Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French novelist, playwright, essayist and journalist, born and raised in French Algeria, whose work on the absurd and on revolt made him one of the leading voices of post-war Europe. His novels The Stranger and The Plague and his essays The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel asked how people should live in a world without ultimate meaning, and how they can resist injustice without themselves becoming murderers. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at 44, and died in a car crash just over two years later.

Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi, today Dréan, in eastern Algeria, then ruled by France. His family were pieds-noirs, Europeans settled in the colony. His father, Lucien, a farm worker, was killed in the First World War in 1914, after being wounded at the Battle of the Marne, and Camus never knew him. He grew up in the working-class district of Belcourt in Algiers, in a crowded flat with his mother, who was of Spanish descent, partly deaf and unable to read, his grandmother, his brother and an uncle.

His primary school teacher, Louis Germain, recognised his gifts and prepared him for a scholarship to the lycée; Camus dedicated his Nobel speech to him. At secondary school he was a keen goalkeeper, but in 1930, aged seventeen, he developed tuberculosis, which ended his sporting hopes and troubled him for the rest of his life. His philosophy teacher, Jean Grenier, became a mentor. At the University of Algiers he wrote a dissertation on Plotinus and Augustine, exploring the meeting of Greek philosophy and Christianity.

In 1935 Camus joined the Communist Party, attracted by its anti-fascism and its stand against inequality between Europeans and Arabs in Algeria, but he was expelled in 1937 after disagreeing with the party line on Algerian nationalists. He founded a workers' theatre company, published two collections of lyrical essays, and from 1938 worked as a reporter for the left-wing newspaper Alger républicain. His 1939 series on the famine and poverty of the Kabylie mountains was an early exposé of colonial neglect. His first marriage, to Simone Hié, broke down; in 1940 he married Francine Faure, the mother of his twins.

Camus moved to Paris in 1940, shortly before the German invasion, and in 1942 published the two works that made his name. The Stranger tells of Meursault, a French Algerian clerk who shows no grief at his mother's funeral, shoots an Arab man on a beach almost without reason, and is condemned to death as much for his indifference as for the killing. The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay, sets out the idea behind it. The absurd, Camus argued, is born from the clash between the human longing for meaning and clarity and the silence of a world that offers none. He asked whether this makes life not worth living, and answered no: suicide, and the leap into religious faith that he saw in thinkers such as Kierkegaard, are both ways of escaping the problem rather than facing it. The right response is to live in full awareness of the absurd, with defiance, freedom and passion. Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a rock uphill forever, becomes his emblem, and the essay ends with the claim that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.

During the Second World War, after a spell teaching in Oran and a period recovering from tuberculosis in the French mountains, Camus joined the Resistance in occupied France. From 1943 he worked for the clandestine newspaper Combat, becoming its editor-in-chief, and after the liberation of Paris in August 1944 his editorials made him a moral voice of the new France. He was one of the few journalists to condemn the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Plays such as Caligula and The Misunderstanding were staged in these years.

The Plague (1947), set in Oran during an epidemic, is often read as an allegory of the German occupation. Its hero, Dr Rieux, fights the disease without hope of final victory or any religious consolation, simply because it is the decent thing to do. The novel marked a shift in Camus's thinking from the solitary experience of the absurd towards solidarity among people facing a common evil.

In The Rebel (1951), Camus distinguished revolt, the refusal of injustice in the name of a shared human dignity, from revolution, which, he argued, had repeatedly turned into terror and tyranny when it claimed to serve the end of history. Tracing this logic from the French Revolution through Nietzsche to Marxism, he criticised the labour camps of the Soviet Union and those Western intellectuals who excused them. The book provoked a hostile review in Les Temps modernes and a bitter public exchange in 1952 that ended his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and isolated him from much of the French left. Although he was often grouped with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an existentialist, Camus rejected the label.

The war of independence in Algeria, which began in 1954, tore at him. He condemned both the terrorism of the National Liberation Front and the repression and torture practised by the French army. In January 1956 he went to Algiers to appeal for a civilian truce, but was shouted down by settler crowds and rejected by both sides. He favoured a federal solution in which Arabs and Europeans would live as equals, and he worked privately to save condemned Algerian prisoners, but his refusal to support independence was criticised then and since.

His novel The Fall (1956), the confession of a Parisian lawyer who has lost faith in his own virtue, was followed by the stories of Exile and the Kingdom. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1957, he was the second-youngest literature laureate after Rudyard Kipling. On 4 January 1960 he was killed when the car driven by his publisher Michel Gallimard struck a tree at Villeblevin, near Sens; an unused train ticket was found in his pocket. He was buried at Lourmarin in Provence. The unfinished manuscript of an autobiographical novel, The First Man, found in the wreck, was published in 1994.

Camus remains one of the most widely read French writers in the world, and The Stranger and The Plague are fixtures of school curricula; sales of The Plague surged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Philosophers have sometimes judged his essays less rigorous than the work of Sartre, but his refusal of political violence and of all doctrines that justify killing in the name of the future has gained in standing since the collapse of communism. Postcolonial critics, notably Edward Said, have argued that his fiction erases the Arab population of Algeria, and the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud answered The Stranger with a novel narrated by the brother of its nameless Arab victim. Camus thus belongs both to the history of continental philosophy and of France, and to the unresolved story of colonial Algeria.