COMMITMENT & SOCIAL CRITICISM: CAMUS'S ALGERIAN WAR

...The lives of Moslems were of no less importance in my eyes," writes Beauvoir, "than those of my fellow countrymen...

...And yet the social critic can never be alone with his people...

...talk about justice masks a merely local love...

...Myself as well...

...Like the schoolmaster Daru in Camus's fine short story "The Guest," one can do that without making anything like an unconditional commitment...

...he must join in a political practice that enacts the principles, a struggle for the principles, and so transform himself even as he transforms the world...

...His "cry of indignation," Jules Roy later wrote, made him "suspect in the eyes of the authorities...

...These are essays in negotiation, the work of a social critic continuallY aware of the on-the-ground obstacles that the map of right and wrong only inadequately represents...

...He said this to a group of students in Stockholm in 1957, when he received the Nobel Prize, and some of his friends have treated it as an offhand remark, a passionate but unreflective outburst...

...The fine deeds did lead to demoralization and loss, and perhaps Camus, had he lived, would have joined Jules Roy in calling for negotiations with the FLN and, in effect, acknowledging the loss of Algeria...

...The articles, the most important of which are reprinted in Actuelles III, constitute a powerful piece of social criticism, and they led, a year later, to Camus's "exile" from Algeria...

...he was always drawn to the projections and gradations of "true relief...

...So Camus remained what he was: a pied noir writer...

...Philosophers of that sort were dangerous...

...This did not lead Camus, as long as he continued to write about Algeria, to temper his criticism of French policies, but it did make it impossible for him to line up, as Sartre and Beauvoir did, with the enemies of the French...

...But he must speak, and speak out loud, so long as there is hope that he will be listened to among his own people...

...That was the meaning, and the inevitable result, of exporting democracy—even if the export was effective only for that one moment when the people of the two colonies voted for freedom and simultaneously submitted themselves to new masters...

...and each had a right to his own...

...What we really want is a social critic who emerges out of his own society...

...Nothing in her life seems to have changed in the years afterward...

...I think that is what he believed...

...He attempted different formulations, always maintaining an antinomy that he might better have avoided by saying simply that a justice without room for love would itself 424 be unjust...

...But there is one moment in his life when Camus is commonly said to have betrayed his principles—an all-important and long-drawn-out moment, dominating the last years of his life: the moment of the Algerian War...

...They miss the texture of moral life...

...I am not of his stamp...

...Rereading Actuelles III, Camus's Algerian chronicle, it is hard to see the bad faith...

...they maneuver by the moral (or the ideological) map...

...Camus's lines about his mother and his brother lend support to this view, but I think that it is, as I have indicated but not yet argued, fundamentally misconceived...

...he had set out from inhabited territory, and he longed to reach inhabited territory again...

...In any case, His omniscience is in the service of abstraction, and He is likely to miss the deep gorges and impassable mountain streams...

...In bad times, it is precisely the principles of ordinary life that need to be asserted...

...He rejects immortality...

...her autobiography is wonderfully lively and openhearted...

...Constantly present in Camus's mind," writes a relatively friendly critic, "was the thought that his mother, his brother, and his friends might be exposed to increased terrorism by words which he could utter without the slightest personal danger to himself...

...The common view of Camus is similar...

...How is he to live...

...The last chapter, calling for immediate negotiations with the FLN, is a tense and passionate argument with Camus...

...he lacked Camus's political realism...

...too far, Camus responds, and one becomes a terrorist...

...He is like a judge, an activist judge, perhaps, whose judgments are resolutely impersonal...

...In the case of the Algerian War, however, they made the more radical move recommended by the Sartrean program: guiltily, they separated themselves from the French people, and they supported the FLN, so far as I can see, without a word of criticism...

...Sartre hopes that the committed intellectual will "never renounce his critical faculties," but this is a matter of some difficulty, touch and go, for his critical faculties are the product of his social conditioning...

...We can learn from his experience something about the practice of criticism, its obligations and limits...

...I only want to suggest that such feelings are not the precondition, they are the result, of social criticism...

