CAMUS AND THE ALGERIAN WAR
Stone, I F & Walzer's, Michael & Abel, Lionel & Frank, Joseph
Michael Walzer's penetrating article on Camus in the Fall 1984 Dissent ("Commitment & Social Criticism: Camus's Algerian War"), is a very convincing defense of that much-maligned...
...Galois died at the age of 21, killed by his adversary in a duel...
...SIMONE PLASTRIK, Business Manager 110...
...And clearly, as we might remind Lionel Abel, there are right-wing as well as left-wing forms of debility...
...To be a social critic in Sartre's sense, he writes, "is a heroic project...
...It is, rather, mean and vindictive, and his motives for differing with the Sartreans are constantly reduced to being only a reflex of his wounded vanity—he was losing in the Parisian popularity contest...
...Camus [he writes], how Sartre had sneered at his rescue-squad morality [which means, of course, a readiness to come to the aid of victims of catastrophe no matter what the cause...
...Let's take Camus the individual, the person, first of all...
...8. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 percent or more of total amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or other Securities: None...
...9. For Completion by Nonprofit Organizations Authorized to Mail at Special Rates (Section 411.3, DMM): The purpose, function and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during preceding 12 months...
...Whether we are being asked to accept Sartre as such a "hero" is not quite clear...
...With kind regards to my traducer, Lionel Abel, I. F. STONE q Michael Walzer Replies I am grateful for Joseph Frank's comment and glad to hear that Camus is being read and honored again in France...
...B. Paid and/or Requested Circulation...
...So far as such self-criticism involved a hatred of "le bourgeois," the class from which he came himself, Sartre was hardly breaking with any French cultural tradition in subjecting it to merciless criticism...
...In Le Testament de Dieu, Bernard Henri Levy writes: "Limiter le politique pour faire place a l'kthique...
...So Camus was simply wrong about Algeria...
...Or, in America, would it be to support Fritz Mondale against President Reagan in last November's election...
...Now I knew Camus quite well, but I do not myself know what principles he stood for...
...This defense, it might be said, coincides with the rehabilitation of Camus's political reputation in France in recent years, which had sunk, at the time of his death, to a very low point...
...Much of what the French press reports about the Afghan rebels comes from information furnished by the young doctors sent to aid the guerrillas by the organization that Domenach mentions...
...I was on a program at Chautauqua along with I. F. Stone last August, and for two days at breakfast, lunch, and dinner we argued...
...He gives a wholly erroneous impression of my talk at Chatauqua, of my activities, and my life...
...and one wonders, as a result, if the exclusively moral terms in which Walzer depicts Camus and his critics ("love versus justice") does not tend somewhat to blur the real issue...
...It made short work of that odd feeling of inferiority that debilitates most of our intellectuals but that I, for one, refuse to feel...
...But even in terms of the concrete French social-political situation of the Algerian war years, the stand taken by Sartre did not have that air of lonely and lofty prophetic dignity that Walzer seems willing to attribute to it...
...5. Location of the Headquarters of General Business Offices of the Publishers: 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...we know what he stood for: he was a man of principle, a 'just man.' " But was he...
...The capital H in the text tells the whole story...
...Michael Walzer's penetrating article on Camus in the Fall 1984 Dissent ("Commitment & Social Criticism: Camus's Algerian War"), is a very convincing defense of that much-maligned writer's position during the French-Algerian war, when he refused to ally himself, unlike the majority of the French intelligentsia, unconditionally on the side of the FLN...
...Directly inspired by Camus's Actuelles, and containing a heart-felt tribute to his example—"one cannot repeat too often how upright a figure he was, and still remains, as an intellectual"—this work contains a slashing attack on the idolatry of History (primarily, though not exclusively, in its Marxist-Leninist guise), which provided the largest part of the French intelligentsia with their ethical norms during the past halfcentury...
...I am 76 and enjoying one of the happiest periods of my life...
...and the ensuing tenderness toward the French Communist party and the Soviet Union —whose interests were considered by Sartre and company, for all practical purposes, to be identical with those of the French working class—has all but vanished...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date-374...
...Actual no...
...1. Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, and Counter Sales: Average no...
...We would understand his having been torn between his attachment to Algeria and his desire for justice, if he had refused to take sides between the two camps...
...Sartre is thus cast as the advocate of a more universal law of justice...
...For example, there was Raymond Aron, who was certainly not pro-Communist, even if not exactly a conservative...
...But now these defrocked Marxists [the "new philosophers," ex-Maoists all, on whom Domenach was reporting] set up Doctors without Frontiers and organized the march for survival aimed at Cambodia...
