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4 FIDELITY

A man wakes before dawn, dresses quietly so as not to disturb his wife, and rides into town to watch a man be put to death. It was neither fascination nor bloodlust that pushed the man to attend the public execution, but instead a sense of outraged justice: the criminal had, in a murderous frenzy, bludgeoned to death not just a hus- band and wife on their farm, but their children as well. When the husband returned to the house after the execu- tion, he rushed past his wife, vomited in the bathroom, and collapsed in bed. Until the end of his life the man refused to speak about what he saw that day.

Most readers of Camus will recognize this story about his father, Lucien Camus. It surfaces intact in his fi rst and last novels, The Stranger and The First Man, as well as in his long essay “Refl ections on the Guillotine,” and fl oats to the surface of The Plague in bits and pieces. In fact, this story— one of the few Camus’ mother was able to

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tell about her husband—haunts the near entirety of Ca- mus’ writings.

In The First Man, the hero Jacques Cormery, seeking news about the dead father he never knew, hears a similar story recounted by his school principal, Monsieur Levesque. Several years earlier, Levesque and Cormery père had served together as French soldiers in Morocco. Stationed in the Atlas Mountains, they were ordered to relieve their com- rades from their shift at an advance post. When they reached the position, they found that the rebels had slit the throats of their comrades, and stuffed their genitals into their mouths.

Once they returned to camp, Cormery suddenly ex- ploded: “A man doesn’t let himself do that kind of thing! That’s what makes a man, or otherwise. . . . I’m poor, I came from an orphanage, they put me in this uniform, they dragged me into the war, but I wouldn’t let myself do that.” When Levesque reminded his companion that Frenchmen had committed equally horrifi c crimes, Cormery shot back: “Then they too, they aren’t men.” He then cried out: “A fi lthy race! What a race! All of them, all of them . . .” And just as Lucien Camus took refuge into his bedroom upon returning home from the public execu- tion, Cormery, “white as a sheet, went into his tent.”1

The “dread that so distressed his father” had been left to his son as “his only clear and certain legacy.”2 Indeed, the dread was the fruit of a conviction with roots as deep as the grape vines that Lucien Camus tended as a vineyard foreman. Camus’ loyalty to the visceral ethics expressed by his father— the intuitive conviction that humankind,

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if it wishes to preserve this status, must obey certain limits on its freedom, all the while acknowledging the humanity of one’s fellow men and women— endured his entire life. It was an ethics based on faithfulness to our fundamental duties and faithfulness to our world. For Ca- mus, it was the same fi delity revealed by his father upon seeing the ritualistic dismemberment by Arab terrorists of French soldiers, and in a French prison to the equally ritualistic act of a “quivering body dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.”3

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Fidelity, the phi los o pher André Comte- Sponville has claimed, is not one virtue among others; it is, instead, the one virtue that makes the others possible.4 For example, would justice be worth anything at all if the world was empty of people faithful to that virtue? Or what value could we ever fi nd in peace without the presence of peace- makers committed to that ideal? And would not truth it- self wither if there were not individuals who insisted on telling truth to power?

But we must be careful: fi delity’s value can be weighed only by fi rst weighing the object toward which it fl ows. As Vladimir Jankélévitch concludes, “Faithfulness to stu- pidity is yet one more stupidity.”5 Fidelity to one’s po liti- cal party at the cost of loyalty to one’s humanity is not fi - delity, but most often betrayal. The vow of loyalty signed by French bureaucrats to Marshal Pétain leads us from the realm of virtue to that of evil. This becomes yet clearer with the SS vow of loyalty to Hitler. In an interview,

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Camus cites this very example when he notes “fi delity is not, in itself, a virtue.”6

By the same token, fi delity to nihilism is unworthy of the name. In the maelstrom of a world war incited by the ideological nihilism embodied by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Communist Rus sia, Camus wrote a series of four “letters” to a fi ctitious German friend. Published in re sis- tance journals during the last two years of the war, “Letters to a German Friend” explores the two primordial and fa- tally opposed responses to a world without meaning. As Camus announces in the fi rst letter: “We are fi ghting for the distinction between sacrifi ce and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even fi ner distinction between the true and the false.”7

Fidelity begins with the recognition that this distinction is not just meaningful, but with the knowledge that strength, sacrifi ce, and energy must serve the demands of the most fundamental of truths: the outrage of a meaning- less cosmos impels all of humankind to struggle against it. Herein laid the difference between Camus and his German friend: “Simply that you readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fi ght against injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness.” While the German, convinced there was no alternative, fl ew into the embrace of nihilism, Camus “merely wanted men to rediscover their solidarity in order to wage war against their revolting fate.”8

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This revolting fate was, all too often, the work of men under the sway of nihilism. In the months leading to the Allied landings, the German forces, abetted by la milice, the French paramilitary units that collaborated in the bloody repression, waged war on France’s civilian popu- lation. In “For Three Hours They Shot Frenchmen,” Ca- mus documents the murder of eighty- six men in the town of Ascq. With great concision, he narrates the actions of the Germans, from the moment they “fi red on three pros- trate employees [at the train station]” to the sixty men “who were rounded up to a pasture” and shot. Camus then turns to the reader: “Eighty- six men just like you, the readers of this newspaper, passed before the German guns. Eighty- six men: enough to fi ll three or four rooms the size of the room you’re sitting in. Eighty- six faces, drawn or defi ant, eighty- six faces overwhelmed by horror or by hatred.” Dwelling on the unrelenting length of the slaughter, Camus offers another everyday reference: “Three hours, the amount of time that some of you will have spent that day at dinner or talking quietly with friends, while elsewhere people watched a fi lm and laughed at made- up adventures. For three hours, minute after min- ute, without a letup, without a pause, in a single French village, shots were fi red one after another and bodies fell writhing to the ground.”9

Or the amount of time it took to read this book to this point. The article’s immediate aim, of course, is justice: to gather evidence to be used against the Germans and their French collaborators once France was liberated.