...Despite the "severance" of their links with France, they remained at home, where they 426 were resolute and sometimes courageous critics of their own government...

...As early as 1945, in his Combat articles, Camus had recognized that the great majority of Arabs did not want to become French citizens: there was an Arab nation ("je voudrais rappeler aussi que le peuple arabe existe...

...He had to choose between eternal justice and French Algeria, and he rejected eternal justice...

...Before taking a stand one must find a standpoint...

...in a bad time he did better than most of his fellows...

...Camus, born among the poor, had no difficulty criticizing the wealthy elite of the pied noir community...

...When he came to Algiers in 1956 to appeal for a "civilian truce," French thugs surrounded the hall in which he was speaking and shouted for his death—while Fanon, inside the hall, was bitterly critical of Camus's "sweet sister" speech...

...The French had their own loyalties, and so did the Arabs...

...God is the ideal "ideal observer," and it is a commonplace of the philosophical tradition that He is chiefly interested in observing Himself...

...He applies those principles with a stringency that makes his fellow citizens uncomfortable: hence he often finds himself alone...

...After 1958, Camus wrote no more about Algeria...

...IM an of letters and moraliste, Camus represents an old French tradition...

...All Camus's schemes had this purpose: to find a formula sufficiently plausible to guide the negotiations...

...still justice did not come into view...

...One might well prefer someone from Japan or Iceland or, even better, someone from Mars, an impartial spectator or ideal observer for whom critical distance is not, so we might suppose, a problem...

...He has been blamed first for a failure of concreteness, for the very abstraction he hated: a rigid universalism...

...As for your choice," says Roy to his dead friend, "I cannot doubt that it would have been like my own, at the cost of what anguish...

...More accurate to say that he was a good man...

...He would commit himself instead to "the common existence of history and of men, everyday life with the most possible light thrown upon it, the dogged struggle against one's own degradation and that of others...

...The war is a catastrophe in progress...

...Hence his Algerian politics, which can best be understood as a long, ultimately a failed, struggle against the degradation of the pied noir community...

...VI C amus's anti-absolutist politics depends not on critical distance but on what we might call critical connection...

...I couldn't sit down near them anymore...

...The attempt was especially urgent because what was at stake was the very existence of the pied noir community...

...Criticism is a more intimate activity than the standard view allows...

...Every Frenchman . . . oppresses, despises, dominates...

...It was necessary to negotiate the differences...

...Moral anxiety lies right on the surface of the reprinted articles and speeches...

...the pied noir intellectual must make himself over—first into a detached observer, and then into a supporter of Algerian liberation...

...Similarly, Camus's first commitment was to self-determination for the pied noir community, but he understood that the first commitment of the Arabs was to their own self-determination...

...He distanced himself not from his local setting and particular interests, but from the universal values "that had hitherto dominated his language...

...Later she was tied in a foetal position and given a spinal injection that appeared to be a drug...

...Though he may not be wrong to be silent, we long to hear his voice...

...Perfect solitude, like existential heroism, is a romantic idea, and it is closely connected to another romantic idea: the absolute opposition between art, philosophy, and moral value, on the one hand, and ordinary life, mundane concern, "bourgeois society," on the other...

...In 1961, a year after Camus's death, his 430 friend Jules Roy, another pied noir writer, published a powerful indictment of the French war...

...Lowmindedly, he defends his friends and relatives...

...But the standard left argument is simple and straightforward: that kind of "belonging" must be repudiated...

...He could not have written about the outcome of the war in O'Brien's casual tone: "Politically, Camus and his tribe . . . were casualties of the post-war period...

...universalism and particularism, justice and love, are equally in evidence...

...Le vrai intellectuel," as Julien Benda wrote, "est un solitaire...

...But Camus conceived of the critic as one of the crew, who can't leave before the passengers...

...The fundamental criticism is that Camus's universalism is only a cover for his particularism...

...It can hardly be said, then, that Camus is an objective critic of French colonialism...

...Who are his comrades...

...Detach oneself, step back, step farther back...

