Today, Albert Camus is one of the best-known French philosophers—though he did not consider himself to be one—and perhaps the most read French novelist in the world. His works have inspired numerous movies, even pop music, and heads of state from France and the United States of America have often invoked them favourably.
But which Camus is being celebrated? Is it the fearless reporter who tirelessly investigated the terrible conditions of the people indigenous to the Algerian region of Kabylia occupied by France in the 1930s? Or the man who wrote that the only salvation for France was to remain an ‘Arab power’? Do we celebrate the writer who published articles in a clandestine resistance newspaper during the German occupation of France? Surely not the ambitious author who agreed to withdraw his chapter on Kafka to ensure that his philosophical treatise would pass the Nazi-controlled censorship? Is our praise reserved for the author who takes to task marriage, mourning, and social mobility in his most famous novel, The Stranger, or the one who, in that same work, does not name any of the Arab characters? When we speak of Camus, do we mean the resister who was in favour of the death penalty, or the philosopher who later condemned it?
Camus was profoundly conflicted. He was a firm believer in the egalitarian ideals of French enlightenment in part because the French state effectively supported him after the loss of his father during the First World War and provided him with the means, through education, to lift himself out of the resulting poverty of his youth. However, the hardships he experienced at that time, and his upbringing in French-colonized Algeria, made him increasingly aware of how France’s oppression of Arabs and Berbers contradicted these egalitarian ideals. Throughout his life and works, Camus oscillated between avoiding this contradiction and confronting it. Ultimately, this duality became his identity. The conflicting impulses toward repressing and coming to terms with this awareness drove his writing in different ways at different times.
This short book will provide the reader with an overview of Camus’s life and works and will also squarely address the ambiguities of Camus’s positions because they are integral to understanding both his major works and his renewed popularity today.