Albert Camus

"Camus" redirects here. For the Spanish poet and writer, see Matilde Camus.

Albert Camus
Camus in 1957, the year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature
Born	(1913-11-07)7 November 1913 Near Mondovi (now Dréan), French Algeria
Died	4 January 1960(1960-01-04) (aged 46) Villeblevin, Yonne, France
Resting place	Lourmarin, Provence, France
Occupation	Writer, journalist, philosopher, theatre director
Language	French
Nationality	French
Notable works	The Stranger (1942) The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) The Plague (1947) The Rebel (1951) The Fall (1956)
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (1957)
Spouse	Simone Hié (1934–1940) Francine Faure (1940–1960)
Children	2
Signature

Albert Camus (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French writer and thinker. He wrote novels, plays, essays, and newspaper articles. He also worked in the theatre as a director and an actor. He said that he felt happier among theatre people than among writers. In 1957, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was 43 when the prize was announced and 44 when he received it. Only Rudyard Kipling had received it at a younger age.

Camus was born in Algeria, which was then ruled by France. His family was very poor. His father died in World War I when Camus was less than one year old. His mother could not read or write. He grew up in a small flat in a poor working-class area of Algiers. The flat had no running water or electricity. He was able to continue at school because a teacher helped him and because he later received money from the state. His poor childhood and his life in Algeria strongly shaped his later work.

Camus is best known for three novels: The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956). He also wrote two long essays about ideas, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951), as well as four plays of his own. He often wrote about a problem that he called the absurd. Human beings want life to have a clear meaning, but the world gives them no answer. Camus called this conflict the absurd. He said that people should not kill themselves because life has no clear meaning. They should instead see the truth clearly, continue to live, and refuse false hopes.

Later, Camus wrote more about revolt. To revolt means to say "no" to something that is wrong or unjust. He believed that revolt could be good, but that it must have limits. He opposed the death penalty and political murder. He refused to support any political system that treated killing as a normal or necessary way to build a better future. However, he was not a pacifist, and he said this clearly. Many people call Camus an existentialist, but he often said that he was not one. He did not want to belong to any complete system of thought. He gave a similar answer when people called him an atheist.

Camus also took part in the French resistance against Nazi Germany. He wrote for the secret newspaper Combat and became one of its editors in 1944. After the war, he wrote against the death penalty, the atomic bomb, and totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a form of government in which the state tries to control every part of public and private life.

The war in Algeria caused Camus great pain. He wanted Arab and Berber Algerians to have full political rights, and he publicly called for an end to the colonial system. However, he did not support full independence for Algeria. He hoped instead for a free and federal Algeria that would remain joined to France. In this system, Muslim Algerians and French settlers would have the same rights. He also refused to accept the killing of civilians by either side. In 1956, he went to Algiers and asked both sides to stop attacking civilians. His plan failed. After this, he said very little in public about Algeria, although he continued to help prisoners in private.

Camus died in a car crash in 1960, at the age of 46. In the car was the unfinished manuscript of his novel The First Man. The book was published in 1994, thirty-four years after his death.

Name and background

The earliest known member of the Camus family in Algeria was Claude Camus. He was born in Bordeaux in 1809. He and his wife crossed the Mediterranean Sea soon after France began to rule Algeria.

Older books often say that the Camus family came from Alsace. Camus also tells this story in The First Man. However, this was probably only a family story. Olivier Todd, one of Camus's biographers, studied the official records and found evidence that the family came from the Bordeaux region instead. This also makes it more likely that they went to Algeria for economic reasons rather than political ones.

French troops landed in Algeria in 1830. The fighting continued for many years, while more and more European settlers arrived. By 1848, there were nearly 100,000 settlers in Algeria. They came not only from France, but also from Spain, Italy, and Malta. By 1936, about one million Europeans lived in Algeria. When the Algerian War began in 1954, Europeans made up about one ninth of the population.

The children and grandchildren of these settlers later became known as pieds-noirs, which means "black feet" in French. Nobody knows for certain where this name came from. Some people say that it referred to the colour of the settlers' shoes. Others say that it came from the muddy feet of farm workers.

Camus belonged to this European settler population. His father's family came from the Bordeaux region, while his mother's family came from Menorca, a Spanish island.

The European settlers were French citizens. Most Muslim Algerians were legally French subjects, but they did not have the same rights as citizens or the same political power. Algeria was ruled as three departments of France rather than as a separate country. However, the people who lived there did not have equal rights. This inequality is important for understanding Camus's life and work.

Early life

Birth and family

Albert Camus with his older brother Lucien, about 1920

Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 on a farm near the small town of Mondovi, which is now called Dréan. The town is in eastern Algeria, near Annaba. His father, Lucien Auguste Camus, worked in the wine cellars of a company called Jules Ricôme. He watched over the pressing of the grapes and the sending of the wine. His mother was Catherine Sintès. Her family had come to Algeria from the Spanish island of Menorca. She was one of nine children in a poor family. Albert had one brother, Lucien, who was three years older.

The death of his father

World War I began in 1914, and Lucien Camus was called into the French army. He served with the Zouaves, a French army unit formed in North Africa. He was badly wounded at the Battle of the Marne. He died in a military hospital on 11 October 1914, at the age of 28. Albert was less than one year old and never knew his father. His mother kept only a photograph of him and a piece of the shell that had killed him. Lucien Camus is buried at Saint-Brieuc in Brittany. His wife never saw his grave. Albert first visited it in 1947.

There was one story about his father that Camus never forgot. His father once got up early to watch a man being killed in public by guillotine. The man had murdered a whole family, and Lucien Camus thought that the punishment was fair. However, the sight made him ill. He came home without speaking, lay down, and was sick for much of the morning. Camus used this story three times: near the end of The Stranger, in The Plague, and in his essay "Reflections on the Guillotine". He also told it again in The First Man. In that book, the story troubles the boy so deeply that he has the same nightmare for the rest of his life.

Growing up in Belcourt

The sea front at Belcourt in Algiers, the poor district where Camus grew up

When her husband was called into the army in August 1914, Catherine Camus had no money of her own. She therefore moved with her two sons into her mother's flat in Belcourt, a poor working-class district of Algiers. The family moved there a few weeks before they learned that Lucien Camus had died. The flat was on the top floor and had three small rooms and a kitchen. There were two other flats on the same floor, and the three families shared one toilet in the hall. Until 1930, the flat had no running water and no electricity. An oil lamp hung above the only table, where the family ate and the children did their school work. Six people lived there: Albert, his brother, his mother, his grandmother, and two uncles. Albert and Lucien shared one bed until Albert was seventeen. During the war, his mother worked in a factory where she sorted bullets. Later, she cleaned houses and washed clothes for other people.

Catherine Camus could not read or write. She was partly deaf and had difficulty speaking. She said some words wrongly and used very few words. Because of this, she was shy with people she did not know and spoke very little at home. Writers do not agree about the cause of these problems. One family story says that she spoke easily when she was young, but that her speech changed in 1914 when she learned that her husband was dead. Another account says that an illness during childhood left her deaf and made her difficult to understand. She had lived in a village where there was no doctor.

Camus loved his mother deeply throughout his life, but they almost never talked. He wrote many times about the silence between them. In The First Man, the main character asks his mother about his dead father but learns almost nothing. The book gives one reason for this silence: poor people have fewer things to remember because their days are much the same and they rarely leave the place where they live.

The head of the family was Camus's grandmother, who was also called Catherine. She was a hard, proud, and bitter woman who had also lost her husband when she was young. She took the place of her daughter as the person who raised the two boys. She beat them with a whip made from the dried neck of a bull. Their mother stood nearby and only asked the grandmother not to hit them on the head.

Another adult in the flat was Camus's uncle Étienne, who made wooden barrels. He could not speak at all until he was a teenager. After an operation, he learned to speak, but he spoke slowly and used only simple words. He also communicated through sounds and signs. He had a dog and a hunting gun, and he cleaned both of them on the family table. Camus loved him and later placed characters based on him in several of his books.

Camus wrote about his childhood many times, but he gave two different pictures of it. In some writings, he showed it as very hard. In others, he remembered it as happy. In 1958, a new edition of his first book was published, and Camus wrote a new preface for it. In this preface, he said that poverty had never been a complete misfortune for him because the light of Algeria had always balanced it. He explained that poverty stopped him from believing that everything in the world was good, while the sun taught him that history was not the only important thing.

The family lived in real poverty, but Camus still remembered Belcourt with pleasure. The district had a beach, a library, cinemas, and cafés. French, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, and Jewish people lived there. Camus swam, played in the street, and walked around the town with his friends. The difference between the dark rooms of the family flat and the bright sea remained important in all his writing. He often placed these two images next to each other.

School

Camus began attending the boys' school in Belcourt in 1918. He was a very good pupil and was especially good at reading and writing. His teacher was Louis Germain. Germain saw that the boy was clever, but Camus's grandmother wanted him to leave school and begin earning money. Germain argued with the family and persuaded them to let Albert continue. He then taught Albert and two other boys every day after school so that they could take the examination for a scholarship.

Because his father had died in the war, Albert was also a pupille de la nation, or "child of the nation". He and his brother received this official position in May 1920. The French state gave children in this position a small amount of money each year to pay for school materials.

Camus won a scholarship and entered the Grand Lycée, the large secondary school in Algiers, in October 1924. Some older books say that he entered it in 1923. His time at the school was interrupted at the end of 1930, when doctors found tuberculosis in his lungs. He later returned, repeated his final year, and completed his secondary studies in 1932.

Camus never forgot Louis Germain and always said that the teacher had changed his life. He described Germain as strict but kind. Many years later, after receiving the Nobel Prize, Camus wrote to him and thanked him.

Sport

Camus played in goal at football

Sport was more important to the young Camus than school work. Most of the friends he made before 1930 were friends from sport. He played football, usually as a goalkeeper but sometimes as a forward. He first played for a small club called Association Sportive Montpensier. Around 1928, he joined the junior team of Racing Universitaire Algérois, usually called RUA. This was the sports club of the students of Algiers. Camus was small for his age, but he threw himself at the feet of other players to stop the ball and was often hurt.

