Who was Albert Camus?
Albert Camus grew up in a poor family in Algiers, where he was born in 1913 in what was then French Algeria. As a young man he briefly joined the Communist Party but was expelled over his stance on Algeria. In the Second World War he worked with the Resistance and edited its paper, Combat. He became famous for novels and essays such as The Stranger, The Plague and The Rebel. Politically he stood on the independent left. He distrusted ideologies that excuse killing for a future goal. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. A car crash killed him in 1960, when he was 46.
Political views
- Taught that the world has no built-in meaning and that the honest response is to rebel against injustice, not to flee into false hope or end one's life.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Wrote in The Rebel that revolutions, and Marxism in particular, end up excusing mass killing in the name of history, and argued that politics needs limits.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Wanted the death penalty ended and made the case in Reflections on the Guillotine, published in 1957.Source: iep.utm.edu
- Asked both sides in Algeria to stop killing civilians, and criticised the FLN's violence as well as abuses by French colonial rule.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Protested against Stalinism and against the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Favoured closer unity among European states and condemned the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Source: en.wikipedia.org
Legacy
Admirers praise Camus for refusing to defend killing for a cause, whichever side it came from. He spoke against the death penalty and against Soviet repression when many French intellectuals stayed quiet. His quarrel with Sartre made him a symbol of the anti-totalitarian left. Critics say he was blind to the injustice of colonial rule and failed to back Algerian independence. Some call his silence on that question a moral failure. His remark after the Nobel Prize, often quoted as putting his mother before justice, is still argued over. His books remain widely read as a defence of human dignity without religious or party certainty.
In their own words
“I revolt, therefore we are”