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Having swiftly abandoned the communist left to denounce its ideological deviations, or rather its crimes parading as ideals, Albert Camus, Nobel laureate for Literature in 1957, is the author of some of the most significant works of the previous century, including “The Stranger” and the masterpiece “The Plague”, which continues to resonate powerfully in the contemporary zeitgeist. How did this champion of the oppressed stop at nothing to honor his commitments, relinquishing “his best enemies”, Sartre and Beauvoir, while continuously reconciling his stances and actions with his discourse and oeuvre? Why is he considered the most Christian of atheists?
Born, like him, in the Algerian crucible of Francophone culture, Camus’s body of work, composed of essays, short stories, novels, and plays, intertwines philosophical inquiry with literary aesthetics, exploring the quintessentially paradoxical: the human condition in its inseparable dimensions of subversion and ethics. His work is divided into three cycles: absurdism, rebellion, and love, each corresponding to three major themes: the scandal of evil, the response of human solidarity, and harmony with the sensual beauty of the world.
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, into abject poverty. His father perished as a martyr in the Battle of the Marne. His deaf-mute and illiterate mother worked as a housekeeper to support Camus and his brother. They lived with their maternal grandmother, the matriarch of the family. His teacher, Louis Germain, noticed Camus’s brilliant intelligence, provided him with free lessons, applied for scholarships on his behalf, and even persuaded his grandmother to keep him in school. Later, it was another teacher of philosophy, Jean Grenier, who would encourage him to pursue higher education and introduce him to Nietzsche. Indeed, Camus bequeathed to posterity an inexhaustible, bewildering, and timeless oeuvre. In 1957, he received the Nobel Prize and used the monetary award to purchase a house in Lourmarin. Two years later, in the prime of his fame and youth, Camus was cut down by an absurd car accident as he was returning from his sanctuary in Lourmarin, sitting in the passenger seat next to Michel Gallimard at the wheel.
Harmony Between Camus’s Actions and Works
The young Camus had initially joined the Popular Front, which attracted intellectuals and represented hope for the working class, but he did not hesitate to leave following disagreements with the Communists’ stance on Algeria’s status. Hired by Pascal Pia as a reporter for his newspaper, Camus investigated the excesses of colonization. He protested against the injustices suffered by North African Muslims and the insulting wages of the poor. His investigative report “Misery in Kabylia” had a powerful impact. As a court reporter for the oppressed, he reported on victims who had committed infractions and were subsequently brought before the correctional tribunal. He positioned himself against the death penalty, a stand borne out by his reflections on the guillotine and his demand for an international justice code advocating the abolition of capital punishment. He detached himself from Communist allegiances and distanced himself from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, aligning his actions with his words and denouncing totalitarian deviations in Europe, Nazism in the West, and Stalinism in the East, long before The Gulag Archipelago, notably in “The Rebel.” Later, he would become a columnist at “Combat,” and on August 8, 1945, he was the sole intellectual to oppose the use of the atomic bomb, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, in a renowned and incisive editorial. Camus also condemned the terrorist justice. When questioned in Stockholm by a student from Algeria about the legitimacy of the FLN’s fight for Independence, he responded: “I must also condemn terrorism blindly exercised on the streets of Algiers, for example, which could one day strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” His words would be distorted. However, simultaneously, Camus carried out discreet actions, as revealed by magistrate and essayist Denis Salas, intervening in pleas for mercy for Algerian activists sentenced to death. “There is ample evidence in the files, hundreds of cases, of personal interventions where Camus, without explicitly taking a stand on the innocence or guilt of Algerian activists, pleaded for clemency in an appeal to the Head of State.” While he had refused both the Resistance Medal and the Legion of Honour, it was in a gesture of integrity and loyalty that Camus dedicated his Nobel Prize for Literature to Louis Germain, his primary school teacher and aid in his intellectual journey.
Subversion and Morality in His Masterpieces
In The Plague, Oran is invaded by a lethal pestilence, a city of the sun and idleness that refused to believe in death. Evil infiltrates and monstrously cuts down lives. “The Plague” can be interpreted as a metaphor for the Occupation or an allegory of Nazism. Some will flee, others, like Dr. Rieux, will resist until the end. There are those who will exploit the situation as true opportunists. Camus scrutinizes human reactions in the face of evil. Dr. Rieux chooses resistance and solidarity, joined by Tarrou. Father Paneloux interprets the scourge of wiping out the city as the consequence of unatoned sin. For Camus, human solidarity is the only viable solution, embodied by Dr. Rieux and his comrades. It is the daily struggle, human grandeur. “Action, struggle, can fill a man’s heart”, he also said in “The Myth of Sisyphus”. By highlighting the absurdity of the protagonist’s condition, eternally condemned to roll a boulder, he nevertheless proposes accepting one’s fate in a lucid relationship open to the possibilities of the present. “We must imagine Sisyphus happy” is the closing sentence of the denouement, alluding to a dimension concealed by religion. There is a certain accord between Camus and the ancient Greek world founded on the reconciliation of body and mind, a concept challenged by the Church dogma. His refusal to defer, to await an uncertain resolution, is his unwillingness to renounce the richness of the present life and the moment.