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But, more broadly, the goal of Camus’ exercise in the phe- nomenology of evil is “so that nothing be forgotten.”10 At the end of the day— and end of our lives— we must be faith- ful, insofar as it is humanly possible, to our past, as it was lived and understood by contemporaries, and not to false- hoods generated by governments or images d’Epinal of- fered by the press. We must avoid caricatures and captious versions of the past; indeed, fi delity, Jankélévitch writes, “is the virtue of memory, and memory itself is a virtue.” The past, unlike the present or future, cannot defend it- self: we alone can protect it against the tendencies to for- get, traduce or— which amounts to more or less the same thing— transform it.11

In his fourth and fi nal letter, Camus tells his German friend that he will resist and defeat him, but that he re- fuses to hate him: “Despite all the tortures infl icted on our people, despite our disfi gured dead and our villages peopled with orphans, I can tell you that at the very mo- ment when we are going to destroy you without pity, we still feel no hatred for you.”12 While this claim may strike us as mere posturing, it is of a piece with the ethics of fi - delity. Resentment, after all, is fi delity to an unworthy emotion: hatred or anger. As such, it has no place in an ethics that insists the ends can never justify the means— and no less important, the means are at times justifi ed only by their ends. Several years later, in an interview, Camus echoed Jankélévitch’s insistence that what we must seek “is not any and all sorts of fi delity, but instead good and great faithfulness.”13 When asked whether faithful- ness can justify a life, Camus replied it could and must—if

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the faithfulness served life and happiness, not death and servitude. “Undoubtedly, one of the last questions a man can ask about the value of his life is ‘Have I been faith- ful?’ But this question means nothing if it does not fi rst of all mean ‘Have I done nothing to degrade my life or another’s?’ ”14

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Toward the end of 1941, when still in Oran, living with his wife Francine in an apartment owned by her parents, Camus noted in his journal that great works of art are often made in times of great historical turmoil. He cites as examples Shakespeare and Milton, Rabelais and Mon- taigne.15 The inventor of the essay, in fact, accompanied Camus for most of his life. As editor of Alger républicain, Camus played cat and mouse with French censors, insert- ing passages from the Essays without attribution, which the authorities would promptly remove, declaring them dangerous for public morale. In early 1947, when Camus went to the Alps to rest his diseased lungs, part of his daily regimen was the Essays.16

Not surprisingly, he was especially moved by Mon- taigne’s refl ections on death. “Amazing things he says of his fear in the face of death,” he wrote in his notebooks after reading the essay “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die.” Consumed by tuberculosis for half his life, Camus was fascinated by Montaigne’s repeated confrontations with death. The sixteenth- century writer, under the spell of Stoicism, sought to combat the fear of death by stripping it of its strangeness and making it commonplace. “It is

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uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere.” But not merely wait: for Montaigne, one must be acting in the world the very moment death comes to take us. “I want death to fi nd me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfi nished garden.”17

Camus knew that Montaigne, before retiring to his chateau to write, had served most of his life as a public offi cial. Not only had he been a magistrate in the Bordeaux Parliament and city mayor during an outbreak of the bu- bonic plague, but he had also served as go- between dur- ing an even more virulent and per sis tent plague: France’s Wars of Religion. Montaigne’s rare ability to remain above the fray, seemingly immune to the passions that drove Catholics and Huguenots to murderous frenzy, made him an invaluable interlocutor for both Henri of Navarre, the Protestant leader, and Catherine de Medici, mother of the Catholic king Henri III. Inevitably, these same quali- ties also made Montaigne a mortal enemy of the fanatics on both sides: he was, at various times, threatened, pur- sued, and imprisoned by both Protestants and Catholic extremists.

Born into a Catholic family (one with possible Jewish ancestors) that branched into the Protestant faith, Mon- taigne knew both worlds, but refused to declare either as the one right world. Stunned by each side’s conviction that they alone knew the truth, shocked by the acts they committed in support of that conviction, Montaigne re- fused to betray his loyalty to the claims of reason and truth. “See the horrible impudence with which we bandy divine reasons about, and how irreligiously we have both

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rejected them and taken them again, according as fortune has changed our place in these public storms,” he ex- claimed. And yet, “we burn the people who say that truth must be made to endure the yoke of our need.”18

Indeed, if only it were limited to the auto- da- fé. Yet more shocking was the cruelty displayed in the killings on both sides. The corpse of the Protestant leader Admi- ral de Coligny, killed with a sword thrust through the mouth, was defenestrated, beheaded, mutilated, hanged, and burned. As for obscure Protestants, their fate was no kinder. One man, Mathurin Lussault, was murdered when he answered his door, as was his son when he heard the commotion. Mathurin’s wife leapt from the upstairs win- dow to escape the mob, breaking both her legs. The crowd dragged her into the street, hacked off her hands, and skewered her on a pole. For several days, dogs were seen gnawing on her hands.19

