Albert Camus the Algerian. Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (review)

Most accounts of the Nobel Prize winner's life present a Parisian Camus: Resistance hero and journalist, habitué of Saint-Germain circles, peer and then adversary of Sartre. This approach casts the author of The Stranger as "French" rather than "Francophone." It dismisses almost anecdotally that Camus spent more than half of his life in his native Algeria and that this ambivalent homeland occupies an important place in many of his works.

Noted scholar David Carroll is one of the first to take seriously the notion that Camus considered himself "Algerian." In an extremely readable, well-argued, and judicious volume, Carroll explores the consequences of this perspective. His inquiry is not a Mediterranean biography but rather a careful critical chronology of the fiction and essays which outlines Camus' intellectual positions concerning French Algeria.

In revisiting this corpus, Carroll opts to bypass the myriad Camus specialists. Readers will not find discussions here of Roger Quilliot, Raymond Gay-Crosier, or Roger Grenier, and only brief notes allude to the contributions of Germaine Brée, Jeanyves Guérin, and Olivier Todd. Instead, Carroll locks horns with a select number of intellectuals for whom Camus was a colon who had no right to claim to be Algerian. Through Carroll's deft critiques of these attacks, we are reminded of the extent to which highly-charged polemics in the present can cloud appreciations of the recent past.

In Albert Camus: Of Europe and Africa (NY: Viking Press, 1970), for instance, the unconventional Irish politician Conor Cruise O'Brien asserts that underneath Camus' "mask of the progressive, antiracist, European humanist and defender of the oppressed" is "a colonialist writer who accepts the myth of and chief justifications for colonialism, the superiority of the colonizers over the colonized" (12; 25). But in the arguments of this diplomat who formerly sought to broker a resolution in the '60s Congo Crisis, commitment overshadows method, for O'Brien builds his condemnation on a superficial awareness of Camus' œuvre and on the mistaken assumption that the colonial context of Maghreb was the same as Central Africa's. Similarly, in Les Français d'Algérie (Paris: René Julliard, 1961), Pierre Nora pens a damning portrait of the ensemble of Algeria's pied-noir population, explicitly including Camus among the closet racists. This was Nora's first book and he arrived at his conclusions after just two years in Oran (1958–60) on his first teaching assignment. Being caught up in the middle of the horrors of the then-unresolved Algerian conflict arguably did not allow the young agrégé the emotional distance necessary to nuance his psychosocial theses.

If the examples of O'Brien and Nora constitute anticolonialist diatribes "from the field," Carroll also examines harsh critiques launched by academic postcolonialists like Edward Said, as presented in Culture and Imperialism (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). While Carroll finds Said's notions of cultural hybridity and Western bias intellectually stimulating, the Irvine scholar is at no great pains to illustrate how Said's rhetorically-rigged renderings of Camus' "The Renegade" border on dishonest (the late theorist ignores the story's central arguments and conveniently overlooks "The Growing Stone" from the same 1957 short story collection, Exile and Kingdom [Carroll, 41–43; 122]).

In each of these instances, Carroll shows how critics of colonialism's heritage use Camus as a means to a polemical end, resorting unfortunately to shortcuts in their partiality and haste. Having disproved many of the gravest accusations brought against Camus, Carroll then sets out to clarify Camus' own vision of the options available to French Algeria and its citizens.

On these points, Carroll aligns himself somewhat with recent reassessments of Camus, in particular those offered by Ronald Aronson in Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Tony Judt in The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago...