Vol. 12, No. 1 (2020)

In these past days I have reread, perhaps for the third or fourth time, Camus’s The Plague. It will be said, with a certain dose of banality, that no reading could be more in tune with the historical moment we are called to live through. But I have also taken advantage, thanks to the time available, and this is the one positive aspect of this confinement, to widen my gaze not only to The Stranger, the other best-known novel of the Franco-Algerian writer, itself the object of a couple of past readings too, but to the whole body of the writings and the public activity of an intellectual who has marked our own age far more deeply than is usually supposed. In truth, thinking it over more carefully, what drove me to this intellectual adventure lies at a level far deeper than the restrictive contingency of the moment. The resurfacing of two memories, one distant in time, the other far more recent, of occasions on which I found myself in physical contact with two places emblematic of Camus’s journey: the bay of Tipasa and the cemetery of Lourmarin. The second reason lies in the reflections prompted, I believe not only in me, by the visit the Pope made in the very first days of the lockdown to two places emblematic of the popular religiosity of Rome.

From those memories I should like to set out, so as to cross paths with fragments of Camus’s work. Between 2006 and 2007 I had occasion to travel often to Algeria on account of the government post I then held as undersecretary for international trade. On one of these occasions the Algerian government arranged a visit to the archaeological site of Tipasa, a place some seventy or eighty kilometres from Algiers along the route nationale that we drove together with the Italian ambassador, Verderami. Reaching the dusty forecourt at the entrance to the site, we were welcomed by the director, a slight, almost frail woman who concealed a very solid grounding in art and history. Besides French and Arabic she spoke a proper Italian, having stayed at length in Palermo for her studies. The famous sandy beaches of Tipasa look out over a bay of enchanting beauty in which the colours of blue, green and ochre collide. If at first one has the impression of being unable to bear the intensity and the physicality of the visual contrasts, as the minutes pass those densities fuse, as if by magic, into a higher order that spreads like a balm over the visitor’s soul. Soon, wandering among the little hills and stones and listening to the director’s precise descriptions, a strange serenity ended by taking hold of me. Not even the watchful presence of a few guards at every rise of the ground, a further guarantee of security in a park that had in fact been temporarily closed to the public, managed to spoil that agreeable sensation. A sensation destined to rise an octave when the director pointed out to me, far off in the very centre of the bay, a rectangular stele whose essential sobriety could be sensed. Even at a distance the contrast between the colour of the little monument, an ochre yellow that sharpens into burnt earth, and the brazen green of the low bushes around it struck me full in the face. It is the stele dedicated to Albert Camus, who often loved to go there to rediscover the centrality of man in full harmony, almost a consubstantiality, with nature. Today, in this sort of suspension of working time brought on by the coronavirus, having finished reading The Plague, I took up the slim little volume in the original language that I had slipped into my bookcase on returning from who knows which trip to Paris. A cheap, very plain edition of Nuptials, which opens precisely with the essay “Nuptials at Tipasa”. Before venturing into an analysis of this youthful work of Camus’s, however, I should like to recount the second occasion of my “encounter” with the great writer. The crossing of paths with the places dear to Camus repeated itself a short while ago, to be precise, on the last day of the year 2019. A few days earlier the Robinson supplement of la Repubblica had published an interview with the writer’s daughter on the sixtieth anniversary of his death, which occurred on 4 January 1960. The interview, rather modest, is followed instead by two fine pieces of quite another calibre, by Kamel Daoud and Dario Olivero. I happened to be reading the supplement during a very brief holiday at Aigues-Mortes. The decision, together with my companion, to make a dash to Lourmarin, a place in the near hinterland of Provence, was immediate. There Camus bought, with the money from the Nobel that had been awarded to him in 1957, a fine house where his papers are now kept, and in the little cemetery near the castle that dominates the village he is buried. In the cemetery no sign helps one to find the burial place. A small group of French tourists came in along with us. We decided to organize ourselves for a little combing operation in search of the tomb. Of absolute simplicity, on the ground, beside his wife, who only in death will be able to enjoy the exclusiveness of her bond with her husband, the two of them united, beyond their nearness, by a shrub, an oleander perhaps, that takes root and draws life from both graves. All around, the silence typical of such places seems even deeper, almost thick. In the background the profile of the high hills of Provence; that reunification of man and nature into which the writer plunged on the shores of the Mediterranean is felt here too, though in altogether different forms.

Let us come now to the other reason that has driven me back once more to the Franco-Algerian writer. Let the juxtaposition I am about to propose not seem eccentric: in fact a subterranean thread binds the problem confronted by two figures as different and as distant in time as Camus and the present Pontiff. Both stand before the same dilemma: how does man place himself before the epidemic, and on which instruments, combining them or setting them against each other, does his conscience believe it should draw? On science or on faith? Pope Francis judged it fitting to leave the Vatican to visit Santa Maria Maggiore and “afterwards, covering a stretch of the Via del Corso on foot, as though on pilgrimage, the Holy Father reached the church of San Marcello al Corso to pray for the end of the pandemic” (from the communiqué of the Vatican Press Office). In this church is the miraculous Crucifix that in 1522 was carried in procession through the quarters of the city to invoke the end of the “Great Plague” in Rome. The Pope’s initiative lends itself to a series of considerations, some of them in conflict with one another, owing to the intrinsic ambivalence of the pontiff’s move. One interpretation might stress Francis’s explicit will to show his own solidarity, visible, I would say physical, both with those who fight the disease on the front line and with those who stay shut up at home to prevent the spread of the contagion. The exhortation not to behave like Don Abbondio, the call to have courage, would represent in this view a spur to the Catholic world to be in the field with all its means in the unhesitating struggle against the epidemic. But there is something a little more subterranean in the papal message that may arouse some perplexity. First of all, it jars with the common feeling of these days, the image, which the Corriere della Sera carries on its front page, of the Pope walking down a deserted Via del Corso, followed at a due distance by a few security men. And this in the days when the appeal of every authority to stay at home is at its most insistent. Certainly the Pontiff cannot be regarded as an ordinary citizen, and his departure from the Vatican walls undoubtedly has an exceptional character. And here comes, adding to the perplexity over the Vatican’s choice, the reason underlying that exceptionality: the “pilgrimage”, to use the Vatican Press Office’s term, to the church of San Marcello in recollection of a sixteenth-century procession to implore the end of the pestilence. As though, in the full deployment of the rational actions to contain the spread of the virus and of the behavioural recommendations based on rigorous prescriptions of a scientific character, the head of Catholicism wished to recall the primacy of faith and of the divine will in the battle against the contagion. The Pontiff’s gesture leaves, at the emotional level, a kind of aftertaste of something anti-modern, the reflex of a traditionalism inconsistent with his general course of action. I do not think, however, that room can be given to the idea that he means thereby to evoke implicitly an unresolved relationship between faith and science, turning back the hands of the clock. It appears rather as an attempt not to lose, in any case, the bond with certain aspects of a popular religiosity that in critical moments like the present one tends to reassert its role. And here Camus comes to our aid. Father Paneloux, one of the characters in The Plague, through a long and tormented inner journey, will modify his initial fundamentalist approach to the plague, precisely by force of that Christian charity, itself integral, that leads him to direct, unmediated contact with the devastating sufferings the disease provokes. From an initial approach of the total subordination of men’s efforts (science) to the divine will (faith), he will arrive at a very different conclusion, putting himself at the service of human action to the point of sacrificing his life. Let us read two significant passages in support of this assertion. “Here the Father took up again, more amply, the pathetic image of the scourge; he evoked the immense wooden beam whirling above the city, striking at random and rising up blood-stained, and in the end scattering human blood and human pain < for the seedtime that will prepare the harvests of truth>” (p. 75 of the Bompiani Tascabili edition). And further on, at the turning of the epidemic, in his second sermon Father Paneloux states that “one must not try to explain to oneself the spectacle of the plague, but seek to learn what could be learned from it”. Doctor Rieux, who is present at the oration, comments: “It would have been easy for him to say that the eternity of delights awaiting the child (dead of the plague amid unspeakable suffering, ed.) could compensate him for his suffering, but in truth he knew nothing of it. For who, indeed, could affirm that an eternity of joy can compensate for a single instant of human pain? Certainly not a Christian, whose Master knew pain in his limbs and in his soul” (pp. 172–173).

The Pope’s “pilgrimage” to the Via del Corso stirred comments within Vatican circles, and not only there, as the small excerpt from an article in Avvenire (17 March) that I reproduce here bears witness. “For whom will the Pope have prayed on Sunday, before the icon of the Salus Populi Romani at Santa Maria Maggiore and the miraculous Crucifix of San Marcello al Corso? Thoughts that will remain gathered in his heart. Just as there will remain impressed in people’s affection the double ‘face-to-face’ that Francis allowed himself, leaving the Vatican by surprise and even covering a stretch on foot along the deserted Via del Corso, usually one of the busiest streets. And yet, while the image portraying him at the centre of the capital has already become the symbolic photograph of the Church at the side of those who suffer from this pandemic, it is not hard to suppose that at the top of his prayers stood all those categories of people he recalls day by day in the Mass at Santa Marta broadcast in streaming.” Let us take this as the authentic interpretation of the Pontiff’s gesture. As further testimony, the following day the same Avvenire returns to the subject, bringing into the field none other than Monsignor Nunzio Galantino. The president of APSA and former secretary-general of the CEI stresses: “A surprising gesture. Made in respect of what the government authorities had rightly asked. By going to Santa Maria Maggiore and to San Marcello, Pope Francis symbolically carried all of humanity with him to the foot of the Crucifix and of the Madonna.” To the interviewer who reminds him of the perplexities voiced by some over a gesture that might appear a challenge to the prescriptions, Galantino makes clear that this is a gesture of prayer, symbolic, made in the name of all, and that “symbols too, at this moment, serve to keep hope awake”.

ARMED WITH SCIENCE AND FAITH runs Avvenire’s headline the following day. The dilemma reassembles itself on very solid ground, which will be interpreted in plastic terms by the Pope, in his hieratic solitude, on the occasion of the Urbi et Orbi blessing imparted on 27 March in a deserted Saint Peter’s Square.

Let us now draw closer to the writer’s artistic production, without neglecting his journalistic reportage, his work for the theatre and his ceaseless participation in the public debate of his time.