Many years later, he wrote about football in a magazine for former members of the club. He said that much of what he knew about right and wrong had been learned through sport. A friend once asked him whether he would have chosen football or the theatre if his health had allowed him to choose freely. Camus immediately answered that he would have chosen football.

Illness

During the winter of 1930, Camus began to cough blood. He was taken to the Mustapha Hospital in Algiers, where doctors found tuberculosis in his right lung. Tuberculosis is a serious disease that often attacks the lungs. Camus had just turned seventeen. At that time, there was no medicine that could cure the disease.

Doctors used a treatment called artificial pneumothorax. They pushed air into the space around the lung so that the lung became flat and the sick part could rest. The treatment had to be repeated, often every two weeks. Camus had to return for this treatment many times during his life. In 1942, tuberculosis also attacked his other lung.

Some of his friends thought that a football match played in heavy rain had caused the illness. Others said that it began after a ball hit him in the chest while he was playing in goal. Neither football nor being hit by a ball causes tuberculosis. However, hard exercise, poor housing, and too little food can make the disease worse.

Tuberculosis changed the whole course of Camus's life. He had to stop playing football in serious competitions. Hard exercise remained dangerous for him, although he continued to swim for many years. The illness later stopped him from becoming a university teacher. It also kept him out of the army during World War II, although he asked to join in 1939.

Camus later said something surprising about his illness. He said that it had made him free. Because he knew that he might die young, he felt free to choose the kind of life he wanted to live.

Studies and influences

After becoming ill, Camus went to live with his aunt Antoinette and her husband, Gustave Acault. Acault was a butcher, and the couple had no children. Life in their home was much easier than life in Belcourt. Camus had a room of his own and ate red meat every day because doctors at the time believed that meat helped people with tuberculosis.

Acault was also a serious reader and was known for his free-thinking ideas. He gave his nephew books, including Les Nourritures terrestres by André Gide. Many years later, Camus said that Acault had been a kind of father to him.

In October 1930, Camus entered the philosophy class at his school. His new teacher was Jean Grenier, who was 32 years old and had recently arrived in Algeria. Grenier noticed that his best pupil was missing. When he learned that Camus was ill, he took a taxi across Algiers to visit him in the flat in Belcourt. The visit was difficult. Camus said very little, and both the teacher and the pupil felt uncomfortable because of the poverty of the rooms.

Ten years later, Camus wrote to Grenier about that visit. He explained that his silence had not meant that he was unfriendly. He also said that Grenier's visit had made him feel that he was not as poor as he had believed.

Grenier became the most important teacher in Camus's life. For the next thirty years, he read and judged almost everything that Camus wrote. His comments were often very severe. Camus dedicated two of his early books to him.

His illness caused him to lose one year of school. In the spring of 1932, he was still writing essays for Grenier's philosophy class. He entered the khâgne only in October of that year. The khâgne was a special class in Algiers for pupils who hoped to enter the famous higher schools in Paris.

Camus then entered the University of Algiers. At first he studied literature, but one year later he changed to philosophy. He had wanted to try to enter the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, one of the most famous schools in France, but he gave up the plan. The second year of preparation that he needed was not offered in Algeria. He also could not pay to live in Paris, and his poor health made the plan even more difficult.

Camus always had to work while he was studying. During the summer, he worked in a food shop and in his uncle's butcher shop. He also taught younger pupils, sold car parts, worked as a clerk in a shipping office, and worked in the Algiers city office that gave licences for cars. He hated this last job and later used his experience of office work in The Stranger. After finishing his studies, he also worked at the Institute of Meteorology in Algiers from November 1937 until September 1938.

In 1936, Camus completed his final university paper. It was about Christian thought and Neoplatonism, a later school of Greek philosophy. The paper compared Plotinus, a Greek thinker, with Augustine of Hippo, a Christian writer from North Africa. It earned Camus the diplôme d'études supérieures, an advanced university degree.

His illness then stopped him from continuing towards a teaching career. A new attack of tuberculosis in 1937 meant that he was not allowed to take the agrégation, the state examination needed to become a university teacher.

Young man in Algiers

First marriage

On 16 June 1934, Camus married Simone Hié. He was twenty years old. Hié was the daughter of a doctor in Algiers and was well known in the small social world of the city. People talked about her clothes and her love affairs. Such behaviour shocked many people in Algiers during the 1930s. She had earlier planned to marry one of Camus's friends, Max-Pol Fouchet. After she married Camus, the two young men never spoke to each other again. In practice, the marriage lasted little more than one year. The couple separated in 1936, but their divorce was not completed until 1940.

For a time after the separation, Camus lived with three other students in a house above the bay of Algiers. They called it "the house facing the world". Camus later remembered those months as an unexpected period of happiness in a difficult life.

The Communist Party

Camus first joined a political group in 1933. It was an anti-fascist movement started by the writers Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland. Two years later, he joined the French Communist Party. Most writers now say that he joined in 1935, although some older books give the end of 1934.

Camus did not join because he believed in Marxism. He later said that he had never read Marx or Engels before joining the party. He told Jean Grenier that he had to become a Communist because he wanted to remain close to the poor people from whom he came. For Camus, joining the party in 1935 meant standing beside writers such as André Gide and André Malraux. It did not mean supporting Stalin or the leaders of the party, who meant little to him.

His main work for the party was to bring Arab and Berber people into it. He later said that this work made up about half of everything he did for the party. It was also the first time that he truly met Muslim people who had received the same kind of education as himself. French and Muslim children in colonial Algeria did not normally meet at school or while playing.

Camus was never an important party leader and never held a high position. However, he was probably the best-known Communist in the cultural life of Algeria. At first, the Communists in Algeria belonged to the French Communist Party. In 1936, they became a separate Algerian Communist Party. This was the party that later expelled Camus.

Leaving the party

The Communist Party then changed its political position. Joseph Stalin wanted France to become an ally against Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union therefore told Communist parties in other countries to support the French government. In Algeria, this caused a major change. The Communists had worked with the Algerian nationalist leader Messali Hadj, but they now turned against him, and his movement was banned.

Camus refused to accept this change and would not break with the Algerian nationalists. He continued to ask for rights for the Algerian people after the party had ended that campaign. Because of this, he was judged by members of the party and then expelled. Even the local leader Amar Ouzegane, who liked Camus, could not protect him.

Writers give slightly different dates for the break. A recent study of all the evidence places it in the autumn of 1937, while an older biography gives November 1937. Camus never joined another political party. He once joked that the only party he could join would be a party of people who were not certain that they were right.

The theatre

Révolte dans les Asturies (1936), the play written by Camus and his friends

In 1936, Camus and a group of young actors created a theatre company called the Théâtre du Travail, which means "Workers' Theatre". Its money came from the Communist House of Culture in Algiers. Their first play was Le Temps du mépris, which was based on a novel by André Malraux. Camus directed the play and also acted in it.

Their next work was Révolte dans les Asturies ("Revolt in Asturias"), which Camus and his friends wrote together. It was about a workers' revolt in Spain. The city government of Algiers banned the play before the group could perform it.

The House of Culture closed in 1937, and the Théâtre du Travail ended with it. In October 1937, Camus created a new company of his own, the Théâtre de l'Équipe, or "Team Theatre". In the same year, he also directed Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. This Greek play is about a hero who is punished for helping human beings and refuses to say that he was wrong.

Camus loved the theatre throughout his life. He said that he felt happy and relaxed among theatre people, but uncomfortable among writers and thinkers.

First books

Camus published his first book in Algiers in 1937. It was called L'Envers et l'endroit. Its English titles include The Wrong Side and the Right Side and Betwixt and Between. The book contains five essays about his childhood, old age, and death. He wrote them in 1935 and 1936 and dedicated the book to Jean Grenier.

Only a small number of copies were printed, and the book was not published again until 1958. One of Camus's friends told him that he used the word "I" too often. Camus agreed and said that a writer should remain behind the scenes.

His second book was Noces ("Nuptials"), which was printed in Algiers in May 1939. Some books give 1938 instead. It contains four essays about the sun, the sea, and the ruins of Tipasa. Like his first book, it received almost no attention in France.

The Roman ruins at Tipasa, the place Camus wrote about in Noces

The essay "Nuptials at Tipasa" is the best known of the four. In it, Camus describes a day among Roman ruins beside the sea. He writes that everything there seemed unimportant except the sun, kisses, and the wild smells of the earth.

Camus called such moments bonheur, the French word for happiness. For him, this meant short moments in which a person feels completely joined to nature. He believed that such moments should not last too long.

At about the same time, Camus began writing his first novel, La Mort heureuse ("A Happy Death"). He did not publish it. It appeared in 1971, many years after his death.

Newspaper work

In September 1938, Pascal Pia employed Camus as an editorial secretary for a new newspaper called Alger républicain. Pia had been sent from Paris to create the paper. It was published from 6 October 1938 until 28 October 1939.

The newspaper said that it spoke for all the people of Algeria, including both Muslims and French settlers. It opposed hatred of Jewish people and the laws that placed Muslim Algerians in a lower position. Camus was not yet twenty-five. Pia employed many young and inexperienced writers because he did not have enough money to pay older journalists.

Camus reported on the courts and watched many trials. He later used this experience in The Stranger. He also wrote about a prison ship carrying 609 men. He described its very small cages and lack of light, and wrote that he was ashamed to be there.

In July 1939, the police broke up a public meeting held by Algerian nationalists. Camus then wrote a short article called "Unfortunate Arrests" and asked for the arrested men to be freed. Publicly defending Algerian nationalists was unusual and dangerous in colonial Algeria in 1939.

Camus published articles under his own name, but he also used several false names. One of them was "Jean Meursault", a name that he later used again for the main character of The Stranger.

He also wrote reviews of books. On 20 October 1938, he reviewed La Nausée ("Nausea") by Jean-Paul Sartre. He recognised in the novel an idea close to his own idea of the absurd. However, he thought that the book was too abstract and that Sartre did not make good use of the freedom he gave to his characters.

The misery of Kabylia

In June 1939, Camus wrote a group of eleven articles about Kabylia, a mountain region of Algeria where many Berber people live. Together, the articles are known as "The Misery of Kabylia". Each article was printed with at least one photograph.

