The Unavoidable

Albert Camus is widely admired. He was a pied-noir, a term used to describe French and other Europeans who colonized or were born and lived in Algeria during the period of French colonial rule. As a leading figure in absurdist literature, he championed the myth of the universal man, a perspective that has been criticized for denying the rights of the native population to their ancestral land. He had great success in his lifetime, having won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957 among other accolades. In 1960, he died in a car accident at the age of 47. Since his death, he has regularly been in the media spotlight. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, for reasons unknown, Italians rushed to buy his 1947 novel The Plague. This book with an apparently prophetic quality, convinced many readers that they would find answers to their growing anxiety. Nothingness is portrayed as a Grim Reaper figure, representing a pervasive and deep-seated fear. Its epilogue differs from the offensive tone of the beginning. It focuses on the spirit of solidarity in which the fate of each protagonist becomes interdependent, whether they are major actors in the drama that is unfolded in the book, or simply its witnesses. Curiously, there is no reference to faith – enduring or fleeting – that might serve as a refuge in moments of profound distress. While Camus’s originality makes some of these concepts attractive, they often end up serving goals that are oddly out of step with what they claim to address. We observed this misalignment once again during the recent pandemic.

In the novel The Plague, death affects a large number of people and prompts an instinctive urge to share the experience of the tragedy, with each person responding in their own way to understand and cope with it. No solidarity or sharing of suffering is mentioned in response to the disaster and the distress of the populations. No opportunities are created for individualism to evolve into a dynamic that is collective or personal. In the end, what Camus updated the themes for modern day readers, which may have created a convenient transformation. Equally, he depicted a drifting process without any sense of collective or strategic thinking – the characters remain as isolated individuals who act almost unconsciously, as though touched by a kind of grace. How can a narrative in which a metaphorical epidemic serves as a critique of violence come to function as a means of domination in the context of a public health crisis?

His work offers powerful portrayal of one of the major scourges of 20th century that ravaged the battlefields of both West and East. Convinced that the conqueror would impose an unbearable burden on individual liberty, he tried in his writing to challenge injustice and the power to turn words into formidable weapons of resistance. However, his sincerity is overshadowed by an inconsistent sense of guilt. In the philosophical essay The Rebel for example, freedom goes together with an intolerable sense of subjugation as it takes on a singular form. His idea of fraternization between the new and the former masters shows the limitations of his understanding of the people he wrote about. Likewise, in his novel A Happy Death, a minor character rises to the status of hero within a tragedy. Although the narrative reads like a crime story, it turns out to be about helping someone ending his life to spare him further pain and misery. In this case, Camus confuses crime and act of compassion. Contrary to his position, the debate is not about a personal moral dilemma, but rather a civilizational issue. Freedom of thought appears to be an illusion, and is further constrained by his mindset.
Camus championed the “Third Way”, a political approach to assimilating subjugated peoples through fraternization, but he never saw his ideas realized the success he had hoped for. He engaged so deeply with progressive thought in the former French colonies that academics continue to study his vast body of work. Despite the controversy surrounding him, his style also captivates a wide variety of readers.

Camus was at the centre of controversy from the beginning of his literary career. Critiques about Camus abound, reflecting a wide spectrum of opinion ranging from near-reverence to the denunciation of an author whose credibility has been utterly undermined. There is no need to revisit the question of his talent; the key point is to remind his admirers that literature is now facing other serious issues, given that literary movements have exhausted the theme of post-1945 decolonization. At a time when humanity faces the risk of a sixth mass extinction for environmental and economic reasons, ethnic issues and migration are matters of politics. His writings often refer to the “Arabs” without acknowledging their social identities. Who are these people? What is their story? His “Arabs” represent the Algerians before the French colonization of Algeria in the 1830s who even after one century of occupation were ten times larger than the colonizers. He contrasts the “Arab” identity with that of his pied-noir without recognizing that both belonged to the same melting pot. The Algerians, with millennia-old Numidian roots, belongs to the Mediterranean, from Albania to Turkey, including all other Mediterranean countries and beyond. He depicts the “Arabs” either as mysterious for the best (“The Adulterous Woman” in the short story collection Exile and Kingdom) or as the worst kind of scoundrel (in “The Guest” from the same book as well as in the novel The Stranger). Such descriptions don’t prevent this fervent admirer of northern Mediterranean civilization to show empathy to his captive, whom he refuses to consider as subject to colonial authority.

