Albert Camus (1913–60) was born in French colonial Algeria, the subject of many of his most lyrical essays. He and Jean-Paul Sartre are considered the founders of French Existentialism. During the Nazi occupation of France he risked his life in the resistance, editing the underground magazine Combat. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Camus, who bore a striking resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, had a developed taste for fast living with respect to both women and cars. He died in a car crash at the age of forty-seven.

Camus’s principal theoretical reflections on tragedy are contained in ‘On the Future of Tragedy’ (FT), a lecture given, appropriately, in Athens in 1955. What makes these reflections of particular interest is that, as well as being a philosopher and novelist, Camus was also a man of the theatre – director, actor and playwright – committed to the potential importance of theatre: ‘The theatre is not a game – that is my conviction’, he wrote in the preface to a collection of four of his plays. ‘On the Future of Tragedy’ thus represents the theoretical reflections of a philosopher who was also a practising playwright, a playwright whose works are to a certain extent ‘theory-driven’.

IN A WELL-KNOWN PASSAGE from Arthur Conan Doyle's story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes, called in to solve a murder, remarks on “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When a Scotland Yard detective replies the dog did nothing during the night, Holmes announces, “That was the curious incident.” While it does not involve skullduggery, a similar air of mystery clings to the subject of this chapter. Were Holmes to read the seminal works by Tzvetan Todorov, particularly th ose devoted to drawing the historical and moral lessons of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, he might ask about the curious place of Albert Camus in Todorov's oeuvre. Upon being told that Todorov rarely mentions the French Algerian artist and intellectual, Holmes would counter that this is, indeed, why his place is so curious. Why this absence is worthy of our curiosity, as I will suggest in this chapter, has to do with the ethical exigencies and personal experien ces shared by the two men.

Camus and Todorov, first of all, had complex ties to France. In effect, both were outsiders at home. Born in French Algeria in 1913, Camus first visited the metropole in 1937. Though Paris won him over during his brief stay—“Je ne trouve pas d’autre mot que celui de tendresse”— he would always feel like un etranger, an outsider, to his fellow French. He never lost his French Algerian accent—indeed, to amus e friends, he often exaggerated it—just as he never felt completely at home in Paris or among the French. Algeria, he writes in a note to his unfinished novel Le premier homme (The First Man, 1994), was his “true country” and “the land I so loved under the sun where I was born.” The Algerian War of Independence, which tormented Camus during the last years of his life, served only to deepen this sense of depaysement in France and his attachment to Algeria.

Similarly, Todorov, born and raised in communist Bulgaria, always viewed himself as un homme depayse in his adopted country. It goes without saying that he did not display the visceral nostalgia for his birthplace that Camus did for his. Never could he have said, as did Camus about his native Algeria, that Bulgaria “is caught in my throat.”

The “revolted soul”

By the time Camus and Sartre were formally introduced in 1943, they were already familiar with, and had publicly expressed measured admiration for, each other's works. In 1938 and 1939 Camus had quite favourably reviewed Sartre's Nausea and The Wall (SEN: 167–72; E: 1417–22). In 1943 Sartre wrote favourably of The Outsider (Sartre 1962a: 108–21; Sartre 1993: 92–112). They first met in Paris in June 1943, at the opening of Sartre's play The Flies, and shortly thereafter Sartre became involved with Combat (where Camus was now editor), although he did not write for it until after the Liberation. In an interview in 1944, Camus declared himself to “have three friends in the literary world, André Malraux, even if I no longer see him because of his political positions, René Char, who is like a brother to me, and Jean-Paul Sartre”. In the same year Sartre asked Camus to direct and act in his play No Exit. In 1945 Camus offered Sartre the opportunity to travel to America to write a series of reports for Combat. While there he wrote of his friend in Vogue magazine:

Camusian rebellion and political engagement

In Chapter 1 I discussed the absurd as manifest in The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula, and sought to show that, at least theoretically, the absurd was not in conflict with a certain form of rebellion or revolt. Indeed, it was argued that a certain form of revolt, a revolt premised on “the human condition” (if not, as Camus appears to suggest in The Rebel, a “human nature”) and solidarity, is seen to be at least a plausible consequence of the absurd. In this chapter I examine Camus's political writing from the period between the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus and the publication of The Rebel, and detail the degree to which these works are consistent with the dictates of the absurd as defined in Chapter 1.

Tony Judt has claimed that Camus was “an unpolitical man”, and to a certain extent, and from a certain perspective, this was probably the case. After all, aside from two years in the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, he remained assiduously independent of party affiliation throughout his life.

