by Albert Camus
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1995
Copyright © 1960 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1960.
The essays, originally published in French, were selected from Lettres à un allemand, copyright 1948 by Librarie Gallimard; Actuelles, copyright 1950 by Librarie Gallimard; Actuelles II, copyright 1953 by Librarie Gallimard; Actuelles III, copyright © 1958 by Librarie Gallimard; Réflexions sur la peine capitale, copyright © 1957 by Calmann-Lévy; Discours de Suède, copyright © Librarie Gallimard. The following were interviews: “Kadar Had His Day of Fear,” which appeared as “Kadar a eu son jour de peur” in Franc-Tireur in 1957; “Socialism of the Gallows,” which appeared as “Le socialisme des potences,” and “The Wager of Our Generation,” which appeared as “Le pari de notre generation,” both in Demain in 1957.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Camus, Albert, 1913–1960.
Resistance, rebellion, and death.
Reprint of the 1961 ed. published by Knopf, New York.
Essays selected by the author from his Actuelles and other works.
1. Europe—Politics—Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Good and evil. I. Title.
[PQ2605.A3734A25 1974] 844′.9.′14 73-14867
eISBN: 978-0-307-82785-2
Cover design by Helen Yentus
v3.1
INTRODUCTION
IT WAS as much for the positive stand Albert Camus took on the issues of the day as for his creative writing—or rather it was for the combination of the two—that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 at the early age of forty-three. Because, in everything he wrote, he spoke to us of our problems and in our language, without raising his voice or indulging in oratory, he illuminated, as the Nobel citation stated, “the problems of the human conscience in our time.” Over and above intellectual or political leadership, he provided the moral guidance the postwar generation needed. By remaining flagrantly independent, he could speak out both against the Russian slave-labor camps and against U.S. support of Franco’s Spain. By overcoming the immature nihilism and despair that he saw as poisoning our century, he emerged as the staunch defender of our positive moral values and of “those silent men who, throughout the world, endure the life that has been made for them.”
Indeed, one of the things that endeared Camus to all of us is that he spoke for all. As he said in the brilliant credo he voiced in the Stockholm town hall upon accepting the most universally distinguished award, “… the writer’s function is not without arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.” Whether we fight in the regular army or wage war as civilians in the shadows of some maquis, whether we succumb to famine or slink into exile, whether we are crushed by dictators or put to death by due process of law, are we not all “subject to history”?
In France Camus made his mark as a journalist and polemicist at about the same time that he asserted himself as one of that country’s leading novelists. But in 1943–4 his readers didn’t yet know that the author of the anonymous editorials they were clipping from the clandestine newspaper Combat as the most vigorous expression of their own feelings and the author of L’Etranger were one and the same person. Only after the Liberation of Paris, when Combat came out into the open, did they discover that the forthright, inspiring editorialist they had admired was named Albert Camus.
Little by little, his compatriots learned that this young Algerian Frenchman had begun life as a journalist, that, after having incurred the government’s wrath for his most revelatory reportage on the sorry condition of the Kabyle tribes of Algeria, he had come over to Occupied France and helped to found what was both an intelligence network and an underground newspaper. And, as admiration for his first two novels, The Stranger and The Plague, grew in all countries, Camus continued to write essays dealing with the major problems, social and political, that haunted him and his generation. In 1950 he brought out a collected volume of those articles under the title Actuelles; a second volume followed in 1953 and a third in 1958, soon after the Nobel Prize.
In the last year of his life, Albert Camus chose from the three volumes of Actuelles the twenty-three essays he considered most worthy of preservation in English. They deal with the perennially current issues that periodically tore him from his creative writing to speak out, as he said, “in the service of truth and the service of freedom”: war and resistance in a Europe dominated by prisons, executions, and exile; the tragedies of Algeria and of Hungary; the horror of the death penalty; and the writer’s commitment.
The very title Actuelles, which unfortunately could not be carried over into English, is typical of the man—concise without being precise, allusive without being descriptive, and modest. Indeed, this mere adjective in the feminine plural meaning “current,” “prevailing,” or “of present interest” almost requires a gloss in the original. What noun did Camus suppress for greater ambiguity—pensées, réflexions, vues?
To some readers these essays will introduce an utterly new Camus—what one might be tempted to call the Camus actuel. But he wrote them concurrently with his novels and plays and in them explored the same themes he touched upon in his creative work. An essential part of the man and the writer, these occasional articles and speeches reveal more clearly the position of one of the most lucid spirits of our time—one who was both committed and aloof, or, as he himself implied in his moral tale “The Artist at Work,” at once solidary and solitary.