Camus’s world glorified the colonizers. For him the French and Europeans in Algeria or pied-noirs are the heroes of legendary epics, of tales worthy of Nietzsche’s most audacious vision of Übermensch; they are physically tall, strong, and robust. By contrast, the “Arabs” look fragile, lurking in the background (in “The Guest”). This characterization of the Arabs of his time is partly correct given their insufficient access to food and healthcare. However, it is crucial not to overlook the fact that the primary cause of their misery was colonization. Until the 20th century, European citizens viewed colonized populations – particularly Africans – as occupying an intermediate state between animal and human. That reminds us the Valladolid debate of the 16th century on the nature of South American native populations. The short story “The Guest” conveys the urgent needs of the “other”: From a mere witness, the host finds himself taking an active part and instinctively siding with his fellow believer, who had taken him for his personal gain, yet ultimately recognized the power of the pen over the fist. Strange alliances are formed, where the wolf protects the lamb during periods of armed conflict.

In Algeria, the native population learned how to make themselves invisible to see the colonizers from the shadow. To survive, they were forced to leave their communities, serve the colonial masters, and live a precarious life on the margins of society. This was despite the fact that the “Wretched of the Earth”, as Frantz Fanon called them, made up more than 90% of the country’s total population. Some of them graduated from Madrasahs or religious schools in isolated regions. A few of them even held higher administrative positions in the school system despite being precluded by the proponents of the “republican school system”. The later was established by the French statesman Jules Ferry (1832-1893) to make education universal for the “superior races” who would then educate the colonized populations, or in Ferry’s words, “inferior races”.

Despite the hard-earned successes of the “Arabs”, Camus could never accept that they had the same rights as the pieds-noirs. Likewise, he failed to see the early signs of the breaking up of the colonies. The two characters in the two stories mentioned above represent the age-old conflict between civilization and ignorance. In his stories, the French characters are often schoolteachers, bearers of knowledge and culture, whose primary mission is to educate the ignorant. On the other hand, the “Arab” characters are detestable anti-heroes. The colonizers were convinced that they were acting in the best interests of the colonized by excluding them from development programs, which they touted as conciliatory and often pacifist. Those self-styled benefactors pitied the “Indigènes, a term referring to the colonized that carried strongly pejorative connotations at the time. The label implied backwardness and an inability to attain or participate in the dominant French culture.

There is no doubt that Camus felt some compassion for the plight of the so-called Arabs. He published articles denouncing their miserable conditions, but without ever trying to identify the root causes of the misery. By adopting the humanist perspective often promoted by religious leaders, he assuaged his moral unease while asserting his supposed racial superiority. However, he adopted a condescending tone when he confronted public opinion, reflecting a Jesuit-like approach with an attempt to find compromise that ultimately led him into moral degradation of ideas. Apparently, he completely erased from his memory the fact that the occupying armies “pacified” the newly conquered territories and forced the rebels to submit to the dictates of the invader – pillaging, executing the combatants and abducting women to use them for the first time in modern history as “comfort women” (ianfu) – a French invention more than a century and a half before the Japanese army.

As an expert in reinterpreting legends, Camus was passionate about reviving forgotten Greek myths, to which his contemporaries attached little value. In The Plague, he criticized almost all references to Latin heritage, preferring instead the Aegean Sea grounding in Greek civilization. He used a priestly language that absolves all crimes, sometimes even generating new injustices and resulting in the opposite effect of a blessing. An example of his fascination with Greek civilization is the book The Myth of Sisyphus, which tells the story of a hero condemned to eternal punishment, forced to perform the same repetitive task forever as a consequence of his vanity. 

