The centenary of the birth of Albert Camus last year underlined not only the writer's abiding international relevance but also his durably contested status. Such widely translated novels as The Outsider (also known as The Stranger; 1942) and The Plague (1947) have ensured a broad readership for Camus's reflections on the absurdity of the human condition, explored most systematically in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). This cultural resonance was enhanced by Camus's editorship of the Resistance newspaper Combat during the second World War and was effectively enshrined by his untimely death in a car crash in 1960.
Yet, as the outstanding intellectual to emerge from France’s colony in Algeria, Camus has been read in sharply contrasting ways. If many commentators have highlighted his global legacy as a liberal humanist, influential critics have sought instead to locate Camus’s writings within the bloody endgame of “French Algeria”.
First occupied by French troops in 1830 and incorporated into the Republic in 1848, Algeria was officially not a colony but a province. It was home to a million French citizens and nine million Arab and Berber inhabitants, whose subaltern status would be changed only by the war of independence between 1954 and 1962.
As a left-leaning moralist Camus faced a dilemma, seeking justice for his homeland’s indigenous population but set apart from them by his membership of the settler community. He did not support Algerian demands for self-determination and was appalled by the violent methods to which the nationalists resorted. Confronted by an insurrection that routinely targeted the “French of Algeria”, Camus would try to act as a peacemaker before opting for a public and heavily criticised silence.
This explains why the writer’s birthplace was officially marked by the Algerian state only in 2012, and also why the 2013 exhibition devoted to his life and work, and conceived as the high point of Marseille-Provence’s tenure as European Capital of Culture, was mired in controversy.
It also highlights the fascination and the timeliness of this first full translation of Camus's Algerian Chronicles, a collection of key essays written between the 1930s and the 1950s. In her introduction Alice Kaplan notes that this volume, conceived as Camus's last statement on the Algerian question, sank almost without trace when published in France in 1958.
However, Camus’s tortured words may profitably be reconsidered half a century later, with the benefit of hindsight as regards Algeria’s traumatic accession to independence, which included the mass exodus of the territory’s settler population.
Algeria’s history since 1962, and particularly the “black decade” of civil war in the 1990s between the military-backed government and Islamist rebels, also casts new light on these texts, underscoring their contemporary relevance.
Camus's alternately angry and anguished engagement is made readily accessible to an English-speaking audience in Arthur Goldhammer's sensitive rendering of what VS Pritchett, in the New Statesman's 1960 obituary, aptly termed "A Conscience with a Style". Two of the earliest interventions presented here highlight both that deceptively simple technique and Camus's inescapably colonial politics. The scrupulous investigative journalism of The Misery of Kabylia (1939) – the reference is to a Berber region afflicted by chronic unemployment and periodic famine, alleviated only by emigration – stood out at a time when few "metropolitan" intellectuals, including those who would later condemn Camus most vocally, focused on colonial questions.
Writing on the eve of the second World War, he urged widespread state investment in Algeria, along with the extension of full political rights to its indigenous population. As elsewhere, the war proved to be a catalyst for the radicalisation of the nationalist movement. The ferocious suppression of rioting on May 8th, 1945 in and around the town of Sétif prompted Camus to write Crisis in Algeria. This essay combined his trademark Mediterranean lyricism and social commitment with what was to become an increasingly apparent political short-sightedness: "In this lovely country, now glorious with spring blossoms and sunshine, people suffering from hunger are demanding justice". In fact, after decades of colonial intransigence, nationalists were seeking no longer to make French rule more "just" but to overthrow it completely.
"Justice" was a key theme for Camus, and the term's regular occurrence is symptomatic of the writer's privileging, in life as in these essays, of ethics over politics and of the individual over the collective. This would lead him to adopt genuinely courageous positions, as when he returned to Algiers to make his idealistic Call for a Civilian Truce in Algeria (1956), in the face of the very real threats to his life made by his own community.
It would also see him publicly decry terrorism but work behind the scenes to spare convicted terrorists from the death sentence. It would lead him, when in Stockholm to receive the 1957 Nobel prize, to declare that he was obliged to condemn the nationalists’ targeting of civilians on the streets of Algiers, where members of his family still lived.
Camus stated: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” This remark was widely interpreted as a reference not only to his own elderly mother but also to “French Algeria” and its settler community, prompting intellectual outrage in France, and thereby reinforcing Camus’s conviction that there was nothing left for him to say.
As the Franco-Algerian memory wars continue to rage – significantly, the French state acknowledged that the 1954-62 “events” had been a war only in 1999 – this new translation offers a welcome opportunity to engage with the political soul-searching of a major figure who, as the American historian James Le Sueur has argued, may have been wrong about Algeria but may also have been right to be wrong.