Montaigne was appalled by these acts, no doubt spur- ring him to write an essay devoted to the subject of cru- elty: “I could hardly be convinced, until I saw it, that there were souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the mere plea sure of it; hack and cut off other men’s limbs; sharpen their wits to invent unaccustomed torments and new forms of death, without enmity, with- out profi t, and for the sole purpose of enjoying the pleas- ing spectacle of the pitiful gestures and movements, the lamentable groans and cries, of a man dying in anguish. For that is the uttermost point that cruelty can attain.”20

A half- millennium later, events in Algeria revealed that little had changed. “Ja-----, smiling all the time, dangled

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the clasps at the end of the electrodes before my eyes. These were little shining steel clips, elongated and toothed. . . . He attached one of them to the lobe of my right ear and the other to a fi nger on the same side. Suddenly, I leapt in my bonds and shouted with all my might. . . . A fl ash of lightning exploded next to my ear and I felt my heart rac- ing in my breast. I struggled, screaming, and stiffened my- self until the straps cut into my fl esh.”21 In 1958, Editions de Minuit, which began life in 1942 as a clandestine publisher committed to France’s liberation, published Henri Alleg’s The Question. An account of his arrest and torture by the “paras” (French paratroopers) engaged in the Battle of Al- giers, Alleg’s story awakened a nation that, until the book’s publication (and the French government’s failed attempt to censure it), had striven to close its eyes to the nature of the confl ict. Scarcely twenty years after the Nazi occupiers and French collaborators, in their doomed effort to eradicate the Re sis tance, had tortured and killed hundreds of Frenchmen and women, French were now torturing Alge- rian men and women for the same reasons. As Alleg an- nounced, while his “par tic u lar case is exceptional in that it has attracted public attention, it is not in any way unique.”22

The French army’s justifi cation for the use of torture was straightforward and compelling: France was at war with a terrorist or ga ni za tion whose bombings and assas- sinations had taken the lives of hundreds of innocent Frenchmen, women, and children. Without the informa- tion extracted from arrested terrorists, or their sympathiz- ers, yet more innocents would die. According to Marcel Bigeard, a col o nel who both revolutionized French military

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tactics in Algeria and oversaw the use of torture, deliber- ately and methodically infl icting pain on the enemy was a “necessary evil.” In order to underscore the gravity of France’s engagement, Bigeard himself underwent water torture in order to know its effects. That he also knew it would occur just once, and that it would not stretch over hours, days, and weeks; that he knew he was a command- ing offi cer whose authority over his “torturers” was un- questioned; and that he knew he was staging the experience all seem to undermine the goal of this personal experi- ment. While Bigeard’s par tic u lar case was, like Alleg’s, exceptional in the amount of attention it eventually re- ceived, it was quite unlike Alleg’s because it was not representative of the practice.23

A few months after Alleg’s book had transformed the perception of France’s war in Algeria, Gallimard pub- lished Algerian Chronicles, Camus’ collection of articles on Algeria. By then, Camus had, like Montaigne, also retired from public affairs— at least in regard to his native Alge- ria. After the failure of his effort to convince the warring sides to adopt a civilian truce, Camus retreated into pub- lic silence. In February 1956, shortly after the still- born civilian truce, Camus had quit his position at L’Express, telling friends he could no longer write or speak publicly on events in Algeria. What more could he say at this point? Silence seemed, if not the sole option, the most meaning- ful one. As he wrote to his friend, the Kabyle writer Mou- loud Feraoun: “When language is thoughtlessly used to dispose of human lives, being silent is not a negative quality.”24

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But there was little agreement then, as there is now, on the nature of Camus’ silence. Speaking for the great ma- jority of Pa ri sian intellectuals, Simone de Beauvoir de- clared she “was revolted by [Camus’] refusal to speak.”25 Even sympathetic critics like the Jewish Tunisian writer Albert Memmi— whose fi rst novel, The Pillar of Salt, carried a foreword by Camus— attributed Camus’ silence to a sort of paralysis visited on “colonizers of good will” who can- not escape the impossible dilemma in which history has placed them. “Indeed, such is Camus’ situation that he was assured of becoming the target of the suspicion of the colonized, of the indignation of the Left of metropolitan France, and the anger of his own people.”26

Montaigne would have immediately recognized Camus’ plight as his own. In sixteenth- century France, extremists among both Catholics and Protestants despised les poli- tiques: moderates devoted to negotiation and compromise. But in a nation increasingly polarized, in which each reli- gious camp saw the other as evil incarnate, the politiques were not just distrusted, but often powerless in the face of repeated spasms of violence. Mayor of a volatile city divided between Huguenots and Catholics, where the fa- natics of the Catholic League terrorized Protestants and politiques, Montaigne was acutely aware of his thankless and desperate task. As he observed: “Our zeal does won- ders when it is seconding our leaning towards hatred, cru- elty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. Against the grain, toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless as by a miracle some rare nature bears it, it will neither walk nor fl y.”27