Man thrown into the world, the existentialists would have said; man before a life that has no meaning; man constantly at the mercy of an external event that, without reason, can annihilate him; man forever on the threshold of death. Not only The Plague but the whole of Camus’s work puts man at the centre, in his irrelevance but also in his greatness. The randomness of being in the world not only generates no form of pessimism or ascetic detachment from life but exalts precisely love, for oneself and for others, the immersion of the self in nature in an ecstatic symbiosis. Being here and now, the passion for politics, the struggle at the side of those who suffer, fulfilling desire and love. Sustaining this whole architecture of values there is something still deeper, the ultimate foundation: man. In two celebrated passages of The Plague, the first at the moment the signs of the disease appear, the second at its raging height, Doctor Rieux, in his rational steadiness, frames the situation with lucidity: “What had to be done was to recognize clearly what had to be recognized, to drive off at last the useless shadows and take the necessary measures. […..] The doctor opened the window, and the murmur (in French bruit) of the city swelled all at once. From a workshop not far off rose the short, repeated whine of a mechanical saw. Rieux shook himself: there lay certainty, in the work of every day. The rest hung by threads and insignificant movements; one could not stop. What was essential was to do one’s job well.” And further on, in another fundamental passage of the work: “What is honesty?” said Rambert, with a suddenly serious air. The doctor replies: “What it is in general, I do not know; but in my case I know that it consists in doing my job.” There it is: the man who does his job well is the man who lives. In the indeterminacy of things, in the uncontrollable flux of existence, free of ideologies and religions, man has a single anchor of salvation: this firm moral principle. There is nothing Promethean, nothing extraordinary, nothing heroic in Camus’s man. In another of those dialogues in which the Franco-Algerian writer distils his vision of the world, in this case in reply to Tarrou, the interlocutor with whom, as the fight against the disease unfolds, a genuine and profound friendship is cemented, Bernard Rieux declares: “But you know, I feel more in solidarity with the defeated than with the saints. I have no inclination, I think, for heroism or for sainthood. To be a man, that is what interests me.” The greatness of man lies, in short, in his ordinariness.

I have already had occasion to refer to the intense relationship Camus always kept with Tipasa. In truth it was his relationship with his native land, Algeria, that ran through his whole life, but here the discourse would be far broader, and freighted with great political implications which, if we manage it, we shall take up further on. Let us limit ourselves for now to Tipasa. The greatest evidence of this relationship we have, in particular, through the first essay of Nuptials. It should be recalled that these works date from 1936–37, when the author was twenty-three, and that he always regarded them as essais, trials, studies, experiments, in short, and, as the publisher’s note reminds us, essais in the exact and limited sense of the term. As though they were meant to serve as materials for later reworkings; and who knows whether it might not in fact have turned out so, had it not been for the tragic car accident. Love, desire, sensuality, symbiosis with nature, these elements brim over, in some cases uncontainably, from those youthful pages. Man thrown into the world, into an existential experience devoid of meaning and direction, is nonetheless never alone. In a twofold sense. Because he always stands on the side of the victims, “on every occasion, to limit the harm” [The Plague, p. 196]. He who comes from nothing, from a very poor family, without a father, and, as he reminds us in a passage of The First Man, “…declaring that he would go and eat at the restaurant, a place he had never once set foot in, nor indeed had anyone in the family, even though the grandmother, whenever words of discontent arose at the table, never failed to pronounce the fateful phrase < Go and eat at the restaurant >”. Or when Rieux lays claim to his social origin, “a worker’s son like me”. With the weakest, with the victims, one stands in order to limit the harm, but also to share happiness, because “there can be shame in being happy alone” [p. 161]. Happiness, then, as the goal of the man who founds everything on himself and on his morality, yet at the same time an existential condition to be shared with others. Second, man is in any case not alone, because he interpenetrates with nature. At the foot of the lighthouse (of Tipasa) “great succulent plants with violet, yellow and red flowers descend toward the first rocks, which the sea sucks at with the sound of kisses”. The musicality of the French language renders better the chromatic physicality of this description, in which one should underline the use of two terms, “bruit” and “suce”. The noise, the murmur, is the same that Camus uses when in The Plague he opens the window to listen to the noise of Oran, the working activity, the pulsing of man’s labour. With the term “suce”, sucks, he means mischievously to insist on a kind of eroticization of the relationship with nature, there being full correspondence between Italian and French in the, let us say, extended use of the term. And further on, when naked he plunges into the sea in a sort of abandon and dissolution into the liquid element, the body scented with the essences of the earth so as to wash them away in those of the sea, in an ecstatic condition in which he can “clasp against my skin the embrace with which, mouth to mouth, the earth and the sea have sighed for one another for so long”. Continuing in this metaphorical erotic conjunction, in which earth, sea, nature and man possess one another reciprocally and make one another fruitful: “Here I understand what is called glory: the right to love without measure. There is but a single love in the world”, and, so it seems, it lies in this indissoluble bond of man within the natural universe. Down to the conclusion, where almost in an orgasmic cry Camus writes: “To embrace a woman’s body is to hold against oneself this disquieting joy (that, in my judgment, is how ‘étrange’ should be rendered) which descends from the sky toward the sea.” It is as though in this embrace a cosmic harmony were recomposed, in which man rediscovers his natural place, tossed as he is between, on the one hand, the ineluctability of things, the unreasonableness of life, for which Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger, can go down to the beach and shoot an Arab, just so, without reason, perhaps only because the heat of the sun is too oppressive, and, on the other, the moral rigour, foundation of man’s freedom, that pervades him in that kind of practical Kantianism, as Bernard-Henri Lévy has called it. But this harmony is never given once and for all. It is a continual search, a constant becoming, a balance that keeps trying to recompose itself. It has as its inseparable travelling companion desire, which at once undermines and recomposes it. Camus loves women and loves being loved. Sartre, at the moment of the rupture, we shall see it further on, will not spare him even this in his malice, expressing his displeasure at this “little Algerian rogue” who courts every woman who crosses his path. We cannot be surprised that the discord between great intellectuals, who are after all still men eager for female conquest, Sartre was certainly no Adonis, but he was a great hit with women, should end up involving male envy and competitiveness as well. Throughout his short life Camus will constantly need an exchange, in the broadest sense of the term, with the other sex. Two marriages, one in 1934 to Simone Hié (it would end just two years later) and one in 1940 to Francine Faure, and a deep and lasting love with Maria Casarès, more than a wife perhaps, will not prevent him from keeping other relationships. The sensual approach to nature is also the sensual approach to life, in which spiritual desire and carnal desire cross and complete each other. “Nuptials at Tipasa” is the vessel, at times in forms that verge on the baroque image, most expressive of a pervasive sensuality as the vector of the harmony between man and nature. The essay’s opening leaves one breathless. We give it in the original: “Au printemps, Tipasa est habitée par les dieux et les dieux parlent dans le soleil et l’odeur des absinthes, la mer cuirassée d’argent, le ciel bleu écru, les ruines couvertes de fleurs et la lumière à gros bouillons dans les amas de pierres. À certaines heures, la campagne est noire de soleil”.

