Foxlee, Neil - Albert Camus's The New Mediterranean Culture. A Text and Its Contexts

Modern French Identities
38
38
Neil Foxlee is a Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University and

a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, where his teaching
has included MA modules on Political Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of
Narrative and Image. His published work includes several articles
on Camus and a study of the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama.
He is also a contributor to (and co-editor of) G. McKay et al. (eds),
Subcultures and New Religious Movements in Russia and East-Central
Europe (Peter Lang, 2009).
ISBN 978-3-0343-0207-4
www.peterlang.com
Neil Foxlee
Albert Camuss
The New
Mediterranean
Culture
A Text and its Contexts
Peter Lang
These various interpretations are based on reading the text of The

New Mediterranean Culture in a single context, whether that of
Camuss life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the
Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that
country). By contrast, this study argues that Camuss lecture and
in principle any historical text needs to be seen in a multiplicity
of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand
properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camuss lecture
as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical
justification of this multi-contextualist approach.
Neil Foxlee Albert Camuss The New Mediterranean Culture
On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural

lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre,
in Algiers. Entitled La nouvelle culture mditerranenne (The New
Mediterranean Culture), Camuss lecture has been interpreted in
radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an
incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding
his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression
of his so-called Mediterranean humanism or as an early indication
of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality.
38
38
Neil Foxlee is a Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University and

a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, where his teaching
has included MA modules on Political Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of
Narrative and Image. His published work includes several articles
on Camus and a study of the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama.
He is also a contributor to (and co-editor of) G. McKay et al. (eds),
Subcultures and New Religious Movements in Russia and East-Central
Europe (Peter Lang, 2009).
ISBN 978-3-0343-0207-4
www.peterlang.com
Neil Foxlee
Albert Camuss
The New
Mediterranean
Culture
Peter Lang
These various interpretations are based on reading the text of The

New Mediterranean Culture in a single context, whether that of
Camuss life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the
Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that
country). By contrast, this study argues that Camuss lecture and
in principle any historical text needs to be seen in a multiplicity
of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand
properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camuss lecture
as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical
justification of this multi-contextualist approach.
Neil Foxlee Albert Camuss The New Mediterranean Culture
On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural

lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre,
in Algiers. Entitled La nouvelle culture mditerranenne (The New
Mediterranean Culture), Camuss lecture has been interpreted in
radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an
incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding
his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression
of his so-called Mediterranean humanism or as an early indication
of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality.
Albert Camuss
The New Mediterranean Culture
M odern F rench I dentities

Edited by Peter Collier
Volume 38
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l
Neil Foxlee
Albert Camuss
The New
Mediterranean
Culture
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Foxlee, Neil, 1953Albert Camuss The new Mediterranean culture : a text and its
contexts / Neil Foxlee.
p. cm. -- (Modern French identities ; v. 38)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0353-0026-0 (alk. paper)
1. Camus, Albert, 1913-1960--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Camus,
Albert, 1913-1960--Philosophy. 3. Camus, Albert,
1913-1960--Knowledge--Mediterranean Region. 4. Mediterranean Region--In
literature. 5. East and West in literature. 6. French
literature--Mediterranean influences. I. Title.
PQ2605.A3734Z6435 2010
848.91409--dc22
2010023517
ISSN 1422-9005
ISBN 978-3-653-00468-7
Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2010
Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
Printed in Germany
This book is dedicated to my mother

and to the memory of my father
Contents
Acknowledgements
ix
Abbreviations
xi
Introduction
Chapter 1
Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach
Chapter 2
The New Mediterranean Culture: An Annotated Translation
37
Chapter 3
Humanist and Postcolonial Approaches
51
Chapter 4
The Context of French Discourses on the Mediterranean
75
Chapter 5
Gabriel Audisios Mid-1930s Writings on the Mediterranean
111
Chapter 6
The Interwar French Intellectual Debate on Culture
139
viii
Chapter 7
The Interwar EastWest Debate
163
Chapter 8
The Algerian Political Context
205
Chapter 9
Biographical Contexts
223
Chapter 10
The Legacy of The New Mediterranean Culture in

Camuss Later Work
261
Conclusion
285
Appendix: Reflections on Generosity (1939)
293
Bibliography
303
Index
325
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their invaluable assistance in my

research: Catherine Camus, for kindly giving me permission to translate
La nouvelle culture mditerranenne and Rflexions sur la gnrosit;
Hilary Higgins, lately of the University of Central Lancashire Library, who
helped me to obtain a number of hard-to-find items; Marcelle Mahasela of
the Centre de Documentation Albert Camus in Aix-en-Provence for her
helpfulness and hospitality; Christiane Chaulet-Achour, for sending me a
copy of her book Albert Camus et lAlgrie when I had difficulty in obtaining a copy; Raymond Gay-Crosier for sending me a copy of Albert Camus
21 after it had just been published; and Toby Garfitt, Michel Levallois,
Philippe Rgnier and Quentin Skinner for their courteous replies to my
enquiries concerning Jean Grenier, Ismal Urbain, le Pre Enfantin and
his own work, respectively. Special thanks are due to Terry Hopton and
Brian Rosebury, my supervisors for the doctoral thesis on which this book
is based: the first, for introducing me to Skinners approach and his guidance throughout; the second, for his prompt, detailed and expert feedback;
and both, for their unstinting encouragement and support. Finally, my
wife Anne, for her support, encouragement and interest: without her this
project would never have been started, let alone finished. My apologies to
anyone I have inadvertently omitted to mention.
Abbreviations
Full publication details will be found in the bibliography.

Works by Albert Camus
IIV
uvres compltes, IIV
Corr. JG Albert Camus Jean Grenier. Correspondance
Essais (1981 printing)
E
Standard Abbreviations
AC1

CAC1
MLN
NRF
Albert Camus 1, etc. (numbers of the Albert Camus series of the

Revue des Lettres Modernes)
Cahiers Albert Camus 1, etc.
Modern Language Notes
Nouvelle Revue Franaise
The use of other abbreviations from time to time is noted in the text.
Introduction
This book applies a multi-contextualist approach to La nouvelle culture

mditerranenne (The New Mediterranean Culture),1 an inaugural lecture given by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus to mark the opening
of a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers in 1937.
As an early and ephemeral text, Camuss lecture has usually been viewed
against the background of his life and work as a whole, where it is seen as
one of the first expressions of what is regarded either as his Mediterranean
humanism or his essentially colonialist mentality. Whereas some critics of
both a humanist and a postcolonial persuasion have thereafter adopted a
predominantly text-focused approach to the lecture, there have been two
corresponding approaches which contextualize the lecture at a discursive
level: while humanist critics have placed it in the context of French discourses on the Mediterranean, postcolonial critics have studied it in relation
to French colonial discourses on Algeria. In adopting a multi-contextualist
approach, however, my study suggests that an adequate account of Camuss
lecture also needs to take account of other contexts, notably the argumentative contexts provided by interwar French intellectual debates on culture
and the East/West question, the contemporary Algerian political context
and the biographical context provided by Camuss personal background
and intellectual development. In so doing, this study sheds new light on
a number of important themes that recur in Camuss later work, both fictional and non-fictional.
For the benefit of non-French-speaking readers, all passages and, where appropriate, titles in French have been translated into English. Except where indicated, all
translations are mine. The terms Occident and Orient, it should be noted, have been
translated as West and East respectively.
Introduction
Given the vast amount of secondary literature on Camus,2 it should be

noted at the outset that The New Mediterranean Culture was described in
an article published by Ray Davison in 2000 as under-discussed3 and that
the only previous study of the work in its own right is an article I myself
published in 2006.4 That said, previous critics have frequently referred to
Camuss lecture, especially in studies of his early writings and his muchdiscussed Mediterraneanism.5 This has become a central focus for Camus
studies, as is shown by the fact that no fewer than five conferences on Camus
and the Mediterranean were held between 1997 and 2006: two in Algeria
and the others in France, Israel and the United States.6 This makes it all the
2
See Robert F. Roeming, Camus: A Bibliography Microform, 15th edn (Milwaukee:

Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin, 2000), and, for more recent
studies, Raymond Gay-Crosier, Selective and Cumulative Bibliography of Recent
Studies on Albert Camus <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gaycros/Bibliog.htm>
accessed 18 May 2010.
Ray Davison, Mythologizing the Mediterranean: the Case of Albert Camus, Journal
of Mediterranean Studies 10 (2000), 7792 (p.80). Davisons study, however, is primarily a critical examination of Camuss Mediterraneanism, and his own treatment
of the lecture (pp.8084) is predominantly descriptive.
Neil Foxlee, Mediterranean Humanism or Colonialism with a Human Face?
Contextualizing Albert Camus The New Mediterranean Culture, Mediterranean
Historical Review 21:1 ( June 2006), 7797. Part of Chapter 3 and most of Chapter
8 of the present study are based on this article. See also my notice Un manifeste
dgradant comme objet de la polmique camusienne dans La nouvelle culture
mditerranenne, Bulletin de la Socit des tudes Camusiennes 77 (2006), 2830,
which I draw on in Chapter 6.
To take a recent example, Peter Dunwoodie begins a study of Camuss early writings
with a long introductory paragraph on the lecture, as a way into examining what
he describes in his conclusion as Camuss problematic mditerranit See From
Noces to Ltranger, in Edward J. Hughes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Camus
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.14764 (p.162). For an overview
of studies of Camus and the Mediterranean written up until the turn of the century,
see Paul-F. Smets, Albert Camus. Sa vraie Mditerrane: la vrit avant la fable, la
vie avant le rve, LEurope et la Mditerrane. Actes de la Vime Chaire Glaverbel
dtudes europennes, 20002001 (Brussels: PIEPeter Lang, 2001), pp.24967.
See <http://webcamus.free.fr/conferences.html>. In chronological order, the conferences were: Albert Camus: parcours mditerranens ( Jerusalem, 1997), the
Introduction
more surprising that there has been no detailed study of the lecture, which
apart from an untitled 1933 poem (I, 97678) represents Camuss first
sustained piece of writing on the Mediterranean.
In the course of my discussion of the various contexts in which the
lecture needs to be situated, I bring a considerable amount of fresh evidence to bear, not only on the text itself and the development of Camuss
ideas, but also on the discourses and debates in which the lecture participates. The other main claim to originality of this book is, of course, the
multi-contextualist approach itself, which is based on a critical synthesis
of existing methodologies in the history of ideas. In Chapter 1, I examine
the approach to textual interpretation developed by the leading intellectual
historian Quentin Skinner and the related approaches of J.G.A. Pocock
and Reinhart Koselleck. (The fact that Skinners, Pococks and to a large
extent Kosellecks approaches have hitherto been applied to texts of the early
modern period constitutes a further claim to the originality of this study.)
In his theoretical writings, Skinner rejects both textualism the view that
it is sufficient to study the text itself to understand its meaning and a
crude contextualism (the view that the meaning of the text is determined
by external factors). Instead, he argues that texts need to be understood in
relation to not only their sociopolitical context but also their argumentative context: the context of previous texts on the same subject. In practice,
however, Skinner also refers to other contexts as a guide to interpretation:
the biographical context, the context of the authors work as a whole and
the context of reception. Since different parts of a text may best be illuminated with reference to different contexts, I therefore argue that only a
multi-contextualist approach can do justice to the text as a whole, avoiding
the reductivism inherent in mono-contextualist approaches.
proceedings of which were published in Perspectives: revue de lUniversit hbraque de
Jrusalem 5 (1998); Camus et le rve mditerranen: de lAlgrie la Grce (Marseille,
2003); Les valeurs mditerranennes dans luvre dAlbert Camus (Algiers, 2003);
Albert Camus: Oran, lAlgrie, la Mditerrane (Oran, 2005) and Albert Camus,
prcurseur: Mditerrane dhier et daujourdhui (University of Madison-Wisconsin,
2006), the basis for a collection of the same name edited by Alek Baylee Toumi (New
York: Peter Lang, 2009).
Introduction
Chapter 2 consists of an annotated translation of La nouvelle culture

