Camus éditorialiste à L’Express (mai 1955–février 1956) (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). When asked by Jean Daniel why he had decided to return to journalism, Camus gave three reasons: “The first is that I am isolated in my era. I am also, as you know, in solidarity with it—and closely. The second is that journalism has always appeared to me as the most agreeable form of political involvement, on the condition of always saying everything. The third finally is that I want to bring Pierre Mendès-France back into power. We will be going through a very difficult period, and I have subjective reasons for wanting him…. When I went to see Mendès-France in 1945 at the Ministry of the Economy, he seemed to me when I met him for the first time to be a genuine statesman.” Quoted in Essais, 1840.

16. “La Table Ronde,” Essais, 971. This essay first appeared as an editorial in L’Express on October 13, 1955. Camus had made similar remarks in his open letter to Aziz Kessous, a friend who was a socialist and had been a member of Fehrat Abbas’s Party of the Manifesto. His “Letter to an Algerian Militant” appeared in the first issue of Kessous’s short-lived journal Communauté algérienne (October 1, 1955). In this essay, Camus evokes their friendship as a counterforce to the violence of the war and the sign that not all French and Arabs in Algeria were intent on “inflicting the greatest possible pain on each other, inexpiably” (Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 127 [963]). In opposition to a tragedy that would end in total destruction, Camus projects a different destiny for the majority of the Algerians who he claims are like Kessous and himself: “You and I, who are so much alike—having the same background [the same culture—de même culture], sharing the same hope, having felt like brothers for so long now, united in our love for our land [notre terre]—know that we are not enemies and that we could live happily together on this soil [cette terre] that belongs to us. For it is ours, and I can no more imagine it without you and your brothers than you can probably separate it from me and those who resemble me. You have said it very well, better than I can say: we are condemned to live together” (127 [963]).

17. Camus’ notion of an “Algerian family” was very close to that of Germaine Tillion, who wrote two important studies of colonial Algeria that described the horrible conditions under which the colonized lived. Camus was influenced by her work and agreed with her description of what could be called the “family traits” of all Algerians in her study of the effects of colonialism: “‘Colons’ and ‘natives’ resemble each other like brothers—a sense of honor, physical courage, fidelity to their word and friends, generosity, tenacity—but also by their faults—a taste for violence, an unrestrained passion for competition, vanity, susceptibility, jealousy.” Germaine Tillion, L’Algérie en 1957 (Paris: Minuit, 1957), 17. Tillion states that it was colonialism itself that produced this “dysfunctional family” and that was the “epidemic” responsible for the destitution of the colonized. She adds, in a chapter entitled “The Link Between France and Algeria Is Not a Political Fiction,” that it was not politicians or bureaucrats but rather “hundreds of thousands of people from each of the two countries, who, without intending it, without knowing it, wove together the millions of threads of the warp and woof [of the fabric connecting them] across the Mediterranean. This explains the gravity and irreversible character of the relations that commit us to each other, on one side and the other, beyond our own will” (90).

18. Jean Daniel, a fellow pied-noir and friend of Camus until their divergent politics separated them in the last years of Camus’ life, describes his own trajectory in the following way: “Shortly before November 1, 1954, if I no longer believed in assimilation, I still felt—and the friends of Ferhat Abbas thought it as well!—that a Franco-Algerian federation still had some chances. After the launching of the insurrection, I understood that everything was lost if we didn’t deal with the rebels as soon as possible.” Jean Daniel, Le temps qui reste: essai d’autobiographie professionnelle (Paris: Stock, 1973), 76. In retrospect, he considers Camus, who “had the despondency of a prophet,” to have been “the most lucid among us”: “He declared that he knew his people, the French of Algeria with whom he would express his solidarity until the end, and that power would from then on no longer be in Paris but Algiers. He predicted the regroupings of liberals around the extremists, racist attacks, counterterrorism, and secession. He had seen in Algiers, at the moment when he proposed a truce for civilians, which the FLN had not rejected but which [General Governor of Algeria] Jacques Soustelle had sabotaged, the exasperation of passions and the insanity of mediocrities. In his mind, there was not much that could any longer be done…. We all tended to think, I did as well, that he was exaggerating, that his predictions were apocalyptic, and that he had found a reason to withdraw from a struggle that was literally making him sick. The future would prove that politically he was right” (78).

19. The English translation of the text in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death erroneously gives the date as February 1956.

