Albert Camus was born in Mondovi in 1913 to a mother of Spanish origins who was both deaf and illiterate. His father died in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was barely a year old. Young Camus grew up in a three-room apartment in the working-class Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers with his domineering grandmother, his silent mother, who supported the family by cleaning houses, his brother Lucien, and his uncle Etienne, a barrel maker.
A grade school teacher, Louis Germain, recognized his talent and saw him through to the lycée, and after completing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Algiers, with a thesis on Plotinus and Saint Augustine, he turned to theater, to journalism, and to the literary career that led him to Paris, the anti-Nazi resistance, and the many books we know, until his life was cut short by a car accident in 1960, when he was forty-six years old. Long after Camus left Algeria, his writing remained imbued with his intense love of Algerian landscapes—the mountainous Kabylia, the Roman ruins of coastal Tipasa, the shining port of Algiers, and the modest blue balcony of his mother’s apartment on the rue de Lyon. Those places were his wellspring.
But by the time Algerian Chronicles appeared, Camus was out of touch with the political and social realities of a country where, aside from brief stays, he hadn’t lived since 1942. In 1956, he traveled to Algiers for a last-ditch political effort. No longer the poor schoolboy in Belcourt, the now renowned writer was staying at the luxurious Hôtel Saint-Georges high up in the city, drafting his “Call for a Civilian Truce.” A roundtable was organized at the Cercle du Progrès that would bring together representatives of various political and religious groups who might be in a position to impose a civilian truce in a country being torn apart by terrorism from the French army, on the one hand, and the dominant Front de Libération Nationale, on the other. At the meeting was Doctor Khaldi from the Muslim community, Ferhat Abbas from the moderate Party of the Manifesto (Abbas would soon join the FLN), and representatives from the Catholic and Protestant churches in Algeria.
Camus’s frustration was palpable in his speech: “If I had the power to give voice to the solitude and distress that each of us feels, I would speak to you in that voice.” He heard the French “ultracolonialists” in the crowd shouting “Death to Camus!” but he didn’t know that he was under the protection of the Front de Libération Nationale that day—the same FLN he decries in his foreword to Algerian Chronicles for their murderous violence toward French and Arabs alike, and who would emerge to lead the first free Algeria in 1962. Roger Grenier has emphasized how much the writer was out of sync that day: “For the European liberals, the civilian truce was the last hope. For the Islamic nationalists—though they hid this carefully—it was merely a strategic maneuver.”3 Camus’s moment of solitude was, for so many others, a high moment of revolutionary fervor.
Camus frames the Algerian Chronicles with references to his silence. After his coalition failed to achieve a civilian truce, Camus refused to make a public statement on the Algerian question, convinced that whatever he might say could only exacerbate the conflict by provoking the rage of one side or the other. Algerian Chronicles is his very public way of breaking his silence, his last hope to have some influence, and it was certainly another blow to him that nobody seemed to be listening. The book ends with the dramatic promise of “the last warning that can be given by a writer … before he lapses once again into silence.”
It’s not unusual to find, in the years following his death and still today, polemics that chastise him for not signing the Manifesto for the 121, a petition of leading French intellectuals calling for military insubordination by Algerian war draftees.4 The manifesto was published, and promptly censored, nine months after Camus’s death. His 29-month silence, from January 1956 to June 1958, became a metonymy for cowardice. And of course, his actual death in 1960 made that 29-month silence permanent. It’s worth emphasizing that Camus was no longer alive when Francis Jeanson’s network was put on trial for its support of the FLN, nor when the 121 intellectuals signed their manifesto, nor when Sartre prefaced Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, nor, indeed, when the war ended with the Evian Accords in 1962. It’s impossible to know exactly how Camus might have reacted to those events.
Camus’s 1957 collection of short stories, Exile and the Kingdom, includes a short story about politics and silence called “Les Muets”—literally “The Mutes,” but usually translated as “The Silent Men.” Silence was fundamental to Camus, through his love for his deaf-mute mother. In a way you could even say that silence, not French, was this writer’s mother tongue. In “The Silent Men,” a workshop of barrel makers, a half-dozen Frenchmen and a single Arab, go out on strike for better wages. Management won’t budge, and the union sends them all back to work, having negotiated a pitiful agreement that gives them the right to earn back wages by working overtime.
Their amicable French boss, who has always treated them with paternalistic bonhomie, now comes to greet them as if nothing has changed. They respond with silence, and when he insists, more silence. There was no concerted plan among them to say nothing; it was spontaneous, a collective imperative, and the narrator of the story, trying to understand, concludes that “anger and helplessness sometimes hurt so much that you can’t even cry out.” Giving speech to anger and helplessness and injustice is the task Camus set for himself in publishing the Algerian Chronicles. His sense of impending loss, his horror of terror, even his vacillations, endow the book with many moments of literary beauty, and with an uncanny relevance.
If until recently Algerian Chronicles has been somewhat forgotten in France, the book’s legacy in the United States and England is even more obscure. This is the only work by Camus never to have been published in its entirety in English translation.
Instead of Algerian Chronicles, Knopf and Hamish Hamilton published Resistance, Rebellion, and Death in 1961. In the last year of his life, Camus had prepared a selection of newspaper articles, speeches, and position papers spanning his entire career. He selected his “Letter to a German Friend” from 1944, a few of his articles in Combat on the Liberation of Paris, a text on Spain and on the Hungarian insurrection of 1956, his Reflections on the Guillotine, and less than a quarter of the full text of Algerian Chronicles. Arthur Goldhammer has done a great service in his retranslation of the previously translated pieces as well as the new material, bringing Camus’s language into clear focus.5
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death was a good title for an English-speaking public in 1961, who understood Camus in abstract, not specific terms. The average reader of Camus in the United States and England may not even have known that Camus and Sartre disagreed violently on whether Algeria should be independent, nor that they had fallen out over their political differences. Camus was still largely identified in the public mind with his resistance to Nazism during the Occupation, and with his first novels.
Titles go in and out of fashion like everything else, and Camus imposed short, essential titles that exuded metaphysical intensity: The Fall, The Plague, The Stranger, Exile and the Kingdom. Hence, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: “Resistance,” to remind the reader of the writer’s role in World War II; “Rebellion,” to echo Camus’s 1951 essay The Rebel; and “Death,” referring to Camus’s opposition to the death penalty—and to the fact of Camus’s own death. The writer had passed quickly from life into legend.
In response to the generation of 1961, who tended to appreciate Camus in philosophical terms, classifying him with Sartre and Beauvoir and Malraux, a new generation of critics writing after the 1970s took their distance from the romance of existentialism. They confronted Camus with his Algerian origins and expressed their dissatisfaction. The Arabs of La Peste and L’Etranger, complained Edward Said, are “nameless beings used as background for the portentous European metaphysics explored by Camus.”6 The questions raised by this first generation of postcolonial literary critics still animate many a classroom debate: Why doesn’t Meursault’s Arab victim speak? (All we hear is another Arab playing on a little reed.) Why does the setting for The Plague look more like Marseille than Oran?
In 1994, the long-delayed publication of Camus’s unfinished novel, The First Man, answered some of these questions, and rereading this novel today in tandem with Algerian Chronicles gives an even fuller picture of Camus’s attitudes. The adult Jacques, who returns
