Was Algeria Camus's Fall?1

This paper is dedicated to Carl Viggiani, brilliant Camusien, who with tact and patience introduced me to l'Etranger in the fall of 1954. An earlier version was presented at a colloquium organized by the Cornell University Program in French Studies, September 27, 2002. The theme was Le premier homme in various contexts. I am grateful to Susan Tarrow, Co‐Director of the Institute for European Studies, for her generous invitation, which allowed me to try out my historian's approach to Camus's posthumous novel, and to the other participants for their astute and helpful criticisms. I am of course responsible for the arguments contained herein. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. For a few key citations I have left the original French in the notes. Address for correspondence: [email protected].

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Notes

Correspondence Address: David L. Schalk, Emeritus, Department of History, Box 711, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, USA. Email: [email protected]

This paper is dedicated to Carl Viggiani, brilliant Camusien, who with tact and patience introduced me to l'Etranger in the fall of 1954. An earlier version was presented at a colloquium organized by the Cornell University Program in French Studies, September 27, 2002. The theme was Le premier homme in various contexts. I am grateful to Susan Tarrow, Co‐Director of the Institute for European Studies, for her generous invitation, which allowed me to try out my historian's approach to Camus's posthumous novel, and to the other participants for their astute and helpful criticisms. I am of course responsible for the arguments contained herein. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. For a few key citations I have left the original French in the notes. Address for correspondence: [email protected].

New York: Viking Press (Modern Masters Series). La Chute was first published by Gallimard in 1956. English edition, The Fall, Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Knopf, 1957. Four of the six short stories in the last fiction published in Camus's lifetime, The Exile and the Kingdom (L'Exil et le royaume), are also set in Colonial Algeria. His intense focus on his Algerian homeland is indisputable.

There are to be sure a number of other ways to interpret The Fall, including building upon the explicit religious imagery and the references to Eden and Clamence as a sort of Adam. Then there is the collapse of European society and the Holocaust; Clamence lives in the former Jewish quarter, site of the most horrific crime perpetrated by and against humanity. While one cannot be certain, The Fall was very probably the determinant factor in the selection committee's decision to award the Nobel Prize to Camus in 1957. The first edition of L'Exil et le royaume (published by Gallimard as were all of Camus's mature works) did not appear until the second trimester of 1957, so the committee would not have had much time to digest the significance of this powerful, if in the view of some critics, uneven collection.

“Colonisateur de bonne volonte´.” See Memmi's Portrait du Colonisateur (Paris: Correa, 1957). See note 29 below. I agree completely with Donald Lozere when he writes, “The quality of The Fall that makes it a unique masterpiece is its power slowly to get under the reader's skin and permanently haunt his conscience.” [The Unique Creation of Albert Camus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 184.] In his analysis of the novel Lozere states that “Clamence's paralysis on the bridge has been widely interpreted as an analogy for Camus's inability to take the plunge into committing himself to one side or the other in the Algerian War”(p. 188). Regrettably there is no footnote reference and Lozere does not identify any of the interpreters.

The title of Alistair Horne's still useful general history of the Algerian war, first published in 1977.

For a analysis of the unanimous vote of the Chamber of Deputies on June 10, 1999, of the Proposition de Loi declaring the “events” of 1954‐1962 to be a true war rather than “ope´rations de maintien de l'ordre” [operations for the maintenance of order, the usual bureaucratic term], which was subsequently ratified by the Senate and then signed into law by President Jacques Chirac on October 18^th, see my “Of Memories and Monuments: Paris and Algeria, Fre´jus and Indochina,” Historical Reflections/Re´flexions historiques, Vol. 28/2 (Summer 2002), pp. 247‐48.

To cite one example, Father Daniel Berrigan during the summer of 1968 was serving as Chaplain at Cornell University. He was at the time was under indictment for burning of draft records in Catonsville Maryland with homemade napalm, the famous action of “The Catonsville Nine,” May 17, 1968. He had posted this quotation from Camus in large letters in his office: “I wish I would love my country as much as I love justice.” [As reported in Francine du Plessix Gray, Divine Disobedience (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), p.134.] Father Berrigan recalls that the citation was reproduced on a serigraph by the well‐known graphic artist Sister Corita Kent, and that the wording was different, “something to the effect that ‘I hope to love my country and still love justice.’ ” (Daniel Berrigan, personal communication, November 10, 2002.) In any case Father Berrigan could have chosen powerful examples of Catholic antiwar activism but preferred the secular humanist Camus.