...There remains a diagram—a map...

...This can sometimes take slightly comic forms, as in Beauvoir's announcement, after the overwhelming popular vote endorsing de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, that she was no longer a member of the French people: "The result of the referendum had severed the last threads linking me to my country...

...It is to their credit, I suppose, that party hacks, whose alignment was really unconditional, always thought them to be petty-bourgeois intellectuals...

...He has his own obligations and loyalties...

...they will have to give up the false universalism of "Frenchness"—" the perennial lie of constantly proposed but never realized assimilation"—and acknowledge Arab particularity...

...What Sartre has in mind is a shift in political position, not social location...

...But how exactly did he fail...

...And yet love fits uneasily into a general moral theory, for it always favors the near and the few...

...The humanist," Beauvoir wrote in her autobiography, "had given way to the pied noir...

...Burial reportedly took place in a secret mass grave...

...The terms must be negotiated, but clearly the French will have to accept a radical redistribution of land, wealth, and power...

...The task of the social critic is precisely to touch the conscience...

...In the case of the other North African colonies, Morocco and Tunisia, the argument was easy...

...True justice must include his own people, though not on their own terms...

...She was held there for more than two months...

...The values he wanted to defend were shared only formally, in practice rejected, by the greater number of his own people...

...How to do that...

...First comes the struggle against one's own degradation and then, by extension, "that of others...

...He never succeeded in doing this—"these reports," he wrote in the Preface to Actuelles III, "are . . . the record of a failure"— but that is not to say that he was wrong to try...

...But there was also a more general point here...

...He returned to the same theme in his 1958 Preface: "We could have used moralists less joyfully resigned to their country's misfortunes...

...Her husband was one of a group evicted from their land by the government...

...Hence they fit the standard model of the social critic...

...it is what his critics commonly deny...

...On that view, as on Fanon's, there is nothing to do but abandon ship...

...he must acknowledge his conditioned self and then subject it to an unrelenting analysis and critique...

...His comment: "The intelligentsia and the totalitarian interpretation of the world...

...his intimacy can't take the form of private speech...

...He did not call for an end to French rule, but his program was very close to that of the Algerian nationalists of the '30s, who were themselves Francophile, their faces turned toward Paris, their politics revolutionary only in the sense of 1789...

...The only authentic example of Camusian nonsense is provided by his many pages (most of them written early on) about Mediterranean culture— an imaginary world of classical "measure" that neither Camus's own people nor the Arabs of Algeria ever gave any sign of inhabiting...

...If we stand sufficiently apart, indeed, we can see the moral world much as God must see the physical world...

...the exile of the pied noir community is a catastrophe "that has not happened...

...I'm French.' The words scalded my throat like an admission of hideous deformity...

...One might well ask, however, whether a solution to the problems of Algeria that ignored Camus's mother, or the interests of the pied noir community generally, could possibly be just...

...It seemed to me both indecent and harmful to 429 protest against tortures in the company of those who readily accepted . . . the mutilation of European children...

...But Camus was not an alien, even though he would soon leave his homeland...

...Every day it became more apparent that there was no chance of preserving, or of reforming and renewing, the Algeria of his youth...

...They were also victims of an absolutist politics with which we should not make our peace...

...But his homelessness was not selfmade...

...Love is injustice," Camus wrote, "but justice is not enough...

...He was indeed a pied noir, born and raised in Algeria...

...The rejection was visible as early as 1945, at the time of the Setif rising and the savage French repression, and it was a permanent presence in Camus's life from 1954 on...

...This is a role that Camus explicitly rejected, telling an interviewer in 1953 that his own choice, if he could choose, "would at least be never to sit on a judge's bench . . . like so many of our philosophers...

...He exploits his connections, as it were, not his disconnections...

...But then, like God, he can only take an abstract view...

...But he doesn't then enter into a world of universal principles...

...Sometimes he expressed his resistance in terms of the simple antinomy of justice and love that I have cited from the Notebooks...

...If we are to be properly critical, then, we must turn our own people into "the others...