A new Mediterranean culture

Camus's attitude to Algerian independence remains highly controversial, but his position can be stated simply: although he believed that Algeria was culturally and historically inextricable from France, he loathed the injustice of its system of government, which served the interests of the tiny minority of wealthy European colons. Any attempt at understanding Camus's paradoxical attitude to Algeria must begin by avoiding the easy assumption that the conflict that broke out in Algeria in 1954 was simply between the demands of French imperialism and those of Algerian independence. Although the conflict can be reduced to this, it is not always helpful to do so, because it obscures some factors that are necessary to a reasonably clear understanding of the conflict itself, as well as Camus's response to it. Perhaps the most important of these factors are the circumstances of Camus's Algerian background. Camus was not in Algeria, as Conor Cruise O'Brien puts it, by right of conquest (the same right, Cruise O'Brien notes, by which the Nazis were in France).

From an early age Camus had wanted to write yet it was not by choice that he became a journalist. His tuberculosis meant that he could not be a teacher and so he had to find some other pathway. He does not appear to have considered using his experience as an actor and producer to turn professional. He was by turns editorial secretary, reporter, leader writer and editor-inchief. Camus did not like to claim to be an 'intellectual' or a 'philosopher'. He called himself an 'artist', a 'witness', occasionally a 'professional journalist'. He once admitted that he felt that journalism was 'une des plus belles professions que je connaisse' (Ess, 1565) ('one of the finest professions that I can think of'). His friend Jean Daniel added that for Camus, journalism was not an exile but a kingdom, something in which he felt at home. Yet it was Camus's literary successes that were to preserve the record of his journalistic achievements. If he had not written L'Etranger, La Peste and Caligula, then Actuelles would certainly not exist as a book. Who, apart from the odd historian, would ever have heard of an obscure reporter for Alger républicain? The leader writer for Combat would have been about as well known as fellow journalists on the paper such as Marcel Gimont and Georges Altschuler. L'Express would not have tried to sign him up.

Across the range of Camus's writings, two terms repeatedly ring out as the expression of his fundamental concerns: 'man' and 'justice'. The two are profoundly linked: Camus's resolute belief in the importance of social justice, and his contributions to the global political debates of his time - including those concerning the Second World War, colonialism, the atom bomb and the Cold War - are inseparable from his affirmation of the values he attaches to the figure of the human. It is impossible to find an example of a key Camusian intervention in the cause of social justice which does not argue its case via reference to the human as its core locus of value. This chapter tries to address Camus's concern for social justice by exploring some of its moral and conceptual frameworks. I do not propose to detail Camus's various interventions as such, as these are discussed elsewhere in this volume. Rather, with reference to some of these key moments, I will attempt to draw out something of the values by which Camus is driven. And I will be using the figure of the human as the common thread by which these values are held together (or, at times, by which they are held in tension). Sometimes, this figure expresses a virile, heroic resolve; sometimes, it can be pathetically vulnerable. But for Camus, 'man' will never quite be effaced; and the point of this persistence is the call for justice it unceasingly articulates. My aim here will be to provide some sense of this irreducible value of resistance.

Act 3 scene 6 of Caligula stages a key encounter between Caligula and Cherea, Camus's murderous protagonist and one of his eventual assassins. Here, the two men articulate the ethical impasse at the heart of the philosophy of the Absurd. Caligula suggests that Cherea must believe in 'quelque idée supérieure' (TRN, 78) ('some higher principle' (COP, 83)); Cherea does not entirely accept this, but neither does he entirely deny it:

Cherea uses an aesthetic term rather than a moral one to characterise his position: some actions are 'plus belles' (literally 'more beautiful') than others, not inherently better or more just. Caligula's retort that all actions are equivalent does not necessarily contradict Cherea's argument, since neither man asserts the existence of a higher value which would make it possible to distinguish between one action and another in strictly ethical terms. It is also significant here that neither man seriously tries to persuade the other to change his views. Each states what he believes, but makes no attempt to offer principles, reasons or explanations which would demonstrate the validity of his own opinion. We are presented here with the confrontation of two positions which are coherent within their own terms, but which are utterly incompatible. One man believes that some actions are preferable to others, whilst the other insists that no action has inherent value above any other.

The phenomenon of cultural marginality finds a very particular focus in the work of Albert Camus, France's French Algerian Prix Nobel, whose position was regularly at odds with that of the metropolis. In 1939, in a decade when French public opinion was as ill-informed about life in the colonies as Montherlant's La Rose de sable demonstrates, Camus exposed the appalling living conditions in Kabylia in journalism designed to inform France of its responsibilities in relation to the destitute of colonization. Rejecting criticism that it was unpatriotic to campaign in this way, Camus insisted that France's reputation was best served through directly addressing issues of human justice in what he contentiously calls a French country (Ess., 936–7). Twenty years later, with colonial rule in crisis, the French left-wing intelligentsia hounded him for his failure to speak out against atrocities inficted on the indigenous population in the course of the Algerian War. This silence, together with his earlier campaigning zeal in highlighting Kabyle dispossession, captures the sense of contradiction that his culturally marginal position generated.