mditerranenne, while in Chapter 3, I examine the two main existing
approaches to interpreting the lecture, humanist and postcolonial. At the
level of an immanent reading, both approaches illuminate various aspects
of the text and indeed both can be taken further than hitherto. Ultimately,
however, neither is satisfactory. Whereas the humanist approach fails to
take account of the lectures Mediterranean particularism and the colonial context in which it was written, the crude contextualist version of
the postcolonial approach glosses over Camuss positive emphasis on the
Mediterranean as the meeting-point of East and West, which contradicts
the view that the lecture expresses a purely Eurocentric, colonialist perspective. At a more sophisticated level, postcolonial critics have placed Camuss
lecture in the context of French literary and paraliterary discourses on
colonial Algeria, seeing it as a manifesto for the utopian Mediterraneanism
of the so-called cole dAlger (Algiers School), centred round Camus and
Gabriel Audisio. This reading, however, fails to take account of the texts
status as an inaugural lecture for the Maison de la culture in Algiers and of
Camuss stance on the colonial issues that the text is alleged to evade.
In Chapter 4, I discuss the humanist discursive contextualisation of
the lecture in terms of French discourses on the Mediterranean. From this
perspective, the lecture is seen as part of a tradition of discourse, going
back to the Saint-Simonians of the 1830s, which promoted an idealistic
vision of the Mediterranean as the meeting-point of East and West. From a
postcolonial viewpoint, however, French discourses on the Mediterranean
from Bonapartes invasion of Egypt to the end of the Algerian War were
inextricably bound up with French colonialism in North Africa, a viewpoint
which is confirmed by an investigation of the tradition in question.
Chapter 5 examines contemporary writings on the Mediterranean
by the most important influence on Camuss lecture, Gabriel Audisio.
A study of articles on the subject that Audisio wrote between the two
volumes of essays published as Jeunesse de la Mditerrane (Youth of the
Mediterranean) reveals the polemical context(s) in which they were written and identifies the manifesto on the Ethiopian war which Camus attacks
in his lecture as Henri Massiss Pour la dfense de lOccident (For the
Defence of the West). Although a close examination of Audisios writings
Introduction
confirms the similarities between the views of Camus and Audisio, it also
shows significant differences between them.
In Chapter 6, I argue that the beginning and end of Camuss lecture in particular are polemical responses to some of the central tenets of
Maurrassian ideology and to Massiss Pour la dfense de lOccident respectively. Massiss manifesto itself is discussed in the context of an interwar
French debate in which left- and right-wing intellectuals clashed over their
attempts to appropriate concepts such as culture, intelligence and mind
for their respective political causes concepts that Camus similarly tries
to reappropriate from the right in the final section of his lecture.
Chapter 7 identifies a further, overlapping debate on the relationship
between East and West as part of the argumentative context for Massiss
manifesto and ultimately Camuss lecture. Massiss manifesto took its title
from a book that he had published in 1927 as a contribution to this debate,
which reached its high point with a special double issue of the periodical
Les Cahiers du Mois entitled Les Appels de lOrient (The Calls of the East).
This title was itself borrowed from an earlier article by Camuss mentor
Jean Grenier, while other contributors to the debate included Audisio and
Andr Malraux, a hero-figure for Camus in his youth. The importance of
this debate as a context for Camuss lecture is confirmed by its references
to the relationship between East and West, and specifically to India, where
his remarks echo Greniers writings on the subject.
In Chapter 8, I place Camuss lecture in its immediate Algerian political
context. Although he was expelled soon after, Camus was still a member
of the Communist party at the time, and the Maison de la culture that his
lecture inaugurated was a Popular Front organization. In attacking the
doctrine of Latinity in what was essentially an anti-fascist cultural-political
polemic, Camus was indirectly taking issue with the exploitation of this
notion by European Algerian political groups sympathetic to fascism.
Although the lecture makes no reference to colonialism, the Maison de
la culture that it inaugurated adopted a pro-Muslim stance that extended
to supporting equal rights for the indigenous population, as shown by a
manifesto in favour of the reformist Viollette Bill that was published in
the second issue of its monthly newsletter.
Introduction
Chapter 9 situates Camuss lecture in the context of his earlier life and
intellectual development. I begin with a critique of a biographical contextualization that interprets the lecture in terms of Camuss eventual expulsion from the Communist party, showing that the passages it discusses can
best be understood in relation to other writings by Camus. I then examine
the impact of Camuss family background on the attitudes he expresses in
the lecture, specifically his rejection of jingoistic rhetoric and his attitude
towards intelligence, the development of which is explored through a
selection of his early writings. The influence of Nietzsche, Grenier and
(possibly) Bakunin on the lecture is also investigated.
Chapter 10 looks at the legacy of Camuss lecture in his later work.
After discussing the editorial that Camus wrote for the first issue of Rivages
(Shores), a review of Mediterranean culture, I focus on two important
aspects of his Mediterraneanism that continued to shape his thinking in
later life. First, I examine how the lectures Mediterranean particularism
its pro-Mediterranean and anti-Nordic bias is also reflected in La pense
de midi (Noonday Thought), the final part of Camuss historico-politicophilosophical essay LHomme rvolt (Eng. tr. The Rebel, literally Man in
Revolt). Second, I investigate how, during the Algerian War, Camus both
retained and modified his view of the Mediterranean, and North Africa in
particular, as the meeting-point (confluent) of East and West.
On the face of it, The New Mediterranean Culture may seem a slight
text, and the degree of contextualization it receives here disproportionate to its length and its lowly status in the canon of Camuss writings.
This study will show, however, not only that the lecture is a seminal text
in Camuss development, but also that it is in large part constituted by
to borrow Camuss own metaphor a confluence of discourses and
debates, which need to be reconstructed if the text, its meaning and its
broader significance are to be properly understood. That these discourses
and debates are of considerable interest in themselves is another reason
why The New Mediterranean Culture is such a fascinating and rewarding text to study.
chapter 1
The Choice of a Methodology

Contrary to what one might expect from its title,1 Camuss lecture on The
New Mediterranean Culture demands to be read, not as a polite talk on
contemporary artistic or social trends, but as a highly charged piece of
political rhetoric. From the outset, Camus emphasizes that he is speaking
on behalf of a group of left-wing intellectuals against those, such as Maurras,
he attacks as right-wing doctrinaires. And in his subsequent references to
Hitler, Mussolini, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil
War, he makes it clear that he is speaking out specifically against fascism
and in favour of what he calls a Mediterranean collectivism, concluding
by affirming the possibility of a new Mediterranean culture that will be
compatible with the social ideal he shares with his comrades.
Given Camuss self-identification as an intellectual, his explicit references to the historical context in which he is speaking and the overtly
political nature of his speech, The New Mediterranean Culture would
seem well suited to the approach developed by Quentin Skinner, the preeminent theorist and practitioner of intellectual history in the political
sphere (in the English-speaking world at least). Together with J.G.A.
Pocock, Skinner is the leading figure in the so-called Cambridge School
of intellectual historians. His major publications, which have been widely
As noted in my introduction to Chapter 2, Camuss lecture was printed under the

heading La culture indigne (Native Culture). See Chapter 8 for a discussion of
the significance of this.
chapter 1
translated, include: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,2 a twovolume study that established his international reputation; monographs on
Machiavelli, Hobbes and pre-nineteenth-century conceptions of liberty;
and, most recently, the essays on methodology, republicanism and the
political thought of Hobbes, respectively collected in the three volumes
of Visions of Politics.3 Skinner is also the co-editor of two important series
published by Cambridge University Press: Ideas in Context, of which over
seventy volumes have appeared so far, and Cambridge Texts in the History
of Political Thought, whose more than a hundred volumes to date seek to
offer an outline of the entire evolution of political thought in the West.
As Pocock noted in a 2004 review of Visions of Politics, the work done
by the Cambridge School has been mainly concerned with the history of
political thought between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in the
English-speaking world (the thought of the Italian Renaissance is a notable
exception). Assuming that it remains the case, as Pocock puts it, that [a]
Skinnerian approach to the modern and the postmodern has not yet been
tried,4 applying this approach to a twentieth-century French-language
text will therefore provide an opportunity to test its broader validity. For
an account of Skinners methodology, I shall refer to both his theoretical writings and his historical studies.5 Rather than repeating Skinners
detailed theoretical justifications of his approach, however, which draw
primarily on the post-analytic Anglo-American philosophy of language, I
shall focus on its fundamental principles and practical application. I shall
also argue that in certain respects, it should be refined and supplemented
2
3
4
5
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner: the History of Politics and the Politics of History
(2004), Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.12342 (p.141).
A selection of Skinners original methodological essays, together with A Reply to My
Critics, was published in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner
and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). Substantially revised versions appear in
Visions of Politics, I: Regarding Method. Where appropriate, subsequent references
to these editions will be abbreviated to M&C and RM respectively.
with the complementary approaches of Pocock and the German school of

Begriffsgeschichte or conceptual history associated with the late Reinhart
Koselleck. First, however, I shall give a brief account of the emergence of
the Cambridge School.
The Origins of the Cambridge School

The origins of the Cambridge School can be traced back to the pioneering
editorial work of the historian Peter Laslett.6 In 1949 and 1960 respectively, Laslett produced authoritative editions of two key seventeenthcentury political texts: Patriarcha by Sir Robert Filmer and John Lockes
Two Treatises of Government, in which, as Laslett emphasized in his introduction, Locke made Filmers work his main polemical target.7 What
Laslett demonstrated was that both works had been written significantly
earlier than had previously been supposed. Patriarcha was first published
by a group of activists in 1679, together with Filmers other political works,
which had originally appeared between 1648 and his death in 1652. Laslett,
however, argued persuasively that what was then the only known manuscript of Patriarcha dated from between 1635 and 1642 between six and
seventeen years before the publication of Filmers other political writings.8
This implied a corresponding broadening in the gap between, on the one
hand, the context in which Patriarcha had originally been written and to
6
7
8
See Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity,
2003), pp.1415.
Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1949); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
The rediscovery of an earlier and significantly different manuscript version of
Patriarcha subsequently led Richard Tuck to conclude that Filmers work can be
dated even earlier, to between 1628 and 1631. See A New Date for Filmers Patriarcha,
The Historical Journal 29: 1 (1986), 18386.
10
chapter 1
which it referred, and on the other, the context in which it was published
and read, most notably by Locke. Similarly, Laslett showed that although
Lockes Two Treatises were published anonymously after the English
Revolution of 1688, they had in fact been written some years before it, in
about 1681. This meant that Lockes treatises, far from being a retrospective
justification of the events of 1688 as he had claimed in his Preface were
in effect written as a call for revolution: they were not so much works of
political theory or philosophy, in other words, as political acts. In its own
way, the effect of Lasletts scholarly editorial work was equally revolutionary,
forcing historians to consider not only Patriarcha and the Two Treatises,
but the whole of seventeenth-century English political thought in a radically different light.
Both Pocock and Skinner have acknowledged Lasletts seminal influence on their different, but complementary approaches to intellectual
history.9 In his 2004 review of Visions of Politics, Pocock gave his own
account of the emergence of the Cambridge School. He stated that his
own research in the wake of Lasletts edition of Filmers political writings
led him to conclude that the republication of these writings in 1679 had
given rise to two different debates in two different fields: one in the field
of political theory, to which Lockes Two Treatises was a contribution, and
another, equally political in its nature, but conducted in the field of English
history, in which Locke did not participate.10 In turn, this led Pocock to
postulate the existence of a plurality of languages of political thought, by
which he means not national languages, but what are nowadays more commonly known as discourses. Thus Pocock has stated that in his usage and,
he claims, in that of Skinner and others: a language or discourse is [] a
9
10
Laslett also influenced a third important figure in the original Cambridge School,
John Dunn, whose postgraduate research on Locke was supervised by Laslett. See
Dunns The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1969).
Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Political Thought and History, pp.12627. It was this
latter debate that Pocock studied in his doctoral dissertation and subsequent book
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1957).
11
complex structure comprising a vocabulary; a grammar; a rhetoric; and a

