The Franco-Algerian writer Albert Camus, winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature and a major figure of post-war French and European culture, was born 100 years ago this month. However, while France has been celebrating the centenary with a flood of events and publications, not least a major exhibition on the author's work in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, controversy over the presentation of Camus's work to the wider public has raised the apparently still thorny question of his Algerian origins. Camus's writings make up some of the most popular and best-known French literature of the post-war period, and they include philosophical essays such as Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L'Homme révolté, novels like L'Etranger and La Peste, and a quantity of plays and journalistic pieces. With the work of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, they were responsible for the development of a whole intellectual climate in post-war Europe, Camus's presentation of existentialist themes in his philosophical writings and his contributions to the literature of the absurd helping to make him a favourite author among students and the general public alike. His novels, still best-sellers in France, have also been well-received abroad, and for his publisher, Gallimard, also the publisher of literary heavy-weights like novelist Marcel Proust and Sartre, they have been considerable money-spinners. According to recent figures, Camus is the most popular author ever published by Gallimard, which has sold some 29 million copies of his works, including 10 million copies of L'Etranger (The Outsider) alone, considerably more than the French translation of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter. This in itself has made Camus an intriguing figure in French intellectual life, where tiny sales figures are often taken as a sign of literary quality. However, his very popularity has also had the effect of drawing attention to his political and other views, notably with regard to the major issues of his time — European decolonisation of the developing world and the Cold War between the United States and former Soviet Union. Camus's philosophical writings, a mish-mash of the existentialist themes of absurdity, commitment, and the need to realise oneself through action, give the individual a heroic role to play as the bearer of moral agency and the author of his own actions. But while for some readers of his work Camus's political commitments were those of the authentic existentialist looking for moral direction in the midst of an at best amoral world, for others they have seemed to speak of an altogether more conventional colonialist mentality, particularly when it comes to Camus's views on the Algerian War of Independence that eventually led to the country's independence from France, and of the Americanophile individualism of one side in the developing Cold War. According to the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said writing in 1993, Camus's novels and short stories, the product of an “incapacitated colonial sensibility”, are “the result of a victory won over a petrified, decimated Muslim population whose rights to the land have been severely curtailed” by French colonial rule in Algeria. Far from being incidental to Camus's universal moral themes of “moral man in an immoral situation”, his choice of an Algerian locale for his best-known novels showed him to be “full of anxiety about the gathering crisis” of the end of French rule in North Africa. “Camus's limitations,” Said concluded, “blocking as they did a compassionate, shared understanding of Algerian nationalism… seem unacceptably paralysing… They express a waste and sadness we have still not completely understood or recovered from.”
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION: The southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, once the home of the painter Paul Cézanne and now a major university town and tourist centre, is home to an important archive of Camus material at the town's Cité du Livre, a library housed within a set of 19th-century former industrial buildings. It is here that the Cité's Centre Albert Camus has decided to commission an exhibition of some of its more important holdings to celebrate the writer's centenary. Divided into 10 thematic sections, the exhibition looks at Camus's life and career from various angles, for example through the places, employments and friendships that were important to him, using these as pegs on which to hang a display of original manuscripts, letters, first editions and other memorabilia drawn from the centre's collections and donated to the Cité du Livre in 2000 by the writer's daughter Catherine Camus. The presentation goes out of its way to be immersive, with video pieces designed by exhibition designer Yacine Ait Kaci counterpointing the written materials on display, and there is a beautifully illustrated catalogue, entitled Albert Camus, citoyen du monde (a citizen of the world), which has fittingly been produced by Gallimard. However, there is little in the exhibition, at least for the casual visitor, to suggest that Camus's work is controversial, at least not in the sense put forward by Said. The tone is reverential, and though there are references to Camus's Algerian origins and even to his views on the Algerian War of Independence from France, there is nothing in it about what Said described as Camus's “incapacitated colonial sensibility,” Algeria's “decimated Muslim population” under French colonial rule, or the author's “unacceptably paralysing limitations”. According to the exhibition's original curator, the French historian Benjamin Stora, the omission of these and other potentially sensitive references could have been due to the still lively controversy over the Algerian elements in Camus's work and to his views on the Algerian War of Independence. Stora, a historian of North Africa at the Université de Paris XIII in the Paris suburbs, had originally been commissioned to produce the exhibition in 2009 in the run-up to the Camus centenary, but had apparently been fired in 2012 as a result of what the French newspaper Le Monde described as “differences of opinion” between “those who are nostalgic for French Algeria,” many of them living in the south of France and around Aix-en-Provence following the exodus from Algeria after the country's independence in 1962, and Stora over what the latter has described as “the vision of Albert Camus that we wanted to put forward” and “attempts to use the writer for political purposes”. Stora has since gone public with the affair, even publishing his version of events in a pamphlet entitled “Camus Burning” (Camus brûlant) published in September. “It is difficult to know whether it was the bad faith or the lack of support that was the more important in leading to the cancellation [of the original exhibition],” he writes in this book. In any case, what the authorities in Aix-en-Provence apparently did not want was “any emphasis on Camus's political activities… or on his anti-colonial positions or on his reticence about Algerian nationalism,” he told the French magazine Jeune Afrique in September. “Amazing as it might seem, the memory of the supporters of French Algeria has not disappeared with time. The passing of the generations has not diminished it, and at the same time, though in the opposite direction, there is the memory [of French colonial rule] in Algeria and among those of Algerian origin in France. This memory is passed from generation to generation, and it is particularly alert to questions having to do with colonialism and the war. The work of Camus, which is about the complexity of each situation and the refusal of violence, is a part of this ‘war of memories' that has now installed itself in France.” In the absence of the exhibition that he had intended to curate, it is difficult to know Stora's views on Camus's work with any certainty, though it seems they are not those of Said. In his interview with Jeune Afrique, Stora says that Camus's writings are best understood in the context of the “anti-Stalinist libertarian dissidence of the 1950s,” presumably a reference to Camus's celebrated argument with Sartre over Soviet totalitarianism, and that his work should be understood as a plea for tolerance and inter-communal pluralism. “It is true that Camus refused to accept Algerian independence, and he remained attached to the Algeria of his childhood and called for reconciliation between the country's different communities. This led to the distrust of Camus, even the rejection of him, by many Algerians, as was the case with [Algerian writer] Kateb Yacine… The whole point about Camus is that he belonged to several different worlds, without seeing that this was becoming impossible.” Meanwhile, the authorities in Aix-en-Provence have refused to allow the controversy to spill over into the Cité du Livre exhibition, the responsibility of local taxpayers following the refusal of the French ministry of culture to pay the grant it had agreed to provide when Stora was appointed. According to Maryse Joissains-Masini, the local mayor, quoted in Le Monde, “I didn't even know that Stora was an historian.” In any case, “I haven't read his book. What we have now is an exhibition in which Camus talks about Camus,” unlike the exhibition that would have taken place, had Stora been allowed to continue with it, in which “other people would have been talking about themselves through Camus.” Visitors to the Aix-en-Provence exhibition, not warned in advance about the controversy, might still wonder at the anodyne presentation, however. While being grateful to the Centre Albert Camus for opening up its archives in the writer's centenary year, they might also wonder why Camus, one of France's most important authors and among the most famous abroad, is not being celebrated in Paris. Cocteau, Sartre, Ionesco, even the 1960s situationist Guy Debord, none of them particularly consensual figures, have all been given Paris exhibitions in recent years, but not Camus. In a country that likes to rank its authors, such implied inclusions and exclusions can be serious. According to Antoine Gallimard of Camus's publishers, quoted in Le Monde, the situation is “incredible, a real mystery — we have suggested [an exhibition] several times to the authorities but have never received a response.” For Stora, writing in Camus brûlant, the reason for Camus's literary black-balling is that he is an author caught up in what is picturesquely described as “the logics of recuperation and exclusion that totally go against his desire for dialogue and openness.” Camus was “against the capitalist and the Soviet systems, was for justice in Algeria and against Algerian independence, and was both French and Algerian,” Stora says. He was characterised by “a paradoxical and double positioning that might be called that of the ‘outsider'.”