The importance of the female component is attested, moreover, by the roles played in the life of the Franco-Algerian writer by the figures of the grandmother and the mother. The former, absolute mistress of the household’s organization, a true pater familias, rough, despotic, at times coarse, dispenses punishments and chastisements, intent solely on administering the scarce money that might allow the family to keep itself just above the line of destitution. Hostile even to the scholastic demands and the educational commitments that the grandson’s evident qualities nonetheless required. The mother, on the other hand, a most gentle woman, has no voice and still less any language, wholly in thrall to the maternal will. Proud of this son, undermined in body by tuberculosis but of evident and palpable extraordinariness. On the occasion of the press conference for the conferral of the Nobel Prize, her Albert will express himself in astonishing fashion, stating that no cause, not even the most just, could ever unhitch him, dissociate him (the French term is desolidariser, and it is stronger still), from his mother, “qui est la plus grande cause que je connaisse au monde”.

To conclude on this aspect of the sensual relationship with nature and with the human universe, it is worth recalling the function performed by immersion in the water of the sea. We recalled above how, on the beach of Tipasa, the author plunges naked into the waters to be part of the embrace between earth and sea. We find an equally significant passage in The Plague, at the sealing of the friendship built between Rieux and Tarrou in the fire of the battle against the epidemic. “Do you know what we ought to do for friendship’s sake?” he said. “Whatever you like,” said Rieux. “Take a swim in the sea.” The two friends then head for the harbour. “The sea heaved gently at the foot of the great blocks of the jetty, and when they had climbed over them it appeared thick as velvet, supple and smooth as a wild beast.” Once in the water the two men began to swim. “For some minutes they moved forward at the same cadence and with the same vigour, solitary, far from the world, freed at last from the city and from the plague.” In the end they came out of the water without exchanging a word, “but they were of one heart”. The sea is openness, the refusal of a small universe closed in on itself, desire that finds fulfilment in the scent and the sweet liquidity of harmony.

The style, the language, even the syntax of the Algerian writer end up forming a spider’s web within which the reader is ensnared in a play of stimulation and gratification. Again and again the writing takes on the forms of an almost physical turgor in the colours, the smells and the tastes that seem to enter our sensory organs. The light, the heat, the springtime explosion of life appear to us like the swollen nipple of a breast offered to our attention. In these parts of his work, forgive me an expression that might seem blasphemous, Camus attains the level of a most refined eroticism that is indelibly inscribed in his Mediterranean DNA. It is that component of his personality which Sartre first throws back at him as “mesure méditerranéenne” in the thick of the political polemic, and then, in the funeral oration, grasps very well indeed as “humanisme sensuel”.