20. Mohamed Lebjaoui, who was a member of the first National Council of the Algerian Revolution and former chief of the Federation of France of the FLN, was also a friend of Camus’ and a member of the group that proposed the civilian truce. Neither Camus nor his other French-Algerian friends knew that Lebjaoui and the other Arab-Algerian supporters of the movement were at that time already members of the FLN. Lebjaoui insists, however, that the FLN’s commitment to the “Appeal for a Civilian Truce” was genuine: “This decision was taken by the national leadership after a long and serious discussion. In accepting to support the movement for a civilian truce, the leadership envisioned a gathering of European liberals in the hope of winning them gradually over to the idea of direct negotiations with the Front…. Our agreement in principle with a civilian truce was not a maneuver.” Mohamed Lebjaoui, Vérités sur la révolution algérienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 47.

21. Lebjaoui describes the group responsible for the “Appeal for a Civilian Truce,” which started as a theater discussion group, in the following way: “There was at that time a group of remarkable men from all points of view, but very distanced from political problems…. We began to get together and to talk. These discussions, as passionate, as concrete as they were, appear with the passing of time to be strangely unreal. The war had started, a ruthless war. Each day more men fell. But young Frenchmen and young Muslims, pretending to ignore all that, could still meet with each other to discuss the theater…. On our side there was Boualem Moussaoui (a future ambassador in Paris), Amar Ouzegane, Mouloud Amarane, myself, and several others. We were all militants who were already associated with the FLN. Not one of our French friends knew that—nor for an instant could they have imagined that such a thing could ever be possible.” Lebjaoui, Vérités sur la révolution algérienne, 38–39.

22. Amar Ouzegane, another participant in the movement who was at the same time a member of the FLN, describes the meeting and Camus’ speech in the following emotional terms: “Our famous compatriot, sickened by the massacre of civilian populations, volunteered to come to Algiers to make an appeal for a civilian truce and for the respect of children, women, and the old…. The generous idea of the future Nobel Prize recipient was identical to the sentiment expressed to us by Sheik Larbi Tebessi, who was shocked by the horrors perpetuated at Tébessa by the Foreign Legion against women and children…. This psychological encounter between two great Algerians, different by origin, language, culture, social milieu, faith, and ideals, is more than symbolic. It is the same cry of suffering and hope of two sons around the same mother, martyred Algeria.” Amar Ouzegane, Le meilleur combat (Paris: René Julliard, 1962), 231.

23. In an entry in his notebooks months after the appeal and dated October 1, 1956, Camus notes his visit with Germaine Tillion and describes her recent meeting with two leaders of the FLN in Algiers, whom she found out only afterward were Yassef Saadi and Ali la Pointe: “At that moment the one who seemed to be the leader said: ‘You take us for assassins.’ So Germaine Tillion replied: ‘But you are assassins’ (it was soon after the attack on the Casino of the cliff). Then the other, a terrible reaction: tears in his eyes. Then: ‘Those bombs, I would like to see them at the bottom of the ocean.’ ‘That depends entirely on you,’ said G. T. They then speak of torture…. They succeed in reaching an agreement. Suppression of terrorism against civilians against the suppression of executions. Approximately what I had proposed (but what followed, alas… )” Albert Camus, Carnets III: mars 1951–décembre 1959 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 213.

24. As does Assia Djebar, in Le blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), where she movingly describes Camus’ appeal in the following terms: “Pale and tense, but determined, Albert Camus reads the text of a talk calling for a truce. With him on the podium, Ferhat Abbas, the moderate nationalist leader (who will join the FLN several months later) listens to the writer. Nationalist Muslims and French liberals mingle and fraternize with each other. This scene from the past will later seem to be from another age. Nevertheless, this dialogue which tried to continue could have led to an Algeria which, like its neighbors, would have come to independence without paying such a bloody price. All Franco-Algerian relations were not broken all at once: in short, a solution ‘à la Mandela’ of South Africa today could have materialized. Instead, it is the law of arms… that will settle things. That will settle things on a heap of civilian dead. A independent and sovereign state is constituted in 1962, bled dry” (127).

7. Last Words

1. In his 1958 preface to the republication of his first published work, The Wrong Side and the Right Side [L’envers et l’endroit], which contains lyrical essays originally written in 1935 and 1936 when he was twenty-two years old, Camus claims that “the final and most revolting injustice is consummated when poverty is wed to life without hope or the sky I found on reaching adulthood in the appalling slums of our [metropolitan] cities; everything must be done so that men can escape from the double humiliation of poverty [la misère] and ugliness.” Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 8 [Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 7]. The absence of natural beauty transforms a geographic space of destitution—unacceptable in itself—into a space of absolute injustice, one to which even the “extreme Arab poverty [of his native Algeria] cannot be compared” (8 [7]). Beauty in itself of course does not diminish destitution and injustice, but its absence in the cold, dreary, working-class suburbs of northern France, what he calls an “injustice of climate,” raises them to another level. Camus describes his own childhood as being “halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything…. It was not poverty that got in my way: in Africa, the sun and the sea cost nothing. The obstacle lay rather in prejudices or stupidity” (7 [6]).

2. Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 98 [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), 91].

3. As we have seen, during his trial, Meursault claims that it “because of the sun” that he killed his victim, which provokes laughter in the courtroom. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 130 [Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), 1166]. His reason for returning to the spot where the initial confrontation between the Arabs and the French had taken place was not to seek revenge for his friend having been knifed, since for him, “the incident was closed” (74 [1167]). It was rather to flee the sun: “The small black lump of rock came into view far down the beach. It was rimmed by a dazzling sheen of light and feathery spray, but I was thinking of the cold, clear stream behind it, and wanting to hear again the murmur of its water, wanting to flee the sun… and to find again shade and rest” (73, trans. mod. [1167]).

4. See especially “The New Mediterranean Culture,” a talk Camus gave on February 8, 1937, for the inauguration of the “Maison de la Culture” in Algiers. In the talk, he first rejects all notions of a Mediterranean nationalism and the Roman roots of Mediterranean identity and then praises its living, culturally hybrid nature: “The Mediterranean lies elsewhere. It is the very denial of Rome and Latin genius. It is living and wants nothing to do with abstractions…. The Mediterranean, an international basin traversed by every current, is perhaps the only land linked to great ideas from the East…. The most basic aspect of Mediterranean genius springs perhaps from this historically and geographically unique encounter between East and West.” Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 193–194 [Essais, 1324–1325].

5. In Memmi’s 1965 preface to The Colonizer and the Colonized, he refers to himself as “a sort of métis of colonization.” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), xvi [Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 29]. In his preface to Memmi’s early autobiographical novel, La statue de sel, Camus insists on Memmi’s ambiguous identity: “Here is a French writer from Tunisia who is neither French nor Tunisian. He’s scarcely Jewish, because in a sense he doesn’t want to be. The curious subject of the book… is the impossibility for a Tunisian Jew of French culture to be anything precise at all.” Albert Camus, in Albert Memmi, La statue de sel (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 10. In a similar vein, Jacques Derrida describes his own “identity problems” in the following way: “To be Franco-Machrebian, one ‘like myself,’ is not… to have a surfeit or richness of identities, attributes, or names. In the first place, it would rather betray a disorder of identity [trouble de l’identité].” Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14 [Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 32].

6. Comery, without the first “r,” is in fact the family name of Camus’ paternal grandmother, who was born in Algeria in 1852. All references to The First Man in this chapter are to Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) [Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)].

7. The “first men” of Camus’ Algeria are of course explicitly men, and women, outside of Jacques Cormery’s mother and grandmother, have little if any role to play in the novel. At the same time, it could be argued that the real subject of the novel is not the son, but his silent, illiterate mother. It is in fact to Camus’ own illiterate mother that the novel is dedicated or addressed: “Intercessor: Widow Camus. To you who will never be able to read this book” (3, [11]). In the novel, through an uncorrected slip of the pen, Camus’ mother is directly identified with the fictional Jacques Cormery’s mother. To receive her war widow’s pension each quarter, Jacques’ mother must each time sign her name to a form: “After the first time when she had problems, a neighbor (?) had taught her to copy a sample of the signature ‘Widow Camus’, and she managed to do this more or less well, but anyway it was always accepted” (206 [189]).

8. Nowhere in his work is Camus closer to the turn-of-the-century Catholic poet Charles Péguy, who like Camus’ own father died at the beginning of World War I, than in his presentation of what could be called the civic virtues of poverty and anonymity. Péguy, for example, describes the authenticity and “spirituality” of the poor (but for him, exclusively Catholic) French in the following way: “Being poor and French, Catholic and peasant, [the most authentic Frenchman] has no family papers…. Nothing that left any trace in the papers of notaires. They never possessed anything…. [The poor Catholic] sees nothing but an immense mass and a vast race, and immediately after, immediately behind, he distinguishes nothing else…. He plunges with pride into this anonymity. The anonymous is his patrimony. Anonymity is his immense patrimony. The more communal the land is, the more he wants to grow out of the land.” Charles Péguy, “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne,” in Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1992), 3:1298–1299. Unlike Péguy, of course, Camus’ defense of the virtues of poverty is secular and has nothing to do with Catholicism.