...In 1939, the young Camus visited the Kabyle Mountains, and wrote (for a socialist newspaper in Algiers) a series of articles on the suffering of the Berbers and the indifference of the colonial regime...

...432...

...After 1954, these two forms of madness were at war with one another, and it was Camus's proposals for equality and federation that looked increasingly dreamlike...

...And so it invites us to doubt the standard view of the social critic as someone who breaks loose from his particular loyalties and views his own society from the outside— from an ideal point, as it were, equidistant from all societies...

...But it might be said that Camus's silence was eloquent in its hopelessness...

...they established their detachment and denounced the local barbarians (and condemned Camus for refusing to join their denunciations...

...Certainly, when he canvassed the possible alternatives to independence, Camus was in search of justice, looking for an outcome that would respect the identity, the interests, the political aspirations of the two Algerian nations...

...At least, Camus would have known that something had been lost...

...The values I ought to defend and illustrate today," Camus wrote in his notebook in October 1946, "are average values...

...I suspect that Camus had another reason for supporting federation: he saw it as a particular instance of the pluralism to which he was increasingly drawn...

...That is indeed a view determined by distance, but it doesn't provide a ground for social criticism...

...From the beginning to the end, Canius displayed the same commitment to particularity...

...So her hardwon impartiality slides into a cold indifference...

...the dream that the Arab masses can be canceled out, silenced and subjugated, is just as mad...

...Maybe so...

...It is an honorable tradition but not without its temptations, the greatest of which is the Godlike pronouncement...

...But the two charges are really one...

...It can be brutal enough, but it doesn't touch the conscience of the people to whom it is addressed...

...Radically desocialized, he is a candidate for ideological discipline: hence the appeal of the Communist party...

...Subsequent retractions of these statements and confessions, to Amnesty's knowledge, have not resulted in investigations of alleged torture...

...While blindfolded, she was burned and beaten...

...But though the articles required a physical journey that few pied noir journalists undertook, they did not require that Camus stop being a pied noir journalist...

...In this view, social criticism from within is literally impossible...

...It is a heroic project, and the result is a hero, standing apart from his fellows, bound to his critical principles...

...The group reportedly hijacked a bus and demanded to be taken to the capital city of AsunciOn, where they hoped to draw attention to land tenure disputes and to poverty...

...The two commitments were equally legitimate, and the conflict between them could not be resolved by abstract reasoning (or by counting heads...

...He must first "universalize" himself...

...Sartre himself, Beauvoir too, avoided party discipline, though it can't be said that they gave their critical faculties free rein...

...From 1954 on, he provides an example only of the inability of the "moderate bourgeoisie" of France to come to grips with the brutality of colonialism...

...He was also a working intellectual, a radical critic, who faced the hardest choices and who flinched sometimes but didn't walk away...

...Morality required the mutual acceptance, not the abolition or transcendence, of these different meanings...

...He remained in fact a Frenchman of Algeria," writes O'Brien, and as time went on he came increasingly "to take the side of his own tribe against the abstract entities...

...I want to reconsider Camus's Algerian moiment, to defend him against his critics, and at the same time to free him from the bonds of myth...

...During her detention, she was tied to the grill of a barred window and left hanging by a rope attached to the handcuffs on her wrists...

...Therein lies perhaps the whole * Pied noir ("black foot"): in origin the mainland name for French settlers in Algeria, many of whom were poor farmers, imagined, like our hillbillies, as barefoot and dirty...

...A certain forbearance qualifies or alternates with his stringency...

...And he has been blamed, second, for a failure of distance, for sentimentality and an unrestrained particularism...

...What Camus could not accept was the claim that the pieds noirs were already degraded, condemned beyond redemption by their colonial history...

...He repeated it later on, it is said, only because of the stir it created and the attacks from opponents on the left—who wrote as if they didn't have mothers or wouldn't think of defending them...

...French lives, even pied noir lives, on the wrong side of history, meant more to him—just as Arab lives meant more to the intellectuals of the FLN (though this latter point, it has to be said, was not always apparent: Camus was committed to a people, the FLN intellectuals to a cause...