In The Stranger, what legitimizes the death penalty verdict against Meursault is less the nonchalantly committed crime against the Arab than the scandalous indifference of the main character of his mother’s death, his insubordination to moral and social codes, and his rebellion against the chaplain who came to squander what remains of his time and energy to live, stuffing him with illusions. Meursault’s moral rebound occurs against his sacrificial destiny. We witness the rejection of all messianism and attachment to lucidity, which reinforces the role of reason. The Stranger remains true to himself, like Camus. His quest for truth disturbs and scandalizes. Society is only sensitive to duplicity, to lies. The tribunal will judge him on his indifference.
“Hope amounts to resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself,” the narrator will say in The Wedding. Here, hope is that of another life for which one renounces the present, sensuality, in short, the joy of living. Hope is thus the enemy of man because it embodies optimism, a certain faith in divine intercession that provokes not remission, but the resignation of man, the abandonment of the fight against evil, which is not limited to its Christian acceptance.
In the same vein, The Fall is the story of the duplicity of a judge who does not intervene to save a woman from committing suicide on the Pont des Arts. It is about closing one’s eyes and ears while a cry of distress desperately rises towards us. “The absurd is born from this confrontation between human appeal and the unreasonable silence of the world. Evil is the scandal of pain, of cruelty, of dreadful violence against the oppressed. In a 1944 Combat article, he even defines Christianity as a doctrine of injustice based on the sacrifice of innocents, referring to the murder of thousands of children in Bethlehem by order of King Herod, at the birth of Jesus Christ.
The Most Christian of Atheists
But it is also the same moral demand concerning the scandal of evil that brings Camus closer to Christians, the same empathy requirement, the same solidarity obligation. Thus, the judge in The Fall would express the fall of the first man, who was obsessed with his comfort, arrogant and self-sufficient, and refused to reach out to others. His first name, Jean-Baptiste, evokes that of the prophet who will announce the coming of Christ, but it is especially the themes of guilt and responsibility in the book that echo Christian morality. Other expressions in Camus’s work reveal the influence of Christian culture even though at the family home, no one initiates him into religion and its dogmas. In The Plague, “Children are tortured” is the expression used to recount the agony of a plague-ridden child, giving up his soul in atrocious pain. Camus focuses on child suffering, which recurs in his speeches. We know Christ’s interest in children, whether in the symbolic dimension of Palm Sunday prefiguring Easter or in Jesus’ recurring exhortation to believers to resemble little ones. Indeed, Camus declares: “Not feeling in possession of any absolute truth or any message, I will never start from the fact that Christian truth is illusory, but only from the fact that I was unable to enter it.” According to the newspaper La Vie, Camus shows certain lines of fractures with the Catholic Church but does not deny the possibility of forging real ties with authentic believers. In a conference titled “What the Non-Believer Expected from Christians” given by Camus in 1948 at the Saint-Dominique convent, the writer confesses, “that they emerge from abstraction and that they face the bloodied figure of History, that they speak a clear language, that believers and non-believers work together to ‘decrease the number of tortured children,’ to put an end to the neutral language of papal diplomacy.” In fact, Camus was an atheist. But the Bible occupied a large part of his memory in philosophy, focusing on Plotinus, Saint Augustine of Hippo, and Christian metaphysics and Neoplatonism. The writer of revolt was interested in Christian mysticism and refuted cynicism. However, while being very moral, Camus was very sensual and given to the pleasures of the flesh, which was condemned by the Catholic dogmas of the time. Death interrupted his work on a third major essay, The Myth of Nemesis, which was to inaugurate the cycle of love. This theme, which should have crowned the work of Camus and constituted a kind of apotheosis, strongly challenges Christians, since the Christian God is that of Love and there is no Christian salvation outside of love. “I have only veneration and respect before the person of Christ and before his story. I do not believe in his resurrection.” Speech by Camus in Stockholm in 1957.
