Algerian chronicles

239 Pages·2014·0.812 MB·English

by  Camus, Albert

A L B E RT C A M U S
Algerian
Chronicles
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ALICE KAPLAN
TRANSLATED BY
ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER
Algerian Chronicles

Albert Camus
x
Algerian
Chronicles
v
translated by Arthur Goldhammer
with an
introduction by Alice Kaplan
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2013
This book was originally published as
Chroniques algériennes, 1939– 1958, by Editions Gallimard,
copyright © 1958 and 2002 by Editions Gallimard, Paris
Chapter 8 (“Crisis in Algeria”) was originally published, in
slightly different form, in Albert Camus, Camus at Combat,
copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by
permission of Princeton University Press.
Introduction and translation copyright © 2013
by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
library of congress cataloging- in- publication data
Camus, Albert, 1913– 1960.
[Chroniques algériennes, 1939– 1958. En glish]
Algerian chronicles / Albert Camus ; translated by Arthur
Goldhammer ; with an introduction by Alice Kaplan.
p. cm.
Originally published in French: Paris : Gallimard, 1958.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 07258- 9 (alk. paper)
1. Algeria— Politics and government— 20th century.
2. Algeria— Social conditions— 20th century.
3. Algeria— History—Revolution, 1954– 1962.
I. Title.
DT295.C293 2013
965.04—dc23 2012036100
Contents
Translator’s Note ix
New Perspectives on Camus’s Algerian Chronicles
by Alice Kaplan 1
Algerian Chronicles
Preface 23
The Misery of Kabylia 37
1 Destitution 41
2 Destitution (continued) 47
3 Wages 53
4 Education 59
5 The Po liti cal Future 65
6 The Economic and Social Future 73
7 Conclusion 81
contents
Crisis in Algeria 85
8 Crisis in Algeria 89
9 Famine in Algeria 93
10 Ships and Justice 97
11 The Po liti cal Malaise 101
12 The Party of the Manifesto 107
13 Conclusion 111
14 Letter to an Algerian Militant 113
Algeria Torn 117
15 The Missing 121
16 The Roundtable 123
17 A Clear Conscience 125
18 The True Surrender 129
19 The Adversary’s Reasons 133
20 November 1 137
21 A Truce for Civilians 141
22 The Party of Truce 145
23 Call for a Civilian Truce in Algeria 149
The Maisonseul Affair 161
24 Letter to Le Monde 165
25 Govern! 169
vi
contents
Algeria 1958 173
26 Algeria 1958 175
27 The New Algeria 181
Appendix 185
Indigenous Culture: The New Mediterranean Culture 187
Men Stricken from the Rolls of Humanity 197
Letter from Camus to Le Monde 203
Draft of a Letter to Encounter 205
Two Letters to René Coty 209
The Nobel Prize Press Conference Incident 213
Index 219
vii

Translator’s Note
Algerian Chronicles is a moving record of Albert Camus’s distress
at his inability to alleviate the series of tragedies that befell his
homeland, Algeria, over a period of 20 years, from 1939 to 1958. Ca-
mus collected these reactions to current events in a volume origi-
nally entitled Actuelles III. It would no doubt have saddened him to
learn that the sources of his heartache—t he diffi culty of reconcil-
ing Eur op ea n and non-E uropean cultures, the senseless recourse
to violence, the fatal spiral of repression and terror—a re once again
matters “of actuality,” lending prescience to his original title.
After listening to Camus lecture, the writer Julien Green de-
scribed him in terms that one might apply to a secular saint:
“There is in this man a probity so obvious that it inspires almost
immediate respect in me. To put it plainly, he is not like the oth-
ers.” This quality of authenticity is unmistakable throughout the
pieces collected here. Camus wrote as a moralist, in the noblest
sense of the term. In fact, he was a moralist in two different senses.
In the French sense, he was a worthy heir to La Rochefoucauld and
La Bruyère, moralistes who exposed the hidden selfi shness in osten-
sibly selfl ess action, the hypocrisy in what society, for reasons of its
own, hypocritically honors as virtue. But he was also a moralist in
the American sense, a writer of “jeremiads,” which, as Sacvan Ber-
covitch revealed, are best understood as appeals to the fatherland