...it makes social criticism superfluous...

...he learned to write in Algeria, and he never wrote more lyrically than when he wrote about the sun and sea of his native land...

...In effect, there were two nations in Algeria, and it was not clear that they could both be free...

...No death certificates were issued, and no bodies were returned to the families...

...In practice, however, the analysis and criticism is more likely to be aimed at one's fellow intellectuals or pieds noirs—not oneself but the ones who look like oneself: the purpose is differentiation...

...And at this point he explicitly denied the antinomy of love and justice, tribe and universe: "If that is not honor and true justice, then I know nothing that is of any use in this world...

...He can't just deny that he is a petty-bourgeois intellectual, or a pied noir, or whatever, and leap into universality...

...Here he became "that just man without justice," described by Simone de Beauvoir in her memoirs...

...I was kept like this for six days without food or sleep," she said...

...The standard view of critical distance rests on a homely analogy: we are more ready to find fault with other people than with ourselves...

...If he sides with the oppressed, he does so because he sees their parties and movements as embodying universal principles...

...I don't mean to mock Simone de Beauvoir...

...it is certainly true that he never rejected French Algeria...

...Though he is said to have been cool and aloof in personal relations, Camus was a connected social critic...

...Camus, in all his writings, resisted this demand, for he understood that independence under FLN leadership meant the destruction of the pied noir community...

...It turns out that the repudiation is easier in the case of class membership than in the case of nationality, for the nation is commonly the deeper tie (and kinship networks often extend, as Camus's did, across class lines, though not across national lines...

...Intimate criticism is a common feature of our private lives...

...Authorities then transferred her to a prison and subsequently brought her before a judge to make preliminary statements...

...He can never be assimilated on the other side of the border...

...The same petty-bourgeois intellectual, the same 425 pied noir, must function in both roles: a strenuous business, though not impossible...

...Hence heretics, prophets, insurgent intellectuals, rebels—Camus's kind of rebels—are insiders all: they know the texts and the tender places of their own culture...

...Writing in 1965, very much in the shadow of the Algerian War, Sartre argued that the only way to do it was through "perpetual self-criticism...

...Like everyone else, Camus sometimes succumbed, but he was programmatically committed to resist...

...The social critic has the same impulse, especially when his own people are confronted by hostile forces...

...This requires a talent so spare and unadorned that I doubt I have it...

...Men in civilian clothes abducted Maria Baez in early 1982 and took her, hooded and gagged, to police headquarters...

...The social critic, Sartre says, must escape his own conditioning...

...At that moment, and in the "Human Rights" in Paraguay Maria Margarita Baez de Britez is the widow of a Paraguayan peasant killed by police in 1980...

...I don't think that Camus was a hero in the 1950s—he may have been a hero in the '40s—and I don't much like the phrase "just man," which suggests a moral absolutism that he explicitly repudiated...

...But though much that they said was true, there was also much that they failed to say, and their failures were closely connected to the radical character of their "self-criticism...

...And his universalism was similarly consistent, though it took a shape that O'Brien did not recognize: it was constructed out of repeated particularities...

...Or again: "All those people in the streets . . . they were all murderers...

...We don't criticize our children, for example, in front of other people, but only when we are alone with them...

...He has been much blamed for his silence, and perhaps the blame is justified: what is the use, after all, of a silent intellectual...

...It's probably fair to say that he hated racism more for what it did to the French than for what it did to the Arabs, but he would have accepted the reversal of that priority in the writing of an Arab intellectual...

...In his Notebooks, in late 1947 or early '48, Camus had copied out the exclamation of a Russian emigre of the 19th century: "What a delight to hate one's native land and to long for its collapse...

...Still, it is a new life that the critic must create for himself, and the creation is hard...

...His most famous statement on Algeria had exactly this form: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice...

...This is not a good thing...

...After all," he wrote mockingly of the ancient argument about rootedness and nomadism, "we need a native soil and we need travel...

...It is no better in ethical life than in geography...

