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dreifus
Camus at Combat: Writing
1944-47. Albert Camus. Edited and annotated by Jacqueline
Lévi-Valensi. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. With
an Introduction by David Carroll. Princeton University Press,
2006. $29.95. 334 pp.
Albert Camus entered
my life in 1986, when I was a high school junior assigned
to read The Stranger in French IV class. As a college sophomore
studying Modern European History and Literature a few years
later I read The Plague. And our relationship could have ended
there. That’s about as much Camus as most Americans
will ever read.
But Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957
(he was then 43 years old) and died in an automobile crash
three years later, was, as I learned during my junior spring
semester in Paris, much more than a mere novelist. He was
a journalist, too.
And he was a journalist in difficult times, including the
moment of German occupation. In fact, it was en pleine occupation
that Camus became editor-in-chief of Combat, a Resistance
newspaper published clandestinely and irregularly until the
liberation in the summer of 1944. This translation of Camus
at Combat, which was originally produced in France in 2002,
collects 165 of his Combat editorials and articles, some attributed
to him from Combat’s clandestine phase, but most dating
from the post-liberation and early postwar period.
It’s a tremendous book. And it’s significant not
only for those, like me, with longstanding intellectual and
emotional attachments to the author and the original texts
(that junior spring I chose the postwar purges of French writers
and journalists as my senior honors thesis topic; before I
left France that summer I spent many hours in the French National
Library, reading Camus’ many Combat editorials on the
subject on microfilm), but for anyone interested in history,
politics, or journalism.
In an editorial published on September 1, 1944, for example,
Camus elaborated on his concept of the journalist: “He
is first of all a person who is supposed to have ideas .…
He is also a person who every day takes it upon himself to
inform the public about the events of the day before. In short,
he is a historian of the moment, and truth must be his primary
concern.”
But for both historians and journalists “truth”
can be complicated—and disturbing. As David Carroll
notes in his superb introduction to this English edition,
in these Combat pieces Camus elucidated and critiqued “three
major failures of French democracy in the immediate postwar
period”:
The first failure,
which occurred immediately after the Liberation, resulted
from the inability of the French to deal effectively and,
more important, justly with the traitors and criminals of
the war period in the purge trials (l’épuration).
The second was the failure of France to recognize the injustices
of colonialism and to uphold the same democratic principles
in its colonies for which the Resistance had fought and
which the French people demanded for themselves. The third
major failure of democracy was related to the inadequacy
of the free press in general, but particularly to Combat’s
own inability to remain independent and thus in Camus’
terms faithful to its democratic mission. Taken together
these particular failures represented a general failure
in or of democracy itself.
Carroll emphasizes
the resonance of Camus’ editorials for our own times,
and you’d probably have to have been living under a
rock lately to disagree. Of course, issues of transitional
justice (think Iraq) and definitions of the rights and responsibilities
of a free press continue to occupy us today. But even Carroll
could not have anticipated just how profoundly Camus’
words would resound, with a specifically French accent, no
less, in the months immediately preceding the book’s
publication.
On October 13, 1944, Camus (who was born to a family of European
origin in Algeria at a time when Algeria was officially considered
a part of France, and whose last, unfinished manuscript, found
in the wreckage of his car and published posthumously as The
First Man in the 1990’s, presents the early part of
a planned—and quite autobiographical—novel chronicling
the history of the French there) wrote: “We will not
find real support in our colonies until we convince them that
their interests coincide with ours and that we do not have
two policies: one granting justice to the people of France
and the other confirming injustice toward the Empire.”
On May 18, 1945:
Far be it from
me to try to formulate a definitive policy for North Africa
in the space of two or three articles. This would please
no one, and truth would not be served. But our Algerian
policy is so distorted by prejudice and ignorance that to
offer an objective account based on accurate information
is already to render an important service . …
I read in a morning newspaper that 80 percent of the Arabs
wished to become French citizens. In contrast, I would sum
up the current state of Algerian policy by saying that,
indeed, Arabs used to want to become citizens but no longer
do. When you’ve hoped for something for a long time
and your hopes are dashed, you avert your eyes and your
erstwhile desire disappears. That is what has happened to
the indigenous peoples of Algeria, and the primary responsibility
for this is ours.
On May 23: “I
have only one question for the French, who today know what
hatred is: ‘Do you truly want to be hated by millions
of people, as you have hated thousands of others? If so, let
things continue on their present course in North Africa. If
not, welcome these people among you and treat them as equals,
using all appropriate means.’” (It should be noted
that Camus did not doubt the response of the French people
to his question. “But what about those in government?”)
On June 15:
It isn’t that
easy to overcome prejudice and blindness .… The world
today is seething with hatred. Everywhere, violence and
force, massacres and riots fill the air from which we thought
the worst poisons had been drained. Whatever we can do for
truth—French truth and human truth—we must also
do to oppose hatred. Whatever it takes must be done to bring
peace to people lacerated and tormented by suffering that
has gone on too long. For our part, at any rate, let us
try not to add anything to Algerian bitterness.
At the very least,
one senses that had he lived to a ripe old age, had he witnessed
the final throes of French decolonization and the emerging
history of North Africans and their descendants in metropolitan
France, Camus might have offered some pretty interesting commentary
on the events in the Paris “suburbs” in the autumn
of 2005.
On the other hand, perhaps Camus—vilified in his lifetime
for so many of his political pronouncements, including those
against Algerian independence, which was not part of his vision
of the solution to France’s colonial quagmire; he deplored
the rebels’ guerrilla tactics which, as he famously
told a group of university students in Stockholm, could threaten
the safety of his own mother—might simply have said,
“I told you so.” His Combat prescriptions for
real shifts in attitudes and mindsets may not have offered
a panacea by any means. But surely, now, we know and understand
that no legal or structural changes could—or will ever—truly
succeed without them.
earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University
and an M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte; currently
she writes and teaches in Massachusetts. Her short stories
and essays have appeared in Lilith, MississippiReview.com,
Small Spiral Notebook, Queen's Quarterly: A Canadian Review,
Vermont Literary Review, and many other publications.
She edits a free monthly newsletter, "The Practicing Writer,"
for fictionists, poets, and nonfiction writers.
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