Jean‐Pierre Rioux, L'Expansion et l'impuissance, Vol. 2 of La France de la Quatrie`me Re´publique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), p. 126.

For more detailed information see War and the Ivory Tower, pp. 68‐69.

Published in Le Monde, December 14, 1957, and reprinted in Albert Camus, Essais, ed. R. Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 1881‐82.

Letter of April 7, 1958, from the archives of Les Editions de Minuit, as cited in Anne Simonin, “Les Editions de Minuit et les Editions du Seuil: Deux strate´gies e´ditoriales face a` la guerre d'Alge´rie,” in Jean‐Pierre Rioux and Jean‐Franc¸ois Sirinelli, eds., La guerre d'Alge´rie et les intellectuels franc¸ais (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1991), p. 242. The passage reads: “I decided more than a year ago, after becoming fully aware of what definitively separates me, both from the Left and the Right, as far as the issue of Algeria is concerned, not to associate myself with any public campaign on the subject. Thus, even when the objective is valid, as it is in this case, I have decided on no further public involvement, and will only act privately.”

The incident of the banning of La Question has been widely discussed. For a brief account see War and the Ivory Tower, pp. 65‐8. Information on the naming of La Chute comes from Olivier Todd, Albert Camus. Une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 879. Todd gives publication data on p. 1128.

Citing from Actuelles III (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 166. My translation.

War and the Ivory Tower, pp. 70‐71. Not italicized in the original. But I want to emphasize this tentativeness.

Camus (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 36.

The University of Alabama Press, 1985, p. 193. She adds, “just as Daru did.” [In the powerful story l'Hoˆte, which is an essential text to analyze because it is the only work of fiction published during his lifetime that explicitly deals with the Algerian War.]

Sub‐titled Chronique alge´rienne, 1939‐1958.

The term “La guerre sans nom,” which became widely used, was probably coined by the great ethnographer Paul Mus, whose son, a Lieutenant, was killed in battle in Algeria.

• Most of the reviews, both of the original edition in 1994, and of the English translation in 1995, were extremely favorable. One example would be “Boyhood's Dark Fire,” the lead article by Victor Brombert in the August 27, 1995 issue of The New York Times Book Review. The only really strong attack on the novel of which I am aware was made by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the October 16, 1995 issue of The New Republic, pp. 42‐7. The heading of this forceful piece is simply “The Fall,” and it re‐examines, in the light cast by Le premier homme, themes Cruise O'Brien had explored a quarter of a century earlier in his controversial Albert Camus of Europe and Algeria (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), already mentioned in the introduction to this paper.

• The question of the very long delay in bringing this work to print is a fascinating one. The principal reason seems to be that his family feared that it would ignite even greater hostility toward Camus on the part of the primarily leftist Parisian intelligentsia, who would interpret it as corroborating their view of him as an apologist for French colonialism.

If only he had decided to take the train from Lourmarin back to Paris instead of accepting a ride with his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard; at the crash site an unused ticket was found in his pocket.

There is an unresolved debate in the literature over the origins of the term pied‐noir, which I use several times in this essay. But its referent is clear enough and widely agreed upon. Pieds‐noirs are those French citizens born in colonial Algeria who are of ethnic European origin. Hence by definition, Camus, born in December 1913 in Mondavi, Algeria, of mixed French and Spanish parentage, was a pied‐noir. It is a human group that will disappear inevitably, when the last European infant born in Algeria before independence in July 1962 dies. Of the large bibliography on the pieds‐noirs Miche`le Baussant, Pieds‐Noirs: Me´moires d'Exils (Paris: Stock, 2002), is a superb sociological study of this group of “losers mistreated by history.”

Albert Camus, Carnets III (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 216. If Camus recorded these remarks correctly, de Gaulle underestimated the capacity for internecine violence of his compatriots. Just to mention one example, the OAS (Secret Army Organization), established in the spring of 1961 with the goal of maintaining French Algeria at any cost, besides attempting to assassinate de Gaulle himself, did not hesitate to kill French men and women.

Ibid., p. 251. In French his haunting words are: “Le matin. L'Alge´rie m'obse`de. Trop tard, trop tard … Ma terre perdue, je ne vaudrais plus rien.”

Todd, op. cit., p. 997. From a 1993 interview. Quilliot also reported that Camus told him at around the same time, “If I ever should become a stranger [in French he uses ‘e´tranger’, which in this context would also mean foreigner] in my own homeland, in Algeria, I shall leave France.” (Ibid., p. 999.)

