Camus and Algeria Jane Hiddleston jane.Hiddleston@exeter.ox.ac.uk

‘Camus and Sartre both wanted a new, more humane social order, but Sartre remained a violent revolutionary in theory, while Camus was a man in revolt who rejected revolutionary excess, whether Jacobin or Communist in origin’ (Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997) p. 310.

‘Sur le plan politique, je voudrais rappeler aussi que le peuple arabe existe. Je veux dire par là qu’il n’est pas cette foule anonyme et misérable, où l’Occidental ne voit rien à respecter ni à défendre’ (‘Crise en Algérie’, Albert Camus: Œuvres complètes IV, 337-351 (p. 338) He calls for, ‘une justice claire et forte, l’union des différences, la marche confiante vers un avenir exemplaire’ (‘L’Algérie déchirée’, Albert Camus:Œuvres complètes IV , 356-371 (p. 371)

‘What most Arabs don’t understand is that I love it as a Frenchman who loves Arabs and wants them to be at home in Algeria, but I don’t want to feel like a foreigner there myself’ (quoted in John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008, p. 394).

Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953) Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953). ‘L’écriture se réduit alors à une sorte de mode négatif dans lequel les caractères sociaux ou mythiques d’un langage s’abolissent au profit d’un état neutre et inerte de la forme’ (p. 67).

Edward Said: ‘The irony is that wherever in his novels or descriptive pieces Camus tells a story, the French presence in Algeria is rendered either as outside narrative, an essence subject to neither time nor interpretation… or as the only history worth being narrated as history.’ (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994, p. 217).

‘Camus’s writings on Algeria, both his political essays and his fictions, dramatically show how terror is a trap for both sides in any conflict and why justice demands the recognition of limits and a respect for human lives that must come before the pursuit of any cause’ (David Carroll, Albert Camus, The Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. New York: Columbia UP, 2007 (p. 185).

‘When the violence of the French past is thus inadvertently recalled, these ceremonies become foreshortened, highly compressed commemorations of survival, that of a community with nowhere to go’ (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 223)

Further Reading Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria Further Reading Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory, and the Work of Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Edward Hughes, Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.