Chapter 4
Rebel without a cause
In 1943, Camus wrote in his diary: ‘to ask the question of the absurd world is to ask: “are we going to accept despair passively?” I suppose no honest person can say yes.’ This early entry encapsulates his awareness that events were forcing him to transcend the nihilism of the absurd (Figure 4). In the midst of the Second World War, Camus realized that he could not be indifferent to the Nazi occupation of France and thus the nihilism of his absurd was untenable.
4. One of the most emblematic pictures of Camus, taken by famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1947.
Camus was still firmly against all-explaining theories and systemic change, but he had to find a way to theorize and narrate his decision to join the resistance, which on many levels contradicted some of the central tenets of the absurd. His early resistance writing, ‘Letters to a German Friend’, showed how he struggled to explain his commitment to this cause as part of the will of the absurd. Pre-Second World War, the central characters in his works—Meursault, Caligula—exhibited complete indifference to morals, to the notion of good and evil. Camus would drastically change his stance in his second trilogy of works—The Plague, The Just Assassins, and The Rebel—which are part of Camus’s cycle of revolt.
Camus develops his concept of revolt as an adaption of the absurd to the times. As he would later write in The Rebel, uncritically following the nihilism of the absurd is not without pitfalls, for if ‘nothing is right or wrong, good or bad, the rule will be about being the most efficient … and that means the strongest’. In short, the absurd does not condemn murder: ‘if we pretend to accept and live the absurd outlook, we have to prepare ourselves to kill.’ Revolt at first for Camus was almost instinctive—something one does in reaction to oppression but at a particular moment in time, when things have reached a certain stage where compromise or submission is no longer bearable; this stage is revolt. Revolt was the name he gave to his decision to enter the resistance, which he then turned into a theory. In September 1944, he wrote that the resistance was spurred on by revolt, not by revolution: ‘revolt comes from the heart.’ So, it is a feeling, like the absurd. However, it is also, like the absurd, a temporary and short-lived feeling, and does not seek to establish a system or long-standing values. Revolt is an emotion based on an inchoate moral code, a feeling that Camus first sought to illustrate in his novel The Plague.
The Plague
The plot of The Plague is relatively simple: a city in French Algeria is overtaken by an outbreak of the plague. At the outset, the colonial order is ratified when the narrator describes the city where the events take place: ‘Oran is, in fact, an ordinary city and nothing more than a French administrative district of the Algerian coast.’ This description seems mundane, but what is extraordinary here is that a city in North Africa is considered the head of a French district, and that this city is described as ordinary. With that word, history is immediately ironed out: the conquest is normalized and accepted.
The Plague begins with an epigraph from Daniel Defoe (although it is often absent from English translations): ‘It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.’ This statement clearly sets forth the novel’s allegorical objective: it is about the German occupation of France, the plague in lieu of the Germans. But, with this allegory, Camus negates human agency from history; German occupation is replaced with a virus. Throughout the novel there is no discussion of the causes of the plague; it just appears and disappears with no explanation. It is problematic as an allegory—perhaps the plague is primarily a symbol, a device to stage human beings (exclusively men) in the face of adversity and to illustrate Camus’s new concept of revolt.
The city is under quarantine: first rats die, then people, no one can enter or leave. The authorities and doctors are helpless and overwhelmed. The narrative focuses on the action of six Frenchmen—Bernard Rieux, Father Paneloux, Raymond Rambert, Jean Tarrou, Joseph Grand, and Cottard, whose lives change in the face of the epidemic. Each of these six men is a stand-in for the two attitudes towards German occupation: resistance or collaboration. The characters struggle with meaning in face of the plague: what is it about, why does it exist, will they die next, what can be done about it? Facing this heightened uncertainty (after all, these are the existential problems, and made omnipresent by the plague), each of the men faces this struggle differently.
One of the main characters is Rieux, the town doctor who tirelessly takes care of patients suffering from the plague. Rieux is separated from his wife because of quarantine due to the plague—a parallel with Camus, who was separated from Francine. Though Rieux’s work is ceaseless it does not produce predictable results: some of his patients die, others do not, with no explanation. Nonetheless, in the face of the arbitrariness of life he persists on moral instinct. He is pragmatic and does not dwell on the drama of the situation.