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Yet Montaigne, though a politique, was not an amoralist— to the contrary. “Among other vices,” he wrote with rare intensity, “I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices.”28 Like Camus, he feared those who argued that a good and great end could justify violent and evil means. The notion of launching a foreign war was pop u lar among certain politiques, for it would help unify the nation and put a damper on the wars of religion. While Montaigne agreed that a foreign confl ict was a “milder evil” than civil war, he refused the tempting proposal: “I do not believe that God would favor so unjust an enterprise as to injure and pick a quarrel with others for our own con ve nience.”29

In a situation where truth- telling could easily be fatal, Montaigne nevertheless insisted on candor. “I do not re- frain from saying anything, however grave or burning, I could not have said behind [others’] backs.” With a nod to the low and mean methods used by regimes, Montaigne acknowledged the inevitability of men who “betray and lie and massacre.”30 As for himself, he will “resign this commission to more obedient and supple people.” In his preface to Algerian Chronicles, Camus seems to channel Montaigne. In attempting to fi nd a common ground be- tween the two sides, he dismisses the judgment of those who have not lived in Algeria. And as for those who have, yet “continue to believe, heroically, that it is better for one’s brother to die than one’s principles, I will limit myself to admiring them from afar. I am not one of their race.”31 Indeed, as his sense of separation deepened, Camus blamed it on his insistence to parler vrai: “If I have always refused

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to lie . . . it is because I could never accept solitude. But solitude should now also be accepted.”32

The historian James Le Sueur underscores this state of solitude when he dismisses Camus as the “glaring excep- tion” from the united front of French intellectuals op- posed “to the violation of human rights in Algeria.”33 He was an exception, but not in the way Le Sueur seems to suggest. Camus did repeatedly condemn the French mili- tary’s practice of torture and executions. Not only were these acts simply criminal, he declared, they were also po- liti cally foolhardy. In a column for L’Express in 1955, Camus underscored what seems obvious only in retrospect: “Each act of repression . . . [and] each act of police torture . . . has deepened the despair and violence of those subjected to them. In this way, the police have given birth to terrorists who in turn have given birth to yet more police.”34

Three years later, in Algerian Chronicles, Camus ago- nized over the tragic harvest to this criminal and crimi- nally myopic policy. Addressing his fellow French and French Algerians, Camus was blunt: “Reprisals against ci- vilians and the practice of torture are crimes for which we are all responsible. That we have allowed these acts to occur is a humiliation we must henceforth confront. For now, we must at the very least reject every justifi cation, even that of effectiveness, for such methods. From the very moment we justify them, even indirectly, neither rule nor value can exist, all claims are equally valid and war with- out limit or laws consecrates the triumph of nihilism.”35

Clearly, Camus did condemn torture. But what he re- fused was what we might call “selective condemnation.”

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He was disgusted by the silence of his erstwhile friends on the French left in regard to the terrorism of the Na- tional Liberation Front (FLN), which led the struggle for Algerian in de pen dence. While the French military and intelligence ser vices were electrocuting, water boarding, and raping FLN militants, the FLN was murdering the leaders of competing nationalist movements as well as pied- noir civilians. In an order issued following the execu- tion of two FLN commanders in 1956, immediate repri- sals were called for against the civilian population: “Kill any Eu ro pe an between the ages of eigh teen and fi fty- four years.” At the same time, female operatives for the FLN launched a series of bomb explosions at pop u lar cafés, killing or maiming dozens of women and men. As Alge- ria lurched into what he called a “xenophobic delirium,” Camus urged both sides to recognize their complicity. Just as “the massacre of civilians must be condemned by the Arab movement, French liberals must do the same in re- gard to French repression.” Failing this, Camus concluded, the very notions of guilt and innocence will be drowned in the bloodshed of total war.36

Camus was exceptional in remaining faithful to an eth- ical stance that Montaigne would have recognized. “I am an average man with an exigency,” he wrote in his note- book. “The values I ought to defend and illustrate today are average values. This requires a talent so spare and un- adorned that I doubt I have it.”37 Among Camus’ average values was the conviction that the end must never justify the means. Once this rule is violated, well- intentioned men and women will begin their race toward incompatible

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goals, leaving behind them the trampled remainder of humankind. In a pained journal entry, he reminded him- self: “My effort now is to carry this presence of myself to myself through to the very end, to maintain it what ever aspect my life takes on— even at the price of the loneliness which I now know is so diffi cult to bear. Not to give way— that is the whole secret. Not to surrender, not to betray.”38

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Fidelity to his father’s gut reaction upon seeing his com- rades’ mutilated bodies—“A man doesn’t let himself do that!”— fueled Camus’ lifelong opposition to capital pun- ishment. In this regard, like Montaigne, Camus would speak truth not just to power, but to his readers as well— in some ways, a far more diffi cult task. As he wrote in “Re- fl ections on the Guillotine,” when “silence or tricks of lan- guage contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscen- ity hidden under the verbal cloak.”39

By the late 1940s, petitioners and lawyers not just in France but across the globe were seeking Camus’ support on behalf of condemned po liti cal prisoners. Camus spoke out on behalf of condemned po liti cal prisoners across the world, protesting, in the words of Eve Morisi, the “ ‘death- centered’ state in all of its guises.”40 Camus intervened on behalf of po liti cal prisoners in Franco’s Spain and Sta- lin’s Rus sia, Eastern Eu rope, Iran, Vietnam, and Greece.