set of usages, assumptions and implications existing together in time and
employable by a semi-specific community of language-users for purposes
political, interested in and extending sometimes as far as the articulation of
a world-view or ideology.11According to Pocock, although a language in
this sense can exist by itself, more commonly, a number of such languages
exist concurrently, in confrontation, contestation, and interaction with
one another. He has also emphasized that a single complex text may be
not only written, but also read in a diversity of languages.12 (The notion
of reading a text in a language is perhaps best exemplified by the variety
of theoretical approaches deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and so on that academic critics apply, sometimes in combination, to literary works.)
For Pocock, then, Lasletts editorial work on Filmer and Locke led to
a way of writing history that was both essentially pluralistic and focused
on the reception, rather than the production of works. The historian, in
Pococks view, was less an interpreter than an archaeologist of interpretations performed by others.13 This Laslett-inspired approach, Pocock
wrote, had two characteristic emphases: first, on the variety of idioms
or languages [] in which political argument might be conducted []
and second, on the participants in political argument as historical actors,
responding to one another in a diversity of linguistic and other political and
11
12
13
J.G.A. Pocock, Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture? Comment on a

Paper by Melvin Richter, in Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter, eds, The Meaning
of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (Washington,
DC: German Historical Institute, 1996), pp.4758 (p.47).
The Concept of a Language and the Mtier dHistorien: Some Considerations on
Practice (1987), Political Thought and History, pp.87105 (p.95).
The Reconstruction of Discourse: Towards the Historiography of Political Thought
(1981), Political Thought and History, pp.6786 (p.83). The term archaeology,
it should be noted, is associated with the early approach of Michel Foucault. See
LArchologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), translated as The Archaeology of
Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972).
12
chapter 1
historical contexts [].14 This second emphasis was exemplified in Pococks

best-known work, The Machiavellian Moment,15 in which he studied the
revival of the language of classical republicanism, first by Machiavelli
and a number of his Italian Renaissance contemporaries, then by James
Harrington and his followers in late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury England and finally by the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Pocock showed in this way how one language had been appropriated in
three very different socio-historical contexts, contexts which nevertheless
shared a certain structural similarity (the moment of the title).
If Pocock drew much of his initial inspiration from Lasletts edition
of Filmer in particular, Skinner was stimulated to adopt a rather different
approach by Lasletts edition of Lockes Two Treatises.16 In his introduction, Laslett made clear that his aim was to establish Lockes text as he
wanted it read, to fix it in its historical context, Lockes own context, and
to demonstrate this connection of what he thought and wrote with the
Locke of historical influence.17 But whereas Pocock, as we have seen, is
interested in the question of historical influence in the sense of the different ways in which a political discourse has been appropriated, Skinner
has been consistently suspicious of the very notion of influence.18 And
although Skinner once wrote that [t]he historian primarily studies what
Pocock calls languages of discourse, he immediately went on to recall his
own stated aim of recovering what individual writers may have intended
or meant (M&C, 26667). In this respect, as he has acknowledged, he
14
15
16
17
18
Introduction: The State of the Art, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.134 (pp.23).
The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Skinner has also acknowledged the influence of among others, notably R.G.
Collingwood Pocock himself. As Skinner puts it: One way of describing my
original essays would be to say that I merely tried to identify and restate in more
abstract terms the assumptions on which Pococks and especially Lasletts scholarship seemed to me to be based (A Reply to My Critics, M&C, p.233).
Laslett, Introduction, in Locke, Two Treatises, p.4.
See The Limits of Historical Explanations, Philosophy 41 (1966), 199215 and RM,
7576.
13
is indebted to Lasletts introduction to the Two Treatises in two ways:

First for [Lasletts] insistence that Locke was basically replying to Filmer,
a claim that served to highlight what Locke was doing in the Two Treatises.
Second, for the consequential emphasis on the specific and local character
of Lockes arguments, and on the need to undertake a detailed study of
their intellectual context in order to explain their distinctive emphases and
shape.19 For Skinner, then, the importance of Lasletts edition of Locke was
to underline that, rather than being studied in isolation, individual political texts needed to be seen as responding to other texts in the context of
debates about contemporary political issues.
The Choice of Skinners Approach and the

Question of Intention
Although the present study will retain Pococks resolutely pluralist perspective, there are three reasons why I will broadly follow Skinners approach
rather than Pococks. First, and most obviously, although I shall be examining the role of various discourses in both Camuss lecture and its subsequent critical reception, the primary focus of this study is a single text.
The second reason has to do with the methodological priority of textual
interpretation over a reception-history approach such as Pococks. For
although a text only acquires meaning in the minds of its readers (beginning with its author), those readers do not approach the text as a series of
blank pages on to which they can project whatever meanings they please,
but as embodying an intentional act of communication by another human
being (however they may subsequently interpret it).
Conversely, of course, the minds of readers are not blank slates on
which authors inscribe their intended meaning or meanings: different readers approach texts with a whole host of different presuppositions, ranging
19
M&C, 327, note 12.
14
chapter 1
from expectations regarding the text, its genre and its author to fully blown
theories (languages in Pococks sense). In practice, however, even historians
of reception give priority to author meaning and authorial intentions
which, it should be emphasized, are always inferred and imputed, and never
simply given (assuming they can be relied upon, even explicit statements
of intention by authors need themselves to be interpreted and contextualized). This is because, as Martyn P. Thompson has pointed out, the sources
that historians of reception study are themselves texts [] which have to be
decoded in terms of their authors (the recipients) intended meanings (my
emphasis).20 There is no ontological difference, in other words, between the
primary text and the secondary texts that respond to it and constitute
the data for reception-historians (whose own responses to these secondary
texts take the form of further texts that are themselves historically situated).
The third reason is related to the second and has to do specifically with
Pococks focus on discourses. From a historical viewpoint, Pocock rightly
stresses the logical priority of discourses over texts: as he points out, the
language an author employs is already in use.21 From a methodological
viewpoint, however, the order of priority is reversed: as the very title of
Pococks article The Reconstruction of Discourse implies, the discourses
which Pocock studies have to be reconstructed from texts.
Some forty years ago, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault famously
announced the death of the author.22 In practice, however, everyone who
studies texts, and particularly historical texts, tacitly acknowledges the
primacy of the author in at least one respect, insofar as they base their
20 Martyn P. Thompson, Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical
Meaning, History and Theory 32: 3 (1993), 24872 (p.257).
21 Pocock, Introduction, Virtue, Commerce and History, p.6.
22 Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (1968), in ImageMusicText, ed. and
trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp.14248; Michel Foucault,
What Is an Author? (1969), in Josu V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-Structuralist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1980), pp.14160. See Sean Burke,
The Death and Return of the Author, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1998), which provides an invaluable corrective to over-literal Anglo-American
interpretations of the pronouncements of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida on the
subject.
15
interpretations on what they believe to be reliable editions and in the case

of foreign-language texts reliable translations of the works they study.
Reliable here can only mean in conformity with the authors intentions
or rather what, on the best available evidence, are presumed to be the
authors intentions. A good example here is George Orwells 1984. As Peter
Davison points out in a note to the 1989 Penguin edition of the novel, there
was a serious error in the 1951 printing of the Secker & Warburg text that
was repeated in all subsequent editions. The 5 in the famous formula 2 +
2 = 5 at the end of the novel dropped out of the printers forme, giving the
false impression that Winston has not submitted entirely to Big Brother
an impression that clearly affected interpretations of the novel as a whole
for over forty years.23 Similar considerations apply to translations, a fact
that monoglot Anglo-American scholars whose interpretations are based
on English-language renderings of primary or theoretical texts would do
well to bear in mind.24 Inaccurate translations can sometimes have farreaching effects: Jeremy Benthams highly influential utilitarian principle
of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, for example, was based on
a faulty rendering of the Italian jurist Cesaria Beccarias phrase la massima
felicit divisa nel maggio numero, or the greatest happiness shared among
the greatest number a very different proposition.25
If every interpretation of a text is based on the implicit assumption that
the text faithfully reflects its authors intentions, however, it would be futile
to insist that every interpreter should restrict themselves to constructing
persuasive hypotheses as to what those intentions were. Once an author
has published a text, it becomes public property and can be appropriated
Peter Davison, A Note on the Text, in George Orwell, 1984 (London: Penguin,
1989), p. xx. The 2 + 2 = 5 formula in question appears on p.303.
24 For a study of how the reception of one of Camuss best-known works was and may
have been affected by the way it was translated, see Konrad Bieber, Traduttore,
traditore. La rception problmatique de LHomme rvolt aux tats-Unis, AC19,
pp.14348.
25 See Robert Shackleton, The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number: the History
of Benthams Phrase, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 90 (1972), 1461
82. I owe this example to Terry Hopton.
23
16
chapter 1
by its readers for their own purposes: as Pocock reminds us, a text can be
(re)interpreted in a variety of contexts and reinscribed in a variety of discourses.26 It is these diverse appropriations that are studied by historians of
reception. By contrast, the approach of the historically minded interpreter
of texts as products is to relocate them in the contexts, discursive and otherwise, in which their authors wrote them. It is a question, as Skinner puts
it, of seeing things their way or at least attempting to do so.
Seeing Things Their Way:

The Need for a Properly Historical Approach
In the general preface to Visions of Politics, Skinner gives the following
outline of his approach:
to write the history of ideas in a properly historical style, we need to situate the texts
we study within such intellectual contexts and frameworks of discourse as enable
us to recognise what their authors were doing in writing them. [] My aspiration
is not of course to perform the impossible task of getting inside the heads of longdead thinkers; it is simply to use the techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their
concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover their beliefs and, so far as possible,
to see things their way. (RM, vii)
From a viewpoint that can be regarded as either radically sceptical or simply

realistic, it can of course be objected that Skinner can never know for certain
when or whether he has achieved this aim. Although he acknowledges that
it is impossible to get inside the heads of long-dead thinkers, his stated
aspiration to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover
their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way might seem
26 As Brian Rosebury has argued, the authors of some kinds of literary work in particular take this fact into account when writing, deliberately designing their works to
be self-sufficient and open to various interpretations (Irrecoverable Intentions and
Literary Interpretation, British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (1997), 1527 (pp.2627).
17
to require precisely this. Equally, however, we can never be certain that we

have not managed to understand the thinkers of the past more or less on
their own terms: in practice, as we do in our dealings with other people in
everyday life, we have to rely on inference.
By the very nature of things, then, what Skinner is doing is not recovering the actual beliefs, concepts and distinctions of the thinkers he studies,
but rather and in the full sense of the word reconstructing them, working
on the assumption that the best evidence for this will be provided by situating the texts he studies in their intellectual and discursive contexts. The
results may be more or less persuasive, but inevitably they will only be an
interpretation, a construction placed on the texts in question. As Skinner
himself observes: Even our most confident ascriptions of intentionality are
nothing more than inferences from the best evidence available to us, and as
such are defeasible at any time (RM, 121). In this respect, the position in
which Skinner finds himself is no different from any other historian or any
other interpreter of historical texts. By giving the introduction to Regarding
Method the subtitle Seeing Things Their Way, however, Skinner makes
clear that his whole approach is based on the rejection of two commonly
held beliefs. First, the belief that it is impossible to (metaphorically) see
things the way people in the past saw them something, as we have seen,
that cannot be proved either way and second that even if this were possible, it should not be the aim (or one of the aims) of the historian to try
to do so.27 Although Skinner is aware, in other words, that anachronism is
an occupational hazard for historians, he firmly rejects the belief that it is
either unavoidable or unimportant: on the contrary, Skinner regards the
avoidance of anachronism as one of the historians prime duties.
27
There is an obvious parallel here with the literary-critical notion of the intentional
fallacy, according to which, as the New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley argued in a
famous 1946 article, the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a guide to either evaluating or interpreting a literary text. See W.K. Wimsatt
and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy, in David Newton-De Molina,
ed., On Literary Intention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976), pp.113
(p.1). For Skinners discussion of this and related issues, see Motives, Intentions and
Interpretation, RM, 90102.
18
chapter 1
The importance of this point may best be brought out by substituting

a cultural for a historical perspective, recalling the famous opening line of
L.P. Hartleys The Go-Between: The past is a foreign country: they do things
differently there. What Skinner is attacking is the historical equivalent of
the belief that it is impossible to see things the way people in another culture see them, and that even if this were possible, it would not be desirable
to do so. For a historian to embrace anachronism, in other words, would
be the equivalent of an anthropologist embracing ethnocentrism or of a
professional Orientalist embracing Orientalism, in the pejorative sense
that Edward Said uses the term.28 For if we do not even try to see things
their way, we will inevitably be restricted to seeing things our way, even as
we acknowledge that ours is not the only way of seeing. (How could we
know this if we cannot in fact get outside our own heads?) It is notable that,
as Kari Palonen has pointed out, Skinner himself has explicitly justified a
historicist approach in quasi-anthropological terms: The investigation of
alien systems of belief provides us with an irreplaceable means of standing
back from our own prevailing assumptions and structures of thought []
[S]uch investigations [] enable us to recognize that our own descriptions
and conceptualizations are in no way uniquely privileged.29 A historicist
approach, in other words, offers us a way out of what would otherwise be
a perverse form of solipsism. To pursue the analogy suggested earlier, it is
like learning the language of a country we are visiting, rather than obstinately persisting in speaking our own.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin,

1985 [1978]).
29 Skinner, A Reply to My Critics, M&C, p.286, quoted by Palonen, Quentin Skinner,
p.26. See also RM, p.125.
28
19
Skinners Approach
I shall now examine Skinners approach more closely. The first point that
needs to be made here is that Skinners practice often departs from his theoretical pronouncements, many of which were originally made in a polemical
context. In the original version of his seminal 1969 article Meaning and
Understanding in the History of Ideas,30 for example, Skinner mounted
a scathing attack on orthodox approaches to the history of ideas, accusing them of imposing a false coherence on their subject-matter, whether
they focused on ideas in themselves or the thought of individual thinkers.
It was a mistake, Skinner concluded, even to try either to write intellectual biographies concentrating on the works of a given writer, or to write
histories of ideas tracing the morphology of a given concept over time
(M&C, 63). In 1981, however, Skinner published Machiavelli, which took
the form of an introductory intellectual biography, and in 1998, Liberty
before Liberalism, which traced the history of different conceptions of
liberty in the early modern period.31
The two broad approaches that Skinner attacked in Meaning and
Understanding were textualism (the view that it was sufficient to study
the text itself to understand its meaning) and a crude contextualism (the
view that the meaning of the text was determined by external factors).
Although he conceded that a knowledge of the social context of texts was
essential, Skinner argued for a third approach, which focused on what he
emphatically described as the linguistic context. This he defined as the
whole range of communications which could have been conventionally
performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the given utterance
(M&C, 6364; cf. RM, 87). The key to interpretation was to establish the
relationship between the utterance and this broader linguistic context.
30 Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory 8: 1 (1969),
353, reprinted in M&C, 2957.
31 Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Liberty before Liberalism
20
chapter 1
Once this had been done, a study of all the facts about the social context
could be undertaken, with this serving, if necessary, as the ultimate criterion for deciding between incompatible interpretations.
This early and decidedly abstract formulation of Skinners approach
raised the obvious question of how it could be applied in practice. By
referring to the linguistic context and using the technical term utterance
(which could be taken as referring to anything from a single statement to
an entire text), Skinner glossed over the fact that, as Pocock puts it, [a]
complex text may turn out to contain a wide range of languages and be
interpretable as performing a wide range of acts of utterance.32 In saying, on
the other hand, that we should not only attempt to determine the whole
range of communications that make up the linguistic context, but also that
we should study all the facts about the social context, Skinner seemed to
be setting an impossibly ambitious task, involving nothing less than the
reconstruction of the entire linguistic and social universe in which texts
were written.33 What Skinner offered, in short, was an ideal programme
rather than a practical methodology.
In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), Skinner
dropped the term linguistic context in favour of what he now called the
ideological and intellectual contexts. And however he may have arrived
at his interpretations of the individual works he examined, Skinner presented his study in a format that was the exact reverse of the procedure he
had outlined in Meaning and Understanding. His starting-point in The
Foundations was not the relationship between the texts and their linguistic
context, but the social context, on the assumption that political life itself
sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range
of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to
become the leading subjects of debate (Preface, p. xi).
32
33
Pocock, The Reconstruction of Discourse, p.84.

Cf. the conclusion of Motives, Intentions and Interpretation: We need, in short,
to be ready to take as our province nothing less than the whole of what Cornelius
Castoriadis has described as the social imaginary, the complete range of the inherited
symbols and representations that constitute the subjectivity of an age (RM, 102).
21
As in Meaning and Understanding, however, Skinner rejected crude

social contextualism, arguing that the intellectual context of the major
texts also needed to be studied: the context of earlier writings and inherited
assumptions about political society, and of more ephemeral contemporary
contributions to social and political thought (Preface, p. xi). According
to Skinner, another factor in determining the ways in which particular
questions came to be singled out and discussed was the nature and limits
of the normative vocabulary available at any given time. This normative
language constituted what Skinner termed the ideological context of the
major works and, by implication, of the other works that helped to make
up the intellectual context. Instead, then, of beginning with texts and placing them first in their linguistic context, and then in their social context,
Skinner started with the social context, then examined the ideological and
intellectual contexts and only then the texts themselves. (To be fair, this
apparent inconsistency in Skinners approach may simply reflect the kind
of book he was writing a history of political thought, rather than a study
of an individual thinker or work.)
In A Reply to My Critics (1988, M&C 23188), Skinner gave a
carefully considered restatement of his theoretical and methodological
position. The final section of this essay was later adapted and developed
for Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts, which Skinner
describes in the introduction to Regarding Method as laying out his approach
to interpretation (RM, 3). In what he therefore presumably regards as the
definitive formulation of this approach to date, Skinner summarizes his
case as follows, using the term argumentative context to replace the earlier
intellectual context:
My contention, in essence, is that we should start by elucidating the meaning, and
hence the subject matter of [] utterances [] and then turn to the argumentative
context [] to determine how exactly [Skinner presumably means exactly how] they
connect with, or relate to, other utterances concerned with the same subject-matter.
If we succeed in identifying this context with sufficient accuracy, we can eventually
hope to read off what it was that the speaker or writer [] was doing in saying what
he or she said. (RM, 116)
22
chapter 1
Two preliminary observations can be made here. First, Skinner abandons the
order of procedure he used in The Foundations and reverts to that outlined
in Meaning and Understanding, beginning with the text (or utterance)
rather than its context. Second, Skinners reference to the meaning and
subject matter of utterances and the argumentative context seems, once
again, to foreclose the possibility raised by Pocock: that complex texts may
contain a wide range of utterances and that, as a result, they may have not
only many meanings, but also more than one subject matter, and be taking
part in more than one argument. Skinner himself appears to acknowledge
this point later. Using the terminology of J.L. Austins theory of speech
acts,34 he talks about having encouraged a misconception by often having
often spoken, grammatically in the singular, about the recovery of intended
illocutionary force (RM, 123) what, in other words, the writer or speaker
was doing in saying what they said. Any text of any complexity, he stresses,
will contain a myriad of illocutionary acts, and any individual phrase in
any such text [] may even contain more acts than words (RM, 124).
The formulation of Skinners approach that I have quoted, however,
still leaves at least three crucial problems unresolved. First, it glosses over
the problem of elucidating meaning at the textual level, in effect reducing
this to a question of identifying the subject-matter. Second, it assumes that
the meaning of the other texts which make up the argumentative context
is unproblematic, for otherwise they too would need to be contextualized,
and so on. Third, it emphasizes the argumentative context at the expense
of all other contexts, whether social, biographical or otherwise. It is these
problems that I shall now address.
34 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbis (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980 [1962]).
23
Refining Skinners Approach

In an article published three years before the Foundations, but not included
in either Meaning and Context or Regarding Method, Skinner explicitly
acknowledged the logical priority of textual over contextual interpretation. In so doing, he identified a contextualist version of the hermeneutic
circle, according to which we understand the meaning of a text as a whole
by understanding the meaning of its parts, and the meaning of those parts
in relation to the whole. Before we can hope, Skinner observed, to identify
the context which helps to disclose the meaning of a given work, we must
already have arrived at an interpretation which serves to suggest what contexts may most profitably be investigated as further aids to interpretation.35
Despite the unfortunate implication that a work has only one meaning,
which only one among a variety of contexts can help to disclose, this is a
crucial point.
For Nathan Tarcov, however, reviewing both the Foundations and
Skinners earlier theoretical writings, Skinners statement merely highlighted
the inadequacy of his method: it is only a set of reflections and procedures
useful in the contextual arc of the hermeneutic circle unaccompanied by
reflections or procedures for the prior textual interpretation itself .36 Given
that Tarcov himself tends towards textualism but does not offer his own
reflections on, or procedures for textual interpretation, this criticism seems
churlish. In fact, I would argue, Skinners characterization of the problem
suggests an obvious solution: if the meanings of a text at the time it was
written are a function of the various contexts in which it was written, the
historically minded interpreter must focus on those aspects of the text that
call, implicitly or explicitly, for contextualization.
35
36
Hermeneutics and the Role of History, New Literary History 7:1 (Autumn 1975),
20932 (p.227).
Nathan Tarcov, Quentin Skinners Method and Machiavellis Prince, Ethics 92
(1982), 692709 (p.701). Tarcovs chapter of the same name in Meaning and Context
(pp.194203) is an abridged version of this.
24
chapter 1
Seen in this light, the task of the historically minded interpreter