CAMUS AND ALGERIA: Two parts of Camus's relationship with Algeria have been particularly commented upon: the presentation of Algeria and Arab Algerians in the novels and short stories, particularly in L'Etranger, La Peste and the stories collected in L'Exil et la royaume, and his attempts to intervene in the Algerian War of Independence in favour of a negotiated settlement that could have led to a continuing French presence in Algeria. Said makes the main points for the prosecution regarding Camus's presentation of Algeria and Arab Algerians in his 1993 discussion, pointing out that when they figure in the novels at all, which is not much when one considers that L'Etranger is set in Algiers and La Peste in Oran, they do so as a kind of backdrop to the existential crises of their European protagonists. The focus of the narrative and of its first-order moral investigation is on the characters of European, and therefore of colonial, origin, something that is as true of the main character Mersault in L'Etranger as it is of Rieux in La Peste. This argument, drawing on the internal evidence of the literary texts, was eloquently made by the Irish writer Conor Cruise O'Brien in 1970, and for those wanting to see Camus's novels in these terms it is probably not really arguable. In the former novel, for example, Mersault, the focus of the narration, kills an Arab Algerian, and as O'Brien pointed out “the man who is shot has no name, and his relation to the narrator is not that of one human being to another… the reader does not quite feel,” or is not expected to feel, “that Mersault has killed a man. He has killed an Arab.” Furthermore, the presentation of Mersault's subsequent trial is “a myth, the myth of French Algeria.” No actual court of law in French Algeria, O'Brien writes, would have “condemned a European to death for shooting an Arab… [and] by suggesting that the court is impartial between Arab and Frenchman, the novel implicitly denies the colonial reality.” Much the same thing could be said about La Peste, O'Brien wrote, where the Algerian city of Oran is a symbol for France under German occupation during World War II. However, “the native question” — the presence in Oran of an Arab population — “is simply abolished, once it has served to reveal the differing standards of two Europeans.” The irony of the novel, which seems to have escaped Camus, is that “there were Arabs for whom ‘French Algeria' was a fiction quite as repugnant as the fiction of Hitler's new European order was for Camus. For such Arabs, the French were in Algeria in virtue of the same right by which the Germans were in France: the right of conquest.” It is “astonishing”, O'Brien writes, that Camus's “great evasion” of such issues in a novel supposedly set in colonial Algeria “should be preceded by a homily on the need for total honesty”. This picture has since been filled out by the publication, in 1995, of a previously unpublished, and unfinished, novel, Le Premier homme, shepherded through the press by Catherine Camus. This book, a semi-autobiographical account of an Algerian childhood, must have been worked on by Camus in 1958/59 before his death in an accident early in 1960, and it represents both a striking new direction in formal or literary terms, being perhaps the most direct and most personal of all his writings, as well as an intervention in the ongoing conflict in Algeria. However, while Le Premier homme is a very good novel, adding to and complicating previous estimates of the writer's career, it would be difficult to hold that it really cancels them. Yet, for all their interest for readers interested in Camus's literary career, the novels are perhaps less important for understanding his relationship to his native Algeria than his journalism. Camus himself might have thought the same, for in 1958, at the height of the Algerian war, he published a selection of his journalistic pieces under the title Chroniques algériennes, 1939 — 1958, the volume bringing together both his earlier pieces, among them those he had published when still a reporter on the Algiers newspaper Alger républicain on the appalling social conditions in Algeria, and his later interventions in the conflict in Algeria and pleas for a negotiated solution that would guarantee a continued French presence in the country. It has long been recognised that the Algerian War of Independence, beginning in 1954 and only ending in 1962 with the country's independence and the exodus of the vast majority of its European population, produced an enormous amount of sometimes important commentary on the history and character of European colonialism. The French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, for example, much of his career spent in Algeria, produced his writings on French