Ibid., p. 262. Those who have studied the history of colonial Algeria know well that the capital city, “Alger la blanche,” was revered for its beauty, the splendor of its bay, which helps explain the powerful nostalgia, the anguish, the bitterness, the sense of betrayal that one finds in so many post‐independence pied‐noir writings.

Nadji Khaoua, “L'e´chec de la transition en Alge´rie ou le populisme de´mythifie,” Le Quotidien d'Oran (July 4‐5, 2004).

A posthumous vindication that he enjoyed especially from 1994 to about 1997, and I think continues to enjoy, if not at quite such a mediatised level. His presence seemed almost tangible for a while in the mid 1990s; does it still? Perhaps, in the way he speaks to our particular time, our particular set of blighted hopes and gnawing fears.

Le Monde, August 5, 1977. The French reads: “De droite et de gauche, les coups pleuvaient, le me´pris cinglait; on n'y allait pas de main morte, en ces anne´es de guerre froide. Or le seul tort de Camus, outre celui d'eˆtre trop lu, n'e´tait‐il pas d'avoir raison trop toˆt?” I have used Susan Tarrow's translation, in op. cit., p. 119.

See Note 4 above. My purpose here is not to undertake detailed literary analysis. One finds the author's high level of comfort, his sense of belonging to Algeria, all throughout the narrative of his childhood years. At one point Camus uses the phrase “Alge´riens” to describe the ethnic French employees with whom his hero Jacques Cormery (Camus himself, as is patently clear in the novel) worked in the summer as a teen‐ager (Le premier homme, p. 246. I am using my own translations from the original 1994 French edition, published as Cahiers Albert Camus VII, throughout.)

From Judt's review in The New York Review of Books (October 6, 1994), p. 5.

Le premier homme, p. 189. The novel is poignantly dedicated to Camus's mother, who was almost totally deaf and illiterate, “To you who will never be able to read this book” [A` toi qui ne pourras jamais lire ce livre.] Most of the internal contradictions are carefully noted by Catherine Camus; for example on p. 12, Jacques Cormery's older brother is with the family in November 1913, on the wagon trip to Solfe´rino where Jacques will be born, but on p. 20 the older boy is left behind in Algiers with his grandmother.

Although at some points in the text this identity shifts and becomes more general, applying to all males, Arab and European, born in that savage, savagely beautiful, land, that “land of forgetfulness, where each and ever male was the first man, where he [Jacques Cormery] had to bring himself up alone, without a father.” (p. 181).

Le premier homme, p. 43.

Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), pp. 160‐1. Her italics. I find it fascinating that in a book published nine years before Le premier homme, Susan Tarrow makes a very similar argument, defending Camus eloquently and persuasively, even, I think, in the retrospective light cast by Le premier homme. She writes, “…with the benefit of hindsight, critics suggest that Camus could have found a way out by advocating the abolition of colonial structures, whereas he proposed reforms within the framework of a French presence. He certainly could not have published [her italics; i.e., because they would have been immediately censored] calls for decolonization, and it seems unfair to expect of a pied‐noir, even an enlightened one, a political stance that not even Algerian Moslems or the PCA [Algerian Communist Party] had taken up. In a sense what Camus advocated was decolonization, in that he called for the abolition of a power structure in which Moslems were always at the bottom of the hierarchy. To him, as a man who had never lived anywhere but Algeria, colonialism was a power structure, not a conflict between European and Moslem; the system could be changed without the eviction of the inhabitants” (62).

Philip Dine, “(Still) A la recherche´ de l'Alge´rie perdue: French Fiction and Film, 1992‐2000,” Historical Reflections/Re´flexions Historiques, Vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 269‐70.

See Raphae¨lle Branche, La torture et l'arme´e pendant la guerre d'Alge´rie (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 280. There is wide agreement among military historians, Jean‐Charles Jauffret and Alastair Horne and others, that the French army was gaining ground from a strictly military perspective in 1959.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. xiii. Wall admits that “it is doubtful that the mystery of de Gaulle's intentions concerning Algeria can be fully resolved….” He believes that most probably de Gaulle himself “did not know how he would solve the problem.” In any case “in the short run his policy was that of the army, the Algerian settlers, and the Fourth Republic that had brought him to power: to keep Algeria French by means of military victory” (158‐59). Wall develops this argument forcefully in three chapters, especially Chapter 7, “De Gaulle Reconsidered.” Thus he believes that de Gaulle's obduracy ensured that the war's end took place “in the worst conditions that anyone could have imagined: amid an unprecedented outbreak of European‐sponsored terrorism, followed by a chaotic withdrawal and resettlement in France of virtually all of the one million‐plus settler population of Algeria…” (xiii.) (This enforced exile would have included, one presumes, though none of the biographers I have been able to consult tell us for sure, Camus's mother, if she lived beyond July 1962. She died in that year, but I do not know where or in what month.) “If I am right,” Wall adds, “de Gaulle will join many other giants who in our estimation must be regarded as having had at least one foot made of clay.”

