At a moment when the most shortsighted realism, a debased conception of power, the passion for dishonor, and the ravages of fear disfigure the world, at the very moment when it is possible to think that all is lost, something on the other hand is beginning, since we have nothing more to lose. What is beginning is the period of the indomitable men devoted to the unconditional defense of liberty. This is why your attitude serves as an example and a comfort to all those who, like me, have now broken with many of their traditional friends by rejecting any complicity, even temporary, even and above all tactical, with regimes or parties whether of the Right or of the Left that justify, however little, the suppression of a single one of our liberties!
In conclusion, allow me to say that, reading the other day the wonderful message you addressed to your people, I appreciated not only your steadfastness and constancy but also the long suffering you must have experienced. When oppression wins out, as we all know here, those who nevertheless believe that their cause is just suffer from a sort of astonishment upon discovering the apparent impotence of justice. Then come the hours of exile and solitude that we have all known. Yet I should like to tell you that, in my opinion, the worst thing that can happen in the world we live in is for one of those men of freedom and courage I have described to stagger under the weight of isolation and prolonged adversity, to doubt himself and what he represents.
And it seems to me that at such a moment those who are like him must come toward him (forgetting his titles and all devices of the official orator) to tell him straight from the heart that he is not alone and that his action is not futile, that there always comes a day when the palaces of oppression crumble, when exile comes to an end, when liberty catches fire. Such calm hope justifies your action. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Believe me when I tell you that across thousands of miles, all the way from far-off Colombia, you and your collaborators have shown us a part of the difficult road we must travel together toward liberty. And allow me, in the name of the faithful and grateful friends receiving you here, to greet fraternally in you and your collaborators the great companions of our common liberation.
The End
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