Camus travelled to the villages himself. He wrote about poor housing, the lack of clean water, and the small number of doctors. He also gave figures about schools, population, and the age at which people died.

He showed that the land was much too crowded. About 247 people lived on each square kilometre, compared with 71 in France. The people ate wheat, whose price had increased, but they grew olives and figs, whose prices had not increased. Many people lived on gifts from others or ate herbs, roots, and thistles because they did not have enough food.

In one village, a man showed Camus his young daughter. She was very thin and wore torn clothes. The man asked whether she would not be as beautiful as a French girl if he could give her enough food and better clothes. Camus wrote that he could never forget this meeting.

The articles angered the French rulers of Algeria. The governor of Algeria visited Kabylia soon afterwards, although it is difficult to know how much Camus's articles caused the visit. Camus's widow later said that the authorities had tried to pay him to remain silent before the articles were published.

Readers have understood the articles in different ways. Many European readers described them as anti-colonial writing, and the Tunisian writer Albert Memmi called them honest and humane. One recent writer believes that this judgement is too generous. He argues that Camus wanted better living conditions for the Kabyle people, but still expected them to remain under French rule. From this point of view, Camus wanted to reform colonialism, not bring it to an end.

The paper is closed

By 1939, Alger républicain was in serious trouble. Camus and Pia had written against the coming war. When the war began, the government placed censors inside the newspaper office. The censors removed whole articles, and empty spaces appeared on the printed pages because Camus refused to replace the missing words with patriotic writing.

He signed some articles with false names and printed passages by older French writers instead. On one occasion, he challenged the censors to remove a passage written by Montaigne.

Alger républicain published its final issue on 28 October 1939. Pia and Camus had also started an evening newspaper called Le Soir républicain in September 1939. It continued for a few more months under Camus's direction, but the authorities closed it on 10 January 1940.

The owners said that Camus had turned the paper into a personal political campaign. Camus wrote to Jean Grenier that this was true. He said that he had used the newspaper to defend freedom of thought against the censors and to oppose the war without hating anyone.

Camus was now without a job and had little hope of finding another one in Algeria because the French colonial authorities did not want him to work there. Foley describes this as a kind of forced exile because the authorities had made it very difficult for Camus to find work in his own country.

The war years

Paris and Lyon

Pascal Pia found Camus a job in France. Camus arrived in Paris in March 1940 and began working for a large popular newspaper called Paris-Soir. He was an editorial secretary and helped to prepare the pages for printing. He never wrote an article for the paper and did not enjoy the work, but he learned how a large newspaper was produced.

The German army attacked France in May 1940. Paris fell in the middle of June, and the newspaper moved south, first to Clermont-Ferrand and then to Lyon. France was divided into two parts. Germany controlled the north and west, while a French government based in Vichy ruled the south. This period is known as Vichy France.

A plaque in Lyon marking the marriage of Albert Camus and Francine Faure in 1940

On 3 December 1940, Camus married for the second time. His wife was Francine Faure, a mathematics teacher from Oran in Algeria. The wedding was very simple. Pascal Pia and a few people from the newspaper were the only guests. Less than one month later, Camus lost his job because the newspaper had to reduce its staff.

Oran

Albert and Francine returned to Algeria in January 1941 and lived in Oran. Both of them worked as teachers. Camus did not like the town. He later described it as a town without a soul and as a place that turned its back on the sea.

He stayed there for about a year and a half. He could not find regular work, and his health became worse. He taught at a private school for Jewish pupils run by his friend André Bénichou. The children had been removed from state schools because of the laws of the Vichy government. In February 1941, while living in Oran, Camus completed The Myth of Sisyphus.

Two books in one year

The first edition of L'Étranger (The Stranger), 1942

In May 1942, the Paris publisher Gallimard published L'Étranger. The book is known in English as either The Stranger or The Outsider. Later in the same year, Gallimard published Le Mythe de Sisyphe ("The Myth of Sisyphus").

Both books were published in Paris while the city was under German rule. The Stranger appeared in May, when Camus was still living in Algeria. By the time The Myth of Sisyphus was published, he was ill and staying at Le Panelier in the mountains of France.

The two books made Camus famous very quickly, and they remain his best-known works. Much of the early success of The Stranger came from a long essay by Jean-Paul Sartre called "Explication de L'Étranger". It was published in the magazine Cahiers du Sud in February 1943. Sartre praised the novel and its plain style, but he was not sure that Camus had fully understood the German and Danish thinkers whose ideas he used.

The Stranger

The Stranger is told by a man named Meursault, who works as a clerk in Algiers. The book begins with the death of his mother. Meursault travels to the home for old people where she has lived for several years. He sits beside her body during the night, as people expect him to do. However, he smokes a cigarette, drinks coffee, and falls asleep for a short time. He does not ask to see her face for the last time. He does not know her exact age, and he does not cry.

The next day, he goes swimming and meets Marie Cardona, a young woman from his office. He takes her to see a comic film and spends the night with her.

After this, his life continues as before. Marie asks whether he loves her. He answers that the word does not mean anything to him, but says that he will marry her if she wants. A neighbour named Raymond Sintès, who is said to make money from women, asks Meursault to write a letter to his Arab mistress. Later, Raymond also asks him to speak for him at the police station. Meursault agrees because agreeing costs him nothing.

Meursault, Marie, and Raymond visit a friend's hut beside the sea. A group of Arab men follows them. There is a short fight, and Raymond is cut with a knife. Later, Meursault walks alone in the strong midday sun and meets one of the men again. He shoots him once and then fires four more bullets into his body.

During the trial, the court says very little about the killing itself. Instead, it speaks mainly about the funeral. Witnesses say that Meursault did not want to see his mother's body, that he smoked, slept, and drank coffee beside it, that he did not cry, and that he did not know her age.

The prosecutor calls Meursault a monster with an empty heart and asks for him to be put to death. He says almost nothing about the man who was killed on the beach. Meursault's own lawyer uses the same kind of argument and asks him to say things that are not true. Meursault refuses. He is sentenced to death.

The same ideas return throughout the book: everything is the same to him, nothing is his fault, and nothing matters. At the end, while waiting in his prison cell, he refuses to speak with a priest. He then finds a kind of peace in the thought that the world is as uncaring about him as he is about it.

The Arab man whom Meursault kills is never given a name. Later writers have paid much attention to this fact. Readers also warn against a common mistake: Meursault should not simply be understood as Camus speaking for himself. Scholars still disagree about how close the character is to his author.

The novel has been understood in many different ways. Some read it as a story about the absurd. Others see Meursault as a man who refuses the lies of society. Some understand the novel mainly through the colonial world of Algeria, while others see it as a trap that tests the reader's own judgement. Camus said that he had three real people in mind when he created Meursault and that he himself was one of the three.

Le Panelier

In August 1942, Camus went to a small place called Le Panelier in the mountains of the Haute-Loire. His doctor had advised him to breathe mountain air. Le Panelier is near the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. During the war, many people in Le Chambon and the villages around it worked together to hide Jewish refugees.

Yad Vashem in Israel gave the title Righteous Among the Nations to about forty people from the village. It also honoured the rescue work of the community as a whole.

Francine returned to Algeria, and Camus planned to join her in November. However, the war changed everything. American forces landed in North Africa in November 1942. The German army then occupied the south of France, and all travel and communication between France and Algeria were cut.

Camus could not leave France. He and Francine remained apart until she arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1944, almost two years later. This forced separation later became part of The Plague, in which a whole town is closed and families are separated from one another.

The Resistance

Combat, the resistance newspaper that Camus edited

In 1943, Pascal Pia was working for the secret resistance newspaper Combat. He asked Camus to join him. Camus moved to Paris near the end of the year. He prepared pages, corrected and edited articles, and wrote articles of his own. For safety, he did not sign them.

The articles he wrote in 1944 attacked the German army and secret police. They also attacked Marshal Pétain and the Vichy government. They warned French people who helped the Germans that they would be judged after the war.

The work was dangerous. Several members of Combat were arrested, sent to prison camps, or killed. One of them was the poet René Leynaud, a friend of Camus who was shot by the Germans in 1944.

Writers give different dates for the time when Camus became the head of the newspaper. Some say that Pia made him editor of the secret paper in 1943. Others say that Pia left in June 1944 to do other resistance work and that Camus took his place at that time.

In 1943, Camus also began working for the publisher Gallimard. He remained there until his death. He read new books for the company and directed a series of books of his own.

Letters to a German Friend

Camus wrote four short essays called "Letters to a German Friend". They are not true letters. They are written as speeches to a German who never answers, and the German is not a real person.

Camus wrote the first essay in July 1943, and it appeared in the secret magazine Revue Libre. The second was signed with the false name Louis Neuville and published in Cahiers de la Libération. The third appeared in 1945 in Libertés. The fourth was not published separately. It appeared when all four essays were published together as a book in 1945. Camus dedicated the book to René Leynaud.

In these essays, Camus explains why France was slow to fight against Germany. He says that the French needed moral reasons for fighting and could not depend only on love of country.

In the final essay, he makes an important argument. He and his German friend began with the same belief: that the world has no meaning. However, they followed different paths. The German chose war and conquest. Camus chose justice. He wrote that although the world itself has no meaning, one thing within it does have meaning: the human being. Human beings matter because they are the only beings who ask for meaning.

This is the point at which Camus's idea of the absurd begins to become an idea about how human beings should treat one another.

The liberation of Paris

Paris was freed in August 1944. Combat could now be published openly. Camus wrote its leading articles, with titles such as "The Blood of Freedom" and "The Night of Truth". On 21 August, the newspaper welcomed the freeing of the city with an article by Camus called "From Resistance to Revolution".

About 200,000 copies were printed. For a time, Combat was seen as the voice of the French Resistance. Many of its readers were young teachers, students, and members of trade unions.

Camus became a well-known public figure almost at once. He also used the newspaper to explain what he thought journalism should be. He wrote that newspapers should be free from the control of money. He said that it was better to report true news second than to report false news first. A newspaper should help its readers to understand events clearly instead of only trying to please them.

Camus asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write for Combat. Sartre reported on the street fighting during the liberation of Paris. In 1945, Camus sent him to the United States as the newspaper's correspondent.

Camus remained at Combat until 1947. He left after arguments inside the newspaper and financial problems that would have forced it to give up its independence.