...My wife of 55 years is my guardian angel...
...But the confrontation of "mother" and "justice" seems to me just a literary phrase and not the recognition of a conflict fraught with tragedy...
...In fact, he was something quite different...
...but there is nothing "open-hearted" in her depiction of Camus...
...But he had an easier time than Camus, for he had no ties to the pied noir community and no close feel for Algerian politics...
...And if this is what Walzer means, he is simply wrong...
...Camus was not an ideologist, any more than he was a just man...
...There has never been an Algerian nation"—Aron replied, "These Muslims have not been a nation in the past, but the youngest among them want to create a nation...
...And I believe the planet must become one polls, and humanity conscious of itself as one race if we are to survive...
...living in a state of laceration [because] action has to give itself ethical norms in this climate of insuperable impossibility," there is very little evidence of such "laceration" in Sartre's own career or the picture we derive from the autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir...
...They, on the other hand, wished to be hard-boiled Realpolitiker (but not enough to join the Communist party, which would have meant surrendering their own bourgeois liberties), who knew at last where History was going and had jumped onto the locomotive...
...4) What annoys Abel most is my identification of Camus with the democratic left, which he professes to know nothing about...
...September 18, 1984 My health is not failing...
...of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date-2,300...
...A recent solid and very informative Italian book that has come my way (Anna Boschetti's Limpresa Intelletuale, Sartre e 'Les Temps Modernes'), studies "le champ intellectuel" (the term is used in the sense given it by Pierre Bourdieu) within which Sartre functioned, his relation to the whole social-cultural context from the beginning of his career up through 1957...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months-10,600...
...Let me cite, as one example, a little brochure, Enqu'ete sur les idees contemporaines, published as a series of newspaper articles a year or two ago, in which J. M. Domenach attempts to sum up the present cultural scene for nonspecialists: Ah...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months—I,746...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date-8,054...
...While not good, he was noble...
...Now Camus may be an exemplary figure for "women of the democratic left," but he can hardly be that for women: too many women he was involved with either tried to commit suicide or considered committing suicide when Camus's interest in them turned elsewhere...
...EDS...
...Here I would call Walzer's attention to a very interesting remark by Max Scheler that I found in Raymond Aron's Minnoires: "In the intellectual empyrean there are very few ideologies...
...I I . I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete...
...10017...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months-6,139...
...without, to be sure, the mass rallies and overt defiance of authority...
...I do not think so...
...Moral principles—and not just absolutist principles—Camus thought were absurd...
...Stone if he had anything to say about that...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months-8,854...
...But on the night before the duel that was to end his life, he developed the Theory of Groups, which we still use, and he did this so as to leave something to humanity...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months415...
...He is a wise man: he is studying Greek...
...the atmosphere was much like that of the Vietnam war days in the U.S...
...But there are a few points worth making...
...As a result, the influence of Camus has taken a new lease on life...
...Camus lived and wrote in the same "world" and functioned in a very similar "champ intellectuel...
...He had the gift of looking at things "from above," as Stendhal said of Fabrice de Dongo...
...No reasonable reader could have missed the point...
...Morality is thus put on the shelf as irrelevant, given the political situation...
...but his response was considerably different...
...and the result is a hero, standing apart from his fellows, bound to his critical principles...
...but he was also, in his public life after the war, in the things he said, the commitments he made, the acts he performed, a good man...
...Now for Aron, Camus's remark was just meaningless...
...True, he refused to alienate himself totally from the community from which he came and, in allying himself with its enemies, to wash his hands of responsibility for its fate...
...About ideology: what could Camus's ideology, assuming he had one, have been...
...I should say, then, that there can be no "connected critics" or "connected criticism...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date-8,426...
...Nor am I at all sure that I would accept, as unquestioningly as Walzer seems to do, that Sartre had truly lived up to his own ideal of the social critic, whose mission was to break with his own background and "subject it to an unrelenting anal* As regards Walzer's remark that de Beauvoir's memoirs are "wonderfully lively and open-hearted...
...Actual no...
...1983...
...2. Mail Subscriptions (paid and/or requested): Average no...
...There was nothing particularly heroic—in the sense of braving the anger of an outraged populace—about writing in favor of the Algerian rebels, or against the war, though those engaged in the underground liseaux ("networks") ran very concrete and substantial risks...
...On the contrary, he was very eager to keep their favor, and worried about losing the readership of his journal if he ruffled their preconceptions in any way...
...I ) I did not know Camus personally...