Ibid., p. 249.

I am referring here to a common theme in French political cartoons of the time, which showed de Gaulle hindered in his movements by a convict's ball and chain (boulet in French), marked “Algeria.”

There is also a third “incorruptible,” Claire Mauss‐Copeaux, who has written on draftees in Algeria.

[“La grande impunite des militaires: mi‐1958‐fin 1959”] Branche's gripping chapter on the “Battle of Algiers,” which began on January 7, 1957, when General Jacques Massu received police powers for the city, is subtitled “The Reign of Torture.” She demonstrates with careful use of archival materials that only in the spring of 1960, i.e., we must remember, after Camus's death, did the newly installed Fifth Republic's efforts to control its military begin to have “consequences in the matter of illegal violence against prisoners. It was a very slow and far from perfect amelioration, as a close study of the final years of the conflict reveals.” (14.) Paul Delouvrier, de Gaulle's “Personal Representative” in Algeria (a new title for what used to be known as the “Governor General,”) who himself strongly opposed torture, had to maneuver carefully. Delouvrier was not able remove from office the brutal, infamous, Colonel Yves Godard until February 1960, again after Camus's death. Godard essentially governed the city of Algiers beginning in 1957. (234.) Only in the fall of 1959 did Delouvrier feel secure enough to try to stop torture during interrogations. And in October 1959 he began to inspect internment centers, and was able to arrange for the Swiss Red Cross to come to Algeria. (240‐1.)

See my discussion above of Camus's refusal to get involved in the Henri Alleg case.

Branche, p. 55.

Ibid., p. 22. The French is more succinct, and reads: “c'est moins la loi qui dicte la guerre, que la guerre qui dicte sa loi.” To give just one example, Branche interviewed a Colonel who served in Algeria, who obviously remained anonymous. He didn't think he lost his honor in Algeria, “let us just say that I lost a little of my soul.” (169.)

The four generals were Salan, Challe, Jouhaud, and Zeller. This key moment in the history of the Algerian war has been extensively studied. There was a generalized panic on the mainland, and a fear that the parachutists would descend upon Paris. De Gaulle has been widely praised for his astute and courageous handling of the crisis, his brilliant use of the medium of television to appeal to the French people, and to the wavering majority of the armed forces in Algeria, who listened to his speech on transistor radios, and in the end did not join the rebellious generals and their supporters in the armed forces.

The police were frequently used as guarantors of a (pseudo) legality. As one military officer, a Captain, put it, the gendarmes, who were often pieds‐noirs and thus especially prone to aid the army in its ignoble work, were present “to legalize our illegalities.” (Ibid., p. 77.)

Jean‐Jacques Becker, preface to Sylvie The´nault, Une droˆle de justice. Les magistrats dans la guerre d'Alge´rie (Paris Editions de la De´couverte, 2001), p. 3. The French reads “… un Etat de droit avait pu bien souvent fouler aui pied le droit, tout en pre´tendant le sauvegarder.”

Olivier Todd was given some access to archival materials at the Ministry of Justice, but could not come up a number of captured Algerian rebels actually saved through Camus's quiet but effective interventions with the authorities. At the time they were totally unpublicized. A reasonable estimate would be between fifteen and twenty‐five. (See Todd, pp. 995 and 1136.)

Justice became “the tool of repression par excellence.” The´nault, p. 8.

Ibid., p. 9.

Ibid., p. 319.

Pierre Vidal‐Naquet, “Postface,” to The´nault, p. 330.

Carnets, III, p. 86. [Je demande une seule chose, et je la demande humblement, bien qu'elle est exorbitante: eˆtre lu avec attention.]