becomes an extension of that of the editor of a critical edition of a historical text. Apart from providing a reliable text, the task of such an editor is
to illuminate the text in question by providing readers with the appropriate critical apparatus. This may include some or all of the following: an
introduction giving details of the genesis of the text and its initial reception, and situating it in relation to its literary or intellectual antecedents,
the period in which it was written and the authors life and uvre; notes
explaining references or allusions and pointing out echoes of or in the
authors other writings; draft passages and variants; relevant extracts from
the authors correspondence, diary and notebooks; a glossary and so on.
Similarly, an intellectual historian focusing on an individual work should
seek to elucidate it by situating it in whichever contexts biographical,
ideological, intellectual, socio-historical and so on prove most helpful
for understanding its various parts, and ultimately the work as a whole.
Another useful perspective on the problem of intellectual-historical
textual interpretation is provided by Skinners discussion of the role of
normative vocabulary, or what he originally called evaluative-descriptive
terms.37 For Skinner, the use of these terms to express approval or disapproval has an overwhelming ideological significance, since it is largely
through their rhetorical manipulation that any society succeeds in establishing, upholding, questioning or altering its moral identity (RM, 149).
To put it another way, it is these normative terms that are used to do much
of the ideological work in language, a phenomenon perhaps most clearly
illustrated by the vocabularies of so-called political correctness and political incorrectness (themselves pejorative and meliorative terms in current
usage). In interpreting political texts such as Camuss lecture but not only
political texts it is therefore obviously vital to focus on the rhetorical use
of these normative terms, which tend not to be employed in isolation, but
to be reinforced by similar or contrasting terms.
37
Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action, M&C, pp.97118
(pp.11112). Cf. RM, 14849.
25
The use of a sub-group of normative terms especially characteristic of

political discourse also repays particularly close attention. These are what
W.B. Gallie38 originally described as essentially contested concepts and
are now generally referred to simply as contested concepts: normative
concepts whose use, far from being agreed, is often the subject of intense
debate, particularly in periods of ideological and political conflict or crisis.
Obvious examples here would include democracy, freedom and justice,
or outside politics, art. The most commonly accepted general definition of
democracy, for example, is rule by the people, but who the people are and
how their rule is exercised in practice has varied considerably from time to
time and place to place. In ancient Athens, where the concept originated,
democracy was exercised directly, rather than through representatives,
with the electorate being restricted to adult males who were full citizens,
defined as those whose parents were both themselves Athenian: immigrants,
slaves and women were excluded. And although democracy is nowadays
generally regarded as a good thing though not, notably, by supporters
of theocratic forms of government members of the Athenian elite used
democracy in the sense of mob rule, a pejorative usage which survived
in some quarters at least as late as the mid-twentieth century.
The historical study of contested socio-political concepts in a particular
socio-historical context the period of transition to modernity in Germany
and France between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries is
the special province of the German school of Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history, whose leading figure was the late Reinhart Koselleck.39 The
38
39
Essentially Contested Concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 56 (1956),

16798.
Koselleck was one of the co-editors of a monumental nine-volume historical lexicon
of fundamental socio-political concepts in Germany: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze
and Reinhart Koselleck, eds, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur
politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 9 vols (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 19721990).
For a translation of an entry written by Koselleck, see Crisis, trans. Michaela W.
Richter, preceded by an introduction by Melvin and Michaela W. Richter, Journal
of the History of Ideas 67 (2006), 343400. Other translations of Kosellecks work
include The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, tr.
Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)
26
chapter 1
most important theoretical contribution of Begriffsgeschichte, for the purposes of this study at least, is the principle that, as Rolf Reichardt has put it,
historical concepts do not develop [] in isolation but rather with concepts
both complementary and antithetical with which they form common
semantic fields.40 In Ancient Athens, for example, the term democracy
drew its meaning from being used in opposition to monarchy, oligarchy (or
rule by the few) and tyranny (rule by a usurper who had seized power by
force). Today, however, the most common counter-concept of democracy
is dictatorship, which is used in a decidedly different sense than it originally
had in Ancient Rome, where it referred to a limited period of rule by an
appointed individual during a state of emergency. (It was in this and not
the modern sense that the classically educated Marx used the term in the
oft-misunderstood phrase the dictatorship of the proletariat.) Monarchy,
on the other hand, is opposed to republic (another Roman term), in the
sense of a state headed by a president: for modern-day republicans, indeed,
monarchy is incompatible with their conception of democracy, whereas
others see no contradiction between the two. In all of these cases, the
meaning of a particular concept is relative to other concepts and depends
on its use in a particular socio-historical context by groups with different
ideological viewpoints.
The need to study concepts and texts respectively in both their discursive and socio-historical contexts is fundamental to the approaches
of both Begriffsgeschichte and the Cambridge School. Responding to the
suggestion by Melvin Richter that the two approaches were not only compatible but complementary, however, Pocock disagreed, alluding to and
and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, new edn, tr. Keith Tribe (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
40 Reichardt, Historical Semantics and Political Iconography: the Case of the Game
of the French Revolution, in Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karen Tilmans and Frank van
Vree, eds, History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 1998), pp.191226 (p.225). The German word Begriff, it should
be noted, means both concept and term, and following criticisms by the linguist
Dietrich Busse of the concept of a concept in Begriffsgeschichte, Reichardt now sees
himself as practising semantic rather than conceptual history.
27
endorsing Skinners assertion that there can be no histories of concepts as

such; there can only be histories of their uses in argument (M&C, 283). In
addition, Pocock argued for the logical priority of his own approach over
Kosellecks: according to Pocock, the history of concepts needed to be
seen as part of an ongoing history of discourses arranged [sc. arraigned?]
against each other in constant and continuing debate.41 In reply, however,
Koselleck suggested that the history of discourses and the history of concepts were interdependent:
Although basic concepts always function within a discourse, they are pivots around
which all arguments turn. [] A discourse requires basic concepts in order to express
what it is talking about. And analysis of concepts requires command of both linguistic
and extra-linguistic contexts, including those provided by discourses.42
Perhaps surprisingly, on the other hand, Koselleck agreed with what

he described as Skinners rigorous historicism: concepts had no autonomous history of their own, insofar as they were the product of speech
acts within a context that cannot be replicated and were thus unique to
that context. As Koselleck saw it, however, the history of concepts was
concerned with how the uses of concepts were subsequently maintained,
altered, or transformed.43 Begriffsgeschichte, said Koselleck,
registers more than sequences of unique speech acts set within specific situations;
it also registers that set of long-term, repeatable structures stored in language that
establish the preconditions for conceptualizing events. [] The task of begriffsgeschichte [sic] is to ask what strands of meaning persist, are translatable, and can
again be applied; what threads of meaning are discarded; and what new strands are
added.44
41 Pocock, Concepts and Discourses, p.58.

42 Koselleck, A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, tr. Melvin
Richter and Sally E. Robertson, in Lehmann and Richter, eds, The Meaning of
Historical Terms and Concepts, pp.5970 (p.65).
43 Koselleck, A Response, pp.6263.
44 Ibid., pp.6768.
28
chapter 1
Koselleck cited the example of the concept of democracy, which once it

had been created, began to acquire its own history. Over time, he pointed
out, some concepts came to be treated as if they were autonomous entities:
they were made into substantives History, Progress and Revolution,
for instance and used as the subjects of sentences.
As Kosellecks account makes clear, Begriffsgeschichte can be seen as a
form of reception history,45 focused not on texts or (as in Pococks approach)
discourses, but on concepts. Insofar as one of the more recent focuses of
Skinners work has been the process of conceptual innovation through
rhetorical redescription46 the appropriation and resemanticization of
concepts to serve different ideological ends there is an obvious affinity
between his approach and Kosellecks, as Skinner himself has acknowledged. In the concluding chapter of Regarding Method, indeed, Skinner
has described himself as not unhappy with Kari Palonens suggestion that
much of his (Skinners) own research might be seen as a contribution to one
aspect of the vastly more ambitious programme pursued by [] Koselleck
and his associates (RM, 18687).47
Pocock, on the other hand, fails to see that, despite different units of
analysis discourses and concepts respectively he and Koselleck share
the same focus on reception. In The State of the Art, for example, Pocock
describes one aspect of the history of texts as their constant adaptation,
translation and reperformance [] in a succession of contexts by a succession of agents48 a description which, as he makes clear elsewhere,
also applies to the history of discourses (cf. The Machiavellian Moment).
Similarly, Koselleck states that the history of concepts can be reconstructed
through studying the reception, or more radically, the translation of
45 See Keith Tribes Translators Introduction to Koselleck, Futures Past, pp.
xviixviii.
46 See Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change, RM 17587.
47 More recently, however, Skinner has described the relations between his work and
Kosellecks as a minefield. See J.F. Sebastin, Intellectual History, Liberty and
Republicanism: An Interview with Quentin Skinner, Contributions to the History
of Concepts 3 (2007), 10323 (p.114).
48 Introduction: the State of the Art, p.21.
29
concepts first used in the past but then pressed into service by later generations.49 Combining these two accounts, we have a picture of contested
concepts as the ideological pivots of texts inscribed in competing discourses,
with concepts, texts and discourses alike having their own histories of active
reception of appropriation, expropriation and reappropriation by different agents employing different discourses in different socio-historical
contexts. (Again, an illuminating parallel is provided by different critical
and literary-theoretical approaches to interpreting the same literary text,
or indeed the different interpretations of the same sacred text by different
religious groups.)
I shall be examining the different ways in which The New Mediterranean
Culture has been interpreted and thus reinscribed within different discourses in my examination of the secondary literature on Camuss lecture. As previously noted, however, the primary focus of this study is on
elucidating Camuss text itself. Here a parallel may be drawn between the
approach of Begriffsgeschichte to concepts and the Skinnerian approach
to texts. For just as Koselleck and Reichardt study individual concepts in
relation to other concepts occupying the same semantic field, so Skinner
studies individual texts in relation to previous texts with the same subjectmatter. (The same principle can of course be applied to competing discourses contesting the same issue or issues the discourses of newspapers
or political parties, for example.) And just as Begriffsgeschichte divides the
concepts related to the concept under examination into complementary
and counter-concepts, so, I would argue, the argumentative intertexts of
a primary text can be divided into what might be called, for lack of better
terms, antecedent pro- and counter-texts: texts, in other words, which
either influence the primary text or against which it reacts as polemical
targets.50 As regards Skinners own theoretical and methodological writings, for example, philosophical texts by J.L. Austin, R.G. Collingwood
49 Koselleck, A Response, p.65.
50 In some cases, the two functions may be combined within a single text or even a
whole genre. Skinner, for example, argues that Machiavellis The Prince both conforms
to and deviates from the generic conventions of humanist advice-books to princes
(Foundations, pp.11838).
30
chapter 1
and Wittgenstein, and intellectual-historical texts by John Dunn,51 Laslett

and Pocock would fall into the category of pro-texts, and similar texts by
Arthur Lovejoy, Leo Strauss and Raymond Williams into the category of
counter-texts.52
Textual analysis focusing on the rhetorical manipulation of normative
terms and key concepts, then, needs to be complemented by an analysis
of the relationship between the target text and its antecedent pro- and
counter-texts, which themselves need to be placed in a broader historical
perspective.53 As Pocock puts it, the historian has to move between exploring [the texts] structure as a synchronously existing artifact to exploring its
occurrence and performance as an incident in a diachronously proceeding
continuum of discourse.54 The target texts antecedent pro- and countertexts, in other words, need themselves to be contextualized. In this way, it
will be possible to build up a picture of an argumentative context focused
not just on ephemeral polemics, but debates extending over a generation
or more, the central terms of which as in the case of democracy, for
example may originate as far back as the Classical world. (An analogy
may be drawn here with Fernand Braudels tripartite division of historical
time into events, medium-term conjonctures and the longue dure.)
See, in particular, The Identity of the History of Ideas, Philosophy 43 (1968),