9. If the colonized (both Arab and Berber) are referred as “the Arabs,” Jacques Cormery’s mother and his entire family refer to the citizens of mainland France in the same general terms as “the French.” When Jacques tells his mother that his father’s grave in France, which she has never visited, is well kept and has flowers on it, she responds by saying, “Yes. The French are good people” (73 [73]), as if she herself were not French.

10. Omar Carlier, after arguing that no people is by nature more violent than another, for, as he puts it, “there is no violence gene,” explains atrocities similar to the scene that appears in Camus’ novel in the following way: “To cut the sex of the enemy and put it in his mouth is to humiliate and defy the dead and to pursue him after death, to condemn him not to arrive intact in the afterlife, and even worse, to have him make the journey in a ignominious state. This anthropological form of violence returned during the war of Independence, and the FLN had trouble eliminating it, even against its own men.” Omar Carlier, “Violences,” in La guerre d’Algérie: 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie, edited by Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004), 347, 377.

11. “And those who still heroically think that a brother should die rather than principles, I shall limit myself to admiring them from afar. I am not of their race.” Albert Camus, “Preface,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1961), trans. mod., 113 [Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), 892–893].

12. I therefore agree with Jeffrey Isaac’s criticism of Michael Walzer’s assertion that because of his “connectedness” with the pied-noir community, Camus valued French lives more than Arab lives: “I think that Walzer is wrong when he writes, for example, that ‘Camus would not have said… that French lives and Arab lives were of equal importance in his eyes. French lives, even pied noir lives, on the wrong side of history, meant more to him—just as Arab lives meant more to the intellectuals of the FLN’ [Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 146]…. Certainly as a pied noir his own community and its culture mattered more to him than the community and culture of the Arabs. But it does not follow that French-Algerian lives mattered more, that he was any less pained by the suffering of Arab children than he was by the suffering of French children.” Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1992), 194–195. There is ample evidence in his writings that this is the case, that Camus was not just “pained” by the suffering of both Arab and French children and other innocent civilians but made saving innocent lives the first principle of his perspective on politics, that which had to come first, before everything else. If different value were to be given to different lives, then terrorism could in fact be justified.

13. In “Algeria 1958,” Camus lists what he considers to be legitimate in Arab demands and the injustices he claims “every Frenchman” knows the Arabs are right to point out and reject: “(1) Colonialism and its abuses, which are well-established. (2) The perennial lie of constantly proposed but never realized assimilation…. (3) The obvious injustice of the agrarian allocation and of the distribution of income (sub-proletariat)…. (4) The psychological suffering; the often scornful or indifferent manner of many French, and the development among the Arabs (as a result of a series of stupid measures being taken) of the complex of humiliation that is at the center of the present drama.” Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 144, trans. mod. [Essais, 1011–1012].

14. “Cain” was one of the titles Camus considered for his short story “The Guest/ Host,” and the “abominable” and mad actions of men under “a ferocious sun” of course evoke the madness and devotion to violence of “The Renegade.” In the “Notes and Sketches” Camus made for The First Man can be found the following entry: “Chapter going backwards: Hostages Kabyle village. Emasculated soldiers—raids, etc., back step by step to the first shot fired during colonization. But why stop there? Cain killed Abel” (304, trans. mod. [300]).

15. In the French text, the quotation marks appear at the beginning but not at the end of the wish or plea expressed by Jacques (by all first men?), and even if it is simply an uncorrected mistake or an editorial oversight, it seems fitting that the quotation itself should remain open, unfinished, unending.

Conclusion. Terrorism and Torture

1. David Ignatius in his editorial in the Washington Post quotes from the flier that the Pentagon sent out announcing the showing of film, which, as he phrases it, “puts it in eerie perspective”: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas…. Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.” David Ignatius, “Think Strategy, Not Numbers,” The Washington Post (August 26, 2003). Ignatius in this article avoids any mention of the French systematic use of torture (which was at the heart of the “tactics” that supposedly succeeded so brilliantly) and claims that the fact that the Pentagon’s special operations chiefs arranged the showing of the film is “a hopeful sign that the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq.” “Thinking creatively” and justly would seem to be exactly what the military and political leaders were not doing. The use of torture can never be considered “creative.”

2. Albert Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” (Combat, November 19–30, 1946), in Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2006) [Camus à Combat: éditoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus 1944–1947 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002)].

3. This is the term Jeffrey Isaac uses in his book to describe the politics of both Arendt and Camus. For example, he states in his introduction that his “aim is not to present these thinkers as saints or authorities, only as exemplary theorists and political actors, who point the way toward a rebellious politics that is alive to many of the concerns of postmodern writing and yet is self-assuredly normative and humanistic.” Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 12.

4. Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 75 [Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 87]