Even the United States prodded Camus, if not to intervene— since the prisoner had already been executed—at

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least to interrogate the nature of capital punishment. In 1959, Robert Wise’s fi lm “I Want to Live!” was released in France. The fi lm starred Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham, a drug addict who, found guilty of the murder of a rich widow, was executed in a gas chamber. Directed in a brutally realistic manner, the fi lm blurs the question of Graham’s guilt— documents suggest she was, in fact, guilty— instead focusing on the stages of a state- sanctioned execution. Camus was deeply impressed by the fi lm— so much so that he saw it twice and wrote a short apprecia- tion. “The merciless story this fi lm retraces is a true story,” he declared. Asserting that fi lm, if it has any purpose at all, is “to confront us with the realities of our time,” Camus concluded that Wise confronts us with a reality “we don’t have the right to ignore.”41

Never published in France, the review was nevertheless translated into En glish and publicized by the fi lm’s pro- ducer. An American journalist based in Los Angeles, Jack Beck, was disturbed by Camus’ apparent claim that Gra- ham was, in fact, innocent. He showed, in a closely argued three- page letter to Camus, how Wise omitted a number of facts from the movie that tied Graham to the crime. Camus quickly replied to Beck, confessing that he might well have been “misinformed” about Graham’s case. But what follows is no less telling: “Nevertheless, may I tell you that I am not convinced that I was wrong?” For Camus the death penalty itself remains a criminal act whether or not Graham was guilty. Indeed, he explains, “To oppose the death penalty only if the accused individual is innocent makes absolutely no sense.”42

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What gripped Camus’ moral imagination was the way in which the fi lm re created the reality of killing another human being. The “quivering body dropped onto a board to have its head cut off ”— or to have its lungs fi lled with poison gas, or to have its heart torn apart by bullets— remained the fundamental datum of capital punishment. Hence Camus’ horror at any effort, by institutions or in- dividuals representing demo cratic or totalitarian societ- ies that sought to render abstract this brute fact. In a let- ter to his former teacher Jean Grenier, Camus recounted how, during the postwar purge in France, he left a trial of a Frenchman accused of treason. The accused man, Ca- mus told Grenier, was clearly guilty. “Yet I left the trial before the end because I was with him [ie., the accused]. . . . In every guilty man, there is an element of innocence. This is what makes any absolute condemnation revolting. We do not think enough about pain.”43

There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specifi c, it is real and, when it is intense, it is “world- destroying.”44 Elaine Scarry makes a fundamental point about pain: whereas most human emotions are attached to an out- side object— one is in love with, one is worried by— pain has no such referent. “It is not of or for anything.” Moreover, Scarry argues, the very effort to objectify or analogize pain is “itself a sign of pain’s triumph, for it achieves its aver- siveness in part by bringing about, even within a radius of several feet, this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons.”45

The dangers of abstraction preoccupied Camus. In 1947, the same year as the publication of The Plague, Camus

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reread his cahiers, the school notebooks in which he had recorded his thoughts for more than a de cade. The effect was sobering: “I have read over all these notebooks— beginning with the fi rst. This was obvious to me: land- scapes gradually disappear. The modern cancer is gnawing at me too.” In other words, his memory of the world— the object of his fi delity— was fading while his preoccupation with ideas grew. This same distancing struck him during a fl ight that same year from Paris to Algiers: “The air- plane as one of the elements of modern negation and ab- straction. There is no more nature; the deep gorge, true relief, the impassable mountain stream, everything dis- appears. There remains a diagram— a map. Man, in short, looks through the eyes of God. And he perceives then that God can have but an abstract view. This is not a good thing.”46

The moral imagination, for Camus as for Simone Weil, is the work of attention. Attention to the physical world in its infl exible and indifferent attitude toward us, atten- tion to our fellow human beings in our common struggle to resist this cosmic indifference. Shortly after France’s liberation, Camus wrote a series of articles for Combat ti- tled “Neither Victims nor Executioners.” The articles were, in part, inspired by conversations Camus had in Paris with Arthur Koestler, whose damning analysis of totalitarian- ism in Darkness At Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar had won him fame on both sides of the Atlantic. But Ca- mus’ essays also refl ect Weil’s portrayal of the ways in which force, be it war or factories or governments, trans- forms human beings into things. “Neither Victims nor

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Executioners” is both an echo and reply to Weil’s claim that those who wield power are no less its victims than those who are subjected to it. Finally the articles fl ow from Camus’ lifelong attachment to the par tic u lar and con- crete, and his enduring suspicion of the general and ab- stract. As he declared in the opening article, “The Century of Fear,” we have lost the habit of speaking “the language of humanity” founded on the everyday realities of our lives when we “confront the beauty of the world and peo- ple’s faces.” In each instance of these crimes, Camus wrote, “it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction.”47

