Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice

256 Pages·2007·1.32 MB·English

by  David Carroll

Columbia University Press New York
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-51176-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, David, 1944– Albert Camus, the
Algerian: colonialism, terrorism, justice / David Carroll.
p. cm.
Included bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–231–14086–7 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–231–51176–6 (ebook) 1.
Camus, Albert, 1913–1960—Political and social views. I. Title. pq2605.a3734z62647 2007
848′.91409—dc22
2006030713
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What they didn’t like in him was the Algerian.
—Albert Camus, The First Man
For Suzanne
Without Whom None of This Would Have Been Possible
Preface A Voice from the Past
Acknowledgments
Introduction “The Algerian” in Camus
1 The Place of the Other
2 Colonial Borders
3 Exile
4 Justice or Death?
5 Terror
6 Anguish
7 Last Words
Conclusion Terrorism and Torture: From Algeria to Iraq
Notes
Index
A Voice from the Past
I want most earnestly to believe that peace will rise over our fields,
our mountains, our shores, and that then at last Arabs and French,
reconciled in freedom and justice, will make an effort to forget the
bloodshed that divides us today. When that happens, we who are
both exiled in hatred and despair shall together recover our native
land.
—Albert Camus, “Letter to an Algerian Militant” (October 1955)
On January 4, 1960, at the age of forty-six, Albert Camus died in an
automobile accident. Two years after his death, colonial French Algeria
died as well, when Algeria became an independent Muslim nation and a
million French Algerians, or pieds-noirs, fled their Algerian homeland.
From that moment, French Algeria, the land in which Camus was born
and grew up, no longer existed, and at the same time, the possibility of
creating a postcolonial, multicultural, democratic Algeria of the type he
advocated throughout his life was also destroyed. Camus’ essays on
Algeria were, for the most part, criticized and dismissed during the war
and then largely ignored after independence. More recently, his Algerian
essays and stories, if they were discussed by critics at all, were attacked
and used as evidence to prove that Camus, no matter how often and
passionately he denounced the lethal effects of colonialism and argued
for equal rights for all Algerians, was himself in fact an unrepentant
colonialist. This was, of course, just another way of silencing his voice
and refusing to hear what it actually had to say about colonial injustice
and the possibilities of a multicultural, democratic Algeria emerging out of
the ruins of colonial Algeria.
With the passage of time, however, the general political atmosphere
has sufficiently changed for Camus to be of interest once again to an
increasingly large audience. It is, of course, not unprecedented for
someone who was once attacked, silenced, and then forgotten in one era
to be listened to again and found to have something important to say,
something that needs to be said again, to or in another historical context.
The project for the present book grew out of my sense that Albert Camus
had been too hastily dismissed and that it is once again an especially
appropriate time to reconsider his work, especially his political essays
and literary texts dealing with colonial Algeria.
This is not to imply that the global political situation has not drastically
changed since Camus’ death or that the contemporary era is identical to
the historical period in which Camus lived. There nonetheless exist
sufficient connections between the postcolonial conflicts of the present
era and the anticolonialist struggles of the 1950s and 1960s—especially,
I would argue, between the Algerian War and the present “global war on
terrorism”—to make it profitable and I would even say necessary to read
Camus again. Already during the Algerian War, but even more vigorously
from the 1980s on, Camus was attacked by postcolonial critics who did
not agree with his position on the war and especially with his refusal to
support the FLN’s (Front de Libération Nationale) armed struggle for
independence or justify its use of terrorism to achieve its goals. After the
war, no one to my knowledge has challenged his criticisms of French
counterterrorist tactics; in fact, his criticisms have been largely ignored.
From a narrow political perspective, many of the specific criticisms
leveled against Camus’ intransigency concerning Algerian independence
could be considered valid. For example, it could be argued that Camus
should have understood that recognition of and dialogue with the FLN,
which had by 1956 succeeded in eliminating all competing Algerian
nationalist opposition, was the necessary condition for ending the horrible
bloodshed of the war. It could even be argued that his blanket
denunciations of terrorism and proposals for moderate solutions to the
war had by 1957 made him, if not an obstacle to the resolution of the
conflict, then simply irrelevant to its eventual outcome, and that he was
no longer listened to or taken seriously by either side. His most important
contributions in the last years of the war were not political but
humanitarian, for in a number of instances the letters he wrote
demanding clemency for FLN militants who had been sentenced to death
for their political activities resulted in their lives being spared. It may also