...She knew about the brutality of the FLN's internal wars but chose not to write about it...

...There was no choice, many French leftists argued, but to choose the least mad, the most just, of these alternatives...

...The issue between them is critical distance...

...They constantly threw icy water over me...

...Roy shares his friend's commitment to the reiteration of justice: for the Arabs, and for the French too...

...As true relief requires contact and closeness, so true morality requires involvement and love...

...If he hates his fellows and breaks his ties, why should they pay attention to what he says...

...The terrorist campaign against civilians signaled the FLN's commitment to the elimination of the "French fact," and the use of torture signaled the French commitment to "silence and subjugate" the Arabs...

...Memmi, a Tunisian Jew whose people had also benefited from French colonialism, was not entirely unsympathetic...

...Too close, say Camus's opponents, and one becomes an apologist...

...According to the police report, the peasants died in a shootout...

...The life of a social critic must begin with the rejection of his own socialization, the refusal of society-in-himself...

...It isn't entirely clear who the analyst is here and who the analysand...

...the deep gorge, true relief, the impassable mountain stream, everything disappears...

...These Algerians were aliensathome, living in a colonial limbo, and they would become effective nationalists only when they reinvented their politics in an Algerian (Islamic, Arab) context...

...The order of that last phrase is important...

...Of course, he often found himself 431 standing at some distance from his fellow pieds noirs...

...Nor was he willing to sign manifestos along with French supporters of the FLN...

...He was solitaire et solidaire...

...The task of men of culture and faith . . . is not to desert historical struggles...

...We also know, because of Herbert Lottman's biography, what he did every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday...

...he is tempted to "pass," making up in zeal what he lacks in familiarity and ease...

...The two are distinguished not merely by their conclusions but by the way they set about their work, by the way they locate themselves among their fellows...

...It was even worse, because, whether I wanted to be or not, I was an accomplice of these people...

...They supported such actions from a distance...

...The pattern of French settlement probably made partition seem even more difficult than co-existence within a federated state...

...Camus would not have said, for example, that French and Arab lives were of equal importance in his eyes...

...it has its own (implicit) rules...

...But the export of democracy was pressed only halfheartedly from Paris and vehemently opposed by pied noir spokesmen...

...Of course, they did not go to Algiers and plant bombs in cafes and dance halls...

...What then did justice require...

...But the case was different in Algeria where over a million Frenchmen had settled...

...it was what justice (liberty too) required...

...But such people are unlikely to take an interest in French colonialism...

...It was much harder for him to take Memmi's view and describe the entire community as somehow "in the wrong...

...Hence the hollowness of his rhetoric—the stylistic sign of bad faith...

...It's not that one severs the threads in order to become a critic, but that the force of one's criticism leads one to think about severing the threads...

...As soon as there were serious and organized demands for independence, independence had to be granted...

...He shaped his politics out of his primary loyalties...

...I felt as dispossessed as I had when the Occupation began...

...No more could he accept Frantz Fanon's description, which underlies and rationalizes the terrorism of the FLN: "The Frenchman in Algeria cannot be neutral or innocent...

...Maybe so, though there is also something to be said for Camus's claim "that too much is expected of a writer in such matters...

...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...

...We must look at them as if they were total strangers...

...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...

...It is clear from Roy's book that he doesn't believe it will happen...

...Man, in short, looks through the eyes of God...

...Moreover, he was connected in a way that tests the theory of critical distance— to a group that benefited, or that thought it benefited, from the oppression of others...

...But criticism will falter and fail if the threads are really cut, for the social critic must have standing among his fellow citizens...

...nor need he embrace and cultivate his solitude...

...De Gaulle maneuvered between the two, but that was, however necessary, a politician's, not an intellectual's task...

...This tension is one of the reiterated themes of the Notebooks during the years of Camus's "second cycle," when he was writing The Plague, The Just Assassins, and The Rebel...

...In the Marxist scheme, a pied noir intellectual was exactly like a bourgeois intellectual: Camus belonged, wrote Albert Memmi in 1957, "to a minority that is historically in the wrong...

