Camus and the Algerian War

Camus and the Algerian War

Michael Walzer’s penetrating article on Camus in the Fall 1984 Dissent (“Commitment & Social Criticism: Camus’s Algerian War”), is a very convincing defense of that much-maligned writer’s position during the French-Algerian war, when he refused to ally himself, unlike the majority of the French intelligentsia, unconditionally on the side of the FLN. This defense, it might be said, coincides with the rehabilitation of Camus’s political reputation in France in recent years, which had sunk, at the time of his death, to a very low point. Partly as a result of his position on the war, but mostly because of the fierce attack made on L’Homme Revoke by Francis Jeanson in Les Temps Modernes (Jeanson, by the way, was a leader of the active underground of French sympathizers aiding the Algerian rebels), Camus had lost all the considerable stature he had acquired in the immediate, post-Liberation years. But the present French mood is marked by a sharp reaction to its formerly prevalent infatuation with Marxism; and the ensuing tenderness toward the French Communist party and the Soviet Union —whose interests were considered by Sartre and company, for all practical purposes, to be identical with those of the French working class—has all but vanished. As a result, the influence of Camus has taken a new lease on life.

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