Exploring what from a Parisian viewpoint were the Algerian margins, this chapter considers the author's early lyrical essays, with their occlusion of colonial actuality and cultivation of a socially isolating innocence; Le Renégat, where Camus engages with cultural conflict in Africa through melodrama and hyperbole; La Chute, set in Amsterdam and yet conveying a North African subtext; and finally, his last work, Le Premier Homme, written in 1959 and published posthumously in 1994, with its uninhibited defence of the petits colons or working-class colonial Europeans.

When Albert Camus (1913–60) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, the jury singled out for special mention the contribution he had made to illuminating ‘the problems of the human conscience in our times’. Camus and Sartre were united by their common need to explore the limits and consequences of human action in an age – the war and the immediate post-war period – in which fundamental values needed to be rediscovered and reaffirmed. On the other hand, they were separated by their totally different social backgrounds and by their profoundly different attitudes to politics. Whereas Sartre, the Parisian, was a son of the bourgeoisie, received a highly privileged education and came first in the national philosophy examination (the agrégation), Camus was the son of European (French and Spanish) immigrants to Algeria, the French colony where he grew up in conditions of extreme poverty; and he was forced by tuberculosis to cut short his education at the University of Algiers. Whereas Sartre was a builder of grand intellectual systems, Camus was suspicious of doctrinaire thinking of any kind and distrusted abstractions that cannot be verified by personal experience.

The outsider

Camus's first publications were two slim volumes of lyrical essays, Betwixt and Between (L'Envers et l'endroit, 1937) and Nuptials (Noces, 1938). Together with his later collection of essays, L'Eté (Summer, 1954), they contain some of his best writing. Their setting is Algeria and their central theme is the contrast between the pleasures of the natural world – the sea, sun and light of the Mediterranean – and the dark realities of poverty and death. This contrast is an aspect of what, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942), Camus called ‘the absurd’. For Camus this meant any of three things: a sense of human mortality (greatly heightened in the case of Camus by the shadow cast by his tubercular condition); the presence in the world of apparently arbitrary suffering and death; and the disjunction between the lack of immanent meaning in the world and the human need for sense and purpose.

As stated in Chapter 1, Camus considered that The Stranger, Caligula and The Myth of Sisyphus should be read together, because they make up the cycle of the absurd. However, Camus also writes in The Myth that the works of an absurd artist may seem ‘to have no connection one with the others’ (OC 2,190). Caligula has few significant links with The Stranger and hence we shall treat it briefly. The Myth will be discussed at greater length because it takes up the issues of Meursault's growing awareness and of the religious motif in the last chapter. Indeed it will be argued that The Myth represents both a conclusion and an interpretation of The Stranger, even if its interpretation resolves in an unsatisfactory manner the ambiguity of Part 1.

There are contrasts and parallels between The Stranger and Sartre's early fiction, Nausea (1938) and The Wall (1939). While Camus recognized the kinship between his sense of the absurd and that of Sartre, the differences between them were great and the origins of their famous quarrel in 1952 may be traced to their early writing. A glance at Camus's other books and at the young Sartre enables us better to situate The Stranger.

The cycle of the absurd

Caligula does not belong entirely to the same period of Camus's writing as The Stranger and The Myth, because it was revised in 1944, 1947 and 1957.

Although Camus's essays and prose fiction had a profound impact on the post-war generation in France and elsewhere, this is less true of his theatrical works, which had mixed success during the author's lifetime. His second play, Le Malentendu, in which the returning, unidentified adult son is murdered by his mother and sister, had a difficult reception in 1944. Caligula, Camus's earliest play, was more successful in 1945, seeming to chime with audiences who had undergone the horrors of Nazi occupation, and it ran for almost a year. L'Etat de siège, a collaboration with Jean-Louis Barrault, closed after only seventeen performances in 1948 and has rarely been staged since, but Les Justes was well-received in 1949, running for over 400 performances. Although Camus wrote no more plays, he continued his lifelong involvement with the theatre, producing six adaptations which he helped to stage, and thinking not only of writing a play on Don Juan, but of reworking Le Malentendu and L'Etat de siège. His theatrical works are still produced throughout the world and since the turn of the millennium Les Justes, Caligula and Le Malentendu have been on the London stage. Yet such productions are rare and although articles on single plays have been published and new editions produced, the few book-length studies of the theatre date mainly from the 1960s and 1970s.