85104, rpt in Political Obligation in its Historical Context: Essays in Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp.1328.
52 Lovejoy and Strauss were two of Skinners principal targets in Meaning and
Understanding, while Williams was the object of an equally harsh critique in The
Idea of a Cultural Lexicon, Essays in Criticism 29 (1979), 20524 (revised version
in RM, 15874).
53 In some cases, these texts may have been written many centuries before. Skinner has
shown, for example, that at various points in The Prince, Machiavelli is directly taking
issue with Ciceros De Officiis (On Moral Obligation), which was a locus classicus for
humanist advice-books to princes. See Machiavelli, pp.40 and 4346.
54 Pocock, The State of the Art, p.28.
51
31
Two Critiques of Skinner

As its title indicates, the present study adopts a multi-contextualist
approach. Before outlining this approach, I shall therefore briefly discuss
two critiques of Skinners original methodological writings from what is, in
effect, a multi-contextualist perspective. In a joint article, Lotte Mulligan,
Judith Richards and John Graham argued that the historian of ideas needs
to consider a number of both wider and more specific issues than those of
Skinners focus.55 They singled out five such issues:
(a) the general conventions of speech and writing within which the
writer was set and which he [sic] needed to invoke in order to
communicate with their audience;
(b) the specific historical circumstances in which each of the authors
works were produced;
(c) the relationship of his specific writings to the whole corpus of
his work;
(d) the degree of novelty or traditionality of the writers concepts;
and
(e) (ideally) the writers psychology.56
Two observations need to be made here. The first is that, as their repeated references to the writer or author suggest, the approach proposed by Mulligan
et al. is author- rather than text-centred: as regards point (c), for example,
they state that we need to grasp the relationship of a text to the corpus
of an authors writings in order to understand the authors intellectual
evolution.57 The second is that at various times, Skinner himself has stressed
55
56
57
Lotte Mulligan, Judith Richards and John Graham, Intentions and Conventions: A
Critique of Quentin Skinners Method for the Study of the History of Ideas, Political
Studies 27:1 (1979), 8498 (p.97).
Mulligan et al, pp.9798.
Ibid., p.98. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this: it depends on what one is
doing.
32
chapter 1
the importance of points (a), (b) and (d) conventions,58 the (socio-)historical context and conceptual innovation. Although Skinner would probably be wary of what he might see as the psychologizing approach proposed
in point (e), on the other hand, he seems to have nothing in particular to
say either way on point (c), the relationship between a particular text and
the authors work as a whole.59
A very similar, albeit largely indirect critique of Skinners methodology was made by Dominick LaCapra, who also stressed the need for a
multi-contextualist approach. As LaCapra pointed out, an appeal to the
context is deceptive; one never has at least in the case of complex texts
the context, but rather a set of interacting contexts whose relations to one
another are variable and problematic.60 He then gave what he described
as a non-exhaustive list of six contexts that might need to be taken into
account:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
the relation between the authors intentions and the text;

the relation between the authors life and the text;
the relation of society to texts;
the relation of culture to texts;
the relation of a text to the corpus of a writer;
the relation between modes of discourse and texts.
Under the heading of (3), the relation of society to texts, it should be noted,
LaCapra includes the relationship of the text to ideologies, discursive practices and social processes as these affect both the genesis of the text and its
See, in particular, Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts, Philosophical

Quarterly 20 (1970), 11838, not included in either Meaning and Context or Regarding
Method.
59 As noted earlier, Skinners initial dismissal, in Meaning and Understanding, of
intellectual biographies concentrating on the works of a given writer (M&C, 63)
was later contradicted by his study of Machiavelli.
60 Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts, History and
Theory 19 (1980), 24576 (254). Further references to this article are incorporated
in the body of the text.
58
33
impact. There is obviously an overlap here with (4), the cultural context,
on which he comments: intellectual history should be a history of intellectuals, of the communities of discourse in which they function, and of
the varying relations [] they manifest towards the larger culture (264).
A similar overlap is evident when, having referred to conventions of interpretation (262) in his discussion of the social context, LaCapra includes
structures of interpretation, and conventions (269) under the heading of
(6), the relation between modes of discourse and texts.
LaCapra only mentions Skinner in relation to the first of his six contexts, that of the authors intentions, criticizing Skinners approach for what
he sees as a tendency to assume a proprietary relation between the author
and the text as well as a unitary meaning for an utterance (254). In so doing,
however, he ignores Skinners own explicit reference, in the introduction
to the Foundations, to the social, ideological and intellectual contexts of
texts and his emphasis elsewhere on the role of conventions. Each of these
corresponds to aspects of three of the five remaining contexts (3, 4 and 6)
identified by LaCapra,61 which in turn overlap substantially with the issues
identified by Mulligan et al. (the exception being the writers concepts).
The only contexts that Skinner can be legitimately accused of failing to
adequately address in his methodological writings are the biographical
context, the context of the writers uvre and the context of reception. In
practice, however, and in spite of his polemical emphasis on the intellectual
or argumentative context, Skinner refers to all these contexts at various
times, both in examples that he discusses and in his non-theoretical writings, notably Machiavelli.62
61
In addition, LaCapra says that (5), the relation of a text to the corpus of a writer also
raises the problem of the relationship between a text and the texts of other writers
(268), which corresponds to Skinners intellectual context.
62 See, for instance, Skinners discussion of the question of Hobbess and Bayles attitude
to religion (RM, 8082), where he refers to both biographical information and the
response of their peers as possible evidence of their scepticism.
34
chapter 1
The Multi-Contextualist Approach

The broad approach on which this study is based though inevitably, this
will not be reflected in the way its findings are presented63 can be summarized as follows:
First, conduct a close analysis of the text, taking account of its genre
and the immediate context of its production and reception,64 establishing
what it is about, what is at stake and its central arguments, focusing on the
rhetorical manipulation of key concepts and normative terms, and paying
particular attention to loaded oppositions.65
Second, identify items that require contextualization, especially references to ideological allies or opponents and other texts or writers, and
follow up the leads they provide.
Third, situate the text in its immediate argumentative and discursive context by comparing and contrasting it with antecedent pro- and
counter-texts identified in the text itself and contemporary texts with the
same subject-matter.
Fourth, contextualize these texts in turn in order to reconstruct the
debates in which they and the target text intervened, and the discourses
in which they were articulated.
63
To take the most obvious example, the reconstruction of a texts argumentative

context requires working backwards from the text itself, whereas the natural order
to present the debate or debates in which it intervenes is chronological.
64 It should be noted, however, that in some (exceptional?) cases, the context of immediate reception may be highly misleading. To borrow one of Skinners own examples,
the irony of Defoes anonymously published pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the
Dissenters (1702) which argued, apparently seriously, that the best and quickest
way to deal with religious dissent was to make it a capital offence was initially lost
on both dissenters and the High Tories whose intolerance it satirized. Defoes hoax
was only exposed when it became known that the pamphlets author was himself a
dissenter.
65 Koselleck refers to the negative terms in loaded oppositions (e.g. barbarism as
opposed to civilization) as asymmetric counterconcepts. See The Historical-Political
Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts, Futures Past, pp.15591.
35
Fifth, explore other contexts: biographical (including the authors

previous reading); the context of the authors work as a whole (including,
for the purposes of triangulation, not only earlier, but also later writings);
and, last but not least, the socio-historical context.
Three final points need to be made. First, a detailed knowledge of
the primary text itself is essential to guide the detective-work of contextual research, so that, for instance, intertextual echoes can be recognized
in earlier texts (to this extent, pace Skinner, it is necessary to read the text
over and over again).66 Second, the procedure outlined does not provide
a magic recipe for textual interpretation, but rather a heuristic framework:
the contexts that shed most light on a text or part of a text may not be
immediately obvious, and much may depend on attention to apparently
trivial detail, serendipity and wide-ranging research (a task immeasurably
facilitated by on-line searches and electronic texts, which can throw up
previously unsuspected connections). Third, and pace Skinners polemical
emphasis on the intellectual or argumentative context, when it comes to
elucidating how various contexts contribute to an understanding of various parts of the text and ultimately the text as a whole, no single context
or set of contexts has methodological priority over all the others. In the
final analysis, what matters most is the quality and quantity of the evidence
that can be brought to light.
66 This is Skinners characterization of the textualist approach: see Foundations, Preface,

p. xiii.
chapter 2

An Annotated Translation
My reasons for including an annotated translation of Camuss lecture are

twofold. First, to remedy the defects, including omissions, of the two existing translations of the lecture,1 both of which like the text in the Pliade
edition lack a critical apparatus, and second, to provide an easily accessible version of the text for reference purposes. I would like to express
my gratitude to Catherine Camus for giving me permission to make this
translation.
As its subtitle makes clear, Camuss lecture was given to inaugurate
a new Maison de la culture (community arts centre) in Algiers, of which
Camus was the general secretary. Forerunners of the eponymous postwar
state institutions introduced by Andr Malraux when he was the French
Minister of Culture, the Maisons de la culture were communist-inspired
Popular Front organizations that sought to bring culture to the masses
(Camus was a member of the Algerian Communist Party at the time). The
text of Camuss lecture was originally published in the first issue of Jeune
Mditerrane (Young Mediterranean),2 the newsletter of the Maison, under
the heading La culture indigne (Native Culture); as the reappearance
Native Culture. The New Culture of the Mediterranean, in Albert Camus: Lyrical
and Critical, ed. and trans. by Philip Thody (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967),
pp.18894. The New Mediterranean Culture, in Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical
Essays, ed. Philip Thody, tr. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970),
pp.18998. The most egregious errors in Thodys and Kennedys translations are
noted below.
La nouvelle culture mditerranenne, Jeune Mditerrane 1 (May 1937).
38
chapter 2
of this heading in the second issue of the newsletter confirmed,3 however,

this was not part of the title of the lecture. Nor, apparently, was The New
Mediterranean Culture the original title of the lecture itself, since the
local communist party newspaper, La Lutte sociale, had announced that
the Maison de la culture would be inaugurated with a lecture on the topic
Is a Mediterranean Culture Realizable?4 With the addition of the word
new, this is the same question that Camus asks at the end of both his
introduction and the text as a whole.
*
Native Culture
Outlines of the inaugural lecture given at the House of Culture
8 February 1937
I. The House of Culture, which is being introduced to you
today, aims to serve Mediterranean culture. In accordance with
the general regulations concerning such institutions, it wishes
to contribute to the creation, within a regional framework, of a
culture whose existence and greatness no longer need to be demonstrated. In this connection, it is perhaps surprising that left-wing
intellectuals can place themselves in the service of a culture that
does not seem in any way to concern their cause, and that may
even, in some cases, have been monopolized (as is the case with
Maurras)5 by right-wing doctrinaires.
3
4
5
Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (London: Picador, 1981), p.133.

See Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi, Lengagement culturel, AC5, pp.83106 (p.95).
Charles Maurras (18681952), the co-founder of both the neoclassical cole romane
or Romanic school of poetry and the far-right Action franaise movement, whose
central principles were anti-Semitism, Catholicism, monarchism and nationalism.
See Chapter 6.
The New Mediterranean Culture An Annotated Translation
39
To serve the cause of a Mediterranean regionalism may seem,

indeed, to be restoring a futile traditionalism that has no future,
or else to be exalting the superiority of one culture over another
and, for example, taking up fascism in reverse,6 to be setting Latin
peoples against Nordic peoples. There is a constant misunderstanding here. The aim of this lecture is to try and clear it up. The
whole mistake comes from people confusing the Mediterranean
and Latinity,7 and placing in Rome what began in Athens. For
us the matter is clear: it cannot be a question of a sort of nationalism of the sun.8 We cannot be a slave to traditions and bind
our living future to exploits that are already dead. A tradition
is a past that distorts9 the present. The Mediterranean that surrounds us is, on the contrary, a living region,10 full of games and
smiles. On the other hand, nationalism has been judged by its
acts. Nationalisms always appear in history as signs of decadence.
When the vast edifice of the [Holy] Roman Empire11 crumbled,
when its spiritual unity, from which so many different regions
derived their reason for living, disintegrated, then and only then,
6
7
8
9
10
11
Reprenant le fascisme rebours.

The doctrine of Latinity, of which Maurras was one of the leading proponents, can
best be described as the Roman equivalent of Hellenism, seeing imperial Rome as the
fons et origo of Western civilization, and hence civilization in general. See Chapter
6.
Both Thody and Kennedy mis-translate this as our only claim is to a kind of nationalism of the sun (my italics). The original French reads: il ne peut sagir dune sorte
de nationalisme du soleil (I, 566).
Contrefait, literally counterfeits.
Pays. Except where it refers to an individual country or countries, this has been
translated as region (cf. vin de pays, regional wine).
While the original French text refers simply to lEmpire romain, it is clear from the
context that Camus means the Holy Roman Empire (8001806), which he mentions a few lines later. Cf. an entry in Camuss notebooks apparently dating from
November 1936: Nationalities appear as signs of disintegration. Religious unity
of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire no sooner broken: nationalities (II, 812; cf.
817).
40
chapter 2
at the time of its decadence, did nationalities appear. Ever since

then, the West has failed to regain its unity. At the present time,
internationalism is trying to give the West back its true meaning
and its vocation. Only the principle is no longer Christian, it is no
longer the papal Rome of the Holy Roman Empire. The principle
is man. The unity is no longer in belief, but in hope. A civilization is only lasting to the extent that, when all nations have been
done away with, its unity and its greatness come from a spiritual
principle. India, almost as big as Europe, without nations, without
a sovereign, has kept its own character, even after two centuries
of English domination.12
That is why, without further consideration, we will reject the
principle of a Mediterranean nationalism. Moreover, there can
be no question of a Mediterranean culture being superior. Man
expresses himself in harmony with his region. And superiority,
in the cultural sphere, lies solely in this harmony. There is no
greater or lesser culture. There are cultures that are more true or
less true. We only wish to help a region to express itself. Locally.
Nothing more. The real question is: is a new Mediterranean culture realizable?
II. OBVIOUS FACTS. a) There is a Mediterranean sea, a
basin that links ten or so countries. The men who yell out in the
cabarets13 of Spain, those who wander around the port of Genoa,
along the Marseille waterfront, the strong and curious race that
lives on our coasts, come from the same family. When one travels
12
13
Camuss remarks here draw on LInde imaginaire (Imaginary India), an essay by his
philosophy teacher and mentor Jean Grenier, included in Les les (Islands) (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977 [1933]), pp.11142. See Chapter 7.
Cafs chantants, literally singing cafs. Camus is drawing here on his experience of
such an establishment in Palma, which he had visited in 1935. See Amour de vivre
(Love of Living), in LEnvers et lendroit (Eng. tr. The Wrong Side and the Right
Side), I, 6466.
41
in Europe, coming back down towards Italy or Provence,14 it is

with a sigh of relief that one returns to men who are unrestrained,
to this strong and colourful life with which we are all familiar. I
spent two months in Central Europe, from Austria to Germany,
wondering where that strange awkwardness that weighed on my
shoulders, that dull anxiety that haunted me, came from. I realized not long ago. These people were always buttoned up to the
neck. They didnt know how to let themselves go. They didnt
know what joy is,15 which is so different from laughter. And yet
it is with details such as this that one can give a valid meaning to
the word Homeland.16 The Homeland is not the abstraction that
precipitates men into massacre,17 but a certain taste for life that
is common to certain beings, through which one can feel closer
to a Genoese or a Majorcan than to a Norman or an Alsatian.18
That is what the Mediterranean is, that smell or scent that it is
pointless to express: we can all feel it with our skin.
b) There are other obvious facts, historical ones. Every time
that a doctrine has encountered the Mediterranean basin, in the
resulting collision of ideas it is always the Mediterranean that
has remained intact, the region that has defeated the doctrine.
Christianity was originally a moving but closed doctrine, Judaic
14
15
16
17
18
Again, Camus is drawing on his personal experience, in this case a trip he made to
Europe in the summer of 1936. In La mort dans lme (Death in the Soul), another
essay in LEnvers et lendroit, for example, he describes his sense of relief at leaving
Central Europe and entering Italy, a land made for my soul (I, 60).
In a footnote to Amour de vivre, Camus who had Catalan blood on his mothers
side wrote: There is a certain ease in joy that defines true civilization. And the
Spanish people is one of the rare peoples in Europe that is civilized (LEnvers et
lendroit, I, 64).
Patrie, literally Fatherland.
Camus was almost certainly thinking of the First World War here, in which his own
father had died the year after Camus was born. See Chapter 9.
Camus mistakenly believed that his fathers family came from Alsace (in fact they
came from Bordeaux); his mothers family came from Minorca. See Lottman, Albert
Camus, pp.8, 12.
42
chapter 2
above all, uncompromising, harsh, exclusive and admirable. From

its encounter with the Mediterranean came a new doctrine:
Catholicism. To the original combination of sentimental aspirations was added a philosophical doctrine. The monument was
given its finishing touches, embellished adapted to man. Thanks
to the Mediterranean, Christianity was able to enter the world to
begin the miraculous career with which we are familiar.19
It was a Mediterranean too, Francis of Assisi, who made
Christianity, all inward and tormented, into a hymn to nature
and nave joy. And we owe the only attempt that has been made
to separate Christianity from the world to the Nordic Luther.20
Protestantism is, strictly speaking, Catholicism torn away from
the Mediterranean and from its influence, simultaneously harmful and stimulating.
Let us take an even closer look. For those who have lived in
both Germany and Italy, it is an obvious fact that fascism does
not wear the same face in the two countries. One feels it everywhere in Germany, on peoples faces, in the streets of the cities.
Dresden, a military city, is suffocating beneath an invisible enemy.
What you feel first in Italy is the country. What you see first in a
German is the Hitlerian who greets you with a Heil Hitler! In an
Italian, it is the man, affable and cheerful. Here too, the doctrine
seems to have retreated before the region and it is a miracle of
the Mediterranean that it allows men who think humanly to live
without oppression in a country with inhuman laws.
19
Camuss remarks on the early history of Christianity need to be seen in the context
of his 1936 postgraduate dissertation Mtaphysique chrtienne et noplatonisme
(Christian Metaphysics and Neo-Platonism) (I, 9991081). See Chapter 9.
20 A notebook entry Camus wrote shortly before his lecture (between November 1936
and January 1937) suggests that his attitude towards Luther and Protestantism at the
time was not as unreservedly negative as this might seem to imply: Protestantism.
Nuance. In theory, admirable attitudes: Luther, Kierkegaard. In practice? (II,
812).
43
III. But this living reality that is the Mediterranean is not something new for us. And it seems that this culture is in the image
of that Latin antiquity that the Renaissance tried to rediscover
throughout the Middle Ages. It is this Latinity that Maurras and
his followers are trying to annex. It is in the name of this Latin
order that, in the Ethiopian affair, twenty-four intellectuals of the
West signed a degrading manifesto that exalted Italys civilizing
work in barbaric Ethiopia.21
No. That is not the Mediterranean that our House of Culture
lays claim to. For it is not the true Mediterranean. It is the abstract
and conventional Mediterranean represented by Rome and the
Romans. This people of imitators without imagination nonetheless hit upon the idea of replacing the artistic genius and the
sense of life that they lacked with martial genius. And this muchvaunted order was the order that is imposed by force and not the
one that is exuded in intelligence. Even when they copied things,
they made them insipid. And it was not even the essential genius
of Greece that they imitated, but the fruits of its decadence and
its errors. Not the hard and strong Greece of the great writers of
tragedies and comedies, but the prettiness and affectation of its
last centuries. It was not life that Rome took from Greece, but
puerile and argumentative abstraction. The Mediterranean is
elsewhere. It is the very negation of Rome and the Latin genius.
Alive, it has no use for abstraction. And one can willingly concede
to Mr Mussolini that he is the worthy successor to the Caesars
and Augustuses of old, if one understands by this that, like them,
he sacrifices truth and greatness to mindless violence.
It is not the taste for argumentation and abstraction that
we lay claim to in the Mediterranean, but its life courtyards,
21
Italy had invaded Ethiopia on 3 October 1935. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the
manifesto in question.
44
chapter 2
cypresses, strings of peppers Aeschylus and not Euripides22

Doric Apollos23 and not the Vaticans copies. It is Spain, its
strength and its pessimism, and not the sabre-rattling of Rome
landscapes bursting with sunlight and not the stage-sets where a
dictator becomes intoxicated with the sound of his own voice and
subjugates crowds. What we want is not the lie that triumphed in
Ethiopia, but the truth that is being murdered in Spain.24
IV. An international basin crossed by every current, the
Mediterranean is of all regions perhaps the only one to link up
with the great Eastern philosophies.25 For it is not classical and
ordered, it is diffuse and turbulent, like those Arab quarters or
those ports of Genoa and Tunisia. This triumphant taste for life,
this sense of oppressiveness and boredom, the deserted squares in
Spain at midday, the siesta that is the true Mediterranean and it
is the East that it resembles. Not the Latin West. North Africa is
one of the only regions where East and West live together. And at
this meeting-point there is no difference between the way of life of
a Spaniard or Italian on the Algiers waterfront and the Arabs who
At the time of his lecture, Camus was preparing to stage Aeschyluss Prometheus
Bound with the Thtre du Travail in Algiers; the first performance was on 6 March
1937 (I, 1435). On Camuss preference for Aeschylus over Euripides, see Chapter 9.
23 In Mtaphysique chrtienne et noplatonisme, Camus had argued that the role of
Greek thought in orienting Christianity towards metaphysics had been prepared for
by a whole tradition that originates in Aeschylus and Doric Apollos [i.e. statues of
Apollo] (I, 1004). The works of Aeschylus are the earliest and purest examples of
Greek tragedy, while the term Doric refers to the earliest and plainest style of Greek
architecture and sculpture.
24 The Spanish Civil War had begun in July 1936 with a rebellion by army officers in
the Spanish zone of Morocco. Camus supported the Republicans against Franco.
25 As his use of the plural indicates, Camus is not just referring to Islam, if indeed he is
referring to Islam at all: see Chapter 9. On Camuss interest in Eastern thought, see
Chapter 7.
22
45
surround them.26 What is most essential in the Mediterranean

