Albert Camus

Albert Camus was the philosopher of the absurd and of revolt: a French-Algerian novelist, playwright, journalist and essayist who asked what remains of life once religious and metaphysical hope have gone, and answered — not despair, not suicide, not a new faith in History, but a lucid, defiant, sensual fidelity to this life and to other people. His three great “cycles” — the absurd (The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula), revolt (The Plague, The Rebel, The Just Assassins), and the unfinished cycle of love — made him, at forty-four, the second-youngest Nobel laureate in literature. He refused the label “existentialist”, broke publicly with Jean-Paul Sartre over Communism and revolutionary violence, and died in a car crash in 1960 with an unfinished autobiographical novel in his briefcase. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Life

Poverty and sunlight: Algeria, 1913–1940

Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi (now Dréan), in French Algeria, into the community of poor European settlers later called pieds-noirs. His father, Lucien, an agricultural labourer, was killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914 when Albert was not yet one; the only thing the son knew of him was that he had once come home vomiting after watching a public execution — a story that haunts The Stranger and Camus’s lifelong opposition to the death penalty.

He grew up in the working-class Belcourt district of Algiers, in a three-room flat with no electricity or running water, with his half-deaf, illiterate, nearly mute mother, a domineering grandmother who beat him with a bullwhip, and a disabled uncle who worked as a cooper. The silence of his mother — her quiet, uncomplaining presence — remained for him an image of dignity in poverty. “I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun,” he wrote. “Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything.”

A schoolteacher, Louis Germain, recognised his gifts and coached him for a scholarship to the lycée; Camus dedicated his Nobel lecture to him. At the lycée and university he found a second mentor in the philosopher Jean Grenier. He was a passionate footballer — goalkeeper for the Racing Universitaire d’Alger junior team — until, at seventeen, he coughed blood: tuberculosis, which would recur all his life, barred him from an academic career (and from the army) and gave him early an intimate knowledge of mortality.

He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, writing a thesis (1936) on Plotinus and Augustine — Hellenism and Christianity. He married young and unhappily (Simone Hié, a morphine addict); joined and was expelled from the Communist Party (1935–37) for refusing to abandon the Arab nationalists when Moscow’s line changed; ran a theatre troupe, the Théâtre du Travail, acting, directing and adapting; and wrote two collections of lyrical essays, Betwixt and Between (L’Envers et l’endroit, 1937) and Nuptials (Noces, 1938), celebrating the sea, the sun, the ruins of Tipasa and the body’s happiness.

As a journalist for Alger Républicain, he wrote in 1939 a famous series of reports, “Misery in Kabylia”, exposing famine among the Berber population — reportage that got the paper shut down and made him unemployable in Algeria.

Paris, the war and the Resistance, 1940–1945

In 1940 he moved to Paris to work for Paris-Soir, and in the year of France’s defeat he completed the “absurd” trilogy: The Stranger (L’Étranger), The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula. He remarried (Francine Faure, a mathematician and pianist from Oran) and spent a dark year in Oran, where typhus was spreading — material for The Plague.

The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus were published by Gallimard in 1942, under German occupation, and made him famous. In 1943 he joined the Resistance newspaper Combat, becoming its editor-in-chief; his editorials at the Liberation in August 1944 made him the moral voice of a generation. He met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1943, and for a few years they were friends and allies.

Fame and estrangement, 1945–1960

After the war, Camus was one of the most celebrated writers in the world. His friendship with the Paris intellectual left, however, frayed. In Combat (1946) he published “Neither Victims nor Executioners”, rejecting any political system that justified murder. The Plague (1947) was a best-seller. His plays included The Misunderstanding (1944), State of Siege (1948) and The Just Assassins (1949).

The Rebel (L’Homme révolté, 1951) attacked the revolutionary tradition from Saint-Just to Lenin and Stalin, condemning the Soviet labour camps. Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes published a hostile review by Francis Jeanson; Camus replied with a wounded letter addressed to “Monsieur le Directeur”; Sartre answered with a crushing public letter that ended their friendship (1952). Camus was isolated on the left, and fell into depression.

The Algerian War (1954–62) tore him apart. He condemned both French torture and FLN terrorism, called for a “civilian truce” (1956) in Algiers amid death threats from both sides, and fell largely silent, saying that he could not speak against his own people while bombs were killing them. At Stockholm in 1957, when a student challenged him, he said (in a remark usually misquoted): “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.”