Rieux is also a crucial character because we learn toward the end of the novel that he is the narrator of the story—a plot twist that strains credulity (Rieux has been the narrator all along, reading excerpts from Tarrou’s diary). Until then, the reader had been led to believe that the narrator was omniscient. Although implausible, this twist fits well with Camus’s goal of challenging all god-like authorities in the novel. By telling the reader that the narrator was Rieux, Camus makes a statement about the omniscient narrator: the novel’s equivalent of an all-knowing deity whom he replaces with a human character.
Asked by one of the characters if he believes in God, Rieux responds that if he believed in an all-powerful god he would stop trying to cure his patients. It is therefore not the existence of god that is challenged, but rather god’s ability to intervene in human affairs. What matters is human agency. Rieux also says he cannot believe in a god that allows the death of innocent children. This exchange is at the heart of the humanist thrust of the novel.
In The Plague Rieux, who keeps on tending to his patients with no hope of curing them, resembles Sisyphus; it is ‘an interminable defeat’. Facing death and the meaninglessness of life on a daily basis, Rieux becomes the incarnation of the man in revolt. He continues to fight for his fellow human beings no matter how dire the circumstances or elusive the chance of success. Rieux is motivated by a secular faith in humanity, which later Camus will theorize as the driving force of his revolt.
Another one of the six men is Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest who starts out with absolute beliefs and is a stand-in for organized religion. He tells his parishioners that the plague is divine punishment—‘you deserved it!’—and attacks ‘vain human science’. Eventually, through his experiences with the plague, Father Paneloux becomes less intransigent, and in a particularly ironic twist dies, the plague forcibly converting him to the realm of simple mortals.
The good character who shares commonalities with Camus is Raymond Rambert, a journalist from mainland France who has come to the colonial town to inquire about the living conditions of Arabs. Rambert, trapped there because of the quarantine, tries desperately to escape for much of the novel. More concerned about reconnecting with his wife and escaping Oran for Paris, he eventually decides to stay and join the fight against the plague. He is the stand-in for the latecomer to the resistance. The initial motivation for his presence is important in that it is swiftly forgotten as soon as the plague emerges.
Jean Tarrou is another stand-in for the resister. He creates a group of volunteers and serves as the embodiment of the resistance and of revolt. Motivated by a humanist ethic, he is the most moral of the six men. Tarrou is selfless and courageous. He too dies of the plague, which further drives home the sense of meaninglessness and injustice that pervades the novel. There is no reward for good actions, whether you are an atheist man in revolt or a Jesuit priest—there is no higher benevolent authority.
A fifth man, Joseph Grand, a municipal employee who has been writing the first sentence of his novel over and over again in an attempt to reach literary perfection, eventually joins the resistance and survives the plague, once again echoing Camus’s point in The Myth of Sisyphus about the randomness of life and death. Here the plague plays the role of Caligula (wantonly administering death), but the focus of the story is not on the source of arbitrary death but rather on how a select few human beings respond to it.
All the characters correspond to various reactions during the occupation. After the heroes (Rieux, Tarrou, Raymond, Grand), and the religious authority figure (Paneloux), we have lastly in Cottard the stand-in for the collaborator. Cottard is a man who tried to commit suicide and was saved by Grand. Cottard goes on to profit from the plague (selling goods on the black market, helping people to leave through illegal channels). He survives but will be arrested at the end of the novel. Here, human justice prevails in the absence of divine retribution.
The few times Camus mentions Algerians in the novel, it is to make them a seamless or invisible part of the decor. There are no Arab characters as such; none speak or are described, even though Oran had a substantial Algerian population.
In the end there is no explanation for the plague, how it arrived, or why it stopped killing. In fact, it just vanishes, inexplicably, ready to return at any time, as the narrator ominously warns. The Plague contains many of the themes found in The Myth of Sisyphus, along with a call for action based on moralism and humanism. As Camus wrote in his diary:
[T]here is no other objection to the totalitarian attitude than the religious or moral objection. If this world is meaningless then they are right. I do not accept that they are right. Therefore … it is on us to create God. He is not the creator. That is all of Christianity’s history. Because we have only one way to create God and that is to become God.