There is a question that in the end cannot but rise to our awareness. Does Camus’s radical humanism, man as the milestone of every judgment, the claim to absolute indifference toward every ideology, freedom against everything and everyone, an atheism that touches moments of paganism, not end by placing the individual on a pedestal, detached from the sometimes petty flow of human affairs? Does it not define for him a heroic, Promethean profile? We have seen above how the writer affirms his aversion to every form of heroism and sainthood, laying the stress on ordinariness. And we must take note of it. But the question remains: how far, in this supreme rigour, does the spectre of the superman show itself? What are the relations between the writer’s thought and Nietzschean theories? It is well known that the whole Parisian cultural milieu, of which Camus became an organic part on his arrival in the capital in 1940, and still more in ’43, when he became a reader at Gallimard’s publishing house, was essentially monopolized by existentialism. Existentialism itself was traversed not only by extremely violent political polemics but also by articulated theoretical references. We have Camus and Sartre, but other figures of the very highest stature marked the cultural scene of the age in France. Breton, Malraux, Koestler, de Beauvoir, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Aron and Lévinas, to name only the greatest. And how great was the theoretical debt that, willingly or not, the existentialist movement owed to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and to Martin Heidegger becomes evident. Sarah Bakewell writes in her 2016 book At the Existentialist Café: “Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the forerunners of modern existentialism; they were the pioneers of a sensibility inclined to rebellion and dissatisfaction, they created a new definition of existence understood as choice, action and self-affirmation, and they explored the anguish and the difficulty of living. Moreover, they carried on their own work convinced that philosophy was not merely a profession. This was life itself: the life of an individual.” At this point, however, I lack the tools to continue this deeper inquiry, and I can only turn to my philosopher friends. There is in any case a historical fact that should be recalled. Camus measured himself more than once against Nietzsche’s work, and he did so within a more general climate of a certain French intelligentsia which, in the postwar years, thought to “clean up” the German philosopher and wrest him from Nazism. But I repeat, here I stop. I can only add, as a small suggestion, that it is the material conditions, the experience of life and its origins, that “save” the Algerian writer, keeping him firmly on democratic ground and coherently anti-fascist. What do I mean? Precisely the conception of philosophy as life, the appeal to “commitment” in the world, lead to the prevailing of the materiality of the human affair, individual and collective, over every intellectual fascination. In his short life Camus knew three wars: the Great War, which took from him the father he never knew; the Second World War, in which he did not take part on account of the tuberculosis that undermined him, and whose atomic bombing of Hiroshima he denounced in vibrant words; the Algerian war. Three historical events, more than twenty years “d’une histoire démentielle”, as he put it at Stockholm on the occasion of the Nobel, that marked him deeply and defined his personality. Moreover, in the second half of the 1930s Camus does not compose only the splendid pages on Tipasa of which we have spoken at length. He is also a great journalist of reportage on the dramatic living conditions of Kabylia in his Algeria. His being on the side of the weak is no compassionate posture, but drives him to a vehement social denunciation with the true weapon at his disposal: writing. And even, on a very different plane, the existential sensuality that pervades his being, precisely by virtue of its depth, presupposes and implies a profound respect and recognition of the object of desire, be it person or thing. Not to mention his inflexible battle for the abolition of the death penalty. In short, there is no moral and political category more foreign to the Franco-Algerian writer than that of the “will to power”. Here there is truly a chasm. It is attested, were there still any need, by one of the last pages of The Plague, which exudes human warmth, even tenderness and “ordinariness”. Referring to those who, after the calvary of the epidemic, had found again the loved and distant person (a privilege not granted to Rieux, who loses his wife in a far-off sanatorium), the doctor reflects: “For a while, at least, they would be happy; they knew now that if there is one thing one can always desire and sometimes obtain, it is human affection.” And again: “Rieux (…) thought it right that, at least now and then, glory should come to reward those who content themselves with man and with his poor, terrible love.” That “poor, terrible love” gives us back, in the round, the figure of this integral humanist, pervaded with sensuality, breathing in unison with nature and with the sufferings of the weakest.

On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the writer’s death (2010), Le Monde devoted to him an excellently made Hors-série, entitled “Albert Camus: Revolt and Freedom”. The predominant part of the booklet is taken up by an essay of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s with the significant title “A Philosopher-Artist”. The underlying thesis, vitiated, in my judgment, by an excessive anti-Sartre stance, lies in the wish to grant Camus a kind of licence as a philosopher. Now this seems to me a somewhat captious and frankly useless exercise. It makes little sense to set about measuring the quarterings of philosophical nobility of a writer who represents one of the peaks of twentieth-century literature. An artist in the fullest sense of the term. Just as one would do him wrong to look at him “in pieces”, the writer, the journalist, the politician, the moralist and so on. Camus is undoubtedly all of this, but the total is not the sum. There is something more, and in this case there is much more. A something more that we can grasp only if we turn to Camus as Camus. Let us say it outright: to the man!

The existentialist movement, in its various articulations, philosophical, political, of custom, brought a gust of fresh air into the culture and the societies of the 1950s. Its contribution to the ferments that marked the subsequent 1960s was without doubt of great importance. The propensity to call into question everything that is established, the drive to affirm another point of view on the things of the world, the taking of the individual as the “ultimate benchmark” against which to measure existence, these represent the precondition of the libertarian developments of the following decade. The anti-authoritarian charge that would mark, to its most extreme consequences, the protest of 1968 finds there, without doubt, a source of nourishment. Once again it would be the confluence of German philosophy and French politics that provided the trigger of that great season of liberation. But this is ground onto which I cannot venture. Camus lives and fully interprets those themes until his death, bringing to them a significant contribution. The freedom of the individual who takes his life wholly into his own hands, with the utterly modern feeling of anguish that follows from it, and who exercises that freedom in the midst of other men who have the same right to live their lives, requires the deployment of a great movement of liberation. Which is individual, social, but also national liberation. We approach thus the great contradiction that runs, unresolved, through the affair of the Franco-Algerian writer: his attitude toward the liberation struggle of Algeria. In a vision politically coherent with that system of thought, to line up alongside the demands of the Algerian people would be almost an automatism. All the more so in the full unfolding, in the second half of the 1950s, of the phenomenon of decolonization. For Camus it is not so. Why? The question is more complex still, because Camus is in principle favourable to processes of national liberation. Let us take as our premise that he is a man of two worlds. He is at once Algerian and French; neither of these components is separable, thinkable on its own. But neither is it composable into a higher synthesis. Only in literary creation, at the highest point of his being an artist, do the two strands fuse in narrative transfiguration. Camus will delude himself, between 1954, the year the Algerian revolt gets under way, and 1958, the year in which he will withdraw from the public debate on the subject, aware of the weakness of his arguments, that he can reach the same synthesis at the political level. For what else is his proposal of a kind of federation between France and Algeria, or of a binational state as some have put it, if not the attempt to bring to institutional synthesis the clash between the colonizers and the pro-independence forces? The position appears at once abstract and cut off from the concrete unravelling of historical events. There is something, in short, that veils the analytical capacity of the Franco-Algerian, or Algerian-French, writer. And it is something, I would venture to say, ancestral, primitive, archaic. Without ascribing any negative meaning to these adjectives. The first aspect, the less important, concerns his radical critique of the practice of terrorism. Camus meditated at length on the subject, arriving at the definition of it, rightly, as an enemy of democracy and as a kind of product of totalitarianism. He holds that in his native land terrorism is the fruit of “l’absence d’espoir”, of the absence of any possibility of a future. It is the expression of hatred and leads to racism. I do not think, however, that this critique of the terrorist form of struggle within the process of independence, a method, moreover, practised by both contending sides, and therefore not attributable exclusively to the Algerian combatants, can represent the underlying motivation. There is something else, at a far more involving level of the writer’s complex personality. The relationship between Camus and Algeria is not situated at the level of historico-political rationality, of the evaluation of the concrete historical circumstances that move a people’s feeling. It is rather a movement of the soul, a substratum of psychological rootedness, a component of the relationship with nature. In this sense it borders on the characteristics of the bond with the mother. We have already seen how, on the occasion of the conferral of the Nobel, Camus said that nothing could ever detach him from his mother, who was the most just cause he knew in the world. An illiterate mother, partly deaf, who knew barely four hundred words, the sole “totalizing” subject before whom he bowed. And Algeria is, we might say, the younger sister of this mother. Algeria is sensuality, the colours, nature, the earth, the sea, the sky, Tipasa, the Kabylia of the downtrodden. It is a bond that cannot be broken. And in some way independence might put this bond at risk, because Algeria, in its irrevocable greatness, is, like the mother, a weak subject. Left to itself it might generate a dictatorship, an entity no longer totalizing but totalitarian.