In his effort to “save bodies” carried atop the fl oodwa- ters of history, Camus diagnoses one of “the faults of our century”: people attached to the language of ideology or bureaucracy, he states, “lack imagination when it comes to other people’s deaths. . . . Just as we now love one an- other by telephone and work not on matter but on ma- chines, we kill and are killed by proxy. What is gained in cleanliness is lost in understanding.”48 In order to salvage our understanding, moral and experiential, Camus insists we push aside the usual clichés we use and instead describe as faithfully as possible what it means to kill another man in a manner so methodical and deliberate. Rather than telling the doomed prisoner that he will atone for or re- pay society for his act, we should inform him that he “will be imprisoned for months or years, torn between an impossible despair and a constantly renewed terror.” And

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then, one day, he shall be carried, his hands tied behind his back and feet “dragging behind in the corridor” to the scaffold. An executioner will “fi nally seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you horizontally on a board while another will steady your head in the lunette and a third will let fall from a height of seven feet a hundred- and- twenty- pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor.”49

Thus the power of his essay “Refl ections on the Guil- lotine,” published in 1957 with an accompanying piece by Koestler. At the outset, Camus warns us he will not speak politely about the nature of capital punishment. Instead, “it is my intention to talk about it crudely”— though not for the sake of sensationalism or sadism. We must never tolerate a certain kind of silence, Camus announces: the kind of silence born from moral lassitude or social con- vention. “When silence or verbal trickery helps to main- tain an abuse that needs to be ended or suffering that needs to be soothed, there is no choice but to speak out and show the obscenity disguised by a cloak of words.”50

Camus does not end his recital here, but instead turns to the physiological reaction of the body when its head is severed— we learn, for instance, that Charlotte Corday’s “severed head blushed from the executioner’s slap”— as well as the psychological reaction of those— such as other prisoners— who watch repeated executions. As for those of us reading these accounts, Camus is trenchant: “The man who enjoys his coffee while reading that justice has been done would spit it out at the least detail.”51 A far bet- ter reaction, of course, than savoring one’s coffee while

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the blade thumped, but the consequences— a human be- ing reduced to a headless lump of fl esh and a “society re- duced to a state of primitive terrors where nothing can be judged”— remain the same.52

In language made taut by suppressed outrage, Camus details what happens to a human being subjected to the legal, social, and technical mechanisms that form the machinery of state- sanctioned killing. He underscores the hypocrisy of offi cial claims that the death penalty has an exemplary or preventative function: if this were the case, he notes, the state would not hide the apparatus or fi nal act from the public’s view. “Today there is no specta- cle, but only a penalty we know only by hearsay along with the occasional announcement of an execution gussied up in gentle phrases.”53 Would it not be more consistent, he asks, to instead distribute to all citizens a detailed report of what happens to a living body once its head is removed? Or, even more effective, “show us the severed head” while we ready ourselves for a new day.54

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A danger with charging others with a lack of moral imag- ination is that one will conclude that, if guilty, they also lack the right of living among the rest of us. For a brief period, Camus demanded on France’s behalf both the right to judge and execute the guilty. In the summer and fall of 1944, as liberated France struggled with its imme- diate past and chaotic present, he wrote an editorial in the clandestine journal Les Lettres françaises, defending

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Charles de Gaulle’s decision to execute Pierre Pucheu, a former minister of interior under Vichy, who had ordered the execution of re sis tance fi ghters. “Too many men have died who we loved and respected,” he declared, “too many splendors betrayed, too many values humiliated . . . even for those of us in the midst of this battle who would oth- erwise be tempted to pardon him.”55

Though heinous, Pucheu’s treason was not his greatest crime. Instead, Camus declared, it was his “lack of imagination”— his inability to attend to the world and the consequences of his actions. As the Vichy bureaucrat who oversaw the nation’s police forces, Pucheu acted as if nothing had changed since France’s defeat and occupa- tion. A creature of the “abstract and administrative sys- tem he had always known,” Pucheu, in the comfort of his offi ce, signed laws condemning men to death. These pa- pers, signed and stamped, would be “transformed into dawns of terror for innocent Frenchmen led to their deaths.”56

Pucheu’s par tic u lar crime forced Camus to mea sure fully his own words: “it is in the full light of our imagina- tion that we are learning to accept without fl inching . . . that a man’s life can be removed from this world.”57 In his editorials immediately following France’s liberation, Camus focused on this same “banal” fl aw. At the end of August, reacting to the torture and murder of thirty- four Frenchmen by members of Vichy’s murderous milice, he exclaimed: “Who would dare speak here of forgiveness?” Once again, his outrage focuses on the torturer’s lack of

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imagination. After describing the state of the corpses, Ca- mus forces us to imagine what led up to their deaths: “Two men face to face, one of whom prepares to tear off the fi ngernails of the other who watches him do it.”58 Was there a place in postwar France for men who committed such crimes? No, replied Camus. As he had declared in an earlier editorial: “No one any longer has the right to lack imagination. . . . The time for abstractions is over.”59

Until, that is, the revolutionary purge collapsed into a series of increasingly inconsistent trials, accompanied by summary acts of revenge parading as justice. As Camus’ disgust deepened, Robert Brasillach’s trial took place. A novelist and essayist who was an ardent collaborationist, Brasillach was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death in early 1945. The writer Marcel Aymé, who launched a petition to General de Gaulle asking that he commute Brasillach’s sentence to life imprisonment, certainly did not lack imagination: he asked Camus for his signature.

