Algeria, Albert Camus

Contents
Algeria
Preface to Algerian Reports
Letter to an Algerian Militant
Appeal for a Civilian Truce
Algeria 1958

Algeria

PREFACE TO ALGERIAN REPORTS

HERE is a group of selected articles and texts concerning Algeria. They are spaced out over a period of twenty years—from 1939, when almost no one in France was interested in that country, until 1958, when everyone talks about it. A volume would not have been enough to contain all the articles. It was necessary to eliminate the repetitions and too general commentaries and preserve the facts, figures, and suggestions that may still be useful.

As they stand, these texts sum up the position of a man who, faced very young with the misery of Algeria, in vain multiplied his warnings and, long aware of his country’s responsibilities, cannot approve a policy of preservation or oppression in Algeria. But I have long been alert to Algerian realities and cannot approve, either, a policy of surrender that would abandon the Arab people to an even greater misery, tear the French in Algeria from their century-old roots, and favor, to no one’s advantage, the new imperialism now threatening the liberty of France and of the West.

Such a position satisfies no one today, and I know in advance how it will be received by both sides. I sincerely regret it, but I cannot do violence to what I feel and what I believe. Besides, on this subject no one satisfies me either. This is why, finding it impossible to join either extreme camp, faced with the gradual disappearance of that third camp in which it was still possible to keep a cool head, doubting my certainties and the things I thought I knew, convinced in short that the real cause of our follies is to be found in the habits and functioning of our intellectual and political society, I decided to take no further part in the constant polemics that have had no result other than to harden the uncompromising points of view at loggerheads in Algeria and to split even wider a France already poisoned by hatreds and sects.

There is indeed a spitefulness in the French, and I refuse to add to it. I know only too well what it has cost us and still costs us. For the past twenty years the French have loathed their political opponent to the point of preferring anything to him, even foreign dictatorship. The French apparently never tire of such potentially fatal games. They are indeed the strange people who, according to Custine, would rather depict themselves as ugly than be forgotten.

But if their country disappeared, she would be forgotten, however she had been depicted; and in a subjugated nation we should not even have the liberty of continuing to insult each other. Until such truths are admitted, we must be resigned to giving a purely personal testimony with all necessary precautions. And, personally, I am interested only in the actions that here and now can spare useless bloodshed and in the solutions that guarantee the future of a land whose suffering I share too much to be able to indulge in speechmaking about it.

Still other reasons keep me from playing such public games. To begin with, I lack the assurance that allows one to settle everything. On this point terrorism as it is practiced in Algeria greatly influenced my attitude. When the fate of men and women of one’s own blood is bound, directly or indirectly, to the articles one writes in the comfort of the study, one has a right to hesitate and to weigh the pros and cons.

In my case, if I am aware that in criticizing the course of the rebellion I risk justifying the most brazen instigators of the Algerian drama, I never cease fearing that, by pointing out the long series of French mistakes, I may, without running any risk myself, provide an alibi for the insane criminal who may throw his bomb into an innocent crowd that includes my family. I went so far as to admit this fact baldly in a recent declaration which was commented upon most strangely. But anyone who does not know the situation I am talking about can hardly judge of it. And if anyone, knowing it, still thinks heroically that one’s brother must die rather than one’s principles, I shall go no farther than to admire him from a distance. I am not of his stamp.

This does not mean that principles have no meaning. An opposition of ideas is possible, even with weapons in hand, and it is only fair to recognize one’s opponent’s reasons even before defending oneself against him. But on both sides a reign of terror, as long as it lasts, changes the scale of values. When one’s own family is in immediate danger of death, one may want to instill in one’s family a feeling of greater generosity and fairness, as these articles clearly show; but (let there be no doubt about it!) one still feels a natural solidarity with the family in such mortal danger and hopes that it will survive at least and, by surviving, have a chance to show its fairness. If that is not honor and true justice, then I know nothing that is of any use in this world.

Only from such a position have we the right and the duty to state that military combat and repression have, on our side, taken on aspects that we cannot accept. Reprisals against civilian populations and the use of torture are crimes in which we are all involved. The fact that such things could take place among us is a humiliation we must henceforth face. Meanwhile, we must at least refuse to justify such methods, even on the score of efficacy.

The moment they are justified, even indirectly, there are no more rules or values; all causes are equally good, and war without aims or laws sanctions the triumph of nihilism. Willy-nilly, we go back in that case to the jungle where the sole principle is violence. Even those who are fed up with morality ought to realize that it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them even to win wars, and that such deeds do us more harm than a hundred underground forces on the enemy’s side. When excuses are made, for instance, for those who do not hesitate to slaughter the innocent in Algeria or, in other places, to torture or to condone torture, are they not also incalculable errors since they may justify the very crimes we want to fight?

And what is that efficacy whereby we manage to justify everything that is most unjustifiable in our adversary? Consequently, the chief argument of those who are trying to make the best of torture must be met head on. Torture has perhaps saved some, at the expense of honor, by uncovering thirty bombs, but at the same time it aroused fifty new terrorists who, operating in some other way and in another place, will cause the death of even more innocent people.

Even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy, such a flouting of honor serves no purpose but to degrade our country in her own eyes and abroad. Finally, such fine deeds inevitably lead to the demoralization of France and the loss of Algeria. And censorship, always stupid, whether resulting from shame or cynicism, will not change anything about these truths. The government’s duty is not to suppress protests, even interested protests, against the criminal excesses of repression. Its duty is rather to suppress the excesses and to condemn them publicly in order to keep each individual citizen from feeling personally responsible for the actions of a few and hence obliged to denounce or approve them.

But, to be both useful and equitable, we must condemn with equal force and in no uncertain terms the terrorism applied by the F.L.N. to French civilians and indeed, to an even greater degree, to Arab civilians. Such terrorism is a crime that can be neither excused nor allowed to develop. Under the form it has assumed, no revolutionary movement has ever accepted it, and the Russian terrorists of 1905, for instance, would have died (they proved this statement) rather than stoop to it.

It would be impossible to transform an awareness of the injustices imposed on the Arab population into a systematic indulgence toward those who indiscriminately slaughter Arab and French civilians without regard for age or sex. After all, Gandhi proved that it is possible to fight for one’s people and win without for a moment losing the world’s respect. Whatever the cause being defended, it will always be dishonored by the blind slaughter of an innocent crowd when the killer knows in advance that he will strike down women and children.

I have never failed to state, as can be seen in these reports, that these two condemnations could not be separated if we wanted to be effective. This is why it seemed to me both indecent and harmful to protest against tortures in the company of those who readily accepted Melouza or the mutilation of European children. Just as it seemed to me harmful and indecent to condemn terrorism in the company of those who are not bothered by torture. The truth, alas, is that a part of French opinion vaguely holds that the Arabs have in a way earned the right to slaughter and mutilate while another part is willing to justify in a way all excesses.

To justify himself, each relies on the other’s crime. But that is a casuistry of blood, and it strikes me that an