colonialism in North Africa during these years, among them Les Damnés de la terre and Pour la révolution africaine, as did the Franco-Tunisian essayist Albert Memmi in his Portrait du colonisé, precede du portrait du colonisateur, a portrait of the colonial system. Camus's contribution to this commentary, adding to the isolation that Stora and others have identified during his later years, was to criticise French colonialism and to argue against Algerian independence, an essential precursor, according to Fanon, of any wider African revolution. In the introduction to Chroniques algériennes, for example, Camus argues against the methods that had been used by the French authorities in Algeria in their prosecution of the war, among them collective punishments and torture, while also criticising the Front de libération nationale (FLN), the Algerian nationalist movement, for its “terrorism against French civilians and even more frequently against Arab civilians.” There must be an end, Camus writes “to the wholesale condemnation of Algeria's French population,” often seen as exploitative plutocrats but in fact, he claims, more like the poverty-stricken families of European origin described in Le Premier homme. A “third way” must be found, he argues, perhaps some kind of federal solution, that would continue Algeria's links to France. This would be “unquestionably preferable from the standpoint of justice to an Algeria linked to an Islamic empire that would subject the Arab peoples to additional misery and suffering and tear the French people of Algeria from their natural homeland.” Such a third way was of course not found, and it was not wanted by many of those involved, though Camus was presumably not alone in wanting to find some way of halting the appalling violence that characterised the Algerian war, particularly in its later stages. According to the British historian Alistair Horne, author of a standard work on the war, Camus had been shocked by the extremism of both sides in the conflict when he had visited Algiers in 1956 to argue for a truce. This “inspired but perhaps hopelessly over-idealistic notion collapsed from the stresses within and without,” Horne says, “and with it there also died the last hope of a liberal compromise.” Camus did not attempt to intervene directly in Algerian affairs again. “From now on he withdrew into his shell,” Horne notes, only briefly emerging from it in 1958 to contribute a preface to his Chroniques algériennes.
CAMUS IN ALGERIA: If Benjamin Stora is to be believed, memories of the Algerian war are still alive today in France, along with memories of the role that Camus played in it, and these may help to explain the avoidance of references to Camus's political activities in the present centenary exhibition. While in the United States Camus's writings are now often studied precisely because of the contributions they can make to understanding French colonialism in the Arab world, in France itself they are still read in exclusively ahistorical and apparently studiedly apolitical terms. Yet, it may be that even in Algeria Camus is gaining new audiences. One of the reasons that Camus was against Algerian independence from France in the 1950s was because he was against what he feared would be a monolithic future for the country and the expulsion or repression of its ethnic or religious minorities, including those who had made their home in the country as a result of European colonialism. In the Algeria of today, following 50 years of military-backed rule, it may be that Camus's message of pluralism and of a liberal conception of the country's identity can benefit from a more sympathetic hearing. According to Camus's French biographer Olivier Todd, “what did he want to see in Algeria? Exactly what we hope to see in South Africa today: two communities living side by side and having the same rights,” having done their best to put the past behind them. Camus, born and educated in Algeria, knew the country better than the French intellectuals who wrote on the country in the 1950s, among them Sartre and Fanon. His subsequent discrediting in Algeria, suggests the Algerian writer Akram Belkaid, has had a lot to do with the way in which the country's post-colonial regime has sought to discredit opposition to its rule, including criticisms of the one-party state and compulsory arabisation. “I think that Camus is a representative of a debate that could still be on-going. He is the symbol of the different directions that history could take, of the different routes that are open to a pluralist Algeria,” Stora has written. “Camus's way of thinking is still of interest when thinking about the course taken by the Algerian War of Independence, and for this reason his work may be of interest to young Algerians.”