What political usability, in so inflamed a public debate, a position that carried so heavy a burden could have is easy to imagine. The inexplicable cannot be argued; better, then, to throw in the towel, to let the silence speak. A defeat? Yes, certainly. An inability to weigh the circumstances and the forces in the field, in other words, to know how to stand within history? Without doubt. Yet what remains to us is the limpid naïveté of Camus the man, of the artist.

In this light the Mediterranean too plays a role different from the one traditionally accorded to it. Without doubt, from the standpoint of his biography and of the development of his personality as a public man, it is the Mediterranean that represents the trait d’union of his life. We might say both on the outward and on the return journey. His father Lucien is a pied noir, as the French transplanted to Algeria are called, descended from a family of Alsatian origin, a modest worker at a wine-producing firm; he will return to France only to be killed at the battle of the Marne in 1914, without ever having seen his son. The mother is of Spanish origin. Albert is born in the remote Algerian provinces, only to move as a small child to Algiers, where he is educated first at the lycée before taking his degree in philosophy. In 1940 he lands in Paris, where he stays a year before returning to Oran as a teacher. At the end of ’42 he returns to the French capital, where he will remain until his death. A path not very different from that of so many who, under every latitude, born of humble origins, are forced to emigrate toward the “centre” in order to assert their own personal profile, be it professional or artistic. Camus will never cut his roots, and in this sense he can be regarded as a man of two worlds, as I defined him above. Yet even at the height of his fame he will be considered an “outsider” by the club of Parisian intellectuals which, political affiliations aside, is configured in any case as a restricted circle. He will make his way among them with great success, but he will never lose, in their eyes, a patina of the parvenu. Sartre and de Beauvoir carry quite another standing! And Sartre will not spare him the sword, no mere foil, when, in the heat of the polemic between the two, he throws his humble origin and his poverty back at him. In this light the Mediterranean performs its age-old role as facilitator of commercial and cultural exchanges. It takes on, in my judgment, quite another significance if we look at it from the point of view of the writer’s poetics and spiritual imagination. The Mediterranean is not, as Fernand Braudel used to say, a sea that unites; but in Camus’s poetics it is one and the same with Algeria. It is nature and sensuality; the glints that dart on its surface are not those of France but those of Africa.