To become God is what Camus suggests in this diary entry, and that is what Doctor Rieux does, in two ways: (1) by acting like a benevolent agent in times of crisis; and (2) by symbolically taking over the function of omniscient narrator. This idea of humans acting like gods would re-emerge during the course of Camus’s many public arguments with communist intellectuals who derogatively called him a secular saint. Amidst all the existential questions on the existence of God and the meaning of life, a spectre intermittently haunts the novel. Though the living conditions of Arabs would be the subject of a series of articles from the novel’s French journalist Rambert, this concern disappears in light of the arising emergency: the invasion of the town by the plague. The message seems to be that ordinary matters such as the ‘living conditions of the Arabs’ must be put to one side. Silence on this issue echoes the silence about the cause of the plague in the novel.
Neither Victims nor Executioners: revolt as a political stance
In a famous series of articles written in 1947, known collectively as Neither Victims nor Executioners, Camus began to articulate his political vision on revolt in the post-Second World War landscape. One of his main targets in these articles was communism. The context for Camus’s positioning is important: right after the Second World War the USSR was at its height in terms of influence and perceived military power. The French Communist Party was immensely powerful, in terms not just of numbers of parliament members (it was France’s largest political party), but also of their union, the CGT, which was the most powerful in France.
On another front, a great many intellectuals supported the Communist Party, including artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger and numerous writers who congregated around the ex-surrealist Louis Aragon and the influential Communist Party literary journal Les Lettres françaises. As Camus knew, many communists—Lenin first among them—made the liberation and independence of former colonies a crucial objective of communism worldwide. In fact, many pro-independence movements were led by communists, starting first with Ho Chi Minh in French-occupied Indochina, a fact of which Camus was also aware. Camus’s main concern at the time was that France retain its empire. For example, in an interview with a Protestant publication in 1945, Camus stated:
If France is still treated with respect, it is not because of its glorious past. The world today does not care about glorious pasts. But it is because France is an Arab Power, a reality that 99% of French people ignore. If France does not imagine, in the years that come, a great Arab policy, there is no future for her.
The most popular analysis of colonialism at the time had at its heart the capitalist profit motive, and it was best opposed by communism, a position theorized by none other than Jean-Paul Sartre himself in a preface to an anthology of poetry from colonized authors. This stance encouraged Camus down the path of anti-communism. Camus was a man of the left, but ultimately of a European and reformist left. The distinctive features of Camus’s own brand of leftism—of Euro-centrism and rejection of revolution in favour of reform—correspond to his notion of revolt. Camus’s revolt was circumscribed to Europe and Europeans and framed in terms of existential issues, not social consciousness. Camus announced his specifics about revolt in Neither Victims nor Executioners (and further developed them in The Rebel).
In his first article in the series, ‘The Century of Fear’, Camus, in a clear attack on communism, writes against political utopia and science: ‘we are suffocating amongst the men who believe to be absolutely right, whether this is about their machines or their ideas’. The question for Camus is how to get out of this terror. And the first step is to renounce all violence. The prerequisites for fighting terror are the unwillingness to be killed (to be a victim) and killing for an idea (to be an executioner). Terror here for Camus is institutionalized violence in the name of a higher cause. His target is clearly communism.
Camus writes in another article (‘Socialism Mystified’) that between a system where freedom prevails but not social justice, and its opposite—social justice without freedom—he would in the end choose freedom. Camus suggests strongly that the French Socialist Party—a minor entity then, but which would eventually come to power in 1981 long after Camus’s death—needs to choose between complete adhesion to Marxism and the notion that the ends justify the means, or reformism. In short, Camus wants the French Socialist Party to abandon revolution and to renounce Marxism as an ‘absolute philosophy’. Another reason to give up on revolution is contextual: according to Camus, the only viable revolution would be a world revolution and that would lead to a grave risk of war with a great many casualties. For Camus, this risk is not worthwhile.
Camus’s alternative to world revolution is ‘international democracy’, a concept he only defines negatively. It is not communism, but neither is it the United Nations. Specifically, he considers the UN to be an international dictatorship because it is governed by executive powers; instead, he advocates a world parliament constituted by world elections. He notes, however, that resistance to the international dictatorship should not employ means that would contradict the desired end, a position which effectively prohibited violent resistance.
In a crucial passage of the article ‘The World Goes Fast’ Camus speaks of the coming ‘clash of civilizations’. He claims that soon, ‘in 10 years, in 50 years’, it is the pre-eminence of Western civilization that will be at stake. Time is of the essence, and he asks that the world parliament he describes in the previous article be opened as soon as possible ‘so that Western civilization and its world order become truly universal’. In short, Camus wants to save the pre-eminence of the West and suggests opening up a world parliament to do this. He does not say exactly how this would happen, but by advocating such a solution and by being in favour of such an objective, he resolutely places safeguarding the pre-eminence of Western powers at the centre of his agenda. This is as close as he would come to overtly defending a colonial world order.