See especially p. 25, “forty years later” after the opening scene portraying Jacques's birth in the village of Solfe´rino in Algeria (identical with Camus's actual birthplace in Mondovi in the Constantinois region). And even more precisely, on p. 29, where Jacques's age is given as forty years, “il avait quarante ans.” Jacques reads the dates of his father's short life, 1885‐1914, and was powerfully shaken by the realization that “the man buried under this tombstone, and who had been his father, was younger than he was.” Again, on p.256, “Jacques was forty years old.” Jacques's mother is 72 when her son visits him in war‐torn Algiers (57), but she was born in 1882 (289), so the calendar year within the framework established at this point in the novel is 1954, even if the historical year is late 1956 or 1957.

The first of the two sections of the novel that were more or less completed when Camus died is entitled “Recherche du pe`re”.

p. 38.

If Jacques does not find out much about his father, the novel provides a wonderful reconstruction of the hero's childhood in colonial Algiers in the 1920s. (Camus died before he could write about Jacques as a young adult in the 1930s.) From a literary perspective this portrayal is surely superior to the briefer contemporary scenes, perhaps because Camus had less time to rework the latter. The technique of interspersing scenes, with the semi‐idyllic past blending with the terrible present, does seem to me to be effective, even in this preliminary draft. To take one example—aesthetically, in my judgment, the description of the childhood games is elegant, perfectly done, clean, precise, with no self‐pity about the extreme poverty. The boys play a poor man's tennis (p. 47).

Also the angry pieds‐noirs who would have attacked an innocent Arab bystander if Jacques had not protected him. (74‐75). This is the Battle of Algiers, 1956‐57.

Immortalized in Gilles Pontecorvo's film, which in the United States at least has again brought memories of that terrible urban struggle to the forefront, with extensive press coverage on parallels between the Algerian and Second Iraq wars. “The Battle of Algiers” has been described as the “Pentagon's Favorite Training Film,” (New York Times, January 4, 2004, p. 26), and a restored print was widely screened in theatres around the country in early 2004.

p. 76.

There is also a brief scene of Jacques's paying a call on Monsieur Bernard, his old teacher, now retired. This is, at least in the incomplete manuscript as published in 1994, less developed than the account of the small boy thirty years earlier, proving himself under Monsieur Bernard's strict yet benign guidance. This is one point where Camus is clearly setting the contemporary action of the novel in 1959 at the earliest. He mentions that in 1945, M. Bernard, back in uniform as an overage volunteer, came to see Jacques in recently liberated Paris, telling him that he was returning to Algiers, and instructing Jacques to come to visit him, “… and Jacques had been going to visit him every year for fifteen years.” (149) Monsieur Bernard's real name was Louis Germain, and at one point in the manuscript Camus slipped and called his teacher “M. Germain.” (138) Catherine Camus included an exchange of letters between Camus and his beloved mentor at the end of the published text of Le premier homme.

The actual title of Chapter 7 is “Mondovi: Colonization and the Father,” so here Camus had not bothered to use the fictitious name “Solfe´rino.” One may assume that he would have made changes for the purposes of consistency, had he lived to finish the novel.

The nearest large cities are Boˆne and Constantine.

p. 166.

p. 167. Surely Camusian shorthand for “Parisian intellectuals.”

I am grateful to Professor Irwin Wall for this insight. It is to be sure conceivable that Camus heard an account of an early example of this type of incident. We learn in the novel (167) that Veillard's parents' farm had been located close to the Tunisian frontier, “the forbidden zone, near the barrier [zone interdite. Pre`s du barrage.] “Forbidden zones” were delineated areas that in America's war in Vietnam were known as “Free‐Fire Zones.” During either of those wars anyone observed in such areas was deemed a fair target, even if he was simply following a stray sheep or water buffalo. The reference to the “barrier” (barrage) is to the fortified, electrified fence that the French army had built along the Algerian‐Tunisian border, known as the “ ”Morice Line,” mentioned earlier.

p. 168.

Ibid.

Which is when it occurs in the aesthetic time set by the novel, but historically three years earlier

• pp. 168‐9. For good reason this passage has often been cited and commented upon. In the French original it reads: “On est fait pour s'entendre. Aussi beˆtes et brutes que nous, mais le meˆme sang d'homme. On va encore un peu se tuer, se couper les couilles et se torturer un brin. Et puis on recommencera a` vivre entre hommes. C'est le pays qui veut c¸a.”

• In the section “Notes et Plans,” which are random jottings, ideas for the novel that Camus never had the chance to develop, there is one notation that suggests he was thinking of modeling his ending more on the M. Veillard pe`re than his more optimistic son. Camus writes that the title for the concluding section would be: “The Nomads. Beginning with moving of a household [un de´me´nagement] and ends with the evacuation of the Algerian lands.” (282.)

pp. 71‐72.