...B. Annual Subscription Price: $14.00...
...What is true is that he was a moraliste in the French sense, but let's understand what that sense is...
...I did say that various people I trusted, including my good friend, the late Carey McWilliams, found Reagan and his wife Nancy engaging and gracious...
...I spent a good deal of time in France during those years, and I recall being struck even then by how little active propaganda there was for the French Army fighting in North Africa, how little the various governments that succeeded each other seemed to want to remind the people of what was going on—obviously because they knew that such efforts would meet with very little sympathy...
...This required more courage than Sartre ever exhibited, since he never "broke" with anything that would endanger his influence, or whose abandonment caused him the slightest inner struggle...
...He has only to remember...
...Nor is such an attack in any way an unfair exaggeration: "Camus was an idealist, a moralist, an anti-Communist," writes Simone de Beauvoir in La Force des Choses...
...Sartre was not risking anything he valued by going along with them...
...Stone, we thought it only fair to ask Mr...
...he may do this by finding arguments for bad actions and strong objec107 tions to good ones...
...but this was by no means the case...
...An emotional demand...
...In France, would he be asked to vote to support President Mitterrand's new tax policies, borrowed from President Reagan...
...E Copies not Distributed...
...But they are suggestions for extending even further his defense of Camus, and refusing to accept the traditional image of him, largely established by his enemies, within whose boundaries Walzer still stakes out his vindication.q Lionel Abel IVI uch of what Michael Walzer has to say about Albert Camus in Commitment & Social Criticism: Camus's Algerian War, in the Fall 1984 Dissent, is true and unexceptionable...
...With Lionel Abel I seem to have a quarrel...
...Stone has turned aside from politics...
...7. Owner: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...Copies Printed (Net Press Run): Average no...
...C. Total Paid Circulation (Sum of 10B1 and 10B2): Average no...
...Extent and Nature of Circulation: A. Total No...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date— None...
...and the fact that such a manifestation could be organized at all was a posthumous triumph for his morale d'ambulancier...
...10017...
...Why did Albert Camus reply to this question by noting his love for his mother...
...For me the study of ancient Greek is not an escape but an enrichment...
...Aron himself believes that there could be no ideology after Marxism...
...Editors: Irving Howe and Michael Walzer, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...Yes, Camus in the Resistance was noble (did Abel know Camus in the Resistance...
...Samples, Complimentary, and Other Free Copies: Average no...
...Now was this use of his mind by Galois in the circumstance he was in particularly moral...
...he is obviously annoyed by my essay, but he is not annoyed in any coherent way, and I am not sure that I can develop a coherent argument against him...
...Aron writes: The Algerian revolt raised for all Frenchmen, but especially for the French of Algeria, a question of conscience...
...All the same, Walzer's emphases seem to me to be off key, and this for two reasons: (1) Walzer's characterization of Camus seems to me wrong (apparently, he never knew Camus personally), and (2) I am unable to determine what Walzer means by "the democratic left" for which, he says, Camus has become an important myth...
...And one sees here very clearly how closely he kept his eye on the compass of public opinion in this "world," how eager he was to steer a steady course...
...But support for Fritz Mondale would mean support for Jesse Jackson, and his power in the Democratic party...
...Actual no...
...In his brochure, Algeria and the Republic, Aron wrote this against Camus: "Despite his will to justice and generosity M. Albert Camus does not rise above the attitude of a colonialist of good will...
...As understood by the French, a moralist is someone with a gift for insight into action, which he may show by crossing up our conventional moral expectations...
...Partly as a result of his position on the war, but mostly because of the fierce attack made on L'Homme Revoke by Francis Jeanson in Les Temps Modernes (Jeanson, by the way, was a leader of the active underground of French sympathizers aiding the Algerian rebels), Camus had lost all the considerable stature he had acquired in the immediate, post-Liberation years...
...But the present French mood is marked by a sharp reaction to its formerly prevalent infatuation with Marxism...
...Actual no...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months-8,439...
...but he knew very well that in doing so he was in danger of losing the prestige he had acquired in the "world" of French cultural life...
...Actual no...
...For such wrestlings with conscience we have to go, rather, to Camus, who genuinely took ethical norms seriously, and, as Walzer writes, refused to subbrdinate morality (which involves people, not political abstractions) to the left-wing political imperatives of the moment...
...Against Camus's statement: " . as far as Algeria is concerned, national independence is surely an emotional formula...
...And while Sartre, like a good Existentialist, does not forget to speak of "a consciousness [presumably his own...