François Mauriac, whose re sis tance and literary cre- dentials were equal to those of Camus, had already signed the petition. Devoutly Catholic, Mauriac had previously collided with Camus on the question of the purge. The older man insisted on the need for mercy and national reconciliation, while the young editor of Combat replied that national healing required a foundation built on im- placable justice. When the trials had turned into sham events, however, Camus confessed in an editorial: “We now see that M. Mauriac was right: we are going to need char- ity.”60 Yet when Mauriac refused to let him off the hook— he

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disdainfully thanked “our young master” for having spoken from the “heights of the works he has yet to write”— Camus retorted that Mauriac’s brand of mercy was irrelevant for the generation that he, Camus, repre- sented. Christianity meant nothing for “those in this tor- mented world who believe that Christ may have died to save others, but that he did not die to save us.” As a result, “we will forever refuse a divine charity which frustrates the justice of men.”61

Yet Camus signed Brasillach’s petition. Reinvesting with all of its complexity his earlier claim that “no one any longer has the right to lack imagination,” Camus spent the sleepless night before signing by dwelling on the reality of the fate that awaited Brasillach. As he explained in his accompanying letter to Aymé: “I have always held the death sentence in horror and judged that, at least as an individual, I couldn’t participate in it, even by abstention. That’s all. And this is a scruple that I suppose would make Brasillach’s friends laugh.”62

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This same scruple drove Camus, especially after his silence on the civil war, to intercede on behalf of Algerians con- demned to death by the French courts. Until the recent publication of several dozen letters he exchanged with lawyers and politicians, Camus’ remarkable role in these cases was mostly unknown. Among his most per sis tent correspondents was his friend Yves Dechezelles: fellow students at the University of Algiers, both men joined

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Combat during the war. Having established a law practice in Algiers, Dechezelles belonged to the besieged minority of liberal pieds- noirs who, like Camus, fought on behalf of the Arab and Berber communities. Not surprisingly, De- chezelles was at Camus’ side in January 1956, when he gave his Algiers speech calling for a civilian truce. In their letters, the friends address one another in the familiar “tu”— a rarity for Camus, who addressed even his close friend René Char in the formal “vous.”

In late July 1957, a French court’s decision to condemn three Algerian militants to death threatened to derail fal- tering negotiations between France and the FLN. More important, Dechezelles, who represented the men, made clear that the sentences were po liti cally motivated. One of the men, Badeche Ben Hamdi, seems to have been inno- cent of the charge of murder, while no deaths occurred in the two other cases. These cases, Dechezelles frantically explained to Camus, “are based on absolutely no concep- tion of justice.” Telling his old friend that he was “ob- sessed” by the executions and “frightened” over their con- sequences, Dechezelles was also scandalized that France’s po liti cal leaders, so as not to be “troubled by [pied- noir] extremists,” will allow “a contingent of heads to fall.” Whether by writing a newspaper or making a public speech, or intervening with the president or other po liti cal leader, Dechezelles pleaded with Camus to act: “My God, you’ve got to shout.”63

Two days after Dechezelles’ plea, there followed a sec- ond one from his colleague Gisèle Halimi, a Tunisian

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Jewish lawyer who was then launching a career as a civil rights lawyer that would span half a century. In 1956, when Camus met Halimi for the fi rst time, he told her: “If I can help you with certain cases, call me.”64 Halimi did not need to be asked twice: writing with tremendous urgency, she summarized the three cases and— with a lawyerly twist— cited Camus’ own “Refl ections on the Guillotine” as an argument for his intervention. She had no need to add that the executions would take place at Barberousse prison— the same prison where Camus’ father witnessed the execution that marked not just his life, but also his son’s. As the bureaucracy of death so meticu- lously described by Camus hummed louder, Halimi con- cluded: “You must help us.”65

Which is what Camus did— though not publicly and perhaps not always consistently with his own writings. Unwilling to break his silence on Algeria, Camus instead carefully reviewed the cases— his private papers contain long and detailed descriptions he wrote for each case— and wrote to President René Coty. Largely a ceremonial posi- tion in France’s Fourth Republic, the president neverthe- less had the power to pardon prisoners. In his letter, Ca- mus made explicit the basis of his request: none of the condemned men were guilty of “either the blind attacks or repugnant terrorism that strikes the civilian popula- tion, whether French or Muslim.” Camus reminds Coty that he is a French Algerian whose family still lives there, and that the “current drama echoes daily within me.” His public reserve, he concludes, is perhaps justifi cation

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enough for him to ask Coty to consider pardoning these men, if only to “preserve what little remains of Algeria’s future.”66

Coty acknowledged his receipt of Camus’ letter, but did not respond directly to Camus’ request. Subsequent events, though, were expressive enough. As Camus tersely noted in a letter to Prime Minister Guy Mollet, almost all of the prisoners whose lives he tried to save had been ex- ecuted.67 (This was not always the case. A letter he sent to Charles de Gaulle in 1959 on behalf of three condemned men appears to have infl uenced the general, who subse- quently commuted their sentences.) In his letters to Coty and Mollet, as with de Gaulle after he came to power in 1958, Camus always recalled the im mense power clothing these men through their elected positions. And behind these reminders hovers Camus’ insistence on the reality behind cold and bureaucratic phrases. He never wanted his interlocutors to elide or hide from the sheer fi nality of the capital punishment. This had already been a preoc- cupation when he was still a reporter for Alger républicain. In an editorial seeking the intervention of Algeria’s most powerful offi cial, the governor general, in the case of Mi- chel Hodent, who had been imprisoned on false charges, Camus spoke as one man to another: while “we glimpse you in pro cessions, laws and speeches,” he asked, “where do we fi nd the man in all of that?” And yet, behind the pomp and scenery, Camus observes, there is a human be- ing: the governor general is just one man among others. It is to this man of fl esh and blood, who will one day know the terror of death, that Camus appeals on behalf of a

