Camus’s state of mind in 1958 dominates most discussions of his relationship to Algeria, drowning out the rest. But it’s important to understand how his position evolved from his earliest anti-colonialist activism. In addition to the never-before-translated “The Misery of Kabylia,” this Harvard edition of Algerian Chronicles includes an appendix of lesser-known texts that did not appear in the French edition of 1958. They add to our sense of Camus’s specific commitments in Algeria and show him acting on those commitments. “Indigenous Culture: The New Mediterranean Culture” is a lecture from 1937, when Camus ran a Communist Party cultural center in Algiers. Here he wrests the meaning of Mediterranean culture from the right-wing and racialized notion of the “Latin genius” that was central to the ideology of Charles Maurras’s Action Française.
There is an eccentric, but significant Algerian text included here, a micro-narrative: in a 1938 newspaper article, “Men Stricken from the Rolls of Humanity,” Camus describes prisoners caged in the hold of a ship in the port of Algiers before being sent to the penal colonies. Camus boards the ship and passes an Algerian prisoner who is clutching the bars of his cage. The man asks him for a cigarette. I believe it’s the only place in all of Camus’s work where the writer shows that he hears, and understands, if only the simplest sentence in Arabic.
There is a letter to the editor of the French daily Le Monde in response to police violence against North Africans on July 14, 1953, in Paris. The police fired on demonstrators who were protesting the arrest of Messali Hadj, leader of an early independence movement. There were seven deaths and a hundred people wounded. For Camus, the police violence was motivated by racism: “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.”
We also include here the full draft of a letter that appeared in an abridged version, in English, in a 1957 issue of the British magazine Encounter—a rare statement, perhaps the only one—published anywhere during Camus’s self-imposed “silent period.” The writer addresses the charge that he argued for Hungarian freedom from the Soviets yet wouldn’t support the same freedom for Algerians. The shortened letter published in Encounter synthesizes his position: “The Hungarian problem is simple: the Hungarians must have their freedom back. The Algerian problem is different: the freedoms of two groups of people must be guaranteed.”16
Finally, among the most interesting documents to come to light in recent years are two of Camus’s private letters to the French president René Coty, protesting death sentences imposed on Algerian freedom fighters—members of the same Front de Libération Nationale whose tactics he deplored. These letters were discovered by Eve Morisi in the Camus archives in Aix-en-Provence.17 When, on the occasion of his Nobel Prize, Camus told an Algerian student at a press conference in Stockholm that he had done more for the Algerian cause than the young man could know, he was certainly thinking about these private letters:
As an Algerian-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, I am affected daily by the current tragedy, and deeply enough that, as a writer and journalist, I have resolved to take no public step that might, despite the best intentions in the world, aggravate rather than improve the situation.
Germaine Tillion estimated that Camus intervened in over 150 cases.18
When Camus spoke in Stockholm about the men whose lives he had saved behind the scenes, he may have been overly optimistic: four of the ten condemned men he named in a footnote to his September 1957 letter to the French president were guillotined a month later. Today in Algiers, the names of all the guillotined men from the Algerian War are inscribed, in Arabic, outside the former Barberousse prison.
Finally we include the polemic around Camus’s 1957 Stockholm press conference with its tragicomedy of misquotation. When the Algerian student arguing the cause of the FLN challenged Camus, the Nobel laureate responded at length, ending with his infamous quid pro quo: “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” Le Monde reported the sentence as “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”
It has often been reduced to a formula that makes Camus sound even more like a sentimental egoist: “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.”19 Three days after the press conference, he sent a letter of clarification to the director of Le Monde. With its gesture of unhappy empathy, its sympathy for the young Algerian nationalists, the letter explains, in a single phrase, the emotional conundrum that would move Camus, six months later, to publish his Algerian Chronicles: “I would also like to say, in regard to the young Algerian who questioned me, that I feel closer to him than to many French people who speak about Algeria without knowing it. He knew what he was talking about, and his face reflected not hatred but despair and unhappiness. I share that unhappiness.”
1. René Maran, “Chronique littéraire,” La Corrèze, August 9, 1958.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Colonialism Is a System,” in Colonialism and Neocolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30–47; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
3. Roger Grenier, Albert Camus: Soleil et ombre (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 306.
4. See for example Susan Sontag, “The Ideal Husband,” New York Review of Books, September 26, 1963, reviewing a translation of Camus’s Notebooks from 1935 to 1942.
5. To take just one example, Camus’s characteristic expression of political feeling through his own body is almost impossible to understand in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: “Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is the cause of my suffering at present as others might say their chest is the cause of their suffering.” The original French is beautiful: “Car vous me croirez sans peine si je vous dis que j’ai mal à l’Algérie, en ce moment, comme d’autres ont mal aux poumons.” Goldhammer’s version is clear: “Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment, as others feel pain in their lungs.”
6. Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 223. See his differently nuanced focus on Camus’s despair in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 185: Camus’s work expresses “a waste and sadness we have still not completely understood or recovered from.”
7. Albert Camus, The First Man (New York: Random House, 1995), 75, 176–97, 318.
8. The epigraph is to an epilogue to the first 1950 edition of the novel; a subsequent 1954 edition has no epilogue, but the original edition has been translated as The Poor Man’s Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). James Le Sueur’s introduction explains the novel’s complex history.
9. Hamid Grine, Camus dans le narguilé (Paris: Editions Après la Lune, 2011). Among Algerian writers and critics who have published influential work on Camus: Maïssa Bey, L’ombre d’un homme qui marche au soleil: Réflexions sur Albert Camus (Montpellier: Editions Chèvre-Feuille Etoilée, 2006), and two collections edited by Aïcha Kassoul and Mohamed Lakhdar Maougal, Albert Camus: Assassinat Post-Mortem (Alger: Editions APIC, 2005), and Albert Camus et le choc des civilizations (Alger: Editions Mille Feuilles, 2009).
10. Assia Djebar, Algerian White: A Narrative (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), 109.
11. Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942), trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Random House / Vintage, 1989), 59.
12. From the preface to Algerian Chronicles.
13. “Greece in rags” is the title of one of the articles in the series that Camus did not reprint in the Chronicles: “La Grèce en haillons,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2006), 1:653–56.
14. “European” and “Muslim” have never been mutually exclusive terms, but in pre-independence Algeria they served to distinguish colonizers and settlers of European origin from indigenous Arab and Berber populations living under French rule.
15. See L’Humanité, May 11 and June 30, 1945, as well as the analysis by Alain Ruscio, “Les Communistes et les massacres du Constantinois (mai–juin 1945),” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 94 (April–June 2007): 217–29.
16. Camus’s published letter can be found in the letters section of the June 1957 issue of Encounter, 68.
17. See Eve Morisi, ed., Camus contre la peine de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).
18. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1997), 399.
19. Here is the sequence of sentences in the original French: “En ce moment on lance des bombes dans les tramways d’Alger. Ma mère peut se trouver dans un de ces tramways. Si c’est cela la justice,