His later works include The Fall (La Chute, 1956), a bitter, brilliant monologue of a “judge-penitent” in an Amsterdam bar; Exile and the Kingdom (1957), stories; and the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine” (1957), a powerful case against capital punishment.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1957 “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”. He bought a house in Lourmarin, in Provence. On 4 January 1960, he was killed when the Facel Vega driven by his publisher Michel Gallimard hit a tree near Villeblevin. In his pocket was an unused train ticket. In the car was the manuscript of The First Man, his unfinished autobiographical novel about the search for his father, published in 1994. He once said that he could think of nothing more absurd than to die in a car accident.

The three cycles

Camus planned his work in cycles, each comprising a novel, an essay and a play:

Cycle	Myth	Novel	Essay	Plays
The absurd	Sisyphus	The Stranger (1942)	The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)	Caligula, The Misunderstanding
Revolt	Prometheus	The Plague (1947)	The Rebel (1951)	State of Siege, The Just Assassins
Love (planned)	Nemesis	The First Man (unfinished)	—	—

The absurd

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem”

The Myth of Sisyphus opens:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Everything else — whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. Camus’s question is whether, without God or ultimate meaning, life is worth living.

What the absurd is

The absurd (see The Absurd and Absurdism) is not a feature of the world, nor of us, but of the confrontation between them: “the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” We long for unity, clarity, meaning; the world answers nothing.

It can arise anywhere: the weariness of routine (“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar…”); the sudden strangeness of the world, as when a familiar landscape turns alien; the realisation of time (“tomorrow… he belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognises his worst enemy”); death. Reason itself discovers its limits — science explains the world with hypotheses and images, ending in metaphor, never in the unity the heart demands.

Three responses

1. Physical suicide — escaping the absurd by ending one of its terms. Camus rejects it: it is a confession that life is “too much”, a surrender.
2. Philosophical suicide — the “leap” of Søren Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Chestov, Husserl: escaping the absurd by embracing a God or an absolute that the absurd itself has ruled out (see The Leap of Faith). Camus calls this an evasion, a sacrifice of the intellect.
3. Revolt — living with the absurd, without appeal, keeping it alive by refusing both hope and resignation. From the absurd, Camus draws three consequences: revolt, freedom and passion. Not to live better, but to live more — “what counts is not the best living but the most living”.

Absurd heroes

Camus offers portraits of “absurd men” who live without appeal: Don Juan, who loves each woman with the same passion knowing it will not last; the actor, who lives many lives in a short span; the conqueror, who acts in history knowing it is vain; and the artist, the most absurd of all, who creates without hope of eternity.

Sisyphus

The essay closes with the myth (see Sisyphus at the Foot of the Mountain). Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a rock up a mountain forever, only to see it roll back, is “the absurd hero” — through his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life. Camus is interested in the moment of descent: as Sisyphus walks back down toward the rock, he is conscious, and “the lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The Stranger

The Stranger (1942) — see The Stranger — is the novel of the absurd. Its narrator, Meursault (Meursault), a clerk in Algiers, tells his story in flat, short sentences:

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.

He attends his mother’s funeral at the old people’s home in Marengo without weeping; the next day he goes swimming, meets Marie, a former typist, sees a comic film with her and sleeps with her. He helps his neighbour Raymond, a pimp, write a letter to entrap his Arab mistress; becomes entangled in Raymond’s feud with her brother; and on a blinding afternoon at the beach, with the sun hammering his forehead and the sweat in his eyes, he shoots an Arab man — once, then four more times into the motionless body, “like four quick knocks on the door of unhappiness”.

The second half is the trial. The prosecution has little interest in the killing; it attacks Meursault for not crying at his mother’s funeral, for smoking and drinking coffee at the vigil, for starting an affair the next day. He is condemned to death, Camus later wrote, because “in our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death”. He will not lie, will not say more than he feels.

In his cell, he refuses the chaplain’s consolations in a burst of fury (Meursault and the Chaplain), and then, emptied of hope, opens himself “for the first time to the gentle indifference of the world”. Feeling it so like himself, he realises that he had been happy and is happy still — and wishes only that on the day of his execution there be a huge crowd greeting him with cries of hate.

Readers have long debated the novel: is Meursault an absurd saint, “the only Christ we deserve” (Camus’s provocative phrase), or a sociopath? Postcolonial critics (Conor Cruise O’Brien, Edward Said) noted that the murdered man is never named — simply “the Arab”. In 2013 the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud answered with The Meursault Investigation, narrated by the dead man’s brother, who gives him a name: Musa.

Revolt

From the absurd to solidarity

In the war years, Camus came to think the absurd alone was insufficient: in itself it allowed everything, even murder. In the Letters to a German Friend (1943–44), he addressed a Nazi who drew from the meaninglessness of the world the conclusion that all is permitted, and answered that he had drawn a different one: that human beings must create the justice the world lacks.

