On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus learns that he will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. A month later, in the hubbub that followed this announcement, the writer took the time to send a letter to Louis Germain, his former teacher.
“But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was for you. Without you, without that loving hand that you extended to the poor little child that I was, without your teaching and your example, none of this would have happened. In his answer, Germain attenuates his merit to better recognize that of Camus and retains his beautiful teacher’s spirit. “Anyway and despite Mr Nobel, he wrote to Camus, then 44 years old, you will always remain my little one. »
You can read these moving missives in “Dear Mr. Germain, …” (Folio, 2022, 128 pages), a short work which reproduces all the known, and partly unpublished, correspondence between the student and his master, from 1945 to 1959. Camus was 10 years old when he left Louis Germain’s class to start high school as a scholarship holder. He will never forget this awakener, “one of the two or three men to whom I owe almost everything”, he wrote to him in 1945.
Camus was born in Algeria, in a poor pied-noir family, in 1913. His father, a modest wine merchant, was mobilized and killed at the front the following year. His mother, a housewife, is deaf and illiterate. The teaching of Germain, at the communal school of Algiers, comes like a light in his life.
In The first manan unfinished novel published by his daughter in 1994 by Gallimard and whose chapter on school is reproduced in “Dear Mr. Germain, …”, Camus, under the name of Jacques, looks back on his meeting with his teacher, renamed Monsieur Bernard, literally portrayed as a hero. The man never bored, says Camus, “for the simple reason that he passionately loved his job” and his students.
In his class, we forget the poverty and ignorance that reign outside because the teacher, judging the little ones “worthy of discovering the world”, feeds in them the hunger for knowledge. He does not treat the children as strangers, but as brothers, welcoming them “with simplicity into his personal life”. Mr. Bernard is cultured and he loves what he does, what he teaches and his students. It changes everything. Beyond the structures and all the pedagogical spiel, even beyond the conclusive data, the essential is there.
When he tells Jacques that the time has come to go further, with more erudite teachers, the student fears separation because, writes Camus, “he could not believe that the masters were more knowledgeable than this one. whose heart knew everything”.
Few pages in the history of literature recount with such delicate force the liberating power of a master. The message is powerful: quality education is a matter of content, of course, and Camus’ teacher is up to it in this regard, but it is also, and perhaps above all, a matter of attitude. Mr. Bernard changes the lives of children by embodying a pedagogy which is, notes the French philosopher Baptiste Jacomino, “an authentic form of fraternity”.
In his letters to Louis Germain, of whom he calls himself the “spiritual son”, Camus multiplies, with poignant sincerity, the marks of gratitude towards his correspondent. “A good master is a great thing, he wrote to him in 1946. You were the best of masters and I have forgotten nothing of what I owe you. »
Fifteen years later, he still evokes this “inexhaustible” debt. In 1950, in response to a letter from Germain in which he almost apologized for writing to Camus, who must have had better things to do than read the letters from his former teacher, the writer corrected his master in a friendly way. “I have and will never have, he wrote, better to do than to read the letters of the one to whom I owe to be what I am, and whom I love and respect like the father I did not know. »
The link between the two men was so strong that when Camus sent him, in 1959, one of the first exhaustive studies devoted to his work, Germain was a bit amused by saying that he believed he knew his “little Camus” better than the scholars. “I have the impression, he writes, that those who try to pierce your personality do not quite succeed. You have always shown an instinctive modesty to detect your nature, your feelings. You get there all the better as you are simple, direct. And good on top of that! »
Camus in The first man, evokes “the powerful poetry of the school”. However, to act, it needs teachers who know how to speak to the heads of the students while making their hearts vibrate, even more so if, like Camus and like me, they come from working-class backgrounds. We had this chance, which I wish everyone.