MONOD’S LETTER WAS subsequently published in the very prominent American journal Science amid a growing outcry over the adverse effects US visa policies were having on American and international scientists.
CHAPTER 22
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again.
—ALBERT CAMUS, The Rebel
COLD WAR POLITICS WERE NEVER FAR FROM CAMUS AND MONOD’S conversations. One evening, the two met for dinner at Jean Bloch-Michel’s home, on rue de Verneuil on the Left Bank, near the Gallimard offices. Another guest that evening, journalist Jean Daniel, cofounder of the Caliban review and future cofounder of Le Nouvel Observateur, was struck by the intimate rapport between the scientist and the author. He later recalled his first impression of the two men as one of watching a Hollywood movie, with Camus as Humphrey Bogart and Monod as Henry Fonda. Daniel was touched by how Camus or Monod finished the other’s sentences, or even anticipated what the other was going to say. The pleasure each took in the other’s company and conversation was obvious. When Monod raged about how his visa was denied even though he had long quit the Communist Party, Camus, who was in the same boat, having once been a member of the Party in Algeria, burst out laughing. The two men were so engaged, and so enjoyed their banter, that Daniel had the sense that he and Bloch-Michel were interrupting a private evening.
That intimacy reflected Monod and Camus’s deep engagement over their shared central concern of the Soviet Union’s deviations. At the time, Camus was putting the finishing touches on The Rebel, a book that was more than nine years in the making. The essay was initially conceived to be a philosophical exploration of what Camus viewed as the “first value of the human race”—rebellion or revolt, the individual saying no to some condition of existence.
Even before the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, Camus had planned to write a full essay on revolt as part of a second “cycle” of his body of work. But as he jotted notes and fragments over the years, the experiences of the war, and of the Resistance in particular, expanded his thinking toward the collective dimensions of rebellion, of what happens when people stand together and say no. The Plague was the novelized version; The Rebel was to be its companion essay. While both works were in progress, he wrote and published a short essay in 1945—“La Remarque sur la Révolte” (“Note on Revolt”)—that framed the central theme of rebellion and ultimately served as the template for the first chapter of The Rebel six years later. Written while the spirit of the Resistance still resonated, and at the height of his involvement in Combat, Camus’s short essay made the point that individual rebellion asserted the existence of values and was the seed of solidarity among humans. He began:
What is a rebel? It is first of all, a man who says no … What does he mean by saying “no”?
He means, for example, that “things are hard enough,” “there are limits beyond which one cannot pass,” “up to this point, yes, beyond it no,” or “you are going too far.”
Camus asserted that by saying no, the rebel is in turn affirming that there are limits beyond which his rights are infringed upon. There is thus something to be preserved, something of value, on one side of the limit. Moreover, these limits and rights belong not just to the rebel but also to others. In the act of refusal, the rebel thereby defines a value, a value that Camus alleged “transcends the individual, which removes him from his solitude” and thus joins him to others, and so establishes “the solidarity of man in the same adventure.”
The first philosophical secret of life for Camus was the recognition of the absurd condition. This instinct for positive rebellion—against death, oppression, suffering, or injustice—was the second secret of life, and a path to humanity.
In the postwar years, revelations about the Soviet Union and the growing tensions of the Cold War led Camus to recognize that rebellion could go too far. Rebellions that evolved into revolutions somehow ended up creating oppressive regimes that denied freedom and happiness, imposed suffering and injustice, destroyed solidarity, and legitimized murder—which betrayed the very purpose of revolt. Camus’s project then took on the added dimension of examining the path from rebellion to revolution to totalitarianism. As he set forth in his introduction, The Rebel sought to “understand the times in which we live,” and how “logical crime” was justified, how murder became seen as a legitimate means to the realization of revolutions. Camus sought to understand this deviation by first tracing the history of revolutions over the previous century and a half, from the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror to the rise of Nazism and Hitler.
Camus observed: “All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state.” He laid blame once again upon the ascent of nihilism. In those revolutions in which God had been replaced, nihilistic attitudes recognized no limits in ensuring the continuity of the revolution as represented by the state. “Nihilism,” Camus wrote, means “one is justified in using every means at one’s disposal.” Rivals and enemies of the revolution were to be eliminated, and individual freedom suppressed as citizens became mere cogs in the apparatus. When everything is meaningless, power is everything.
In the last third of the book, Camus turned the spotlight exclusively on Marxism, Stalinism, and Communism, and delivered a scathing, comprehensive indictment of the entire Soviet system. Camus declared: “The greatest revolution that history ever knew” has become “the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people,” a regime in which “all freedom must be crushed in order to preserve the empire” and that “contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle.” He further condemned “the concentration camp system of the Russians” that had transitioned “from the government of people to the administration of objects,” creating a country in which “dialogue and personal relations have been replaced by propaganda or polemic” and “the ration coupon substituted for bread.”