At the end of the article, Camus advocates ‘relative utopia’, which would entail, for example, the nationalization of natural resources (uranium, oil, and coal) but nothing else. In short, Camus’s goal is akin to the tenets of social democracy: a compromise between collectivization and all-out privatization. In his penultimate article, ‘The New Social Contract’, Camus wants to create an international code of justice. This is also the first article in which he proposes to outlaw the death penalty. Camus, however, is not in favour of ideological changes. He is asking men to have the courage to give up some of their dreams (i.e. communism) to focus on the saving of lives (i.e. peace). These articles are consistently lyrical and declarative in tone, as though Camus is announcing rules rather than proposing them.
The last article, despite its title ‘Towards Dialogue’, is no exception. Camus once again takes a stand against ‘historical logic’; he describes the notion of progress, of liberation as a logic ‘we created out of thin air’, notions ‘whose knots will end up strangling us’.
What is Camus concerned with here? The anti-historical leitmotif throughout Camus’s works requires explanation. This notion of history comes from Camus’s understanding of Hegel, who famously stated upon seeing Napoleon arrive in his town—and thereby toppling the aristocratic order—that he saw history on a horse. Thus, Napoleon became a personification of a progressive history. Although this is problematic in many ways (given his actions in Haiti, Spain, and elsewhere), this was the French view of Napoleon—as an emancipator of the people, a toppler of unjust regimes. The idea was that with ‘progress’ every oppressive regime would inexorably meet its violent end at the hands of the people.
Camus knew better than most that France had conquered Algeria and that Algerians were indeed oppressed and yearning for liberation. One way to look at Camus’s anti-historicism is as the fear of a narrative that would end with the liberation of Algeria. Camus’s awareness of this theory of the inevitability of progress—and on one level his belief in it—made him uneasy with the situation in Algeria. This was the source of Camus’s overt appeal to his readers to relinquish their ideals, their utopia of complete liberation, in favour of a more modest ‘change of lifestyle’ or ‘relative utopia’. Camus wanted moderate reforms, not radical change—all the more so when it came to Algeria. Though this reformist stance found few allies during the Algerian War of Independence as neither party was favouring compromise, it eventually led to renewed popularity after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union; then, Camus was celebrated as having been right all along.
The Just Assassins and The Rebel
Camus’s opposition to political violence, or in his own words the condemnation of ‘the right to kill in the name of history’, was a vehicle for both his rejection of sweeping revolutionary change and his opposition to anti-colonialist movements. Therefore, the question of violence for a good cause, whether murder is ever justified, is at the centre of Camus’s second most famous play, The Just Assassins, published in 1949. Basing it on the memoirs of a former Russian terrorist, Boris Savinkov, who in 1905 attempted to kill the tsar, Camus stages the dilemma of political violence through the debate among militants of a terrorist cell who are planning the assassination of the tsar.
The three main characters in the play are Ivan Kaliayev, Stepan Fedorov, and Dora Doulebov. At first, the characters seem to have a seemingly unshakeable faith in the legitimacy of their actions. On the one hand, Camus presents Kaliayev as the true hero, who has scruples. Initially, he could not throw the bomb because the young nephew and niece of the tsar were present. After a second attempt, he manages to kill the Grand Duke alone. He is caught, and when authorities offer him a pardon if he betrays his comrades, he refuses. He is executed by the state in the final act. Kaliayev is the hero of the play because his actions correspond to the precise circumstances that make violence permissible according to Camus: he was willing to risk his life. Camus proposes that this willingness is a guarantee that the violence will not take place on a large scale, will be limited in time, and thus will not lead to a tyrannical regime.
Stepan, on the other hand, seems a caricature: he enthusiastically endorses the killing of innocents. He is a stand-in for the communist militant whom Camus dislikes so much, he is in favour of collective punishment, even mass murder. He is violent, intolerant, and eager to kill. For him the ends justify the means. Yet he is also fragile; he ultimately admits he was envious of Kaliayev. Dora, though a militant as well, is driven by her love for Kaliayev. Once he dies, she decides to pursue the struggle so that she may meet him in death.
The play was not well received; critics found it odd that a love story was inserted in such a political play. However, perhaps this was one of Camus’s points; in the end, love seems to transcend political commitments, putting human feelings above human history, above political actions.