And Camus would never have allowed anyone to consider these essays as incidental to, or less important than, his plays and novels, for he recognized them as a significant part of that opera omnia with which he now—too soon, alas—must face posterity.
JUSTIN O’BRIEN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Letters to a German Friend
Preface for the Italian Edition
First Letter
Second Letter
Third Letter
Fourth Letter
The Liberation of Paris The Blood of Freedom
The Night of Truth
The Flesh
Pessimism and Tyranny Pessimism and Courage
Defense of Intelligence
The Unbeliever and Christians
Why Spain?
Defense of Freedom Bread and Freedom
Homage to an Exile
Algeria Preface to Algerian Reports
Letter to an Algerian Militant
Appeal for a Civilian Truce
Algeria 1958
Hungary Kadar Had His Day of Fear
Socialism of the Gallows
Reflections on the Guillotine
The Artist and His Time The Wager of Our Generation
Create Dangerously
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Letters to a German Friend
for
René Leynaud
A man does not show his greatness
by being at one extremity,
but rather by touching
both at once.
—PASCAL
PREFACE FOR THE ITALIAN EDITION
THE Letters to a German Friend1 were published in France after the Liberation in a limited editi
on and have never been reprinted. I have always been opposed to their circulation abroad for the reasons that I shall give.
This is the first time they have appeared outside of France and I should not have made up my mind to this had it not been for my long-standing desire to contribute, insofar as I can, to removing the stupid frontiers separating our two territories.
But I cannot let these pages be reprinted without saying what they are. They were written and published clandestinely during the Occupation. They had a purpose, which was to throw some light on the blind battle we were then waging and thereby to make our battle more effective. They are topical writings and hence they may appear unjust. Indeed, if one were to write about defeated Germany, a rather different tone would be called for. But I should simply like to forestall a misunderstanding. When the author of these letters says “you,” he means not “you Germans” but “you Nazis.” When he says “we,” this signifies not always “we Frenchmen” but sometimes “we free Europeans.” I am contrasting two attitudes, not two nations, even if, at a certain moment in history, these two nations personified two enemy attitudes. To repeat a remark that is not mine, I love my country too much to be a nationalist. And I know that neither France nor Italy would lose anything—quite the contrary—if they both had broader horizons. But we are still wide of the mark, and Europe is still torn. This is why I should be ashamed today if I implied that a French writer could be the enemy of a single nation. I loathe none but executioners. Any reader who reads the Letters to a German Friend in this perspective—in other words, as a document emerging from the struggle against violence—will see how I can say that I don’t disown a single word I have written here.
1 The first of these letters appeared in the second issue of the Revue Libre in 1943; the second, in No. 3 of the Cahiers de Libération in the beginning of 1944. The two others, written for the Revue Libre, remained unpublished.
FIRST LETTER
YOU said to me: “The greatness of my country is beyond price. Anything is good that contributes to its greatness. And in a world where everything has lost its meaning, those who, like us young Germans, are lucky enough to find a meaning in the destiny of our nation must sacrifice everything else.” I loved you then, but at that point we diverged. “No,” I told you, “I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.” You retorted: “Well, you don’t love your country.”
That was five years ago; we have been separated since then and I can say that not a single day has passed during those long years (so brief, so dazzlingly swift for you!) without my remembering your remark. “You don’t love your country!” When I think of your words today, I feel a choking sensation. No, I didn’t love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we love amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving. That was five years ago, and many men in France thought as I did. Some of them, however, have already been stood up against the wall facing the twelve little black eyes of German destiny. And those men, who in your opinion did not love their country, did more for it than you will ever do for yours, even if it were possible for you to give your life a hundred times. For their heroism was that they had to conquer themselves first. But I am speaking here of two kinds of greatness and of a contradiction about which I must enlighten you.
We shall meet soon again—if possible. But our friendship will be over. You will be full of your defeat. You will not be ashamed of your former victory. Rather, you will longingly remember it with all your crushed might. Today I am still close to you in spirit—your enemy, to be sure, but still a little your friend because I am withholding nothing from you here. Tomorrow all will be over. What your victory could not penetrate, your defeat will bring to an end. But at least, before we become indifferent to each other, I want to leave you a clear idea of what neither peace nor war has taught you to see in the destiny of my country.
I want to tell you at once what sort of greatness keeps us going. But this amounts to telling you what kind of courage we applaud, which is not your kind. For it is not much to be able to do violence when you have been simply preparing for it for years and when violence is more natural to you than thinking. It is a great deal, on the other hand, to face torture and death when you know for a fact that hatred and violence are empty things in themselves. It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization. That is how we do more than you because we have to draw on ourselves. You had nothing to conquer in your heart or in your intelligence. We had two enemies, and a military victory was not enough for us, as it was for you who had nothing to overcome.