The end of the war

After the war, France had to judge the people who had helped the German forces. This period is called the épuration, or purge. At first, Camus supported severe punishment. He wrote that a country that failed to remove guilty people from public life would also fail to rebuild itself.

The Catholic writer François Mauriac disagreed with him and asked for mercy. In January 1945, the writer Robert Brasillach, who had supported Germany, was sentenced to death. Camus was asked to sign a request to Charles de Gaulle to save Brasillach's life.

Camus signed the request and explained his reason in a letter. He said that he had always been deeply against the death penalty and that the least he could do was refuse to take part in it. He also said that he had no respect for Brasillach, either as a writer or as a man. The request failed, and Brasillach was shot.

Camus soon understood that the purge was not fair. Some people were punished severely, while many others who were also guilty were never judged. In 1948, Camus said publicly that Mauriac had been right.

His articles from the war are still difficult to judge because he asked for quick and strong justice even though he opposed the death penalty throughout his life. He later said that the purge had taught him an important lesson: justice that tries to become complete and perfectly pure stops being justice.

On 6 August 1945, an American aircraft dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. About 80,000 people died at once. Most French newspapers welcomed the event and described it as a great victory.

Camus wrote against the bombing on 8 August. He said that a civilisation built on machines had reached its highest point of savagery. He warned that human beings would soon have to choose between destroying themselves together and using science in a wise way.

Almost no one in France agreed with him publicly. Only a few writers, including François Mauriac, expressed a similar view.

Camus's family life also changed during these months. Francine Camus arrived in Paris from Algeria in October 1944. On 5 September 1945, she gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean.

After the war

New York, 1946

On 25 March 1946, Camus arrived in New York harbour on a ship carrying goods called the Oregon. He was 32 years old. The border officers kept him for a long time, and the French cultural service had to help him enter the country. American security services had collected information about him. They knew that he had once belonged to the Communist Party and that he had worked in the Resistance.

On the evening of 28 March, he gave a talk at Columbia University. Every seat was taken, and many people could not enter. No talk in French had ever brought such a large crowd to the university. Camus called his talk "The Human Crisis", and it lasted less than half an hour.

He began with four short stories from the war. In one of them, a woman cleans the stairs of a building while two men are being tortured inside. She says that she never becomes involved in the private business of the people who live there. Camus's point was simple: the war had ended, but the sickness that had caused it had not. People had learned to watch murder without feeling horror.

He then described the main signs of the crisis. Terror was growing, people no longer tried to persuade one another, leaders understood only victory and defeat, and murder had become accepted. At the end, he asked people to act. He called for clear language, pity for others, small groups of people working together across national borders, and an end to the death penalty everywhere in the world. Few people understood the importance of the talk at the time, but it became better known many years later.

Neither Victims nor Executioners

In November 1946, Camus wrote a group of eight articles for Combat called "Neither Victims nor Executioners". In these articles, he said that terror had taken control of the world. He gave several reasons for this. People no longer tried to persuade one another, everyone lived among machines and political ideas, and everyone was certain that they were right.

The articles asked people to refuse to kill for a political cause. They also asked them to refuse a world in which killing had become normal. Camus returned to these words during the Algerian War. He then said that everyone in Algeria was becoming either a victim or a killer, and sometimes both at the same time.

The Plague

The first edition of La Peste (The Plague), 1947

La Peste ("The Plague") was published on 10 June 1947. It won a French prize given by book critics and sold 22,000 copies in two weeks. Camus had worked on the novel for several years. He had thought about calling it The Prisoners or The Separated. Even shortly before it was published, he believed that the book was a failure.

The story takes place in Oran during the 1940s. Rats begin to die in the streets. People then begin to die, and the town is closed off from the rest of the world.

The main character is Doctor Bernard Rieux. His wife is ill and is staying far away in a hospital in the mountains. His quiet mother lives with him. Several other characters are important. Tarrou is a visitor who lives in a hotel and hates death sentences. Rambert is a newspaper writer who tries to escape from the town. Father Paneloux is a Christian priest. Grand is an office worker who is writing a book but cannot get past its first sentence. Cottard is a man who is pleased that the plague has come.

So many people die that the town has to bury large numbers of bodies at the same time. The football stadium becomes a camp where people who may have caught the disease are kept away from everyone else. At the centre of the story is the slow death of a young boy, the son of Judge Othon. Rieux, Tarrou, and the priest watch him die but cannot save him.

Love and friendship become difficult because they depend on a future, while the people of Oran have only the present. The novel begins with words from Daniel Defoe. They say that it is reasonable to show one kind of prison by using another, just as it is reasonable to show something real by using something that does not exist.

The novel can be understood in several ways. It can be read as a picture of the German occupation of France and the Resistance, as a picture of any great evil, or as a call to fight against a world that has no clear meaning. Camus said that the enemy in the book was never named, although everyone understood who it was.

The critic Roland Barthes said that the novel had moved too far away from real history. Camus answered that the plague could stand for any kind of tyranny. He also suggested that this was the very reason why some critics disliked the book. Camus said that the novel marked an important change in his work. The Stranger was about one man alone, while The Plague was about a group of people who shared the same struggle. The book made Camus a best-selling writer.

The novel has also been criticised. One criticism was already made while Camus was alive. A disease has no will, and nobody is morally guilty of causing it. For this reason, some readers thought that a plague was a poor picture of a military occupation. The difficult moral choices of the war disappear from the story, as does the fact that people chose to do evil.

A second criticism became common around 1970. Almost no Arab people appear in this story about an Algerian city. Only their empty streets are described. Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote that Camus had to remove the Arabs because a story about people living under occupation could not work if the French characters were themselves the occupiers. He called this silence an artistic way of making the Arabs of Oran disappear.

Other writers answer that a fable is not meant to be a complete picture of real life. They also point out that Camus was writing openly against colonial violence at the same time. In an article for Combat in May 1947, he wrote that the French were now doing in Algeria what they had blamed the Germans for doing in Europe.

In 1951, the Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun told Camus that he was sorry not to find Algerians in the novel. Camus answered that including them would have meant writing a different book, one about the problem that poisoned every life in Algeria.

Four plays

Camus wrote four plays of his own. Caligula is about a Roman emperor who learns that people die and that the world does not care. He then uses his power to show everyone how mad and cruel the world is. Camus wrote the play in 1938 for his theatre company in Algiers and published its final form in 1944. It was first performed in Paris in September 1945 and was successful.

Le Malentendu ("The Misunderstanding" or "Cross Purpose") was written in 1942 and 1943. It is about a man who returns home after many years. His mother and sister do not know who he is, and they kill him for his money. The play was first performed in Paris in 1944, but the public did not receive it warmly.

L'État de siège ("State of Siege") appeared in 1948. It is also about a plague, but it does not tell the same story as the novel. In this play, the plague is a person and acts like a dictator. Camus created the work with the actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault. The public did not like it, and it was removed from the theatre after seventeen performances.

Les Justes ("The Just Assassins") was first performed in December 1949 and published in 1950. It is about a group of Russian revolutionaries in 1905 who plan to kill a grand duke. One man refuses to throw the bomb because children are travelling in the carriage. He kills the grand duke later, is arrested, and is put to death. Another member of the group is willing to kill the children as well.

The play is not simply about a hero fighting a villain. It places two ideas about revolutionary violence against each other. One idea still recognises the value of the life that it destroys and accepts death in return. The other accepts no limit at all.

Dora, one of the members of the group, says that even destruction can be done in a right way or a wrong way and that there must be limits. In one scene, a character says that they kill in order to build a world in which nobody will kill again. Another quietly asks what will happen if that world never comes. This question is at the heart of the play.

Camus also translated and freely changed plays by other writers. In 1953, he worked on La Dévotion à la croix by Calderón de la Barca and Les Esprits by Pierre de Larivey. In 1955, he worked on Un cas intéressant by Dino Buzzati. In 1956 and 1957 came Le Chevalier d'Olmedo by Lope de Vega and Requiem pour une nonne by William Faulkner. In 1959, he produced The Possessed, based on a novel by Dostoyevsky.

South America and illness

In June 1949, Camus left Marseille by ship for a journey through South America, where he gave a number of public talks. The journey ended on 31 August. He was still suffering from tuberculosis. After the journey, he had to rest at Cabris, near Grasse in the south of France. He did not return to Paris until March 1950.

The Rebel

The first edition of L'Homme révolté (The Rebel), 1951

L'Homme révolté ("The Rebel") was published on 18 October 1951. It is a long essay about revolutions and about killing for an idea.

Camus begins with the absurd. If nothing has any meaning, then nothing is forbidden and murder is allowed. Camus refuses this answer. He says that the act of saying "no" is itself a value.

His main example is a slave who says, "Enough!" At that moment, the slave says two things at once. He says no to his master, but he also says yes to something within himself that is worth protecting. He understands that other people share the same value.

Camus then makes a difference between revolt and revolution. In his argument, revolt accepts limits. Revolution forgets these limits and kills people in the name of a future that never arrives.

Most of the book discusses people and political movements that Camus believed had followed the wrong path. These include the Marquis de Sade, the Romantic poets, Hegel, characters created by Dostoyevsky, the Russian revolutionaries of 1905, the Nazis, and the Communists.

Camus admired the Russian bomb throwers of 1905 because they accepted death in return for the life they had taken. He compared them with later political movements that killed people without accepting any limits.

The final part of the book praises what Camus calls Mediterranean thought. He connects clear thought and moral limits with the light of the Mediterranean Sea. Many readers did not accept this idea.

The book made many people angry. Some were angry because Camus placed Nazism and communism beside each other. Others were angry because he did not include colonial rule in his history of revolt. Camus also argued with André Breton, the leader of the surrealist artists, whom he had criticised in the book.

The break with Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre. He and Camus were friends, then enemies.

Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre met in Paris in 1943, during the German occupation, and quickly became friends. They met in cafés, talked, and drank together.

The two men were very different. Sartre had studied at the École Normale Supérieure, while Camus had grown up in poverty in Belcourt. Sartre had received much more formal training in philosophy. In his 1943 essay about The Stranger, he had already written that Camus quoted German thinkers whom he did not always understand.