The Plague

The Plague (1947) is set in Oran, which in an unspecified year of the 1940s is struck by bubonic plague. Rats come out to die in the streets; then people sicken; the city is sealed off. The chronicle, revealed at the end to be written by Dr Bernard Rieux, follows those who fight: Rieux himself, who works without heroics because “the only means of fighting a plague is common decency”; Tarrou, a visitor who organises sanitary squads and seeks to become “a saint without God”; Rambert, a journalist trying to escape to his lover in Paris, who decides to stay because “it may be shameful to be happy by oneself”; Grand, a clerk who spends his nights rewriting the first sentence of a novel; Father Paneloux, a Jesuit who first preaches that the plague is God’s punishment, then — after watching a child die in agony — preaches that one must will what God wills or deny God altogether; and Cottard, a criminal who thrives under the plague.

The novel is an allegory of the Occupation and of every collective evil, and a portrait of revolt as solidarity: “I rebel — therefore we exist.” It ends with Rieux’s warning amid the celebrations: the plague bacillus never dies, and “the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city”.

The Rebel

The Rebel (1951) asks how revolt, which begins as a defence of human dignity, ends in tyranny. “What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes.” The slave who refuses a further order affirms a limit — and in doing so affirms a value common to all people. Hence Camus’s version of the cogito: “I rebel — therefore we exist.”

He then traces metaphysical revolt (against God and creation) from Sade and the Romantics through Ivan Karamazov (“everything is permitted”) and Friedrich Nietzsche, and historical revolt from the regicides of 1793 through the Russian terrorists to Communism, which made History an absolute and murder a means. Against this logic of “rational murder”, he proposes measure (la mesure), the Mediterranean sense of limits — “la pensée de midi”, noontime thought — and a revolt that never forgets its origin in the refusal of humiliation and suffering.

The quarrel with Sartre

The Sartre–Camus quarrel (1952) became a symbol of the Cold War divide. Sartre, moving toward the Communists, accused Camus of having become a moralist, of standing above history, of objectively serving the bourgeoisie. Camus held that no future justice can justify present murders and camps. History has largely vindicated Camus about the Gulag; Sartre’s defenders say Camus offered no real politics. See Jean-Paul Sartre.

The Fall and later work

The Fall (1956) is a dramatic monologue in which Jean-Baptiste Clamence, once a celebrated Parisian lawyer who defended widows and orphans, explains to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar, the Mexico City, how he discovered his own hypocrisy: one November night, crossing a bridge, he heard a young woman fall into the Seine and did nothing. Since then he has become a “judge-penitent”: he confesses his sins in order to judge others, and lure them into confessing their own. “Every man testifies to the crime of all the others.” Many read it as a sardonic portrait of Paris intellectuals — and of Camus himself.

Camus and existentialism

Camus repeatedly denied being an existentialist: “No, I am not an existentialist.” He shared with Existentialism the starting point — a godless world, the priority of lived experience — but he rejected its philosophical systems and especially its notion that human beings create values out of nothing. For Camus, there is a human nature, revealed in revolt, and a limit. He thought of himself as an artist rather than a philosopher.

Influences and comparisons

• Fyodor Dostoevsky: Camus adapted Demons for the stage (1959) and considered Ivan Karamazov the key figure of metaphysical revolt.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: admired for his diagnosis of nihilism, criticised for his political appropriations.
• Franz Kafka: an appendix of The Myth of Sisyphus, “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka”, analyses the trial-like world of Josef K.
• Søren Kierkegaard: the model of “philosophical suicide”.
• Pascal and Augustine: interlocutors he could not follow.
• Greek thought: his ideal of measure and the sun.

Critics

• Philosophers (Sartre, Jeanson, later Ayer) found him philosophically amateurish.
• The political left found him unable to choose sides.
• Postcolonial critics faulted his silence on Algerian independence and his invisible Arabs.
• Religious thinkers charged that revolt without God cannot ground the values it defends.

Key terms

The absurd

The confrontation between the human need for meaning and the world's silence.

Philosophical suicide

Escaping the absurd through a leap of faith.

Revolt

Living with the absurd without hope or resignation; in the second cycle, the refusal of oppression that affirms shared value.

Measure (la mesure)

A sense of limits opposed to revolutionary absolutes.

Noontime thought (la pensée de midi)

Mediterranean balance, sun and limits.

Using Camus in conversation

• On meaning: the absurd is born of the confrontation between human need and the world’s silence.
• On persistence: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
• On solidarity: “I rebel — therefore we exist.”
• On ends and means: no future justice justifies present murder.