Surprisingly, Camus wrote one of his best books, Nuptials, that includes his prophetic words as they are found engraved in Roman ruins in Tipasa (an Algerian town): “I understand here what is called glory: the right to love without measure.” Regardless of different possible interpretations of the quote, it evokes the words of Corneille in the racist play The Cid: “To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.” In fact, this quote can be interpreted as having similarities with Camus’s tragedy, as well as his lack of understanding of the “Arabs”. Upon reaching adulthood, Camus went through a very difficult period deeply shrouded in silence – so much so that those responsible for this painful experience were never formally identified. Before becoming famous, Camus had an average social position; he was between submissive pieds-noirs and the French, whom he considered to have a civilizing role. Nothing is more uncomfortable than this intermediate social status, akin to a fold-down seat that is open or closed according to the shifting needs of governance expediency. Small community leaders used to negotiate an intermediate status between the dominant colonizers – jealous of their privileges – and local groups, the indigenous communities, rejected from both sides.

Camus denounces decay and degeneration, but he neglects to look at the root causes of conflicts or epidemics. He advances his own beliefs instead of addressing the suffering of the victims. His failure to grasp the mass behaviour and its political consequences mirror his inability to acknowledge the people among whom he lived.

While his actions had been ambiguous for decades, his 1957 statement dispelled all doubts regarding his true beliefs about Algeria relative to colonization. In the public statement he asserted that, if forced to choose between justice and his mother, he would choose the latter. He had also labeled those fighting for Algerian independence as “terrorists”. Today, the language has changed, not the concept. During the Algeria’s independence movement, freedom fighters were called terrorists by the national authorities; Western medias called them extremists, radical extremists or militants, and even insurgents, but rarely terrorists. It is the injustice perpetrated by rulers in the name of protecting liberty leads to the act of terrorism. The action of Robespierre during the French Revolution to order the massacre of a portion of the population, officially to counter slander, illustrates this point. While it is well known that Louis XVI and his wife were guillotined, it is often forgotten that Lavoisier, the spiritual father of modern chemistry, suffered the same fate.

To return to Camus’s public statement regarding justice vs. his mother, the type of response he gave constitutes a denial of the legitimate right to freedom of the oppressed people, in this case, the Algerians. It also confirms his colonialist character. He would have renounced this character had he acknowledged his belonging to the Mediterranean, a land of ethnic assimilation dating back to the Phoenicians and numerous waves of migration.

He seems to have been lost himself in the distant legends of ancient Greece, believing he could bring back to life a long-buried Antigone. Living at the dawn of dystopian thought, Camus helped popularize a profoundly human anxiety, obscuring the natural course of life which eventually brings an end to the living being. In his autobiographical novel, The First Man, published 60 years after his death, he evokes this anxiety in a different form. However, the idea of the first man would have made sense had he been able to use the lens of an archeologist, biologist, or historian. In a nutshell, and according to evolution theory, diverse human groups appeared in different areas after the first African original migration.

When Camus separated justice from legitimacy, he also mixed up means and ends regarding the Algerian War of Independence. Admittedly, the ultimate goal of freedom suffered setbacks in newly independent states, not because they failed to emancipate their people, but because they lacked the power to define a more equitable world order. On the other hand, the independence disappointed the visionaries, including Camus, who dreamed of keeping colonized Africa under the domination of the colonizers.

Whether it is colonization or occupation, the result is the same historical injustice: the denial of human dignity. Ignoring this reality is a blatant contradiction for anyone who aspires to be a humanist. Camus falsifies the history of the 20th century; he denies the status of human beings in its anthropological sense to all indigenous peoples, those who shed their blood to free Europe. Even after achieving success as a writer, Camus failed to reconnect meaningfully with the people of his native land. He conflates Berbers and Arabs, when in fact they are two distinct peoples: the Berbers are the indigenous people of Algeria, whereas the Arabs are Algerians whose ancestors immigrated, most of them from the Middle East over time. The inability to see the difference is characteristic of colonizers, but that should not have been the case in the work of Camus who flourished intellectually in Algeria. Camus’s equivocal stand point raises sensitive questions. He also seemed to ignore the role of the Ottoman regency of Algiers and its pirates of Greek origin who roamed what were then called the Barbary Coasts. In his work, there is no mention of Numidia – the land that gave birth to the Algerians who enriched a culture extending from the Middle East to the Pillars of Hercules. Camus didn’t either said a word on Saint Augustin, one of the first and most illustrious Numidia’s son. This theorist has contributed to the setting of Catholic church in its very early stages and unified Roman and Greek heritage despite his poor knowledge of the latter.