Camus refused a place on the board of Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes in 1944. The two men also argued in public in 1948 about the meaning of democracy.

Their first serious quarrel happened in 1946 at a party given by the writer Boris Vian. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that everyone had to choose a side in the Cold War and that political violence could sometimes be accepted. Camus shouted at him and left the flat.

The final break came after the publication of The Rebel. Nobody at Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes wanted to review the book. Sartre finally gave the work to Francis Jeanson. He said that Jeanson would be the hardest critic, but would at least be polite.

The review appeared in May 1952 and was very severe. Jeanson asked a difficult question. Camus had written about the people who suffered under Stalin, but what about the people who suffered under Western countries and colonial rule?

Camus answered in the same magazine in August. He did not write directly to Jeanson. Instead, he wrote to Sartre as the person in charge of the magazine. Camus complained that the review had replaced his real book with a different one. He said that when he wrote that the sky was blue and someone told him that he had written that it was black, either he was mad or the other person could not hear.

Sartre's reply appeared in the same issue. It was twenty pages long and even more severe. He laughed at Camus's pride and at his idea of Mediterranean limits. Sartre said that a person who wanted to guide others in a struggle first had to take part in that struggle.

In Foley's reading, neither Jeanson nor Sartre answered the question that Camus believed was most important: whether the Marxist view of history leads to tyranny.

The two men never spoke again. Most readers at the time believed that Sartre had won the argument, and Camus was left alone. Camus wrote a long answer to all the attacks called "Defence of The Rebel", but it was not published during his lifetime.

The Fall

La Chute ("The Fall") was published in May 1956. It is a short novel written as one long speech.

A man called Jean-Baptiste Clamence speaks to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar called the Mexico-City. He was once a successful lawyer in Paris. He now calls himself a judge-penitent, a man who admits his own wrong acts while judging the wrong acts of others.

He tells the stranger about a night when a young woman threw herself from a bridge into the River Seine. Clamence was walking past. He heard the sound of her falling into the water and then heard her cries, but he continued walking and did nothing. He has never been able to forget the event.

He later explains that the more he accuses himself, the more right he feels he has to judge everyone else.

Clamence also keeps a stolen painting in his cupboard. It is a real panel painted by Jan van Eyck. It was stolen from a church in Ghent in 1934 and has never been found.

Readers often notice the change in the light and weather of Camus's novels. The Stranger and The Plague take place in the strong sun of North Africa. The Fall takes place among fog, rain, and dark water. Its main subject is guilt, while the earlier books were more concerned with innocence.

Many people have read the novel as a book about Camus himself. His wife Francine believed that it was about his love affairs during their marriage. She told him that he owed the book to her. Other readers see it as an answer to Sartre and to the writers who had attacked The Rebel.

Exile and the Kingdom

L'Exil et le Royaume ("Exile and the Kingdom") was published in 1957. It contains six short stories. One of them, "The Adulterous Woman", grew from a journey that Camus made to Laghouat in southern Algeria in December 1952.

Camus said that each story dealt with exile in a different way. He explained that the kingdom in the title meant a free and simple life that human beings had to find again.

The best-known story is "The Guest". A French teacher living in the mountains of Algeria is ordered to take an Arab prisoner to the police. He does not want to do it. He takes the man halfway, gives him food and money, and then allows him to choose his own road. The prisoner chooses the road leading to the prison.

The teacher returns to his classroom and finds a message on the blackboard. It says that he has handed over their brother and that he will be punished for it.

Readers disagree about the meaning of the ending. Some see the teacher as a good man caught in a situation from which there is no good way out. Others think it is strange that the only kind person in a story about colonial Algeria is a European settler.

Against the death penalty

A guillotine. France used it to kill prisoners until 1977.

In 1957, Camus published a long essay called "Reflections on the Guillotine". It appeared in a book that also contained an essay by Arthur Koestler.

The essay begins with the story of Camus's father and the public execution that made him ill. Camus argues that when the killing of a prisoner makes even a decent citizen sick, it cannot be bringing peace to society.

He also says that silence about the death penalty helps it to continue. The same is true when people use soft or unclear words to describe it.

Camus points out that the same crime might lead to death in one part of France but not in another. He also argues that a court which admits that it can make mistakes should not give a punishment that can never be corrected.

He asks France to end the death penalty and replace it with hard labour. He adds that hard labour at least leaves a prisoner the choice of dying.

François Mauriac criticised the essay. He said that talking about the death penalty allowed people to avoid more urgent subjects, such as torture in Algeria.

Camus opposed the death penalty from his youth until his death. He also acted against it. He personally gave Charles de Gaulle letters asking him to show mercy to prisoners who had been sentenced to death.

Hungary and Spain

Camus also spoke in support of people suffering in other countries. On 15 March 1957, he gave a speech at the Salle Wagram in Paris against the actions of the Soviet army in Hungary. He said that Hungary had become what Spain had been twenty years earlier.

He argued that a country under totalitarian rule could not slowly become better. Terror, he said, only became worse, and the gallows could never become kind.

A 1954 poster of a committee asking for mercy for prisoners from the French colonies. Camus supported such work.

In 1957, Camus also refused to join a government group created to study abuse and torture in Algeria. He refused because the group had no clear powers and was not free from government control.

Camus and Algeria

A divided man

Algeria is central to understanding Camus. He was born there, his mother lived there throughout her life, and most of his family and friends were there. At the same time, he saw that life in Algeria was deeply unjust. From his first years as a newspaper writer, he wrote about the poverty of Arab and Berber people. He also spoke against colonial violence in other countries. In 1947, for example, he attacked the French killings in Madagascar.

In 1943, Camus wrote in his diary that returning to Algeria was like looking at the face of a child. However, he added that he knew that not everything there was innocent or pure.

Sétif and Guelma

The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. On that day, Algerian nationalists marched while carrying their own flag. They wanted both to celebrate the end of the war and to protest against the removal of their leader, Messali Hadj. In several towns, especially Sétif and Guelma, the marches became violent. About one hundred French people were killed, some of them in very cruel ways.

The French answer was much larger. For several weeks, the police, the army, and groups of European settlers killed Algerians. French aircraft also bombed villages. Nobody knows the exact number of people who died. The French government gave a figure of about 1,500. A French parliamentary group gave a figure of 15,000, while later Algerian sources gave much higher numbers. Many people see these killings as the true beginning of the Algerian War, nine years before the war officially began.

Camus had travelled through Algeria for several weeks in April 1945. He returned to Paris only a few days before the violence began. From 13 to 23 May, he published eight articles in Combat under the title "Crisis in Algeria". Six of these articles were later included in his book of writings about Algeria.

In the articles, he reminded French readers that Algeria existed, that most Algerians were hungry, and that Arab people were not simply a crowd without faces. He warned that more violence would come if nothing changed.

However, the articles also show the limits of his position. One week after the killings, he wrote that Algeria had to be won for a second time. He meant that it should be won through reform rather than through military force, but he still used the language of conquest.

Writers disagree about how this should be judged. One recent writer points out that almost no French newspaper reported the killings, that Camus wrote only a few lines about them, and that his language was softer when speaking about French anger than when speaking about Arab fear.

Another writer argues that Camus was one of the very few French newspaper writers who tried to explain the riots and defend the rights of Algerians at that time. Both the political right and the political left were calling for revenge.

What Camus wanted

After the war, Camus asked for more political and social rights for Algerians. He wanted more schools, and he wanted every pupil who completed primary school to become a French citizen.

By 1945, he no longer believed that Algerians could simply be changed into French people. The Algerian leaders whom he respected no longer believed this either. His position became close to that of Ferhat Abbas. Abbas wanted an Algerian nation with its own government, but still joined to France as part of a larger state.

In 1956, Camus presented a fuller plan. Algeria would have two parliaments, one for Muslim Algerians and one for the European settlers. The two groups would share political power, while France would continue to control the army and the economy.

In 1957, writing in the British magazine Encounter, he asked for three things. First, France should publicly declare that colonial rule in Algeria was over. Second, every Algerian political party and group should meet together, without any conditions being set before the meeting. Third, they should discuss the creation of a free and federal Algeria in which both peoples would keep their rights and freedom.

Camus never supported complete independence for Algeria. He also never accepted direct talks between France and the National Liberation Front alone.

In 1958, he explained his reasons in the introduction to his book of writings about Algeria. He could not accept a policy based only on force and punishment. However, he also could not accept independence. He believed that independence would make Arab Algerians even poorer. He thought that it would also drive the French settlers away from a land where their families had lived for one hundred years. He also feared that independence would help create a new empire that would threaten the freedom of France and the Western world.

The war begins

The Algerian War began on 1 November 1954. The National Liberation Front, usually called the FLN, wanted full independence from France.

Bombs were placed in cafés, trams, and buses in Algiers. The French army used torture, and both sides killed people who were not taking part in the fighting. From 1955, Camus wrote a regular column in the weekly newspaper L'Express. He first asked for a meeting between all sides and later asked both sides to stop killing civilians.

In October 1955, he also wrote an open letter to Aziz Kessous, an Algerian socialist who was starting a newspaper for both Muslim Algerians and European settlers. Camus told him that Algeria was the cause of his suffering just as another man's chest might be the cause of that man's pain. He wrote that the two of them were not enemies and that the peoples of Algeria had no choice but to live together.

In 1956, Camus told a friend that if a bomb killed his mother in the Belcourt market, he would in some way be responsible because he had defended justice. However, he added that he would still defend his mother before anything else.

The call for a civil truce

On 22 January 1956, Camus spoke at a public meeting in Algiers. The meeting asked both sides to agree on one limited aim: they should stop killing people who were not taking part in the fighting. This proposal was called a civil truce.

The meeting took place in the Cercle du Progrès. This was a meeting hall built by a Muslim reform group between the old Muslim part of the city and a poor European district.

A group of Camus's French and Muslim friends had prepared the meeting. Many of them had known him during his years in the theatre. They included Charles Poncet and Amar Ouzegane. Ferhat Abbas sat on the platform beside Camus. Abbas later led the Algerian government outside the country during the war. After independence, he became head of the assembly that wrote the first laws of the new Algerian state.

Outside the hall, about one thousand European settlers shouted that Camus should be killed. Stones were thrown through the windows, and the police line almost broke. A larger Muslim crowd came down from the old city to hold the first crowd back. Camus had received death threats for several days, and friends from Belcourt stood around him inside the hall. The meeting had to end early.

Camus told the people inside that the meeting had to take place, even if its only purpose was to show that people could still speak to one another. He reminded them of several simple facts. One million French people had lived in Algeria for one hundred years. Millions of Muslims had lived there for much longer, and several other groups also lived in the country.

He warned that if the two main groups stopped speaking, each would decide that it did not need to know anything about the other. He did not ask for the whole war to end at once. He asked only that the killing of innocent people should stop so that calmer talks could begin.

Several of the Muslim organisers were secretly members of the FLN. The FLN had decided to support and protect the meeting. Writers disagree about how much Camus knew. One organiser later said that he had told Camus the evening before the meeting. Another account says that Camus knew nothing about it.

Neither the French government nor the army showed any interest in the plan, and nothing came from it.

Silence

The civil truce failed. Soon afterwards, Camus stopped writing his column for L'Express. He then said almost nothing in public about Algeria.

He wrote to a friend that he had returned from Algeria feeling deeply unhappy. He called the war a personal disaster. In a private note written in February 1957, he explained why he had become silent. He did not want to add to Algeria's suffering or to the foolish things already being written about it. He believed that anything he said would only increase the hatred.

His silence was only public. In private, he continued to act. He wrote more than 150 letters asking that prisoners who had been sentenced to death should be shown mercy. He wrote in support of FLN fighters as well as Communists. In every letter, he explained the case of one particular person.

Sometimes his requests succeeded. Often they did not. On one occasion, he read in a newspaper that men for whom he had written had already been shot.

In 1958, Camus visited the Kabyle writer Mouloud Feraoun in Algeria. The two men spoke for two hours. Feraoun wrote in his diary that Camus's position seemed human and honest to him. Camus said that when two brothers fight without mercy, it is madness to encourage either of them. He also said that silence is not always a bad or passive act.

In the same year, Camus published a collection of his writings about Algeria called Chroniques algériennes, also known as Actuelles III. It contained seven of his eleven articles about Kabylia from 1939 and a clear explanation of the political solution that he supported.

What people say about his position

People still disagree strongly about Camus's position on Algeria. There is no general agreement.

Some people see him as a brave man who tried to stop two peoples from destroying one another. They say that he became silent because he understood that both sides included innocent victims.

Others argue that he defended French rule until the end. In their view, he wanted Algerians to have better lives but never accepted their right to have an independent country of their own.

The strongest attack came from Conor Cruise O'Brien in 1970. He wrote that, whatever Camus said, he finally supported the French army's war. He also said that the civil truce was Camus's only practical political idea and that it had no chance of succeeding.

Later writers have answered that this judgement depends too much on knowing what happened after Camus's death. They also say that it ignores his articles against colonial rule and the many letters that he wrote for prisoners.

Simone de Beauvoir, who knew Camus, wrote at the time that the humane thinker in him had been defeated by the European settler. The Tunisian writer Albert Memmi, who was friendly towards Camus, used a phrase that stands between these two opinions and is often repeated. He called Camus a coloniser of good will.

Opinion in Algeria itself has also changed. Since the 1990s, more Algerian writers have described Camus as one of their own writers. The novelist Assia Djebar included him among the first important voices of Algerian literature.

The Nobel Prize

The award

Camus in Stockholm in December 1957

On 17 October 1957, Camus learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was in a restaurant in Paris when a waiter brought him the news from the radio. Camus was 43 years old that day. He became 44 three weeks later, before the prize ceremony. Only Rudyard Kipling had been younger when he received the prize. The Swedish Academy said that the prize was given for his important literary work, which helped people understand the problems of human conscience in the modern world.

Camus became pale when he heard the news. His first thought was that André Malraux deserved the prize more than he did, and many writers in Paris agreed with him. He almost refused the award, but his publisher persuaded him to accept it.

The prize came at a difficult time. Camus wanted to remain out of public view while the Algerian War continued, and he thought that politics might have influenced the Academy's choice. He was also afraid that he had little more to give as a writer. He had not published a long novel since The Plague, although The Fall had appeared the year before. Some French writers attacked him. They said that he had won only because he was less dangerous than other possible winners.

Stockholm

Camus travelled to Stockholm and received the prize on 10 December 1957. In his short speech, he said that the country where he had been born was suffering from endless unhappiness. He said that a writer must serve truth and freedom. A writer should not stand apart from other people, but should share their suffering and their hopes. He also said that there are times when silence takes on a terrible meaning.

When he thanked the Swedish Academy, Camus described himself as a French Algerian. On 14 December, he gave a longer talk at the University of Uppsala about the artist and the artist's own time. In this talk, he said that an artist must not excuse any torturer.

The Algerian student

During the same visit, an Algerian student stood up and asked Camus why he spoke so freely about violence in Eastern Europe but said so little about Algeria. Before Camus could answer, the student continued speaking for a long time and with great anger. He attacked Camus for his public silence about Algeria.

Sources give slightly different dates for this meeting. Some describe it as a discussion with students, while others call it a press conference. However, they all agree that it happened after the Nobel ceremony and that Le Monde printed Camus's words on 14 December.

Camus waited until the student had finished. He then said that no Arab person or FLN fighter had ever spoken to him in the way that the student had just done. He added that someone who wanted democracy in Algeria should allow him to speak.

Camus said that he had always wanted a just Algeria in which two equal peoples could live together in peace. He had often asked for full democratic rights for the Algerian people. He also said that some of the student's own friends were still alive because of actions that Camus had taken, although the young man knew nothing about them.

Camus then spoke the words that became famous. He said that he had always condemned terror. He also had to condemn terror that struck people without choosing its victims in the streets of Algiers and that might one day kill his mother or another member of his family: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice."

The statement caused debate around the world, although this was the last thing Camus had wanted. Both sides used his words. Supporters of French Algeria read them as an attack on the FLN. Supporters of independence read them as a defence of colonial rule.

The pied-noir poet Jean Sénac immediately attacked Camus. He said that Camus's duty was to defend both his mother and justice, rather than choosing one against the other.

Camus later said that the newspaper had shortened his answer and had not given its full meaning. He explained that he had been speaking about bombs placed in the trams of Algiers. His mother might have been travelling in one of those trams. If such violence was called justice, he said, then he preferred his mother.

Writers still understand the sentence in opposite ways. Some see it as proof that Camus finally stood on the side of the European settlers. Others argue that Camus was not placing his own family above other people. Instead, he was placing a living human being above a political idea. They say that he might have avoided much criticism if he had said "innocent people" instead of "my mother". Camus made the same argument several times, so the words were not simply a mistake made while speaking.

During the same days, Camus also said something else about the student. He said that he felt closer to this young man than to many French people who spoke about Algeria without knowing the country. He added that the student's face showed despair rather than hatred.

Last years and death

Lourmarin

Lourmarin in Provence, where Camus bought a house and is buried

In 1958, Camus used the money from the Nobel Prize to buy a house in Lourmarin, a village in Provence in the south of France. He had first found the village after the war with the help of his friend René Char, a poet who lived nearby.

For the first time in his life, Camus no longer had to worry about money. He began to turn away from life in Paris, refused many invitations, and planned to spend half of every year working in the south. In 1959, he stayed at Lourmarin during the spring, again in the middle of the summer, and then from November until the beginning of the new year.

Two things gave him great pleasure during his final months. In 1959, he put Dostoyevsky's The Possessed on the stage in Paris. André Malraux, who was then the French minister for culture, also offered him the direction of a new theatre for experimental work. Camus gladly accepted the offer. He was also thinking about creating an open-air theatre at Lourmarin.

In 1959, someone asked Camus whether the main part of his work was now finished. He answered that he was only forty-five years old and was still full of energy.

The First Man

Camus had been planning a large novel for about twelve years. It was to be called Le Premier Homme ("The First Man"), and he wanted it to become his greatest work. He told his friends, seriously, that it would be his own War and Peace.

The novel was about a boy who grows up in poverty in Algeria. It was also about the same person as a grown man, searching for the father whom he had never known. The book begins with a visit to a military grave in Brittany. There, the son understands that he is now older than his father had been when he died.

The "first man" of the title has more than one meaning. He is the first settler to arrive in a land that he does not know. He is also Camus himself, beginning life with almost nothing: no money, no books in his family home, and very little family memory to guide him.

By 2 January 1960, Camus had written about 145 large pages in his small handwriting. This may have been about 80,000 words. The novel was never finished.

The car crash

The memorial to Camus at Villeblevin

Camus had planned to return to Paris by train with his wife and children. He had already bought a ticket, and it was still in his pocket. At the last moment, he agreed to travel by car with his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard.

Michel Gallimard owned a fast Facel Vega car. Camus did not like fast driving. The two women sitting in the back sometimes asked Michel to drive more slowly.

They left Lourmarin, and the journey lasted two days. It was a pleasant trip. On Monday 4 January 1960, they were travelling on the old road north of Sens, in the Yonne. The road was wide and straight, with trees on both sides. There was little traffic, and light rain had made the road a little wet.

Near the small village of Petit-Villeblevin, the car left the road. It struck one tree and then hit a second tree about twelve metres farther away. The car closed around the second tree. Camus was thrown backwards through the rear window. His skull and neck were broken, and he died at once. He was 46 years old.

The exact cause of the crash was never discovered. The police thought that a tyre may have burst or that part of the car may have broken. Experts could not understand how such a serious crash had happened on such a straight and empty road.

The two people sitting in the back, Janine Gallimard and her daughter Anne, survived. Michel Gallimard was badly injured and died several days later.

The briefcase

Camus was carrying a black leather briefcase. It was found in the mud beside the tree. Inside it were a diary, several letters, a passport, and the manuscript of The First Man.

At first, the French government took the manuscript on the orders of André Malraux. It was later returned to Camus's family.

Camus's friends discussed what should be done with the unfinished novel. They included René Char, Jean Grenier, and the novelist Louis Guilloux. They decided not to publish it because they feared that it might cause more trouble while the Algerian War was still continuing.

The novel was finally published in 1994, thirty-four years after Camus's death.