...political democracy as a necessary and indispensable (though not sufficient) condition of economic democracy—this is what Budapest was defending...
...De Beauvoir told Koestler: "If we have to choose between de Gaulle and the Communists, we'll take the Communists...
...108 And I noted that when he gave his prepared speech, I. E Stone at one point defended President Reagan's personality, remarking that he was gracious to his subordinates and not mean-spirited as President Carter had been to his...
...1. Title of Publication: DISSENT A. Publication No.: 00123846...
...How can we think of Camus supporting that...
...But what Galois did was certainly noble, and what Camus did in the French resistance was noble...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months-10,600...
...The term is strange to me, but I suppose what Walzer means by it is that Camus connected various moral and political judgments into an ideological whole...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date-372...
...2. Returns from News Agents: Average no...
...10017...
...I am willing to learn from people with more intimate knowledge, but they have to be better teachers than Lionel Abel, with his sour mix 109 of low gossip and obiter dicta...
...by contrast, and even though Walzer defends 106 such a choice, Camus refuses to break so thoroughly with a narrower and more local loyalty to his native community...
...q STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULA TION (Required by 39 U.S.C...
...1. Office Use, Left Over, Unaccounted, Spoiled After Printing: Average no...
...Actual no...
...I am not saying that a man noble as Camus was does not belong in the democratic left—if I only knew what that was...
...These remarks, I hope, are amply clear, and in no way meant as criticisms of Walzer's admirably sensitive reevaluation, with whose conclusions I am in thorough sympathy...
...Such a juxtaposition, however, tends to forget that the "world" of both was really that of the French intelligentsia, predominantly left-wing and in favor of the anticolonial uprising...
...Not, I think, for a set of moral principles...
...When he opted for negotiations with the FLN and for Algerian independence, he did so convinced that arrangements could be worked out enabling the pieds noirs to remain in the country...
...He reminds me of the French mathematician Evariste Galois, whom Edward Teller has called the greatest mathematician ever...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months—None...
...But now what about the democratic left, where, according to Walzer, he is remembered with honor...
...He was merely taking his place in a long-established line going back at least to Flaubert, the writer with whom, and certainly for this reason, he maintained an ambiguous lovehate relationship all through his life...
...At the same time, as Walzer points out, he also refused to accept the values of the pied noir community so far as they conflicted with his conception of justice...
...Indeed, if one tries to imagine the "world" of Sartre and Camus ("world" taken in its existentialist sense as a primarily social-cultural environment, not one defined simply as an abstract geographical, national, economic locus), then, it seems to me, there would be some justification for reversing the manner in which Walzer depicts their differing positions...
...3685...
...And what would Camus be asked to do for it if by some miracle he could be restored to life...
...It is rather difficult these days even to appear to be a radical...
...105 There has been a considerable revulsion in recent years against just such a subordination—as witness the title of the first section of a book by one of the "new philosophers...
...It is to him that we must turn for an example of genuine independence, of a willingness to risk unpopularity for principle...
...A. No...
...Camus, who refused to abandon his mother and brother (that is, the pied noir community**), represents love...
...By this time they had concluded that morality was just the hobby-horse of bourgeois intellectuals...
...History was calling the shots...
...Had Camus been similarly convinced, he might have opted for the same solution...
...I do not know anything about Galois's ethics, or his sense of the ethical...
...Camus would certainly have been there if he had been alive...
...ON THE ALGERIAN QUESTION, Camus happened to have been wrong, and it was a question about which it was not impossible to take a proper view...
...the simple antinomy of justice and love...
...Walzer argues that Camus's position was somehow better than that of those who criticized it, but the only critics of it he mentions are Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, and it is easy for Walzer to show what was wrong with their views...
...10017...
...I have never met them, and would rather not because I consider him a planetary pied piper leading the world to a nuclear confrontation...
...The press coverage was neutral at best, hardly drumbeating or rabble-rousing...
...and Jesse Jackson, in his turn, supports Sovietized Cuba, and the extension of Soviet power in Central America...
...Sartre, however, should not be confused with Zola defending Captain Dreyfus...
...ysis and critique...
...I detest Plato politically, and agree with Aristotle that virtue is political, the exercise of those qualities that make it possible for man to live in peace with his fellows in communities and cities...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date-8,800...
...q I. F. Stone Since Lionel Abel, in his comment, brought in the name of I.F...
...Actual no...
...3. Frequency of Issue: Quarterly...
...G. Total (Sum of E, F I and 2—should equal net press run shown in A): Average no...
...But of course, like all revolutionary demands...