...austere urgency collapsing, says Conor Cruise O'Brien, into hollow rhetoric...

...But I respect an order of precedence: I move first to the injustice that cries out in pain, since the other for the moment constitutes only a hypothesis...

...Nothing French will be saved in North Africa . . . unless justice is saved...

...nor could he support the pied noir ultras, committed now, to the point of no return, to policies he had opposed all his life...

...And he perceives then that God can have but an abstract view...

...But it isn't her own deformity that Beauvoir is describing in these passages...

...The trouble with the analogy is that such easy fault-finding is never very effective...

...But he doesn't begin by cutting himself off...

...That last is not only a prudential but also a moral point, and I want to develop it briefly before asking again how social criticism properly begins...

...After Setif, he returned to Algeria and wrote for Combat a second series of articles denouncing the repression and calling again for absolute equality: France must demonstrate its commitment "to export to Algeria the democratic regime that [its own citizens] enjoy...

...The FLN represents liberation, the French are fascists...

...More simply, he must consult the moral map and set out to cross the border that separates oppressor from oppressed...

...The FLN victory would have made it impossible in practice anyway, as he foresaw...

...But there is no reason either why 9 million Arabs should live on their land like forgotten men...

...I want to render justice on one side without stripping it from the other...

...There is little evidence that she attached much importance to any particular lives...

...He could not join Sartre and Beauvoir in supporting the FLN...

...His writing and his life, both of them enhanced, perhaps, by his early and senseless death, have taken on mythic proportions, so that we can plausibly feel that we know him well even without knowing much about him...

...His opponents are critics of a different sort...

...Several children in the region had recently died from malnutrition...

...Nor was this, in his view, merely the creed of a threatened minority...

...Camus's prose is sometimes too elevated, too "noble," to capture average values, but he had another and a more pressing problem...

...From the beginning of its revolt, in 1954, the FLN demanded independence and full sovereignty...

...Like Rousseau, Camus had no use for philosophers who loved humanity and disdained the men and women among whom they lived...

...It is rather to remain what they are . . . to favor freedom against the fatalities that close in upon it...

...He must undertake, says Sartre, "a concrete and unconditioned alignment with . . . the underprivileged classes...

...Someone who is inside, connected, emotionally close, must wrench himself loose and learn to say no...

...This doesn't require going to live and work among the underprivileged...

...Camus's response to the Algerian War has been criticized in two different ways...

...The social critic works from principles naturalized in his own society...

...Independence was necessary, perhaps courage, but not the repudiation of national identity: he simply applied the standards of the French left—the putative standards, 427 indeed, of the colonial regime—to the case of Kabylia...

...Should he have broken his silence and told his people that the struggle was over, that they had to leave...

...Harassment of defense lawyers also obstructs due process...

...Even this failure serves, in a way, to sustain the myth: it makes Camus into a disfigured hero, human, all-toohuman...

...but by that time Camus was dead...

...As if the critic plucked his principles from the sky...

...There is no more nature," Camus wrote in his notebook after a plane flight from Paris to Algiers...

...Camus's description of the intellectual is better: solitaire et solidaire, apart and united...

...Even "true intellectuals" have parents, friends, familiar places, warm memories...

...He called for a redistribution of land, technical assistance on a large scale, lccal selfgovernment, equal rights for all the inhabitants of Algeria...

...Though she is a very sophisticated writer, her politics and morality are artless— which Camus's never were...

...Reading her account of her Algerian years, one feels the force of E. M. Forster's injunction: "Only connect...

...Amid the anguish and uncertainty she described, Maria Baez asked, "What is my crime...

...The shame she expresses over Algeria, and the pathology of shame that she also expresses, both find their echo on the American left during the Vietnam years...

...she seems never to have given a thought to the likely fate of the pied noir community after an FLN victory...

...For Algeria . . . I have unbridled passion, and I surrender to the pleasure of loving...

...Where...

...and she was outraged by Algerian deaths only when they were caused by the French (there were, no doubt, enough of those to provoke anyone's outrage...

