Albert CAMUS

prix Nobel 1957

 

Albert Camus was born on the 17 November 1913 near Mondovi, in the department of Constantine, in Algeria. Lucien, his father, worked in a vineyard, for an Algiers wine merchant. He was mobilised in September 1914, and in France he fought in the uniform of the zouaves. Injured at the Battle of the Marne, he died in the military hospital at Saint-Brieuc on the 17th October 1914. His son was one year old. Of his father, Albert had only one photograph and a telling anecdote: he was horrified by the spectacle of capital execution.

The family moved to Algiers, to the working-class district of Belcourt, where Albert, his elder brother and his mother lived with an uncle and their maternal grandmother. His mother Catherine Sintes was an illiterate servant of Spanish origin, who was partially deaf, and afflicted with a speaking pathology. Albert, like the majority of boys from his socio-economic background, would have had to leave school for an apprenticeship were it not for the intervention of his teacher, M. Louis Germain, who recognised his gifts and prepared him for a scholarship exam for secondary school.

He pursued his studies, and although stigmatised as “pupil of the nation”, he was encouraged by his teachers, among them Jean Grenier, who introduced him to Nietzsche. The young student loved amateur theatre and football. After the baccalaureat, he obtained a degree in humanities ( specialising in philosophy), but as a result of tuberculosis, could not obtain a diploma for the teaching of philosophy.

He had begun to write from a very young age and his first efforts appeared in the literary review Sud in 1932. He finished his degree in philosophy in 1935, and in May 1935 a thesis on Plotinus, Neoplatinism and Christian thought was accepted for his masters.

In 1935 he began to write The Two Sides of the Coin which was published two years later. In Algiers he founded the Workers’ Theatre (renamed the Team Theatre in 1937), which survived until 1939.

In 1934 he entered into two short-lived relationships, one his marriage to Simone Hie, which was dissolved two years later after infidelities on the part of both spouses, and the other to the Communist Party. During them same period he became involved with the separatist Party of the Algerian People, which led to criticism from members of the Communist Party. He left the Party in 1937.

In 1938 he started writing for the socialist journal Alger Republicain, founded by Pascal Pia. His trenchant inquiry into the living conditions of the Arabs in the impoverished region of Kabyl generated controversy. “Poverty in Kabylie” had significant repercussions; the Governor General of Algeria banned the journal and Camus could no longer find work in Algeria.

He therefore moved to Paris, where he worked as an editor at Paris-Soir. It was during this period that he published the novel The Outsider ( 1942), and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) in which he outlined his philosophical position. These works belong to the “cycle of the absurd”, a cycle which he completed with the plays The Misunderstanding (1944) and Caligula (1945.)

In 1940 he married a pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, who gave birth to twins Jean and Catherine in 1945. A pacifist at the beginning of the war, on the 5th of December 1941 Camus witnessed the execution of Gabriel Peri, and his resistance against the Germans was galvanised. The witnessing of this act would leave a profound mark on Camus and directly influence his campaign against the death penalty in the 1950s.

In 1943 he was a reader at Gallimard, a post that he would retain up until his death. He became editor in chief of Combat when Pascal Pia was called up to perform other functions within the Resistance. His literary endeavours continued with what he called “ the cycle of revolt “ which included The Plague (1947), The State of Siege (1948), The Just (1949) and The Rebel (1951).

After the war he became involved with the philosophical circle of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and gave a series of lectures in the United States about existentialism. He broke with Jean Paul Sartre in 1952, after the publication of Francis Jeanson’s review of The Rebel in Les Temps Modernes (the journal started by Sartre) which criticised Camus for a revolt that was ‘ deliberately static.” This article provoked a series of angry letters between Sartre and Camus that encompassed both philosophical tensions and personal ones. Camus also showed a critical attitude towards the USSR when workers revolts were suppressed in East Berlin, and later in Poland and Hungary, at a time when the majority of left wingers were hesitant to demonstrate any opposition to Stalin’s regime.

Camus unceasingly reflected upon the human condition, even at points where it may have seemed peripheral to insist upon this. He refused to invest any faith in God, history, or in reason, and thus opposed Christianity, Marxism and existentialism. He never hesitated to battle against ideologies that did not take the human as their foundation.

The Algerian War of Independence began in 1954 and posed for Camus a political and personal dilemma. He was condemned by the left wing for his refusal to speak out overtly against the military action of the French. He favoured the idea of a more autonomous Algeria but believed essentially, faithful to his belief in collectivity, that the French Algerian settlers and the Arabs should be capable of living together harmoniously.

In Alger in 1956 he launched his “call for a civil truce”. This suggestion that was unpopular with colonialists and revolutionaries alike. Camus even began to receive death threats as a result of his position on the war, even though at that point he was beginning to work clandestinely for Algerians who were facing the death penalty. The same year he published The Fall, a pessimistic text in which in which he dissects existentialism, but without necessarily adopting an alternative philosophical stance.

In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech, he expressed the importance of collective understanding and humanism. He said in his speech

“For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.

At the same time, after having outlined the nobility of the writer's craft, I should have put him in his proper place. He has no other claims but those which he shares with his comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between sorrow and beauty, and devoted finally to drawing from his double existence the creations that he obstinately tries to erect in the destructive movement of history. Who after all this can expect from him complete solutions and high morals? Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road. What writer would from now on in good conscience dare set himself up as a preacher of virtue?……….. It remains for me to thank you from the bottom of my heart and to make before you publicly, as a personal sign of my gratitude, the same and ancient promise of faithfulness which every true artist repeats to himself in silence every day.”

His Nobel Prize would be buried with his father, 43 years after his death, in the military cemetery of Saint Brieuc.

On the 4th of January 1960 in Petit-Villeblevin in the Yonne valley Camus died in a car crash. The car was driven by his friend Michel Gallimard, the nephew of Gaston Gallimard, who also perished in the accident.. The manuscript of The First Man, which would be published posthumously was found in the trunk of the car. An unused train ticket was found in Camus’s pocket.

Despite their differences, at the death of Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre wrote a moving eulogy in France-Observateur for his former friend, praising his “stubborn humanism.”