Reading Camus

Absurdity and Existentialism
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in French Algeria, in northern Africa, to a French father he never knew and an illiterate mother of poor Balearic origins. They were a family of pieds-noirs (black feet), originally a derogatory term for Europeans born in Algeria under colonization. It was a difficult childhood, but he was granted a scholarship to better schools. He went on to study at the University of Algiers. His dissertation, Philosophical Work: Absurdity, explored the opposing forces of a seemingly meaningless world and man’s innate desire to find meaning in our lives.

While working for the Alger Républican, beginning in 1938, Camus met another absurdist, Piscal Pia. Their discussions and analyses led Camus to read Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works on existential philosophy focus on human existence, the power of man’s will, the choices he makes, and his role in the world, questions that consumed Camus’ thoughts and writing throughout his life.

The Stranger and The Myth
As a book reviewer, he came across Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Wall and Nausea – both seminal works on existentialism. Two years later, Camus would complete his own. The Stranger is about a French-Algerian who kills an Arab man and shows no remorse until the end, when he lashes out against the prison chaplain. Anguished, he welcomes his own execution as a respite from a life where he has found no meaning. Published in 1942, The Stranger not only made the 29-year-old Camus famous but also cemented his place among the giants of French literature that included André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir and Satre, an intellectual circle he would soon become part of.

That same year, he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay asking whether life is worth living when it has no meaning. In Sisyphus, we find a hero who, with or without meaning, loves life so much he puts Death in chains so no human will have to die. He is then punished by the gods and condemned to push up a rock on a mountain, which slides back down for him to push up again, and again, and again. He has to repeat this for all eternity – an absurd, meaningless task.

Here, Camus questions the absurdity of life that doesn’t make sense when good and bad things happen to people at random and without reason. Yet he persuades us not to answer with nihilism or resignation but rebellion. He said man should never accept their fate; they should revolt against it. In this, he teaches us that if life is made without meaning, you must give it your own.

Occupation and Resistance
In 1940, Camus moved to Paris, just months before the Germans crossed the Maginot line and invaded France. He became active in the Resistance as editor-in-chief for Combat, writing about the atrocities of war and the need for justice while denouncing Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation. After the liberation, he called for the swift punishment of the perpetrators who had caused so many deaths in France. It was the one time he wavered from his lifelong stance against capital punishment but would later reverse to actively campaign to save even the worst Nazi collaborators and terrorists from execution.

At the same time, he was writing The Plague, a fictional story about an epidemic spreading while the authorities are slow to respond, optimistic it can be contained. When more and more people keep dying, the town can do nothing but panic. Published in 1947, it was an allegory to the German invasion the French did not think possible, and to the occupation they were too late to prevent. The scenes in the book are symbolic of wartime France. The gates of the city are closed so no one can escape. There is looting everywhere. There are those who stood by passively, like those who condoned the atrocities. And there are those who formed voluntary sanitary teams to fight the plague – representative of the Resistance.

Algerian Chronicles
Camus once said that “the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” And no other work would embody his plight as a writer – and as a humanist – than Algerian Chronicles. Starting with his visit to Kabylia in 1939 to write an article for the Alger Républican, it would span 20 years of observations, essays, critics and letters he wrote on the conflicts throughout Algeria. From the moment he witnessed most of its 27,000 inhabitants living in impoverished conditions – people were starving, only 1,000 were on a normal diet, children were dying – he began to criticize the French government. He exposed the mistreatment of the native population and advocated for better wages, funding for schools and the need for economic reform.

Exile and the Kingdom
Because Camus’ father was French, his citizenship came with privileges the nine million Arabs and Berbers living in Algeria did not have. The government completely ignored his calls for equality and justice. Their only response was to censor him, eventually forcing his newspaper to close.

In 1943, Camus supported a manifesto from the Arab population who wanted political representation. However, its leader, Ferhat Abbas, who issued the manifesto, was imprisoned by the French leaders, who followed it with swift reprisals against other dissidents. Many of them were brutally tortured. Camus pleaded for an end to the violence, saying the French were destroying the very ideals they were supposed to protect.

In 1954, war broke out. While Camus believed Algerian nationals deserved the right to sovereignty, he also wanted Algeria to remain part of France, not a separate state he could no longer call his own. He always felt he was Algerian, not French. He called for a truce but was once again completely ignored by both sides. And so the war raged on, tearing him and his country both apart. When the war ended in 1962, after Camus’ death, with an independent Algeria, over a million people had died, two million were displaced, and another million French-Algerians had to flee.

Today, Camus is barely read nor sold in his native Algeria, ostracized for not supporting its fight for independence when I cannot think of anyone who loved that country more. To those of us who do read him, Camus is the too-rare individual who is absolutely brilliant – in terms of both intellect and human qualities. And that is why I love him. He was an idealist who believed in using language as a way of reasoning out conflicts rather than fighting them. It was heartbreaking for him to see that the things he sought and thought possible – like peace and equality, social justice and tolerance – were not. Not even today. And while they seem forever unattainable, he is that great writer who makes us believe in those ideals and lets us hope still.

Love and Glory
After he died in 1960, his friends built a small monument, the only one of him in Algeria. While the name “Albert Camus” was long ago etched out by nationalists, it still stands in Tipasa, on the seaside ruins of his childhood that inspired the inscription: Je comprends ici ce qu’on appelle gloire, le droit d’aimer sans mesure. This they leave untouched written on the stone.