Let us come, finally, to the more strictly political question that has already peeped out more than once in these notes: the relationship between Camus and Sartre. Albert’s militancy in the ranks of the Algerian Communist Party is an experience that plays out over the span of two years. He joins in 1935, becomes secretary of the House of Culture in Algiers at the beginning of ’37, and in the course of the same year resigns from the party. His participation in the Algerian and French public debate will grow exponentially, with the founding of journals, journalistic activity, political polemics, stances on various subjects, to the point of making him one of the most influential, if not the most influential, intellectuals for almost two decades, from the postwar years to nineteen sixty. In short, his departure from a political party did not cause his “engagement” on all the great themes that ran through his age to lapse. Quite the contrary. We have tried to bring out certain aspects of the writer’s thought and work, his complex and tormented personality, his irrepressible reference to man as the foundation of his ideological universe, individual freedom as the fulcrum of the lever of existence. Can a personality such as this be brought back within a strictly political, and moreover party-political, horizon? All the more so in a context of ideological, political and doctrinal rigidity such as that of the time. The answer is in the premises even before it is in the unfolding of events as they were historically determined. The two protagonists were long united by the common will to fight for the affirmation of social justice and to stand always and in any case on the side of the weak. For Sartre all this coincided with communism, and communism with the system established in the Soviet Union. So it was, and little room was left for beautiful souls. The emergence of Stalin’s crimes, the horror of the gulags, had to be accepted, though not shared, within a revolutionary process whose outcome would be liberation from capitalist slavery. There were fundamental questions behind these lacerating oppositions. The role of violence in revolutionary action, the totalizing (totalitarian?) vocation toward an ideal, individual freedom as the foundation of a just society. The clash was in the nature of things. But it was a clash not between two granite men but between two lacerated men. The writer’s lacerations we have tried to describe above and, as regards politics in particular, they showed themselves blatantly in his unresolved relationship with Algeria and its war of independence. As for Sartre, suffice it to note the plain contradiction between the existentialist philosopher who preached the absolute freedom of the individual in the world and the Marxist politician who accepted the amputation of that freedom in the concrete flow of the historical process. Camus abhorred, as we have seen, every form of terrorist violence, which he regarded not only as a wound to democracy but as a direct filiation of totalitarianism. On the more theoretical plane, in his vision of absolute moralism, he laid the stress on man’s responsibility to live authentically the freedom at his disposal. Sartre, from his upper-bourgeois position, could permit himself a condescending cynicism toward violence and toward the actors who practised it; Camus, in his humble provenance, remained foursquare in defence of coherence and of the refusal, in any case, of violence. The first meeting between the two took place in 1943 at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, where Camus presented himself to attend the rehearsals of the play The Flies, written by Sartre. The philosopher’s star had by then long been shining in the intellectual firmament, ever since he had become famous in 1938 with the publication of Nausea. They did not know each other personally, but were known to one another, since Albert had already published a review of Nausea and the philosopher was writing his own of The Stranger. According to Simone de Beauvoir’s testimony there was immediate liking, underlined by Sartre’s appreciation of Camus’s “simple, cheerful soul” and his emotionality. As one may note, there transpires from these confidences between Simone and Jean-Paul a certain dose of condescension, not to say haughtiness, toward the Algerian, typical of the two great priests of the Parisian intelligentsia. In any case the relationship developed in important ways over the following years, with a component of human warmth and cultural closeness too. Among other things, Sartre in the 1940s was much focused on the theme of man’s freedom, and this research favoured the contiguity with the writer. In 1947, which is the year, let us not forget, of the publication of The Plague, Sartre and Camus jointly signed an appeal by the journal Esprit in support of an international positioning of France in absolute autonomy from the Soviet Union and the United States, precisely at the moment when the configuration of the world into two opposing blocs was taking shape. The situation begins to grow more complex at the opening of the 1950s. In October ’51 The Rebel appears, in which Camus extols a kind of permanent revolution as a creative action that allows man to identify and to express a meaning in a world dominated by non-meaning, according to his deep-rooted philosophical conviction. Sartre had always shown himself sceptical toward this vision, at the limit of nihilism, of his friend’s, and the pressing course of international political events led him to harden his positions. The Korean War was in full swing, the first real military act of the confrontation between the two blocs, and there were strong fears that it would turn into another tragic world conflict a few years after the end of the second. In Parisian circles there was fierce debate, even, on occasion, to the point of coming to blows, over the hypothesis that, in this context, France might be the object of an invasion by the Soviets. Dramatically bringing to the surface the question of questions, that of the double loyalty. That is to say: what would the French supporters of the communist cause do, would they remain faithful to their ideal incarnated by the invaders, or would they convert to the patriotic cause? The laceration reached very high levels, also because of the obscure work of infiltrated agents who fed the tension and drew up proscription lists in one camp and in the other. But let us return to the more strictly cultural aspects. Camus’s position is, as usual, granite: revolt is what allows us, by pushing us to look inside ourselves, to learn how to conduct ourselves, to give a meaning to our being in the world. “The solidarity of men rests on the movement of revolt.” There is only one limit that stands before the man in revolt: “to accept killing oneself in order to refuse complicity with murder in general.” As we know, the twentieth century is traversed, philosophically too, by the problem of violence. The tragic century that left on the ground, in thirty years, more dead than all the history of humanity, lives face to face with the theme of the use and the finality of violence. The dilemma that had run through many a soul: to accept violence so as not to become an accomplice in the choice of not acting. But at the same time the refusal, very strong in Albert, as we know, of terrorism and of every form of murder. To the point of sacrificing oneself. For completeness of Camus’s position it is, nonetheless, not irrelevant to recall, also in homage to his crystalline honesty, that he himself will become aware of the extreme radicalism he had reached. After the publication of The Rebel, with an apodictic, almost sculptural phrase, he will express himself thus: “Revolt, true crucible of the gods. But it engenders idols as well.” In short, the writer becomes aware, at the very moment of his irreversible critique, as a man of the left, of Marxism and of communism, of the antinomy inherent in his reasoning, and tries to get out of it with what he calls the philosophy of the limit. Revolt must be ceaselessly in search of a balance; in the fire of events it must always re-phase itself. Running not so very far beneath this line of argument is the irrepressible conflict between morality and politics. And in this case too Camus entrenches himself on the ground he feels to be most solid, on those roots that germinate so splendidly in his artistic activity but are not equally prolific in historico-political analysis: moral principles are the indispensable cornerstone. In the white heat of the political clash, at this point a gap opens in the Algerian writer’s guard, and the sword, not the foil, of the old fox Sartre slips in without pity. Beautiful soul!