With their political and military power and driven by the desire to exploit resources, the new settlers in Algeria viewed the native Arabs as a people to be wary of. They see the Arabs with some mysterious fascination, but their vision is clouded by stereotypes of ignorance and distrust, as can be seen in short story, “The Adulterous Woman”. Terms such as, honor, glory, and physical strength exist across cultures and historical periods, but they become expressions of violence when invoked by colonizers.  
One of the strengths of Camus’ writing lies in the simplicity of the images he evokes, allowing the reader to easily relate to them. Nonetheless, many of his works lack the true physical picture of the land. For example, the Mediterranean Sea is present in many of his works (such as Nuptials), but its richness is reduced to a play of colors, a kaleidoscope illuminated by an imperious, capricious sun.

As his fame spread in France, he decided to get married. He set his sights on a young pied-noire from a wealthy family. A few months after his marriage, he discovered that his wife was a drug addict. The young woman procured drugs from a group of doctors, including her family doctor,  in return for sex. Apparently, some “Arab” practitioners were also involved. Two journalists investigated the scandal but decided to bury the matter and conceal the identities of those involved out of consideration for Camus. What man could accept such a situation, one that at best fosters intergenerational hatred and at worst fuels endless wars? Despite his professed humanism, the wronged man cannot forgive. He seeks revenge against the country and people he holds responsible for the betrayal. Everything else is fiction.
In 2021, Camus’s heirs put his love letters up for sale, placing commercial interests over privacy and confidentiality and thus compromising their literary value. Quality literary works do not always bring financial reward. Nothing is more disappointing than to find that after decades of pointless debates and contradictory interpretations, analysts agree on only one point concerning Camus’ writings: the exclusion of Algerians. Nevertheless, critics continue to seek a humanist connection within a linear mode of thinking, building arguments on uncertain premises.

Although Camus was known for his bold view, neither his essays nor his novels are contextualized in the geographical reality. On the contrary, they are situated within a context where the characters seek recognition but are constrained by uncertainty. There is no recognition either that the two worlds – one where the conquerors enjoy freedom and rights, and the other where natives are dispossessed of their rights and resources – are in constant conflict and remain divided.

Camus believes only in the purpose he has set for himself and does not accept others’ judgments about whether his actions are right or wrong. His turbulent life contains many lessons, but people look to them only when they lack firm principles of their own. Hate and passion are deeply intertwined. As loves flourish, hatreds intensify, and what once seemed unimaginable becomes possible. Camus had several affairs simultaneously. Even though the law does not forbid having simultaneous relationships except within marriage, bigamy and in this case de facto polygamy, raises the issue of trust and faithfulness, which forms the basis of credibility and integrity. While love takes shape on one side, hatred intensifies on the other. For those who have not set foot in this confining space where each step grows heavy, where vision is blinded by the white light that merges into a black hole with no beginning and no end, the words will hold no meaning.

Camus raises more questions than he provides answers to his devoted readership. Having benefited from socioeconomic mobility, is he simply a free spirit finding his own path? Or does he reflect a generation trying to rebuild itself after centuries of conflict? He seems to move with the currents of change, adapting to forces that are unpredictable yet strangely familiar. If the myth of Sisyphus reflects any truth about human existence, it is the reality of an endless cycle of violence that no philosophical system can fully resolve. The miracle of life keeps most of its secrets and cannot be reduced to a cycle built on the idea of absurdity. The pointless quest for eternal youth only akin to a futile attempt to tilt Cervantes’s windmills. Dynasties, like castles, eventually crumble, and sycophants eventually fade away.

Should we read Camus and appreciate his work? Why not? Does he deserve lavish praise, and what lessons does he offer to the future generations? These are questions best answered by those who lost loved ones to liberate the country from the colonizers. Through a twist of history, the unavoidable has become indispensable to all those anxious souls for whom Paul Éluard remains a great unknown, and freedom, a vague sense of lightness that is more unsettling than reassuring. Once again, the Nobel prize has shaken things up.