After the death

News of Camus's death was sent out by news services during the afternoon. Radio workers who were on strike stopped their strike so that the news could be broadcast.

Francine Camus was teaching in Paris that day. She learned that her husband was dead when she returned home. Camus's coffin was placed in a bare room in the small town hall at Villeblevin. A single wreath lay on it before it was taken south.

Camus was buried at Lourmarin. Cameras, newspaper reporters, friends, and members of his family were present, but the burial itself was quiet.

The New York Times wrote about the absurd nature of his death. This was also the word used by many other people. His death seemed like a cruel and meaningless act of chance, especially because the unused train ticket was still in his pocket.

His wife Francine died on 24 December 1979. She is buried beside him.

Personal life

Camus married twice. His first wife was Simone Hié, from 1934 to 1940; his second was Francine Faure, from 1940 until his death. He had two children, the twins Catherine and Jean, born in 1945.

Camus had many love affairs during his second marriage. The best known was with the actress Maria Casarès, whom he met in 1944. Their letters were printed in 2017; there are nearly 900 letters, notes and telegrams, covering fifteen years. He wrote very little in public about any of the women in his life. Catherine Camus has looked after her father's writings since his death.

Camus was ill for most of his life, and the tuberculosis came back again and again. Each new attack meant weeks of rest, and he often had to give up travel and work. In 1958 he went through a long, bad period of low spirits, and wrote to a friend that he had not been able to work during it.

From 1943 until his death, Camus worked for the publisher Gallimard in Paris. He read new books for the house and ran his own series of books, called Espoir ("Hope"). He kept an office there and called it his island.

His ideas

The absurd

Sisyphus by Titian. Camus used the Greek story of a man who must push a stone up a hill for ever.

The Myth of Sisyphus begins with a strong statement. Camus writes that there is only one truly serious question in philosophy, and that question is suicide. The book is not mainly a study of suicide. It is a study of the way people think about it.

Camus rejects suicide. Life gives people no final meaning, but they must continue living. His argument begins with this conflict. He does not say that nothing in human life matters. He says that no meaning is given to people from outside, either by a god, by reason, or by the order of the world.

The absurd is not found only in the world, and it is not found only in human beings. It comes from the meeting between them. People want clear answers, but the world remains silent. The absurd is the space between the human need for meaning and the silence of the world.

Camus describes how the feeling of the absurd can begin. It may come suddenly at a street corner or while a person is passing through a revolving door. Nothing clear causes it, and this makes it difficult to understand.

He gives a well-known picture of ordinary life: getting up, taking the tram, working for four hours in an office, eating, taking the tram again, working for another four hours, eating, sleeping, and then doing the same thing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and the following days. Most of the time, people follow this path without difficulty. Then one day, a person asks why. For Camus, this question is the beginning of the feeling of the absurd.

Camus also writes about time. When a man says that he is thirty years old, he places himself on a line that he must follow until death. He then begins to see time as his enemy.

He writes about nature as well. A stone is not friendly towards human beings, and even beauty is not human at its deepest level. People place meanings on hills and trees. When these meanings disappear, nature becomes strange again.

Philosophical suicide

The middle part of The Myth of Sisyphus attacks several other thinkers. Camus discusses Kierkegaard, Shestov, Jaspers, and Husserl. He admires them because they understood that the world does not make sense and were deeply troubled by this problem.

However, Camus says that they all lose their courage at the end. Each thinker finds a way to escape from the problem and gives the world a meaning after first saying that it has none. Camus calls this "philosophical suicide". He says that they make a leap and finally worship the very thing that had defeated them.

Camus explains the difference in one sentence. For Shestov, reason reaches its limit, but something still exists beyond that limit. For the absurd mind, reason also has limits, but nothing beyond those limits can be known.

This does not mean that Camus rejects reason. He says that he understands the limits of reason without denying its value. He wants to remain on a middle path where thought can stay clear.

One recent study argues that Camus was unfair to Kierkegaard. It says that Camus understood Kierkegaard through the writings of Shestov and therefore saw him as a thinker who completely rejected reason. The study also notes that Camus read more of Kierkegaard in 1942. He then wrote in his notebook that Kierkegaard's leap was itself an act of thought.

Camus's answer is to remain awake. A person should see the absurd clearly and continue living. Camus calls this daily refusal revolt. He writes that living means keeping the absurd alive. To keep it alive, a person must continue looking at it, because the absurd disappears as soon as the person looks away.

At the end of the book, Camus tells the Greek story of Sisyphus. The gods punish Sisyphus by making him push a rock up a hill. Every time he reaches the top, the rock rolls down again. Camus says that people must imagine Sisyphus as happy. The important thing is not the rock itself. It is that Sisyphus knows his fate and does not turn away from it.

The absurd man

In the second part of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes people who live while fully accepting the absurd. He calls this kind of person the absurd man.

The absurd man does not build his life on the hope of a perfect future or of a life after death. He tries to live fully in the present. He also refuses values that claim to last for ever or to come from outside human life. Such values would give a final meaning to life, while the absurd man believes that life has no such meaning.

Camus says that this way of living is about living more, not about living better.

He gives several examples. Don Juan passes from one woman to another. The actor lives many lives on the stage and then leaves each life behind. The conqueror lives through action. Camus calls these people princes without kingdoms. They are used to explain an idea. They are not examples that Camus asks his readers to follow. None of his examples is a woman.

Not everyone accepts this part of the book. One critic says that Camus's idea of the absurd is too broad. Almost anyone who is not religious and does not wish to die could fit inside it.

Another reader gives the opposite view. He says that the absurd describes something real that ordinary life usually hides. This is why so many people recognise the feeling when Camus describes it.

Revolt

The Rebel returns to the same problem ten years later, but the main question has changed. The Myth of Sisyphus asks about suicide. The Rebel asks about murder.

Camus says that people live in an age of carefully planned crime. Before anything else can be understood, people must decide whether they have the right to kill. He notes that during fifty years, about seventy million people had been driven from their homes, made slaves, or killed. He says that such an age cannot simply be judged and forgotten. It must also be understood.

For Camus, revolt begins with the word "no", but every "no" also contains a "yes". The rebel says no to the master. At the same time, the rebel says yes to something within every person that is worth protecting.

This is why Camus writes that he revolts and that other people therefore exist as well. The act of revolt joins one person to all other people.

Revolt becomes revolution when it forgets this "yes". It then begins to kill in the name of history and becomes the same kind of evil that it had first opposed.

Measure

The French word that Camus uses for limits is mesure. In English, it can mean measure or moderation.

In his essay "Helen's Exile", Camus calls Nemesis the goddess of measure rather than the goddess of revenge. He warns that when human beings break the old limits, dark powers fall upon them.

Camus takes this idea from ancient Greek thought. In 1942, he wrote a note in his diary about the Odyssey. The goddess Calypso offers Odysseus a choice. He can become a god and never die, or he can return home. Odysseus chooses to go home. Camus wrote that this choice might contain the whole meaning of the poem.

For Camus, the choice is at the centre of Greek thought. The hero refuses to become a god and accepts the life and death of an ordinary human being.

Camus connects this idea with the Mediterranean Sea, sunlight, and the human body. Some readers found this beautiful. Others thought that it was a strange basis for a philosophical argument.

Behind the idea is a particular view of history. Camus believed that Greek thought saw the world as an ordered whole containing natural limits. Christianity replaced this view with a story in which history moves towards a final end. Modern politics kept the idea of history moving towards an end, but removed God and everything above human life. Only history and political power remained.

Not an existentialist

Camus is often called an existentialist, but he repeatedly said that this was wrong. In New York in 1946, a newspaper writer asked him about it. Camus answered that he was not an existentialist. He joked that he and Sartre were thinking of publishing a notice saying that they had nothing in common.

In a letter, he gave three reasons. First, he had written his play Caligula in 1938, before Sartre's form of existentialism became known. Second, The Myth of Sisyphus was written against thinkers who were called existentialists. Third, he did not trust reason enough to belong to any complete system of thought.

A student in New York once asked him directly whether he was an existentialist. Camus sighed and answered no.

Scholars still disagree about the name. Camus mainly refused it because he did not accept Sartre's system and because The Myth of Sisyphus attacks several writers who are normally called existentialists.

However, writers on philosophy often place Camus close to existentialism because he also wrote about freedom, choice, death, and life in a world without final answers. His daughter Catherine Camus has worked for many years to keep Camus's thought separate from Sartre's existentialism.

Religion

Camus is also often called an atheist, but he refused this name almost as strongly as he refused the name existentialist.

In 1954, he wrote in his notebook that he often read that he was an atheist. He said that the word meant nothing to him. He did not believe in God, but he did not call himself an atheist either. He gave a similar answer to a newspaper in 1956. He added that being against religion seemed to him a common and old-fashioned position.

In 1959, someone asked him about an earlier note in which he had written about imagining God without life after death. Camus answered that he had a sense of the sacred but did not believe in a future life.

Not every reader accepts Camus's own description. One study of his religious thought calls him an atheist and even an enemy of the idea of God. It says that Nietzsche influenced him when he was young and that Camus rejected every idea of sin or salvation.

It is clear that Camus belonged to no church. He did not believe that a god gave meaning to the world, and his idea of the absurd begins with a world that gives no answer.

It is also clear that he studied Christian writers closely. His university work in 1936 was about Augustine of Hippo and the Greek thinker Plotinus. In 1946, he spoke to a group of Dominican monks about what Christians and people without faith owed to one another. His books also contain many stories and images from both Greek religion and the Bible.

One biography describes his position in a short phrase: holiness without God.

The three cycles

By the middle of the 1940s, Camus was planning his books in groups, which he called stages or cycles. The first plan appears in his notebook in 1947, soon after The Plague. He changed the plan several times between 1947 and 1955.

The first cycle uses the story of Sisyphus and is about the absurd. The second uses the story of Prometheus and is about revolt. The third uses the story of Nemesis. In 1955, Camus added the missing subject of this cycle: love.

In the same plan, he placed another stage between the second and third cycles. This stage contained the books on which he was then working, The Fall and Exile and the Kingdom.

Each complete cycle was to contain a novel, a play, and an essay. The first cycle contains The Stranger, Caligula, and The Myth of Sisyphus. The second contains The Plague, The Just Assassins, and The Rebel.

