Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)

One of the most important figures associated with French existentialism, the Algerian-born Frenchman Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) made significant contributions to literature, philosophy, political analysis, drama, and journalism. An important critic of the capital punishment and totalitarianism, Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car crash three years later.

Albert Camus was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest in philosophy (only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field), he came to France at the age of twenty-five. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat. But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of the time; in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as producer and playwright (e.g., Caligula, 1944). He also adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. His love for the theatre may be traced back to his membership in L'Equipe, an Algerian theatre group, whose ‘collective creation’ Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

In 1942 Camus published the novel The Stranger and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, two classics associated with existentialism. The point of departure for both is that humans are often unable to make sense of the world. Nevertheless, humans seek fundamental meaning, which, in what seems to be a fundamentally meaningless world, constitutes the relationship that Camus terms “the absurd” and also invites humankind to face. The challenge is to face the truth and seek meaning even though humans must continually fail, like the mythical Sisyphus who had to roll a boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down each evening.

In Camus’s The Rebel (1951), the argument shifted from a critical rejection of suicide to one of political murder. The modern discovery of revolutionary meaning within the historical process suggests that the strategic removal of those who stand in the way of a better future for all is justified. However, all futures are speculative, and if humans are seduced by the Utopian promise of the future, humankind will sacrifice real individuals to what may never be, which would amount to a failure to understand the meaning of revolt. To kill anyone is to violate the very principle on which the rebel stands. The challenge is to preserve the principle by resisting oppression, not to violate it by becoming another oppressor.

During the cold war, there seemed to be no alternative between world capitalism and world communism. Camus was critical of the latter, and The Rebel’s critique of strategic violence read like an assault on revolutionary communism and its sympathisers. This elicited a counterattack from Camus’s friend and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and his colleagues, who continued to support communist possibilities against capitalist exploitation and imperialism. The ensuing debate, carried out in Sartre’s journal Les Temps modemes, was very public and acrimonious, ending the friendship and dividing intellectuals throughout France and the world on essential issues of progressive politics and theory.

Other well-known works of Camus are La Chute (The Fall), 1956, and L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom), 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He was a stylist of great purity and intense concentration and rationality.