The evidence cited in his indictments included the liquidation of so-called enemies of the revolution, trials based on false charges, labor camps, the repression of literature and art, and the denial of modern science.
Camus asked: How could the ambitions of a so-called scientific socialism conflict to such an extreme with the facts as they were in the USSR? He replied: “The answer is easy: it was not scientific.” Camus argued that in positing the end of history with the end of class struggle under Communism, Marxist theory had taken on the character of a prophecy, of a religion. He explained: “There remains of Marx’s prophecy … only the passionate annunciation of an event that will take place in the very far future. The only recourse of the Marxists consists in saying that the delays are simply longer than was imagined and that one day, far away in the future, the end will justify all … This new faith is no more founded on pure reason than were the ancient faiths.”
He added, “Prophecy functions on a very long-term basis and has as one of its properties a characteristic that is the very source of strength of all religions: the impossibility of proof. When the predictions failed to come true, the prophecies remained the only hope; with the result that they alone rule over our history.”
What Camus could not abide were ideologies that sacrificed life in the present, the one fundamental value above all, for some promise of future justice. Christianity “postpones to a point beyond the span of history the cure of evil and murder,” he noted, while Russian Communism justified terror and murder and crushed freedom in the promise of some far-off workers’ utopia. For Camus, “real generosity to the future lies in giving all to the present.”
With respect to the denial of modern science, Camus had the benefit of Monod’s direct help in formulating his accusations and conclusions. Well after his Combat article, Monod expended considerable effort in getting to the bottom of the Lys
enko matter and the derailment of Soviet science. He wrote a sixty-eight-page-long analysis that, although Monod never published it himself, provided sophisticated arguments for his friend to use.
Monod focused on how Lysenko’s lack of understanding of a variety of empirically demonstrated facts of genetics was coupled with rigid ideology. One glaring example upon which Monod seized was the matter of mutations and the role of chance. For almost half a century, geneticists studying plants, fruit flies, or other organisms observed that mutations in genes arose spontaneously at some low but measurable frequency. They could not predict whether any given individual plant or animal would bear a particular new mutation; it was a matter of probability, of chance.
According to Monod, Lysenko strongly objected to such unpredictability and argued that the mutations must then lack a material basis, that they were some sort of miracle. In Lysenko’s eyes, genetics was thus a false science, irrational and metaphysical because its laws were based on probabilities. “In ridding our science of Mendelism-Morganism,” Lysenko stated, “we rid it of chance.” He added, “Sciences such as those of physics and chemistry are rid of chance. It is for this reason that they have become exact sciences.”
With that declaration, Lysenko had multiplied his errors. As Monod pointed out, the previous century’s physicists and chemists had shown “not only that all of their knowledge, all of their observations, were statistical in nature, and that nearly all of their laws, even the most rigorous, express in reality not certainties, but probabilities. These are classic ideas, familiar today to every enlightened mind. If one were to adopt Lysenko’s attitude, it would be necessary to renounce not only genetics, but modern physics, radioactivity and quantum theory, the gas laws, chemical kinetics, thermodynamics.” And indeed, following the Lysenko episode, various Soviet science academies met to debate and to purge Soviet science of key Western (“bourgeois and reactionary”) theories in chemistry, physics, and astronomy. Monod attributed the denial of science in the USSR to a plague he labeled “Fundamentalist Bolshevism.”
Guided by Monod, Camus explained in The Rebel that religious adherence to Marxism, enforced by the Soviet state apparatus, had led to the denial of science:
To make Marxism scientific and to preserve this fiction … it has been a necessary first step to render science Marxist through terror. The progress of science, since Marx, has roughly consisted in replacing determinism and the rather crude mechanism of its period by a doctrine of provisional probabilities … For Marxism to remain infallible, it has therefore been necessary to deny all biological discoveries made since Darwin. As it happens that all discoveries since the unexpected mutations established by De Vries have consisted in introducing, contrary to the doctrines of determinism, the idea of chance [italics added] into biology.
Marxism had also negated other great scientific discoveries. Camus wrote, “Marxism is scientific today in defiance of Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and all the greatest minds of our time.”
He further pointed out that Marxism
has also had to rewrite history, even the most recent and best known, even the history of the Party and of the Revolution. Year by year, sometimes month by month, Pravda corrects itself …
As in the fairy story, in which all the looms of an entire town wove the empty air to provide clothes for the king, thousands of men, whose strange profession it is, rewrite a presumptuous version of history, which is destroyed the same evening while waiting for the calm voice of a child to proclaim suddenly that the king is naked. This small voice, the voice of rebellion, will then be saying, what all the world can already see, that a revolution which, in order to last … is living by false principles.
That voice would be Camus’s voice, which in 1951 was one of the best-known voices in France and becoming so in the Western world.
And yet, despite 300 pages of grim history, 150 years of brutal, failed revolutions, and the staggering death toll of nihilistic regimes, Camus was still not pessimistic.
What could possibly rescue humanity from its excesses and tragedies?