The third cycle was never completed. Its planned essay, "The Myth of Nemesis", was never written. The First Man was to form part of this cycle.

Most readers understand the cycles as stages in which Camus's thought moves forward. One study argues against this view. It says that the problems become more difficult, rather than being solved, as Camus moves from one cycle to the next.

The limits of violence

One idea appears throughout Camus's work: killing must never be treated as innocent and must never become a normal method of politics. Camus opposed the death penalty and political murder, although he did not believe that a world completely free from killing was possible.

He was not a pacifist, and he said this clearly when people described him in that way. He had taken part in the struggle against Nazi Germany. He later wrote that some of the violence used during those years had caused him no moral difficulty.

His argument was different. Violence can sometimes be impossible to avoid, but it can never be fully justified. It must therefore remain rare and limited. It must never receive the support of a state or of a complete system of ideas.

A rebel who refuses to kill in every possible situation may have to give up the struggle and accept the evil being opposed. However, a rebel who agrees too easily to kill destroys the moral reason for the struggle. Camus believed that the rebel could never fully escape from this difficulty.

Camus developed this position before the Algerian War. It grew from three main experiences: his years in the Algerian Communist Party, his work in the Resistance, and his horror at the purge trials that followed the Second World War.

How he wrote

Camus did not write like a university philosopher. The Myth of Sisyphus is not a chain of proofs; it is a set of pictures and feelings, put one after another. His model was Michel de Montaigne, the French writer of the 16th century who invented the personal essay. Camus warned his readers about this himself: at the start of The Myth of Sisyphus he says that the book is not about a philosophy of the absurd but about a feeling of the absurd.

His novels are written in short, plain sentences. Sartre and other early readers compared this to what the French then called the American style, and above all to Ernest Hemingway, who also kept his characters at the surface and let them say only what they saw and did. The Swedish Academy spoke of the clear cut of his writing and of a sad, sunlit seriousness in it. He also changed his style from book to book: The Stranger is flat and cold, The Plague is slow and careful, like a doctor's report, and The Fall is one long, clever voice that never stops. Camus was aware of the danger of feeling sorry for himself when he wrote about his own poor childhood, and he answered it with short sentences and with irony.

He said that he tried to be an objective writer, by which he meant a writer who chooses his subjects without ever making himself the subject. Many readers do not agree, and point out how much of his own life is in his books: his mother, his illness, Algiers and Oran come back again and again.

What people think of his work

Opinions about Camus have always been divided, and they still are. Some readers see him as one of the important moral voices of the twentieth century, and his own time called him the conscience of Europe. One writer describes him as a moralist, and adds that a moralist is not the same as a moraliser: a moraliser has the answer before the question, while a moralist has questions after hearing the answers. An English study written while he was still alive called his work a remarkable journey through the ideas of his century, made by a writer who had really lived that century, while saying that parts of the journey are not convincing.

Others are far less kind. The American critic Harold Bloom wrote in 2003 that he could not remember any idea of Camus that had stayed fresh. He called Camus a better man than he was a writer or thinker, and said that he would be remembered by history rather than by the history of literature. The philosopher Paul de Man wrote that Camus gave a real sense of how fragile human life is, but little sense of strong thinking. Sartre had said something similar in 1943, when he wrote that Camus quoted German thinkers he did not always understand.

Camus knew about such criticism. When the British philosopher A. J. Ayer told him that his reasoning was weak, Camus agreed with him. He did not call himself a philosopher. He came from poor people, and he wanted to speak to ordinary people. One critic notes that his work has now become a classic in a simple sense: it is a set of books that people keep reading in new ways, and that have never finished saying what they have to say.

Legacy

Growing fame

When Camus died he was famous, but he was not loved by everyone. His fame grew much greater after his death, and it grew again after the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991. The Stranger is now read in schools in many countries, and his books have been turned into films and plays.

Claimed by many sides

People of very different views quote Camus. French politicians of the right, the centre and the far right have all used his words, anarchist groups call him one of theirs, and some Arab writers have read him as a friend of revolution. One reason may be that Camus did not offer a complete political programme. He wrote about nature, about death and about right and wrong, but he never set out a whole system of government.

In 2009 the French president Nicolas Sarkozy suggested moving Camus's remains to the Panthéon in Paris, where France buries its great figures. The idea caused an argument and even divided his children: his son Jean was against it, while his daughter Catherine thought it would crown her father's wish to speak for people who had no voice. Camus is still buried at Lourmarin.

Answers to his books

In 2013 the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud printed The Meursault Investigation, a reply to The Stranger. The speaker in Daoud's book is the brother of the Arab man who is killed on the beach; in Camus's novel that man has no name, and Daoud gives him one. The book is both an attack on The Stranger and a mark of respect for it. A Turkish film of 2001, Yazgı (Fate), also retells The Stranger; it is set in Turkey, where the colonial question does not apply.

In popular culture

Naming Camus in a film or a television show is often a short way of showing that a character is educated. The first single by the British band The Cure was based on the killing on the beach in The Stranger. In some later live performances, the singer Robert Smith changed the main line of the song.

Why he is still read

One reason may be his own background. Very few famous French writers grew up as poor as Camus did, and he worked at school, at university and after it. Another reason may be his idea of bonheur. In 1936 French workers won holidays and a shorter working week for the first time, and people began to go to the beach and to the mountains; Camus turned this new way of living into writing. His readers often say that they turn to him for help in hard times.

Main works

Novels and stories

• L'Étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider), 1942. A clerk in Algiers kills an Arab man on a beach. He is condemned to death, partly because he did not cry at his mother's funeral.
• La Peste (The Plague), 1947. A plague shuts off the city of Oran.
• La Chute (The Fall), 1956. A former lawyer talks in a bar in Amsterdam.
• L'Exil et le Royaume (Exile and the Kingdom), 1957. Six short stories.
• La Mort heureuse (A Happy Death), written 1936–1938, printed 1971.
• Le Premier Homme (The First Man), unfinished, printed 1994.

Essays

• L'Envers et l'endroit (The Wrong Side and the Right Side), 1937.
• Noces (Nuptials), 1939.
• Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942.
• Lettres à un ami allemand (Letters to a German Friend), 1945.
• L'Homme révolté (The Rebel), 1951.
• L'Été (Summer), 1954.
• "Réflexions sur la guillotine" ("Reflections on the Guillotine"), 1957.

Plays

• Caligula, written 1938, printed 1944.
• Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding), 1944.
• L'État de siège (State of Siege), 1948.
• Les Justes (The Just Assassins), 1950.

Journalism and notebooks

• Actuelles I, articles from Combat, 1950.
• Actuelles II, 1953.
• Actuelles III: Chroniques algériennes, 1958.
• Carnets (Notebooks), printed in three parts in 1962, 1964 and 1989.

Notes and references

The notes give the author, the year of the book and the page or the part of the book. Full details of every book are in the next section.

Books used to write this article

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• Bloom, Harold, ed. (2003). Albert Camus. Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. ISBN 0-7910-7381-5.
• Boisvert, Raymond D. (2023). Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-3503-4791-5.
• Brée, Germaine (1961). Camus (revised ed.). New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
• Camus, Albert (1961). Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Carroll, David (2007). Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-14086-7.
• Cruickshank, John (1959). Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. London: Oxford University Press.
• de Luppe, Robert (1966). Albert Camus. Translated by John Cumming and J. Hargreaves. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
• Ellison, David R. (1990). Understanding Albert Camus. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 0-87249-705-4.
• Foley, John (2008). Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt. Stocksfield: Acumen. ISBN 978-1-84465-141-2.
• Francev, Peter, ed. (2014). Albert Camus's The Stranger: Critical Essays. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-5391-0.
• Gloag, Oliver (2020). Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-879297-0.
• Hughes, Edward J., ed. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Camus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-54978-3.
• Knapp, Bettina L., ed. (1988). Critical Essays on Albert Camus. Critical Essays on World Literature. Boston: G. K. Hall. ISBN 0-8161-8838-6.
• Lottman, Herbert R. (1997) [1979]. Albert Camus: A Biography. Corte Madera, California: Gingko Press. ISBN 978-1-58423-534-7.
• Meagher, Robert Emmet (2021). Albert Camus and the Human Crisis. New York: Pegasus Books. ISBN 978-1-64313-821-3.
• O'Brien, Conor Cruise (1970). Camus. Fontana Modern Masters. London: Fontana/Collins. ISBN 0-00-632254-9.
• Ohana, David (2017). Albert Camus and the Critique of Violence. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. ISBN 978-1-84519-822-0.
• Payette, Jean-François; Olivier, Lawrence, eds. (2007). Camus: nouveaux regards sur sa vie et son œuvre (in French). Quebec: Presses de l'Université du Québec. ISBN 978-2-7605-1506-2.
• Phéline, Christian; Spiquel-Courdille, Agnès (2017). Camus, militant communiste: Alger 1935–1937 (in French). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 978-2-07-269921-4.
• Rhein, Phillip H. (1969). Albert Camus. New York: Twayne. LCCN 69-18497.
• Rizzuto, Anthony (1981). Camus' Imperial Vision. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-1002-9.
• Rudd, Anthony (2024). The Philosophy of Camus: Through a Kierkegaardian Lens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-892483-8.
• Scott, Nathan A. (1962). Albert Camus. London: Bowes & Bowes.
• Sleasman, Brent C. (2011). Albert Camus's Philosophy of Communication: Making Sense in an Age of Absurdity. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press. ISBN 978-1-60497-791-2.
• Srigley, Ronald D. (2011). Albert Camus' Critique of Modernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. ISBN 978-0-8262-1924-4.
• Thody, Philip (1957). Albert Camus: A Study of His Work. London: Hamish Hamilton.
• Todd, Olivier (2000). Albert Camus: A Life. Translated by Benjamin Ivry. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 978-0-7867-0739-3.
• Zaretsky, Robert (2010). Albert Camus: Elements of a Life. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-4805-8.
• Zaretsky, Robert (2013). A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-72476-1.

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• Absurdism
• Existentialism
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Algerian War
• French Resistance
• Nobel Prize in Literature
• The Stranger (novel)
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