Messali hadj biography of albert camus
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The Colonial Contradictions of Albert Camus
What do George W. Bush, an African-American prisoner sentenced to death in Indiana, the entire French political class (from the extreme right to the Anarchist Federation), Hollywood stars, and anti-colonialist Arab intellectuals have in common? They have all laid claim to the legacy of Albert Camus.
Camus is a fascinating character in his own right, who left behind an important body of writing, and the story of his life sheds light on a crucial period in French and Algerian history. But his cult status — and the seemingly contradictory readings of his work — make Camus very much a man of our own time, too.
Camus (1913–1960) was a French novelist, philosopher, reporter, essayist, and playwright, born in French Algeria to a family of white settlers (called Pieds-Noirs in French). Although he came from a modest social background, Camus emerged as a major literary figure of his generation, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
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Mediterranean Man
By the time Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 the nuanced position he took on the Algerian revolution had caused a scandal in orthodox progressive circles. Camus kept as quiet as he could because he feared terrorist reprisals against his mother, who was still living in Algiers. At the Nobel ceremony, however, he was harangued by an FLN enthusiast and forced into making a statement. ‘I must condemn a terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day might strike at my mother and my family,’ he said. ‘I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.’ This produced a further explosion. ‘I was totally sure,’ remarked Hubert Beuve-Méry, the editor of Le Monde, ‘that Camus would say some fucking fool thing.’ Sartre and Beauvoir’s response was very similar – they had long ceased to be on speaking terms with Camus because of his ‘react
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On July 5, 2022, Algeria celebrated the 60th anniversary of its independence from France. When it comes to Algeria, author and Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus remains a problematic figure who today is both claimed and rejected by Algerian intellectuals and artists.
Oliver Gloag
Camus was always ambivalent about colonialism in Algeria and this ambivalence greatly affected him. In 1943, he wrote in his diary: “Algeria. I do not know if I make myself understood well. But I have the same feeling when returning to Algeria that one does looking at the face of a child. And despite this, I know that all is not pure.”
For Camus, Algerian nationalism could not be allowed to express itself formally at the expense of France; Algerian independence was out of the question.
In the late 1930s Camus had advocated the passage of the Blum-Viollette bill, which would have granted French citizenship to a very small minority of Arab men (a few thousand). All efforts to pass th