...Madness was practical, moral sanity utopian...

...He did not live to see the final spasm of OAS violence, after which it was morally impossible for the pieds noirs to remain in Algeria...

...The detached and disinterested moralist goes on and on, and we don't care...

...it can only shape and control his public speech...

...oddly, that doesn't dispel the myth, any more than it reveals the inner man...

...We know what he stood for: he was a man of principle, a "just man...

...For all her passion, she writes without the complexity of love...

...Particular men and women he does not see at all...

...The two would have to coexist, and the coexistence would require complicated arrangements of a sort incompatible with the currently favored principles of political life: state sovereignty and legal uniformity...

...But that remark, like all of Camus's Algerian arguments, is prefigured in the Notebooks, and 428 its repetition is of a piece with the Preface to Actuelles III...

...meaning of the Odyssey...

...Of course, the severing of threads had begun much earlier, and I suppose one can say that it began with self-criticism, though self-criticism of a very special sort: "I could no longer bear my fellow citizens...

...Camus's argument against the use of torture during the Battle of Algiers applies also to the brutalities of pacification: "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 . . . such fine deeds inevitably lead to the demoralization of France and the loss of Algeria...

...In effect, says O'Brien, Camus supported the government's policies, at least up to the point at which de Gaulle made his deal with the FLN...

...Terrorist attacks on French civilians left her unconcerned...

...Wrenched loose from bourgeois France, unable to become Algerians, Sartre and Beauvoir see an ideologically flattened world...

...Physical and psychological torture continued as interrogators pressed her to sign a document of "personal testimony...

...An excerpt from Camus's Notebooks, 1942: "Calypso offers Ulysses a choice between immortality and the land of his birth...

...Camus is as much a man of honor as a man of principle, and honor begins with personal loyalty, not with ideological commitment...

...Amnesty International has received persistent reports that Paraguayan authorities force political detainees to sign statements without informing them of the contents...

...Men and women don't lose their rights even if they are "historically in the wrong...

...But the historicism and collectivism of these arguments are further examples of abstract morality...

...or we must make ourselves into strangers to them...

...In the last two years of his life, years of rising opposition to the war among the French in France and increasing fanaticism among the French in Algeria, he was silent...

...And because it is intimate, it is sometimes reduced to silence, as impersonal judgment never is...

...Here as in every domain, I believe only in differences and not in uniformity...

...Political choices are extraordinarily easy, a function of critical distance...

...it worked by reiteration, not by abstraction...

...The distance that they established had its cost...

...It is curious that Camus never considered the partition of Algeria, the only solution that was compatible with those principles and with the self-determination of the two communities— compatible also with Camus's assertion (in 1958) that "the way to human society passes through national society...

...High-mindedly, it is said, he applies the same standards to oppressors and oppressed alike, without regard to their actual circumstances...

...A small cost, perhaps, if one conceives of human life in existentialist terms: the petty-bourgeois intellectual, aspiring to be the author of himself, invents himself as a social critic...

...But his sense of precedence was almost certainly right—especially after the bloody (and as it turned out pointless) "pacification" campaigns of de Gaulle's first years in power...

...He refused to cut himself loose and establish critical distance...

...Many prisoners subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment have "confessed" to offenses they have not committed...

...The threat came from within as much as from without: that is why he condemned French racism long before FLN terrorism...

...but (let there be no doubt about it...

...nothing is concealed...

...But the silence of the connected social critic is a grim sign—a sign of defeat, a sign of endings...

...Living in France, he still wrote about Algeria from close up...

...And when he refused to choose Camus was charged with the crime he finally embraced—the crime of love, expressed now in terms of brothers rather than mothers: " . . . if anyone still thinks heroically that one's brother must die rather than one's principles, I shall go no further than to admire him from a distance...

...There was also a French nation...

...The 'French fact' cannot be eliminated in Algeria, and the dream of a sudden disappearance of France is childish...

...From Amnesty Action, February-March, 1984 q years after, Camus occupied a kind of noman'sland...