We had much to overcome—and, first of all, the constant temptation to emulate you. For there is always something in us that yields to instinct, to contempt for intelligence, to the cult of efficiency. Our great virtues eventually become tiresome to us. We become ashamed of our intelligence, and sometimes we imagine some barbarous state where truth would be effortless. But the cure for this is easy; you are there to show us what such imagining would lead to, and we mend our ways. If I believed in some fatalism in history, I should suppose that you are placed beside us, helots of the intelligence, as our living reproof. Then we reawaken to the mind and we are more at ease.
But we also had to overcome the suspicion we had of heroism. I know, you think that heroism is alien to us. You are wrong. It’s just that we profess heroism and we distrust it at the same time. We profess it because ten centuries of history have given us knowledge of all that is noble. We distrust it because ten centuries of intelligence have taught us the art and blessings of being natural. In order to face up to you, we had first to be at death’s door. And this is why we fell behind all of Europe, which wallowed in falsehood the moment it was necessary, while we were concerned with seeking truth. This is why we were defeated in the beginning: because we were so concerned, while you were falling upon us, to determine in our hearts whether right was on our side.
We had to overcome our weakness for mankind, the image we had formed of a peaceful destiny, that deep-rooted conviction of ours that no victory ever pays, whereas any mutilation of mankind is irrevocable. We had to give up all at once our knowledge and our hope, the reasons we had for loving and the loathing we had for all war. To put it in a word that I suppose you will understand when it comes from me whom you counted as a friend, we had to stifle our passion for friendship.
Now we have done that. We had to make a long detour, and we are far behind. It is a detour that regard for truth imposes on intelligence, that regard for friendship imposes on the heart. It is a detour that safeguarded justice and put truth on the side of those who questioned themselves. And, without a doubt, we paid very dearly for it. We paid for it with humiliations and silences, with bitter experiences, with prison sentences, with executions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and, above all, with humiliation of our human dignity. But that was natural. It took us all that time to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we were allowed to add to the frightful misery of this world. And because of that time lost and recaptured, our defeat accepted and surmounted, those scruples paid for with blood, we French have the right to think today that we entered this war with hands clean—clean as victims and the condemned are—and that we are going to come out of it with hands clean—but clean this time with a great victory won against injustice and against ourselves.
For we shall be victorious, you may be sure. But we shall be victorious thanks to that very defeat, to that long, slow progress during which we found our justification, to that suffering which, in all its injustice, taught
us a lesson. It taught us the secret of any victory, and if we don’t lose the secret, we shall know final victory. It taught us that, contrary to what we sometimes used to think, the spirit is of no avail against the sword, but that the spirit together with the sword will always win out over the sword alone. That is why we have now accepted the sword, after making sure that the spirit was on our side. We had first to see people die and to run the risk of dying ourselves. We had to see a French workman walking toward the guillotine at dawn down the prison corridors and exhorting his comrades from cell to cell to show their courage. Finally, to possess ourselves of the spirit, we had to endure torture of our flesh. One really possesses only what one has paid for. We have paid dearly, and we have not finished paying. But we have our certainties, our justifications, our justice; your defeat is inevitable.
I have never believed in the power of truth in itself. But it is at least worth knowing that when expressed forcefully truth wins out over falsehood. This is the difficult equilibrium we have reached. This is the distinction that gives us strength as we fight today. And I am tempted to tell you that it so happens that we are fighting for fine distinctions, but the kind of distinctions that are as important as man himself. We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.
This is what I wanted to tell you, not above the fray but in the thick of the fray. This is what I wanted to answer to your remark, “You don’t love your country,” which is still haunting me. But I want to be clear with you. I believe that France lost her power and her sway for a long time to come and that for a long time she will need a desperate patience, a vigilant revolt to recover the element of prestige necessary for any culture. But I believe she has lost all that for reasons that are pure. And this is why I have not lost hope. This is the whole meaning of my letter. The man whom you pitied five years ago for being so reticent about his country is the same man who wants to say to you today, and to all those of our age in Europe and throughout the world: “I belong to an admirable and persevering nation which, admitting her errors and weaknesses, has not lost the idea that constitutes her whole greatness. Her people are always trying and her leaders are sometimes trying to express that idea even more clearly. I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history and to take her chance in a game where she holds no trumps. This country is worthy of the difficult and demanding love that is mine. And I believe she is decidedly worth fighting for since she is worthy of a higher love. And I say that your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?”
