Resistance Rebellion and Death, Albert Camus
Contents
Introduction
Letters to a German Friend
Preface for the Italian Edition
First Letter
Second Letter
Third Letter
Fourth Letter
The Liberation of Paris
The Blood of Freedom
The Night of Truth
The Flesh
Pessimism and Tyranny
Pessimism and Courage
Defense of Intelligence
The Unbeliever and Christians
Why Spain?
Defense of Freedom
Bread and Freedom
Homage to an Exile
Algeria
Preface to Algerian Reports
Letter to an Algerian Militant
Appeal for a Civilian Truce
Algeria 1958
Hungary
Kadar Had His Day of Fear
Socialism of the Gallows
Reflections on the Guillotine
The Artist and His Time
The Wager of Our Generation
Create Dangerously
Introduction
IT WAS as much for the positive stand Albert Camus took on the issues of the day as for his creative writing—or rather it was for the combination of the two—that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 at the early age of forty-three. Because, in everything he wrote, he spoke to us of our problems and in our language, without raising his voice or indulging in oratory, he illuminated, as the Nobel citation stated, “the problems of the human conscience in our time.” Over and above intellectual or political leadership, he provided the moral guidance the postwar generation needed. By remaining flagrantly independent, he could speak out both against the Russian slave-labor camps and against U.S. support of Franco’s Spain.
By overcoming the immature nihilism and despair that he saw as poisoning our century, he emerged as the staunch defender of our positive moral values and of “those silent men who, throughout the world, endure the life that has been made for them.”
Indeed, one of the things that endeared Camus to all of us is that he spoke for all. As he said in the brilliant credo he voiced in the Stockholm town hall upon accepting the most universally distinguished award, “… the writer’s function is not without arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.” Whether we fight in the regular army or wage war as civilians in the shadows of some maquis, whether we succumb to famine or slink into exile, whether we are crushed by dictators or put to death by due process of law, are we not all “subject to history”?
In France Camus made his mark as a journalist and polemicist at about the same time that he asserted himself as one of that country’s leading novelists. But in 1943–4 his readers didn’t yet know that the author of the anonymous editorials they were clipping from the clandestine newspaper Combat as the most vigorous expression of their own feelings and the author of L’Etranger were one and the same person. Only after the Liberation of Paris, when Combat came out into the open, did they discover that the forthright, inspiring editorialist they had admired was named Albert Camus.
Little by little, his compatriots learned that this young Algerian Frenchman had begun life as a journalist, that, after having incurred the government’s wrath for his most revelatory reportage on the sorry condition of the Kabyle tribes of Algeria, he had come over to Occupied France and helped to found what was both an intelligence network and an underground newspaper. And, as admiration for his first two novels, The Stranger and The Plague, grew in all countries, Camus continued to write essays dealing with the major problems, social and political, that haunted him and his generation. In 1950 he brought out a collected volume of those articles under the title Actuelles; a second volume followed in 1953 and a third in 1958, soon after the Nobel Prize.
In the last year of his life, Albert Camus chose from the three volumes of Actuelles the twenty-three essays he considered most worthy of preservation in English. They deal with the perennially current issues that periodically tore him from his creative writing to speak out, as he said, “in the service of truth and the service of freedom”: war and resistance in a Europe dominated by prisons, executions, and exile; the tragedies of Algeria and of Hungary; the horror of the death penalty; and the writer’s commitment.
The very title Actuelles, which unfortunately could not be carried over into English, is typical of the man—concise without being precise, allusive without being descriptive, and modest. Indeed, this mere adjective in the feminine plural meaning “current,” “prevailing,” or “of present interest” almost requires a gloss in the original. What noun did Camus suppress for greater ambiguity—pensées, réflexions, vues?
To some readers these essays will introduce an utterly new Camus—what one might be tempted to call the Camus actuel. But he wrote them concurrently with his novels and plays and in them explored the same themes he touched upon in his creative work. An essential part of the man and the writer, these occasional articles and speeches reveal more clearly the position of one of the most lucid spirits of our time—one who was both committed and aloof, or, as he himself implied in his moral tale “The Artist at Work,” at once solidary and solitary.
And Camus would never have allowed anyone to consider these essays as incidental to, or less important than, his plays and novels, for he recognized them as a significant part of that opera omnia with which he now—too soon, alas—must face posterity.
Letters to a German Friend, Albert Camus
Letters to a German Friend
for
René Leynaud
Letters to a German Friend
Preface for the Italian Edition
First Letter
Second Letter
Third Letter
Fourth Letter
A man does not show his greatness
by being at one extremity,
but rather by touching
both at once.
—PASCAL
PREFACE FOR THE ITALIAN EDITION
THE Letters to a German Friend1 were published in France after the Liberation in a limited edition and have never been reprinted. I have always been opposed to their circulation abroad for the reasons that I shall give.
This is the first time they have appeared outside of France and I should not have made up my mind to this had it not been for my long-standing desire to contribute, insofar as I can, to removing the stupid frontiers separating our two territories.
But I cannot let these pages be reprinted without saying what they are. They were written and published clandestinely during the Occupation. They had a purpose, which was to throw some light on the blind battle we were then waging and thereby to make our battle more effective. They are topical writings and hence they may appear unjust.
Indeed, if one were to write about defeated Germany, a rather different tone would be called for. But I should simply like to forestall a misunderstanding. When the author of these letters says “you,” he means not “you Germans” but “you Nazis.” When he says “we,” this signifies not always “we Frenchmen” but sometimes “we free Europeans.”
I am contrasting two attitudes, not two nations, even if, at a certain moment in history, these two nations personified two enemy attitudes. To repeat a remark that is not mine, I love my country too much to be a nationalist. And I know that neither France nor Italy would lose anything—quite the contrary—if they both had broader horizons.
But we are still wide of the mark, and Europe is still torn. This is why I should be ashamed today if I implied that a French writer could be the enemy of a single nation. I loathe none but executioners. Any reader who reads the Letters to a German Friend in this perspective—in other words, as a document emerging from the struggle against violence—will see how I can say that I don’t disown a single word I have written here.
1 The first of these letters appeared in the second issue of the Revue Libre in 1943; the second, in No. 3 of the Cahiers de Libération in the beginning of 1944. The two others, written for the Revue Libre, remained unpublished.
FIRST LETTER
YOU said to me: “The greatness of my country is beyond price. Anything is good that contributes to its greatness. And in a world where everything has lost its meaning, those who, like us young Germans, are lucky enough to find a meaning in the destiny of our nation must sacrifice everything else.” I loved you then, but at that point we diverged. “No,” I told you, “I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means that cannot be excused.
And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.” You retorted: “Well, you don’t love your country.”
That was five years ago; we have been separated since then and I can say that not a single day has passed during those long years (so brief, so dazzlingly swift for you!) without my remembering your remark. “You don’t love your country!” When I think of your words today, I feel a choking sensation.
No, I didn’t love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we love amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving. That was five years ago, and many men in France thought as I did.
Some of them, however, have already been stood up against the wall facing the twelve little black eyes of German destiny. And those men, who in your opinion did not love their country, did more for it than you will ever do for yours, even if it were possible for you to give your life a hundred times. For their heroism was that they had to conquer themselves first. But I am speaking here of two kinds of