...I enjoyed meeting Lionel Abel...
...Walzer also says of Camus that he was "a connected critic...
...As a result, he alienated everybody, and stood truly alone at the end of his life in defense of what he believed to be both love and justice...
...I have said that Camus was not a just man...
...Trying to give a political slant to the "principles" he supposes Camus to have had, Walzer writes in the very first sentence of his piece: "For men and women of the democratic left, Albert Camus is an exemplary figure...
...But there were other critics of Camus's position on Algeria whom Walzer has ignored...
...What is this democratic left...
...Sartre had declared, in a notorious passage of Saint Genet, that in the climate of those postwar years, "every morality that does not present itself explicitly as impossible today, contributes to the mystification and alienation of mankind...
...The Sartreans, if we are to judge by de Beauvoir's remarks, would not have justified themselves in such terms at all...
...IN THE FIRST PLACE, if this were so, we would have to assume that the French people had actually been heart and soul engaged in defending their colonial enterprise...
...Below is his reply...
...Sartre was so determined not to offend his audience that he got rid of Merleau-Ponty when the latter's growing disillusionment with the Communist line (after the invasion of South Korea) began to be noticeable and to arouse reader protest...
...I am saying that a man like him may very well find himself at different times being of service to other groups...
...but it is suggested so strongly that a few remarks seem to be in order...
...But surely that was Camus's own identification throughout his life—and never more strongly than when he was attacking French leftists for their Stalinist apologetics...
...forced to yield a moment to History, he aspired, as quickly as possible, to withdraw from it...
...He's gifted but he'd have a lot more fun if he weren't so crabby...
...But not over any policy that could really be called radical...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months-2,300...
...But in fact Mr...
...3) Raymond Aron indeed did well during the years of the Algerian war...
...4. Complete mailing address: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...But Camus saw more deeply into the "tragic" nature of the conflict...
...10017...
...Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre were quite simply pro-Communist, and so they took the side of the FLN...
...But didn't he stand for something...
...A man who is noble is not one whose political position we can be certain of at all times...
...What this means is that the issue, posed by Walzer, of the moral basis of political action (or the attempt to justify political action in moral terms) has now taken on a renewed importance in France—while during the period about which he is writing it had simply been dismissed with an imperious wave of the pen...
...While not exactly endorsing this remark, Walzer indicates that its meaning for him is...
...I will quote just one example, from an essay published in 1957, in the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution: The untiring insistence upon freedom and truth [Camus wrote], the community of the worker and the intellectual...
...10017...
...2. Date of Filing: Oct...
...Pied noir ("black foot"), as Walzer explained in his article, was the mainland name for the French settlers in Algeria, many of whom were poor farmers, imagined, like our hillbillies, as barefoot and dirty...
...I am for the Mondale–Ferraro ticket and I don't believe any fight is over until the last blow or ballot...
...For the first, yes...
...of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date-5,754...
...D. Free Distribution by Mail, Carrier, or Other Means...
...his book L'Algerie et la Republique was both brave and (largely) true...
...6. Names and Complete Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...In Stockholm in 1957, Camus said this about Algeria: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date8,800...
...Actual no...
...Managing Editor: Edith Tarcov, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...This tells us something about her motives...
...Now I. E Stone is an old-fashioned but authentic American radical, and if there were anything radical to be done, despite his failing health, I think he would be doing it...
...And in any case, what radical deed is there to be performed requiring a radical temperament like Camus's...
...Actual no...
...Nor did I know John Calvin, or Oliver Cromwell, or John Locke, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Robespierre, or Clausewitz, or Marx, or General MacArthur, all of whom I have written about at one time or another...
...I have been saying so in political talks here and abroad (on London's Channel Four in August, among other places), and will do so again in preelection talks I have scheduled in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, and Minneapolis...
...And he could also have included among his references the famous meeting on behalf of the Vietnamese boat people, at which two old classmates of the Ecole Normale, Raymond Aron and Sartre (the latter then blind), met after 30 years of political enmity and shook hands...
...2) The phrase "connected critic" describes a writer who acknowledges and honors his ties to the people he criticizes...
...Walzer writes...
...of Issues Published Annually: Four...
...I was not saying anything about the critic's ideology...
...E. Total Distribution (Sum of C and D): Average no...
...To the Editors of Dissent: Thank you for letting me see Lionel Abel's attack on Michael Walzer...
...And in doing so, the great city in insurrection reminded Western Europe of its forgotten truth and greatness...
...Sartre, in his account, courageously rips himself free from all attachment to his inherited roots...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