Sartre, with an almost contemptuous haughtiness, entrusts to Francis Jeanson, in his journal Les Temps Modernes, the demolition of his friend’s work, setting off what may be considered the most famous cultural controversy of the modern era. Camus does not answer the reviewer but addresses himself directly to Sartre, restating point by point his line and accusing the journal, in extreme synthesis, of being in favour “of revolting against everything except the Communist party and the Communist State”, and of wishing to replace history with historicism. In August ’52 Sartre’s reply appears, permeated at bottom by the idea of the inadequacy of the writer’s thought, an idea that is made explicit at several points. The attack is harsh, direct, personal. Camus has ended up “prey to a dismal excess that masks your inner difficulties”. Again: “a violent and ceremonious dictatorship has installed itself within you, one that rests on an abstract bureaucracy and claims to make the moral law reign”. “You became a terrorist and violent at the very moment when history, which you reject, rejected you in its turn.” To close with a phrase that admits no reply: “I hope our silence will let this quarrel be forgotten.” It is the tombstone laid on the friendship. In its icy cynicism, the cynicism of a man who knows well how to distinguish, in the name of realized communism, which side one must take at the moment when history demands that one dirty one’s hands, Sartre’s article is technically perfect. They will not see each other again. Only the writer’s death will allow Sartre to free himself of all the superstructures that the last years had consolidated, and to bring their relationship back to its true and profound essence, in a masterpiece of a funeral oration. Their discord, their quarrel becomes “another way of living together”; “his silence, which, depending on events and on my mood, I sometimes thought too cautious and sometimes painful, was a presence of every day, like warmth or light, but human ones”. Passing then from the plane of personal relations to the judgment on the artist: “He represented in this century, and against History, the present-day heir of that long line of moralists whose works probably constitute what is most original in French letters. His stubborn humanism, rigorous and pure, austere and sensual, waged an improbable battle against the enormous and deformed events of this age.” And, further, recognizing in this “Cartesian of the absurd” his unfailing will to remain anchored to the ground of absolute morality, refusing, and here sounds the note of criticism, to set out along the uncertain roads of practice.

In the service of truth and freedom: this is the watchword to which Albert Camus loved to summon himself. Something not quite human, of a somehow transcendent savour. A mission more than a programmatic aim of existence. Comparable only to the labour of Sisyphus, to which he devoted a work we might call formative when he had not yet turned thirty. A work that allowed him to define, already, a peculiar position of his own within the existentialist movement, laying particular stress on the theme of the absurd. A labour, that of Sisyphus, which is habitually associated with the useless yet inescapable effort of pushing a boulder to the summit only to see it inevitably return, always, to the starting point. Synonymous, therefore, in the common imagination, with the futility of life and the antechamber of resignation and depression. Camus instead overturns the scheme, underlining the fullness of being that this activity generates in Sisyphus, in some way the realization of his existential function. “The struggle toward the summit is itself enough to fill a man’s heart” is the affirmation that ought to lead to the overcoming of one component of existentialism: anguish, the condition that grips man before the abyss of his unconditioned freedom. One has more than once posed the question whether the Algerian writer may be considered, to all effects, an existentialist. Quite apart from the intrinsic difficulty of defining existentialism as a completed movement and body of thought, and consequently of establishing who the existentialists actually were, I believe the answer can be at once yes and no. Because Camus is Camus, within existentialism and quite apart from existentialism. It is a question I find as useless as the one about whether the writer was also a philosopher or not.

Before concluding, two brief considerations on Camus and our own days. There developed in France, in the middle of the twenty-tens of this century, a debate on the advisability of transferring the great writer’s remains from the cemetery of Lourmarin to the Panthéon, so as to reaffirm not only the relevance of his thought but also his place of honour in the republican public spirit of France. The proposal, advanced by the then President Nicolas Sarkozy, slid rapidly from the level of debate to that of polemic. A polemic, as often happens in France, marked by a good dose of radicality, which ended by dividing the French left, and the writer’s own family in the persons of his two twin children. The arguments for and against are easily guessed. I offer a simple personal impression, which may be biased by the emotion the visit to that little cemetery conveyed to me. The balance between man and nature, the being part of that sensual harmony that embraces sky and earth, seem in that place fully realized. I do not know whether in a more austere and institutional place one could breathe in its effluvium.

Lastly, if one gives room to certain metaphorical interpretations of the plague described in the novel as a reference to the then recent Nazi occupation of France, and if at the same time one recognizes the writer’s relevance, one would be led to ask what the plague of the present time might be. It would be easy, or even banal, to think that until a short while ago it might have been identified with terrorism, and today perhaps with the pandemic, with climate change, with anti-scientism and racist sovereignism, in a politically weightier sense, with the wretched free-market theories rampant over the last thirty years. Perhaps a recent phrase of Pope Francis strikes closer to the mark, one to which a broader meaning should be given: “We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick.” Perhaps Camus too was referring to Nazism, but within a broader frame in which the plague represents evil, ever present as the dark side of human nature and conscience, and as such ineradicable.

We like to imagine him, at the moment of his exit from the scene, not in the deadly tangle of the twisted metal of the car crashed off the road but, thanks also to his undoubted resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, as the Rick of Casablanca who walks off into the fog toward one knows not what. Firm, however, in his unfailing conviction of the primacy of morality over every other cause. And we, the men of today, feel more than ever the absolute need for the public side of morality, that is, for ethics as the firmest guide of human conduct at the moment when events impose on us a veritable redesign of our civil and social life. Perhaps it may truly be the occasion for a turning point; or perhaps we are still condemned to irrelevance. But one thing is certain: in both cases we feel Camus terribly close.

Mauro Agostini is an Italian economist, politician and business executive. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for three legislatures (1994–2006) and to the Senate for one (2008–2013). In the Prodi government (2006–2008) he served as undersecretary for international trade. The author of articles and essays on economic and political themes, he was director-general of Sviluppumbria and a member of the boards of the University of Perugia and of the company managing the Umbria International Airport “San Francesco d’Assisi”.