Out of Character: Camus's French Algerian Subjects

I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised 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 shall defend my mother before justice. ¹

Albert Camus, Stockholm interview, Dec. 14, 1957

Camus’s position in the 1950s was one of extreme intellectual and emotional difficulty and tension. He had written about freedom, justice, violence and revolt in abstract terms, and asserted principles which he presented as of both fundamental importance and universal application. He never altogether abandoned this language, and he continued to write about politics in the tone of a severe moralist. Yet his actual positions were political and partisan. The violence of the Hungarian rebels and of the Anglo-French expedition in Egypt raised no problems. It was violence “on the right side”—precisely the logic he had rejected, on grounds of a rigorous morality, in relation to revolutionary violence. Freedom was an absolute for the Hungarians, and their violence in asserting their will “to stand upright” was “pure.” The violence of the Algerian Arabs, who thought that they were making the same claim, was “inexcusable,” and the nature and degree of the freedom to be accorded to them were matters to be decided by France, in the light of its own strategic needs—a plea which was irrelevant when made by Russia. ²

Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus: Of Europe and Africa, 1970

Algeria is no longer a Mediterranean paradise. It is neither the homosocial utopia André Gide celebrated at the turn of the century in Les nourritures terrestres nor the never-never land of what Club Med made of the North African coast sixty years later. Gutted and drained by violence aimed at everyone by every kind of warring faction, the nation no longer stands as the emblem of self-determination or successful decolonization. In any event we can be sure that Algeria never stood for the timeless landscape of metaphysical intensity that Albert Camus concocted for his readers at Editions Gallimard in the postwar years. However messy it may have become, Algeria remains a rich and varied terrain for the study of what Edward Said has lately called “a comparative literature of colonialism” with many “intertwined and overlapping histories. ³

Tom Conley, Afterword to Réda Bensmaïa’s The Year of Passages, 1995

The three citations throw into stark relief the fact that Albert Camus’s vexed relation to his Algerian terre natale, remains unfinished business and therefore a necessary part of the agenda in reexamining Camus’s reputation as a world-class, cosmopolitical author in the 1990’s. The often remarked on, yet no less astonishing phrase from his Nobel acceptance speech in 1956, placing filial piety on the same axis as the defense of a dirty colonial war, provides the context for Conor Cruise O’Brien’s scathing exposure of Camus’s moral double standards vis-à-vis Europe and North Africa. It also points up the extent to which critical reception of Camus’s work has, until relatively recently, tended to downplay how he compromised his moral stance by taking the French side; focusing instead on the deconstructive metaphysics of his landscapes of absence. ⁴ Tom Conley’s geopolitical positioning of Camus within a Mediterranean dystopia riven by “intellocide” (the assassination of intellectuals deemed symbols of westernization by the Front Islamique de Salut), and the economic ruin wreaked by the morally collapsed, militarily bolstered shell of a post-Independence nation-state, underscores how it has now become impossible to abstract Camus’s writings from their Algerian backdrop, and more specifically, from the current politics of civil strife. ⁵

The Algerian Camus is currently being disputed by Algerian secularists and western postcolonial critics. On one side, we find Algerian exiles and dissidents (many fearing for their lives), who have resuscitated Camus as a universal freedom-fighter who loved the country of his birth despite his misplaced political allegiances. Heralded as a partisan of truce between a Mendès-France Algerian policy and the...