Camus and France’s Algerian Wars

[Jazairi 10]

In this week’s issue of the magazine, there’s a superb essay by Adam Gopnik, about Albert Camus and his intellectual legacy—in particular, about the moral gravity of Camus’s liberal decency. By pure coincidence, I’ve recently been thinking about some of the historical background to the story, because Claude Lanzmann, whose autobiography, “The Patagonian Hare,” I recently reviewed here, was a close associate of Camus’s onetime friend Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as an activist for the independence of Algeria from French rule—for which he was prosecuted in 1960. In the book, Lanzmann writes extensively about the anticolonialist movement in France, and about what it was up against.

 

It’s a subject I spent some time researching for my book about Jean-Luc Godard’s life and work: his second feature, “Le Petit Soldat,” from 1960, was banned by the French government (not just in France but from distribution anywhere in the world) because of its references to the Algerian war. One of the things that emerges from a glance at French history during the Algerian war (1954-1962) is just how turbulent and brutal a time it was.

 

In response to a campaign of terror against French colonists by Algerian fighters, the French army engaged in the torture of its detainees—both Algerians and their French sympathizers. The fact was well known (after all, soldiers returned home from their tours of duty and spoke privately about it) and the practice outraged many French people, yet the press was barred from speaking out—because the French government practiced censorship at home. For instance, Henri Alleg, who had been tortured by the French army, wrote a book about that experience, “La Question” (Sartre wrote the preface); after its publication in February, 1958, the government banned it and seized it from bookstores. (Sartre wrote about the incident in the weekly L’Express; the magazine, too, was seized.) The publisher, Jérôme Lindon, mounted a petition to protest the censorship of the book; Camus refused to sign. (The story is told in “Les Porteurs de valises: La Résistance Française a la Guerre d’Algérie,” by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman.) Sartre ultimately paid a price for his involvement in the movement: his apartment was bombed twice by paramilitaries, in 1961 and 1962, as was the office of his magazine, Les Temps Modernes.

 

The dissolution of the Fourth Republic and the return to power of General Charles de Gaulle was something close to a military coup. As Adam writes, the Fourth Republic was democratic and, in many ways, progressive, but it was unstable: France had twenty Prime Ministers between 1947 and 1958, some only serving several days. Its leaders waged war in Algeria, unleashing the army’s cruel might against Algerian insurgents and their sympathizers, but French military leaders there nonetheless feared that its will was weak. In May, 1958, rebels in the French army overthrew the French civil authorities in Algiers, then took Corsica and were preparing to do the same in Paris—to install an actual military dictatorship. Their condition for not doing so was the return to power of de Gaulle as head of state in a centralized Presidential government. Thus the Fifth Republic (the current French regime) was founded.

 

In Algeria, the French army itself did the dirty work of combatting an insurgency; in France and, indeed, in Europe at large, the French secret service formed a secret group of paramilitaries to assassinate enemies, including Algerian agents and sympathizers. (The protagonist of Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat,” played by Michel Subor, was one of those agents, and the drama concerns his mission to kill a pro-Algerian professor in Geneva. Rachid Bouchareb’s film “Outside the Law,” from 2011, about three Algerian brothers in postwar Paris, also dramatizes the group’s actions.) Camus was killed in a car accident in 1960—he didn’t see the worst of the war at home. In 1961, when de Gaulle began to negotiate with Algerian representatives, soldiers involved in the short-lived putsch founded a secret army of paramilitaries (the O.A.S., or Organisation Armé Secrète), which included many former collaborators with the German occupation) to assassinate Algerian agents and sympathizers. Meanwhile, Algerian militants committed terrorist acts in France, and the French police was also involved in this dirty war; Lanzmann writes of the “Paris massacre of 1961”:

 

the CRS riot police had lain in wait for [Algerian protesters] at the entrances to métro stations after a peaceful demonstration in favor of Algerian independence that had included women and children; some were beaten to death with truncheons, others dragged off in police vans and thrown into the Seine.

 

The conflict at home over the Algerian war—which is to say, the virtual civil war fought within France over the war in Algeria—was part of a grand struggle for the soul of France, for the very survival of democracy there (the attempted assassination of de Gaulle, as seen in “The Day of the Jackal,” was plotted by the O.A.S.). That’s why Camus’s principled and decent abstention from the pitched debates over the events in Algeria seemed to be a refusal to choose between stark alternatives, in the name of an impossible third option. Under such circumstances, there’s reasonable doubt whether it was Camus or Sartre who remained in greater fealty to political abstraction. Yet the abstraction that Camus bravely defended is a humane one; Adam characterizes it as the opposition to “totalitarian thought,” to the readiness of political idealists to “look past the humanity of the kulaks or the pieds noirs or whoever is the necessary victim of the day,” to the recognition that “all systems of ideal government were wrong, all atrocities equally atrocious.” Lanzmann (speaking of his relations with his father during the French resistance) also addresses Camus’s famous dictum:

 

Like Albert Camus, who condemned the blind terrorism of which his mother might have been a victim during the war in Algeria, saying, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice,” I too instinctively chose my loyalty to my father over my loyalty to the [Communist] Party…

In the long run of history, Camus has been proven right regarding the mounting and unresolved agonies that would result from campaigns of terror—even ones undertaken in a legitimate cause (Barbet Schroeder’s remarkable documentary “Terror’s Advocate,” about the lawyer Jacques Vergès, addresses the issue movingly). At the same time, neither his writing nor his silence was able to do much about it, and that, above all, may be another tragic dimension of Camus’s liberalism. And I do wonder—what actually happened to Camus’s mother, Catherine, during the Algerian war? Perhaps the best thing he could have done for his mother—the path of least injustice—would have been to get her to pull up stakes and join him in Paris.

 

P.S. Adam mentions Francis Jeanson, the Sartre associate who criticized Camus in Les Temps Modernes in 1952 and became a leading pro-independence activist (and was driven into hiding for nearly a decade). He, too, surfaces in Godard’s work: after having been the philosophy tutor to Anne Wiazemsky, whom Godard married in 1967, Jeanson played a remarkable extended scene with her in “La Chinoise” (as a philosophy professor whose practical political action is countered by the young Maoist’s revolutionary plot). Wiazemsky’s recent book, “Une Anné Studieuse,” about her first encounters with Godard in the mid-sixties, their burgeoning relationship, the early days of their marriage, and the shoot of “La Chinoise,” offers an engaging portrayal of the relations between the two men. (Oddly, on the book’s cover, it’s called a novel; nothing in the text suggests that it’s anything other than a memoir.)

 

Film still from “Outside the Law.”

 

 

 

Read more The Front Row: Camus and France’s Algerian Wars : The New Yorker