The return of Camus

You cannot get hold of a copy of Albert Camus’s The Plague. Not surprising, of course. It could hardly be more topical. But even before the arrival of this pestilence, we were going through a Camus revival here and in the US. When Sartre died in 1980, the streets of Paris were lined with mourners. Camus, his great rival, was out of fashion. What has changed?

2o13 was Camus’s centenary. Penguin marked it with a much-acclaimed new translation of The Outsider and there was a new biography, Robert Zaretsky’s A life worth living: Albert Camus and the quest for meaning.

Since then, books have been, pouring out. Camus at “Combat”: Writing 1944–1947, his 1950s notebooks, his Algerian Chronicles and this year alone, Camus: A Very Short Introduction, and, later this Summer, new Penguin editions of The Plague, The Fall, The Outsider and a book of essays, Committed Writing.

The last title is the clue. Camus was a great writer and philosopher, but, above all, he was a public intellectual, revered in the English-speaking world as a kind of French Orwell, or perhaps for younger readers, a French Hitchens. One American admirer wrote, “He was one of the fiercest, most partisan polemicists in the history of French journalism.”

Camus played an honourable role in the war, the Resistance and debates about Communism in post-war France. Unlike the once-famous Structuralists and post-Structuralists he was readable and took on the big issues of his day. You didn’t have to read Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger to understand his writing.

The point is that Camus not only took on the big issues of the day. He was right about the big issues of post-war France. He was right about Vichy, right about punishing collaborators, right about French anti-Semitism and racism against Algerian Arabs and, above all, he was right about French Communism.

In his book, Past Imperfect, about the importance of Communism in French intellectual life in the decade after the war, Tony Judt wrote that these years were “unique in the near-monopoly exercised by the appeal of Soviet Communism within the Left.” When French Communists attacked East European emigres like Czeslaw Milosz for telling the truth about Stalinism in east Europe and when Communists denied the show-trials in Eastern Europe, Camus spoke out.

The one big issue where he was wrong, his critics argued then and now, was Algeria. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Algeria for understanding French political life in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Camus was born there. The Algerian crisis and eventual independence was one of the key moments in the anti-colonialist movement. But was Camus wrong? Look what’s happened to post-colonial Algeria and the post-colonial Middle East. Who would you rather side with: Camus, or Fanon and Sartre?

The Left said Camus was wrong about Algeria. But the French Left wasn’t right about anything. They were wrong about the Show Trials in eastern Europe (1947-53) and about Stalinism, about Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and then Foucault was wrong about Iran in the 1980s. In a superb profile in The Nation, Thomas Meaney writes, “His [Camus’s] books outsell Fanon’s at the Librairie Tiers Monde on Abdel Kader Square.” That’s in Algiers.

In his book, Culture & Imperialism (1993), Edward W. Said passionately attacked Camus for his stand on Algeria. Said was then at the height of his fame, as Sartre and de Beauvoir had been in the Fifties. He attacked Camus as a representative of French colonialism, whereas he was a poor and fatherless outsider. But it was Said, not Camus, who went to one of the most prestigious schools in Egypt and then Harvard. Camus, in contrast, was the son of a cellarman and an illiterate mother. “Camus,” Said wrote, “is a novelist from whose work the facts of imperial actuality, so clearly there to be noted, have dropped away.” Camus, he wrote, “is a very late imperial figure.”

The years have been kinder to Camus than to Said or Sartre. Said fought over Palestinian statehood from a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side. Sensibly, because in all probability he wouldn’t have survived for long in Gaza. Camus’s passionate attacks on terrorist violence and nationalism in Algeria read well today.

This is why Tony Judt had a photo of Camus on his desk. Judt championed Camus for more than twenty years, from an essay in The New York Review of Books in 1994, “Albert Camus: The Best Man in France”. A group of interesting critics — Judt and Claire Messud, at The New York Review, Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Thomas Meaney in The Nation — have admired Camus not just for his prose or his philosophical ideas, but for his political decency and moderation.

After the demise of Sartre and de Beauvoir, politically extreme and fashionable for thirty years, and French Theory, fashionable but impossibly abstract and opaque, Camus’s moment has come.