Although the terrorists appear flawed, Camus seems to admire them if only because they are prepared to die for their ideas as well as to kill for them. Camus contrasts this stance with that of philosophers and thinkers when he writes about ‘two races of men. One kills once and pays the price of his life. The other justifies thousands of crimes and accepts all sorts of honors.’ Camus’s anti-intellectualism resurfaces here; he is in favour of action, even violent action, but only in the short term: the death of the violent actor is the best guarantee of the limited scope of the revolt.
The play is inseparable from Camus’s later essay on revolt, The Rebel, because it is the transposition of an essay that Camus published before The Just Assassins and that he would re-insert later in The Rebel. This long essay is a continuation of Camus’s multi-pronged attack on communism and revolution. It is for revolt what his Myth of Sisyphus was for the absurd: a blueprint.
Camus begins The Rebel by reassessing the absurd. It is recast as a starting point for revolt. Camus states that he believes in nothing, that everything is absurd, but that belief is in itself a revolt, a protest. Revolt is born out of the absurd, out of a lack of meaning; it is a reaction to the absurdity of life. Further at issue with the absurd is that it has no moral component (murder is permissible), and revolt is a reaction to this as well. For Camus, revolt is a breaking point, an existential reaction akin to someone saying, I can’t go on like this! In one of the first examples Camus uses an uncharacteristic social component: the moment when a slave says ‘Enough!’ However, he does not address what happens next: Camusian revolt prescribes limited violence that is temporary, unsystematic, tied only to the moment.
Notwithstanding the example of the slave, a crucial point is that revolt is limited to Europe: ‘the problem of revolt only has meaning inside our own Western society’. Camus adds that ‘it is hard for revolt to express itself in societies with very significant inequalities’. Camus also writes that revolt cannot happen in societies where the sacred takes on great importance; in his view these societies have not yet come to terms with the absurd. Certainly, expression of the divide between Europe and the rest of the world echoes his thought on the upcoming ‘clash of civilizations’ which concerns him and which he wrote about in Neither Victims nor Executioners.
The paradox of The Rebel is that most of its many pages describe what revolt is not. The Rebel includes a long list of counter-examples—of enemies of all kinds in all fields: political (Nazis and communists), historical (revolution), and philosophical (Hegel).
For example, Camus takes on the Marquis de Sade (the famous French author whose pornographic stories and actions gave rise to the word sadism and who was famously imprisoned in the Bastille) because he was too driven by ‘absolute hatred’ of his fellow man. Camus criticizes Romantic writers because their revolt is limited, too literary, and individualist. He discusses Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov but sees it as offering a dead end because Karamazov’s refusal of God’s truth leads him to madness in which ‘everything is permitted’—harking back to the nihilism associated with the absurd.
Camus also discusses human revolt as art, as an artistic expression, and here he sees revolt as existential, not social. As the book progresses, its tone becomes more virulent. Camus issues edicts on human nature and on what we should and should not believe. He brandishes an undefined humanistic moral against any and all large-scale emancipating projects. Any dissent from Camus’s point of view becomes a voice in favour of mass murder and ‘servitude’. His statements are definitive and bear no discussion.
The paradox is that, for example, when Camus restricts to Europeans those issues pertaining to human nature and revolt, he leaves himself open to the criticism that he himself is the messianic teller of truths which he criticizes so thoroughly elsewhere in the essay.
The essay concludes with a curiously regionalist note praising ‘Mediterranean thought’, which for Camus is synonymous with certain distinct intellectual attributes, which include a particular sensitivity to nature and a privileged relationship with the sun. Certainly, Camus was grateful for being born in that area of the world and not in the working-class cities of mainland France:
What good luck to have been born to the world on the hills of Tipasa instead of in Saint-Étienne or Roubaix. Know my luck and receive it with gratitude.
This section received a fair amount of criticism. Can a particular thought and world outlook be linked to geography, to weather patterns, as Camus seemed to say? At the time, many critics were not convinced.
The intransigent tone, the exclusion of non-Europeans from revolt, and the equation of Nazism with communism led many intellectuals from all sides to criticize the book virulently when it was published. Though initially he did not want to, Camus’s long-time friend Jean-Paul Sartre would become the strongest and most persuasive critic of The Rebel. This launched the very public break between France’s two most famous intellectuals at the time.