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fellow man. To save the life of an individual “in a world where the humanity of so many others is lost to absur- dity and misery . . . amounts to saving oneself.”68

While Camus reminded Mollet in one of his letters that he was opposed to capital punishment as a “general principle”— this, after all, is the fruit of “Refl ections on the Guillotine”— fi erce emotional and time pressures tested this principle. At times, he clearly makes a tactical decision: in a letter to Mollet, he begins by declaring “he will leave aside the human element [to capital punish- ment] of which you are aware.”69 Instead, Camus reviews the practical and po liti cal reasons for commuting the death sentences, all of which share the same goal: pre- serving an Algeria where French and Arabs would coexist peacefully.

It may also be for tactical reasons that, at times, Ca- mus seems willing to ignore the human element alto- gether, as when he distinguishes between those acts that did not take civilian lives and “blind acts of terrorism.” Indeed, in her memoir, Halimi recounts that after another request to Camus for assistance, he replied: “I despise the murderers of women and children.” On that day, she writes, Camus “refused to help me.”70

But the precise nature of Camus’ refusal remains ob- scure. In fact, the archival documents suggest that the only time Camus turned down such a request was in February 1958. The writer Bernard Clavel wrote to him, asking if he would accept leadership of a movement to abolish the death penalty. But Camus’ secretary, Suzanne Agnely, re- plied that he was too ill to reply, much less assume such a

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task. All the more so as his illness, in the wake of receiv- ing the Nobel Prize a few weeks earlier, seemed as much emotional as physical: subject to fi ts of asphyxiation, Ca- mus avoided walking in public, terrifi ed that he would be recognized by strangers.71

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At the heart of Homer’s Odyssey is the reuniting of a fa- ther and son who never knew one another. The epic be- gins with the son, Telemachus, leaving Ithaka in search of news of the father who, twenty years later, he believes is dead. Of course, it is only upon his return that he fi nds Odysseus alive, well, and preparing to reclaim his rule. But what if Telemachus, years into his pursuit of his father, instead stumbled across a burial site on a far- fl ung Aegean isle on which his father’s name and age are inscribed. With the force of a god’s blow, Telemachus reels under the real- ization he has lived longer than did the father at whose tomb he is standing.

This, at least, is the variation on Homer’s story we fi nd in The First Man. When Jacques Cormery visits the ceme- tery in Saint- Brieuc and discovers his father’s gravestone, he realizes he is now older than his father had been when he died, a father “who had died unknown on this earth where he had fl eetingly passed, like a stranger.”72 Like Telemachus, Cormery is told he is a “spitting image” of the father he never knew.73 And, like Telemachus as he sets out to fi nd news, Cormery tells himself: “It was not too late; he could still search, he could learn who this man had been

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who now seemed closer to him than any other being on this earth. He could . . .”

And he did, in part, by remaining faithful to the one memory of his father passed down to him.

5 REVOLT

On December 17, 2010, history descended on the Tuni- sian town of Sidi Bouzid. At midday, a fruit vendor by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi walked to offi ces of the re- gional government. Standing in the street outside the entrance, he doused himself with a can of gasoline and struck a match to his clothing. By the time the fl ames were stamped out, Bouazizi’s body had been almost entirely scorched. Though he lived for another eigh teen days, the young man never woke from his coma. By the time he was buried on January 4, 2011, the fi rst tremors of Arab Spring were rippling from Sidi Bouzid across North Africa and the Middle East.

Earlier that day, the local offi cials, under the pretext that Bouazizi did not have a vendor’s license, overturned his cart and confi scated his scales. For good mea sure, they also slapped and spat on him. The sole breadwinner for a family of eight, Bouazizi was too poor to pay the

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usual bribe required in such situations. It was only after his complaints to the police went unheeded that Bouazizi walked to a nearby gas station, bought enough gasoline to soak his clothing, and returned to the governor’s build- ing. Shouting “How do you expect me to make a living?” Mohamed Bouazizi already knew the answer. The match he lit served not just as an exclamation mark, but also as the mark of rebellion. In effect, Bouazizi asked: “How can you expect me to accept the life you impose on me?”

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To the only philosophical question worth asking— whether suicide must be our response to an absurd world— Camus’ reply was clear: it cannot and must not be. If, as he wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, “revolt gives life its value,” suicide instead accepts— embraces, even— a life and world devoid of meaning and importance. It is essential, he af- fi rmed, “to die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will. Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end. . . . The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by soli- tary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day- to- day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defi ance.”1

By all accounts a thoughtful and responsible man, Mohamed Bouazizi had most probably not read Camus. But if he had, would he have disputed the claim that sui- cide is tantamount to ac cep tance of the way things are— a gesture of despair? In his fi ctionalized account of Bouazizi’s act, the French novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun