Albert Camus contre la peine de mort (review)

Ève Morisi's book was published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981 by the Justice minister in François Mitterrand's government, Robert Badinter, who contributes a preface. It seeks to retrace the history of Camus's long-standing militant role in the campaign against 'legalized killing' between 1936 and 1959. The inclusion of some inédits supplements textual evidence to be found in Camus's essays, fiction, journalism, notebooks, and correspondence widely accessible in Folio paperback, in the Œuvres complètes (Gallimard), or in works such as Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi's Camus à combat and the biographies of Olivier Todd and Herbert Lottman. While most readers may be familiar with the prevalence of the theme throughout Camus's oeuvre, Morisi's compilation and her essay (in the second part of the book) help them understand both the mix of personal, ethical, and political factors that motivated him as a writer and as a committed intellectual, and the rejet viscéral at the centre thereof. The inédits, unpublished but often referred to by critics (p. 27), relate essentially to interventions by Camus and the Groupes de Liaison Internationale in Greek or Italian political cases; and they provide a useful complement to the better-known instances linked to the post-war épuration in France (and his polemic with Mauriac), to political trials in Europe, the US, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere, or to the Algerian War. In noting whether the death penalty was carried out or commuted in these cases, in clarifying the number of committees, appeals, meetings, etc. in which Camus was involved, Morisi's compilation provides evidence of the commitment, obstinacy, and, one suspects, emotional toll involved. While brevity in the Carnets, letters, and many newspaper articles allows reproduction without truncation, reducing a text like L'Étranger to seven and a half pages (including Camus's preface to the American edition, focused on a protagonist who refuses to 'jouer le jeu'), Le Mythe de Sisyphe to one and a half pages, La Peste to six, and Caligula to one illustrates the shortcomings inherent in an anthologizing approach of this kind, especially since the essay that follows (pp. 257-327) seeks neither to enhance the overall coherence by referring systematically to the selected extracts and/or cross-referencing them, nor to compensate for the inevitable arbitrariness of the selections when dealing with texts saturated by the presence, inevitability, and injustice of the death penalty, whether metaphorical or legal (both introduction and essay slip unproblematically between one and the other). The possible benefit of the digest, however, is either that it helps readers situate individual works in Camus's lifelong commitment to abolition (via the chronologically based network of journalism, letters, action), or that it instils in them a desire to explore the unabridged works. In both cases it should be welcomed, because it shows that his twenty-year fight against capital punishment was a seminal feature of the utopie relative at the heart of his world view, as summarized in the one text to which Morisi pays surprisingly little attention, Réflexions sur la guillotine (1957).