Rebellion, was Camus’s answer, rebellion against nihilism and the very regimes and ideologies that darkened the globe. “Rebellion indefatigably confronts evil,” Camus affirmed. But, he urged, what was needed was rebellion “in moderation,” rebellion that recognizes limits, one that is “mastered by intelligence.”
It was time to take sides: “When revolution in the name of power and of history becomes a murderous and immoderate mechanism, a new rebellion is consecrated in the name of moderation and of life. We are at that extremity now. At the end of this tunnel of darkness, however, there is inevitably a light, which we already divine and for which we only have to fight to ensure its coming.”
DURING THE EVENING at Bloch-Michel’s, Daniel observed between Camus and Monod a “complicity so intense … that only a shared kindness of heart allowed them not to find unwelcome those who interfered in their privacy.”
The two rebels had found their “solidarity in the same adventure”—against the oppressive ideology of Communism. On the frontispiece of Monod’s copy of L’Homme révolté, Camus inscribed:
à Jacques Monod
cette réponse à quelques-unes
de nos questions
fraternellement
Albert Camus
[To Jacques Monod,
this answer to a few
of our questions.
Fraternally,
Albert Camus]
Frontispiece of Jacques Monod’s copy of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), inscribed to Monod by Camus. (Courtesy of Olivier Monod)
CHAPTER 23
TAKING SIDES
True friends stab you in the front.
—OSCAR WILDE
CAMUS BRACED HIMSELF.
In labeling Marxism a religious prophecy and describing Communist Russia as a delusion ruled by a ruthless dictator and enforced by terror, he declared what no other Frenchman of the left had dared. He knew that there would be strong reactions from both ends of the political spectrum in France. A few days before The Rebel was to appear, he had lunch with a friend at the Hôtel Lutétia, on the Left Bank not far from the Luxembourg Gardens. Upon parting, Camus said, “Let’s shake hands, because in a few days, not many people will want to shake my hand.”
There were the expected vitriolic attacks from Communists, and more polite criticisms from Christian publications. But some reviewers hailed The Rebel, especially those of an anti-Communist bent. In Le Figaro Littéraire, it was declared to be both Camus’s most important book and one of the great books of the postwar era. Le Monde agreed that nothing of such value had appeared since the war. Some literary and journalistic colleagues also offered praise. André Malraux, who served as de Gaulle’s minister of information immediately after the war, approved. On the non-Communist left, Camus’s former Combat comrade Claude Bourdet of L’Observateur gave it a favorable review that was spread over two successive issues. And a reviewer in Combat predicted that the book would change the conversation in France: “More than the coming to awareness of an era by a lucid and courageous spirit, it won’t take long to see a reflection of the era on itself, the announcement of a turning-point after which certain problems will be posed differently.”
Beyond the critics, the public reception was respectable. The book sold fairly well, 60,000 copies in the first several months, and Camus received a good deal of mail from admiring readers.
Noticeably absent from the raft of reviews that appeared over the first months after publication was that of Les Temps Modernes and its editor in chief. It was not because Sartre or anyone else at the magazine had not read the book—all of his team had. The problem was that no one approved of it. The general feeling was that Camus was out of his depth in terms of both history and philosophy. No one was prepared to say so, but with all of the attention being paid to The Rebel, the periodical’s long silence had to be broken. Given his long-standing relationship with Camus, Sartre was lookin
g for someone to volunteer who would be firm but courteous. Sartre finally tapped Francis Jeanson, a twenty-nine-year-old who had studied at the Sorbonne and risen to manager of Les Temps Modernes. Jeanson, like Sartre, was not a Communist but at the same time was opposed to anti-Communism.
While Jeanson was still working on his review in April 1952, Camus met Sartre and de Beauvoir in a small Left Bank café. Camus mocked some of the negative reviews he had received, assuming that Sartre and de Beauvoir approved of the book. The couple did not know how to reply. A short time later, upon meeting in another bar, Sartre warned Camus that the upcoming review of his book would be reserved, and perhaps even severe. Camus was taken aback.
Jeanson’s twenty-one-page review appeared the following month, in the May issue of Les Temps Modernes. The title, “Albert Camus ou l’âme révoltée,” was a pun: l’âme, meaning “soul,” sounds much like l’homme; hence “The Soul in Revolt.” Camus did not appreciate the jab, and the article went downhill for him from there. Jeanson mockingly questioned the praise the book had received, noting “the wave of right-wing enthusiasm that has come crashing down from the heights of eternal France.” Jeanson sniped, “It seems to me, were I in Camus’ place, in spite of everything, I would be worried … I have been assured, moreover, that he is worried.” Jeanson continued his sarcastic tone: “We can at least attempt to understand those unique virtues of his book that have provided an occasion for such intense delight … What then is this ‘good news’ that all greet with such joy? What promises does this message contain that each can find in it what he was waiting for, to the exclusion of all others?”
Brave Genius Page 33
