Make no mistake about the meaning of these remarks. I am under no illusion as to how some people will take them. These are “the dregs of society,” they will say, and no doubt they are (although one hopes that the people who say this aren’t the same ones who think that the elite of society consists of the salon intellectuals who grant themselves the right to judge these dregs).
The point is not to pity these prisoners. Nothing is more abject than the sight of human beings subjected to inhuman conditions. That is the only emotion this piece is meant to convey.
It would have been nice, for instance, not to see elegant women on the dock, drawn there by curiosity. Because curiosity should not have deprived these women of something I am embarrassed to have to remind them of: their sense of decency.
It is not up to us to judge these men. Others have done this for us. Nor is it for us to pity them, which would be childish. The only purpose of this piece is to describe the singular and final fate of these prisoners, who have been stricken from the rolls of humanity. And perhaps it is because this fate cannot be appealed that it is so horrifying.
Letter from Camus to Le Monde5
JULY 19–20, 1953
To the Editor:
Some of your readers, of whom I am one, may have felt a certain admiration upon learning that after the massacre of July 14, the government filed charges against persons unknown for assaulting officers of the law. This was indeed a rather fine example of cynicism.
When one discovers in addition that most newspapers (not including yours) applied the rather discreet term “disturbance” or “incident” to a minor police operation that cost the lives of seven people and left more than a hundred injured, and when one sees our legislators, in a hurry to get away on vacation, hastily dispatch the embarrassing corpses, one is justified, I think, in asking whether the press, the government, and Parliament would have been quite so nonchalant if the demonstrators had not been North Africans, and whether the police would have fired with such confident abandon if that had been the case. Surely the answer is no, and the victims of July 14 were to some extent the victims of a racism that dares not speak its name.
Nevertheless, one doesn’t want to leave the impression that this attitude is shared by all French people, so it also seems to me that at least a few of us, setting partisan motives aside, ought to insist on another investigation, which would focus primarily on those who gave the order to open fire and who, even within the government, have joined that long-standing conspiracy of stupidity, silence, and cruelty that has uprooted Algerian workers, forced them to live in miserable slums, and driven them in desperation to violence in order to kill them on this occasion.
Thank you for your attention.
—Albert Camus
5. On July 14, 1953, a demonstration organized by the Communist Party ended in violent clashes between the police and about 2,000 Algerian demonstrators on the Place de la Nation. Most of the demonstrators belonged to the Movement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD), which was calling for the release of Messali Hadj. The killing of 7 demonstrators and wounding of 44 others triggered an intense reaction, echoed by the press. An official investigation concluded that the demonstrators had provoked the police. The incident led to a reorganization of the police intended to exert stricter control on Algerians. See E. Blanchard, “Police judiciaire et pratiques d’exception pendant la guerre d’Algérie,” Vingtième siècle 90 (2006): 61.
Draft of a Letter to Encounter
JUNE 1957
To the Editor:
The Channel is much wider than most people think. Mr. Caracciolo, whose letter can hardly be said to overflow with sympathy for me or my country, can therefore be excused for not knowing that for the past twenty years, first in Algiers itself, quite alone, and later in France, at a time when the public, including that segment of the public which is most vociferous today, systematically ignored Algerian realities, I defended the right of the Arab people to be treated justly. He may be excused as well for not knowing that because of my actions, I was forced to leave Algeria, where I had been deprived of the means of earning a livelihood.
It is less excusable, perhaps, given that he was sufficiently interested in my position to have set out to investigate it, that he does not know that one year ago, alone, I am sorry to say, among French writers in Paris with outspoken views on the subject, I went to Algiers to plead for a civil truce in a lecture that was nearly drowned out by the shouts of ultracolonialists calling for my death. This personal effort followed, moreover, a series of articles published in L’Express, which summarized my position, and which are available to your correspondent in the offices of that publication. Finally, on March 15, the date of Hungary’s national holiday, I publicly expressed the disgust that any free man must feel at the use of torture, whether practiced in Budapest or Algiers.
I hope, but am not certain, that this record of my past service will win me an acquittal by Mr. Caracciolo. I am not certain of this, however, because I know that there are people of a certain cast of mind who would be unwilling to grant an acquittal to men of my sort unless we were to enlist in the Arab guerrilla or accord wholehearted approval to the statements and actions of the FLN. I am unable to grant them this satisfaction, however. Although I am aware that French policy has gone awry, I can still distinguish between Algerian liberty and the fanatical intransigence of overheated nationalism, dreams of an Arab empire, and above all terrorism when it attacks children, women, and innocent civilians, whether Arab or French.
No one, after all, can ask me to denounce repression while remaining silent about this terrorism, which is only making Algeria’s misfortunes worse. Furthermore, I do not believe—far from it—that Algerian liberty is incompatible with the rights of French settlers in Algeria (1,200,000 of whom have lived in the country for more than a century and 80 percent of whom are people of modest means). The solutions that I have always favored (talks, proclamation of the end of the colonial era, followed by autonomy within a federal framework) are inspired by this historical reality, and they can guarantee the rights and liberties of both populations.
In any case, this reality, which is already quite unlike anything else in history, cannot be compared without rhetorical excess to what is going on in Hungary, where a venerable free nation (defended by men who, it should be noted, never made terrorist attacks on Russian civilians) has been oppressed and massacred by the troops of a tyrannical foreign power. For such a comparison even to be possible, one of every eight Hungarians would have to be a Russian settler established in the country for a century. I therefore maintain that the abandonment of Hungary by Asian and African nations incapable of distinguishing between the last throes of nineteenth-century colonialism and the rise of a new and powerful colonial empire that is pressuring them in a calculated and relentless fashion is inexcusable and constitutes a serious blow to their own future.
One final word about France. Mr. Caracciolo’s letter is by no means indulgent toward my country, and I know that his feelings are shared by many. Please do not expect me to attack my homeland in a foreign publication. I know better than anyone the errors of French policy in Algeria. They are, as I have said elsewhere, vast, tragic, and perhaps irreparable. For the past few months in particular, it has not been easy to be French. In conclusion, however, I would ask your readers to pose themselves a question: Do they know of any other country engaged in a civil as well as foreign war in which a substantial body of public and intellectual opinion has found the strength and generosity to publicly indict the methods employed in that war and, even in the midst of extreme anguish, called for justice to be done to the very people engaged in implacable combat with their own nation?
Sincerely yours,
Albert Camus
Two Letters to René Coty, President of the Fourth Republic6
September 26, 1957
Mr. President,
The attorneys for several condemned prisoners in Algeria7 have sent me the requests for pardon that they recently submitted to you on behalf of their clients. Although I am unable to comment on the substance of these cases, I am moved to add my request to those already before you. My reason for doing so is that these cases do not involve indiscriminate attacks or the repugnant form of terrorism directed against civilian populations, be they French or Muslim. Furthermore, in nearly all of these cases, there were no deaths.
As an Algeria-born Frenchman whose entire family lives in Algiers and who is aware of the threat that terrorism poses to my own kin as to all the inhabitants of Algeria, the
