Like many supporters of a reformist left-wing political ideology, I am an admirer of Albert Camus (1913-1960). In my youth, I read with excitement The rebellious man (1951). Camus wrote there, against communism, that “we now know […] that revolution without limits other than historical effectiveness means limitless servitude.” I found, in him, a way of profoundly refusing injustice without throwing myself into the arms of an ideology that reproduced it differently, often worse.
I like the novelist and the playwright in Camus, but I am especially attached to the intellectual. Every time I reread his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, delivered in 1957, I am moved. The writer, he says, “cannot put himself today at the service of those who make History: he is at the service of those who endure it”. Two commitments, he continues, are imposed on him: “the refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression”.
The task is clear, but it is no less arduous. “The truth,” notes Camus, “is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Freedom is dangerous, hard to live with as well as exhilarating. » When he speaks like this, with determination and nuance, Camus is my man.
Would I have been fooled by his reputation, which would have prevented me from seeing the less glamorous side of his work? This is the shocking thesis defended by Frenchman Olivier Gloag, professor at the University of North Carolina, in Forget Camus (La Fabrique, 2023, 160 pages).
“Claiming oneself from Camus,” he writes, “constitutes a way of claiming a humanism that is as vague as it is ostentatious,” which ignores the colonialist, misogynistic and reactionary ideas of the celebrated writer.
Gloag’s demonstration, against him, hurts. Camus, it is true, was never a strong supporter of Algerian independence. Raymond Aron said of his attitude in this regard that it was that of the “colonizer of good will”. Blackfoot, Camus considered Algeria his physical homeland and he wanted it to be fair to the Algerians, but French.
For Gloag, this position, which consists of softening the occupation by granting certain rights to Algerians, amounts to “humanitarianism in aid of colonialism”. Because he wants to avoid Algerian independence at all costs, Camus pleads for a “humanist compromise” aimed at saving the colonial system. To make Camus an anti-colonialist thinker would therefore be erroneous.
Even Camus’s work of fiction would corroborate this colonialist attitude. In The strangerfor example, we would find a denial of the humanity of the Arabs, who never have a name and are always confined “to their subordinate positions”.
Gloag even goes so far as to suggest that Meursault kills “the Arab” because the latter harms the “communion with nature” that the Frenchman seeks. Furthermore, Gloag attributes a similar thought to Camus: the Algerians would obstruct the pleasure of French living in Algeria. Meursault and Camus, in other words, share the same fight against the Arabs.
As an interpretation, it’s a bit strong and, above all, methodologically very questionable. A novel is not an essay. Attributing the ideas of one of his characters to the author himself is a matter of intention and is not worthy of a professor of literature.
Gloag darkens the picture even more. Camus, he writes, unlike Sartre, would have been a late resistance fighter, a primary anti-communist, a controlling misogynist and an opponent of the variable geometry death penalty. To drive the point home, Gloag adds that Camus’s writing is “blurred and boilerplate” in order to allow him to camouflage “thoughts that he knows are unspeakable.”
In Le Figaro of September 28, 2023, the French right-wing essayist Eugénie Bastié denounces the “intellectual dishonesty” of Gloag’s book. She uses as proof a truncated quote which makes Camus say that he refuses to settle in Algeria “because there are Arabs”.
However, the rest of this quote, taken from a book by Jean Grenier, a close friend of Camus, reads as follows: “ […] not meaning that the Arabs were bothering him by their presence, but by the fact that they had been dispossessed.” Gloag, in other words, makes the quote say the opposite of what it says to overwhelm Camus. Such a mistake casts a shadow over the overall value of this pamphlet, which is otherwise stimulating in certain respects.
We can, in fact, love Camus without considering him a “secular saint”, according to the formula of his friend Pascal Pia. To forget him, however, at Gloag’s invitation, would amount to depriving ourselves of the essential philosophical enlightenment and torments that he left us as a legacy.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.