(Merci au traducteur David Walker)
Pierre Masson, « Albert Camus, critique littéraire 1932-1947 »
In the case of Camus there is a blank space, carefully maintained, between the distracted schoolboy, growing up in a milieu of illiterates, apparently without access to books, and the writer whose style and images reveal a knowledge of the ancient and modern classics. That is perhaps how Camus can be distinguished from the critics who preceded him: largely indifferent to locating his reading in a historical perspective, whether it be La Rochefoucauld or Sainte-Beuve or even his immediate predecessors, his method consists of a kind of “unfettered reading” which allows him in particular to situate each book in relation to issues of the immediate present, or to a reflection outside time in which these issues have their place. Ultimately his attitude is akin to a philosophical reflection, applied to the field of literature, at the very moment when Sartre insists on its historicity.
Pierre-Louis Rey, « Camus et la Révolution française »
If, as we might expect, Camus condemns the State terrorism of 1793 in L’Homme révolté, he notes that it has its origins in the revolution of 1789 and beyond, in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which is to blame for its faith in rectilinear and limitless progress. The “assassination” of Louis XVI signified the death of God, but in his place was substituted another God , the God of Reason and Virtue, in whose name it was necessary to eliminate from the regenerated society elements which were alien to it. Two figures dominate the pages devoted to the French Revolution in L’Homme révolté: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who invented the notion of the General Will which overrides the will of all, and Saint-Just, “The Archangel of Terror” who gives rise to a strange fascination in Camus. Through his aspiration to the Absolute, which led him to crime and a form of suicide, Saint-Just stands out as a tragic character alongside those pale figures who, setting morality aside, slide into nihilism.
Kevin Mills, « Victor Malan, un douanier et un maître : les masques de Jean Grenier dans Le Premier Homme »
The Preface to Les Îles is often considered as the legacy of Albert Camus to Jean Grenier, so much so that it overshadows the novelistic epilogue to their dialogue conducted through the characters of Jacques Cormery and Victor Malan in Le Premier Homme. The author hesitated to retain the third chapter of the manuscript along with the character in whom he transposed his philosophy teacher; but the incomprehension provoked by the transformation whereby the brilliant university academic, renowned writer and respected friend becomes a retired customs officer has relegated the mentor of Saint-Brieuc lastingly into second place behind the Algerian primary-school teacher. Published thirty-five years apart but written concurrently the Preface to Les Îles and the third chapter of Le Premier homme shed light on each other, revealing a truth which Camus ruminated over a long period, concerning the particular features of his link to Grenier and the universality of the master-disciple relationship.
Hugo Melchior, « Deux Algériens à la recherche du « vivre heureusement, ensemble » »
In this article we seek to explain why Albert Camus and Messali Hadj, who never met and never even corresponded, were in total disagreement when it came to the future status of the homeland they had in common. This in spite of being the embodiment of the variegated nature of French Algeria, the colony unlike any other, and notwithstanding all that could unite them, in particular a radical conception of justice and the shared will to bind together without exception, within the Algerian polis, the men and women who lived there.
A systematic study shows that they never managed to reach a consensus on the issue of the juridical conditions capable of enabling that “living happily together”, in the writer’s words, on Algerian soil; put another way, on the kind of institutional framework which might have made possible the “Algerian community”, an expression of the peaceful and harmonious coexistence, on the same territory, of Muslim Algerians and French Algerians.
Éric Fougère, « Among Arabs and French: what is Algeria for Camus ? »
The Arab is the nameless individual who is remembered as the one who got shot at by Meursault. The Arab is the one who keeps mum in The Adulterous Woman, himself an alien in a colony where he is an inhabitant but not a citizen. Does anyone remember the name of a single Oranese Arab in The Plague? Consider as missing… However, why not wonder what such an absence means, an absence that is, indeed, quite relative? Beyond the political issues raised by Camus in his Algerian Chronicles, one should read The Host, where it is unclear who – Arab or European – is at the giving or the receiving end of hospitality. The “first man” is always in the position of a stranger in relation to another person. That is to say, one’s fellow human. While Arabs might be considered as disappearing figures in Camus’ works, they are in no way ignored and totally written out of the picture, as some critics may accuse him of, he who speaks only of land to lament the condition of landless people, and who evokes the concept of countries only to pay tribute to the countrymen who shaped them.
Martine Job, « Camus et le voyage »
Among the voyages that Camus undertook, we must distinguish between the obligatory voyages (for health or work reasons) and those freely entered into, and within the second group those which are a response to external invitations and those which stem from personal choices. In this latter category there is clear evidence of a Mediterranean leaning which corresponds to a fundamental sensibility. Although Italy is the most frequent destination, it is Greece which emerges as a predilection. The interest of travelling abroad lies less in the exploration of differences than in the opportunity to confront a personal truth, and Greece appears to him as a mythic homeland he instinctively recognizes; the country permits him to retrieve primordial emotions lived out in Algeria or experienced in reading the texts of the Hellenic tradition, the foundations of his thought concerning his relation to the world. Therefore the voyage was always for Camus a way of putting himself to the test, and it is in addition, as is shown in several examples, a reservoir of images and sensations which nourish the artist that he is first and foremost. The notes scattered in the Carnets are refracted directly or indirectly throughout the works that follow; the fragmentary writing of these continual snapshots even provides the writer with an opportunity to craft here and there an accomplished poetic form.