genius springs, perhaps, from this encounter, unique in history
and geography, born between East and West. (In this connection
one can only refer to Audisio.)27
This culture, this Mediterranean truth exists and manifests
itself in every way: 1. linguistic unity ease of learning a Romance
language when one already knows another one ; 2. unity of
origins prodigious collectivism of the Middle Ages order of
knights, monastic order, feudal systems, etc.28 The Mediterranean,
in all these ways, gives us here the image of a living and variegated,
concrete civilisation, transforming doctrines in its own image
and receiving ideas without changing its own nature.
But then, it will be said, why go any further?
V. It is because the same region that transformed so many doctrines must transform the doctrines of today.29 A Mediterranean
26 The description of the Muslim population of Algeria as Arabs, it should be emphasized, was part of standard European-Algerian usage at the time. Nevertheless, given
the colonial context in which it was made, Camuss assertion may seem deeply problematic (see Chapter 3). It also, however, echoes a passage from an earlier article by
Grenier: From Marseille to Constantinople, in the ports of the Mediterranean, a
whole people the same lives barefoot on the waterfront. Cum apparuerit ,
NRF 34 (1930), 64147 (p.642).
27 Gabriel Audisio (19001978), the author of two volumes of essays entitled Jeunesse
de la Mditerrane (Youth of the Mediterranean) (Paris: Gallimard, 1935 and 1936)
which greatly influenced Camus. After the Second World War, Camus and Audisio
were bracketed together, with a number of other writers, as members of the cole
dAlger. See Chapters 3 and 5.
28 As its subtitle reminds us, the printed text only provides the outlines of Camuss
lecture: this is the only point, however, where note-form is adopted. Conor Cruise
OBrien suggests that the orders of knights Camus refers to here are associated with
the Crusades. OBrien, Camus (Glasgow: Fontana Modern Masters, 1970), p.12.
See Chapter 3.
29 Camuss remark recalls an observation made by Grenier in an article he had published
the previous year: Whatever political, social or religious revolutions there may be,
the Mediterranean is older and at the same time younger than them. The Christian
46
chapter 2
collectivism will be different from a Russian collectivism, properly

so called. The battle for collectivism is not being played out in
Russia: it is being played out in the Mediterranean basin and in
Spain at the present time. Of course, the battle for man has been
playing out for a long time, but it is here, perhaps, that it has it
attained its most tragic pitch and that so many trump-cards are
concentrated in our hands. There are before our eyes realities
that are stronger than us. Our ideas will yield and adapt to them.
That is why our opponents are mistaken in all their objections.
One does not have the right to pre-judge the fate of a doctrine,
and to judge our future in the name of the past, even if it is that
of Russia.
Our task in this very place is to rehabilitate the Mediterranean,
to take it back from those who unjustly lay claim to it, and to
make it ready to receive the economic forms that await it. It is to
discover what is concrete and alive in it, and, at every opportunity, to encourage the diverse aspects of this culture. We are all
the better prepared for this task for being in immediate contact
with this East that can teach us so much in this respect. Here
we are with the Mediterranean against Rome. And the essential
role that cities such as Algiers and Barcelona can play is to serve,
in their modest way, that aspect of Mediterranean culture that
encourages man instead of crushing him.
VI. The role of the intellectual is difficult in our time. It is not
for him to change history. Whatever people may say, revolutions
are made first and ideas come afterwards.30 This means that great
has had to place himself under its guidance [se mettre son cole], and the communist will place himself under its guidance, Sagesse de Lourmarin, Cahiers du Sud
183 (May 1936), 39097 (p.397).
30 Compare the distinction Camus makes in LHomme rvolt between revolution and
rebellion: Revolution starts [] from the idea. To be precise, it is the insertion of
the idea into historical experience, when rebellion is only the movement that leads
from individual experience to the idea. [A] revolution is an attempt to model the
47
courage is needed today to declare oneself faithful to matters of

the mind. But at least this courage is not useless. If so much scorn
and disapproval is attached to the name intellectual, it is to the
extent that it implies the idea of the argumentative and abstract
gentleman, incapable of connecting with life, and preferring his
personality to all the rest of the world. But for those who do not
wish to evade their responsibilities, the essential task is to rehabilitate intelligence by regenerating the material it works on, to give
back to the mind all of its true meaning by restoring to culture its
true face of health and sunlight. And I said that this courage was
not useless. For indeed, if it is not for the intelligence31 to change
history, its own task will therefore be to act on the man who
himself makes history.32 To this task, we have a contribution to
make. We want to reconnect culture with life. The Mediterranean,
which surrounds us with smiles, sunlight and sea teaches us a
lesson in this respect. Xenophon relates, in his Retreat of the Ten
Thousand,33 that the Greek soldiers who had ventured into Asia,
coming back to their country, dying of hunger and thirst, driven
31
32
33
act on an idea, to mould the world in a theoretical framework (LHomme rvolt,

III, 151).
Camus could well be using lintelligence here to refer to the intelligentsia.
In his postwar polemic with the communist sympathizer Emmanuel dAstier de la
Vigerie, Camus would declare that his role was not to transform either the world
or man, but to serve the few values without which a world, even transformed, is
not worth living in, and without which a man, even a new man, will not be worth
respecting (Deux rponses Emmanuel dAstier de la Vigerie: deuxime rponse,
II, 469). Judging from what Camus went on to say, these values included happiness,
love and natural beauty cf. his later reference here to the culture that lives in hills,
trees and men.
See Xenophon, Anabasis, 4.7.2125. Xenophon, however, makes no reference to
dancing, while the sea in question was the Black Sea rather than the Mediterranean
itself. Ironically, Xenophon was an opponent of democracy and a mercenary (as
were the soldiers he commanded in this episode) who ended up fighting for Sparta
against Athens. He was also a pupil and admirer of Socrates, about whom he wrote
three books.
48
chapter 2
to despair by so many failures and humiliations, reached the top

of a mountain from where they caught sight of the sea. Then they
started to dance, forgetting their fatigue and their disgust, faced
with the most wonderful sight of their whole lives. We too do
not wish to separate ourselves from the world. There is only one
culture. Not the one that feeds on abstractions and capital letters.
Not the one that condemns. Not the one that justifies the abuses
and deaths of Ethiopia and which legitimates the taste for brutal
conquest we know that culture well and we want none of it
but the culture that lives in hills, trees and men.
This is why men of the Left are presenting themselves before
you today, to serve a cause that at first sight had nothing to do
with their opinions. I would like to think that you, like us, are now
convinced of the contrary. Everything that is alive is ours. Politics
is made for men and not men for politics.34 For Mediterranean
men a Mediterranean politics is needed.35 We do not want to
live on fables. In the world of violence and death that surrounds
us, there is no place for hope.36 But there is perhaps a place for
civilization, the true civilization, the one that puts truth before
fables, life before dreams. And this civilization has no use for
hope. In it, man lives on his truths.
It is to this combined effort that men of the West must apply
themselves. In the framework of internationalism, it is realizable. If
each in his sphere, his region, his province, agrees to modest work,
34 Cf. Mark 2:27: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Similarly, in
the immediate post-war period, Camus would repeatedly condemn what he described
as the detestable Hegelian principle which he also saw as that of the whole of
modern philosophy (II, 673) that man is made for History and not History for
man (II, 507, 673, 741; cf. II, 687).
35 Kennedys translation omits this sentence altogether.
36 Cf. Lt Alger (Summer in Algiers), from Noces, written circa 193738: if there is
a sin against life, it is not perhaps so much to despair of it as to hope for another life,
and to shy away from the implacable grandeur of this one. [] For hope, contrary to
what people believe, is equivalent to resignation. And to live is not to be resigned
(I, 12526).
49
success is not far off. As for us, we know our goal, our limits and
our potential. We have only to open our eyes to become aware of
our task:37 to make it known that culture can only be understood
when it is placed in the service of life, that mind need not be the
enemy of man. Just as the Mediterranean sun is the same for all
men, so the effort of human intelligence must be a common heritage and not a source of conflicts and murders.
Is a new Mediterranean culture that is compatible with our
social ideal realizable? Yes. But it is up to us and to you to help
towards its realization.
* I spoke of a new civilization and not of a progress in civilization. It would be too dangerous to handle that harmful toy called
Progress.38
37
38
Kennedy does not translate pour avoir conscience de notre tche (I, 572).
Grenier had published an article criticizing the ideology of progress the previous
year. See Remarques sur lide de progrs (Remarks on the Idea of Progress), Esprit
4748 (1936), 71218, rpt in Essai sur lesprit dorthodoxie (Essay on the Spirit of
Orthodoxy) (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), pp.16680. See Chapter 9.
chapter 3
As an early and ephemeral text, The New Mediterranean Culture has

usually been discussed in the context of Camuss life and work as a whole,
where it has been seen as important for two very different reasons. First, it
has been seen as the earliest formulation of a Mediterranean humanism
central to Camuss world-view. This would most famously be expressed in
La pense de midi (Noonday Thought), the concluding part of Camuss
1951 historico-politico-philosophical essay LHomme rvolt, in which
he proposed Greco-Mediterranean thought as a corrective to what he
saw as the disastrous influence of German ideology, in the shape of both
Marxism and Nazism.1 Second, from a postcolonial viewpoint, the lecture has been seen as an early indication of Camuss essentially colonial
mentality, as expressed, for instance, in what is seen as the marginalization
of native Algerians in his novels Ltranger (The Outsider) and La Peste
This view is shared even by critics with a low opinion of the work. Despite describing the lecture as sentimental and lacking in intellectual foundations, Roger Quilliot
writes that noonday thought, the final theme of LHomme rvolt, [] takes on its
full sense from a reading of this text (E, 1316). Similarly, Maurice Weyembergh sees
some of Camuss observations as strangely contradictory and superficial, but suggests
that LHomme rvolt represents a mature reprise of his youthful remarks; Camus et
Saint-Augustin, Perspectives. Revue de lUniversit Hbraque de Jrusalem 5 (1998),
13146 (pp.13536). Jean Sarocchi, meanwhile, asserts that the lecture expresses
a very vague and polemical humanism and that LHomme rvolt repeats, with
admittedly more talent, more nuances, more loftiness and more knowledge, [its]
tiresome public declamations (Lhumanisme de Camus au risque de Jean Grenier,
Variations Camus (Biarritz: Atlantica-Sguier, 2005), p.124, and La Mditerrane
est un songe, monsieur, ibid., p.306).
52
chapter 3
(The Plague), and in his opposition, during the Algerian War, to Algerian
independence.2
From a historical viewpoint, these two different views of Camuss
lecture correspond to two broader discursive contexts. First, and again
from a humanistic perspective, the lecture has been placed in the context
of French discourses on the Mediterranean. Camus is seen as belonging
to a succession of thinkers from the Saint-Simonians of the 1830s to
twentieth-century Mediterranean humanists such as the writer Gabriel
Audisio whose idea of the Mediterranean can broadly be described as
inclusive, multicultural and progressive, as opposed to the exclusive, antiSemitic and reactionary doctrine of Latinity propounded by the right-wing
ideologues Louis Bertrand and Charles Maurras.3 Second, postcolonial
critics have situated the lecture in the context of French literary and paraliterary discourses on Algeria. Here Camus and Audisio are seen as belonging
to a group of writers the so-called cole dAlger (Algiers School), who set
themselves up in opposition to the earlier, self-consciously colonialist and
Bertrand-inspired school of Algerianism, but who nevertheless failed to
free themselves from colonial attitudes and contradictions.
Both of these approaches to contextualizing Camuss lecture help to
illuminate various aspects of the text, and indeed both approaches can be
taken further than hitherto. This chapter will therefore consist as much of
an extension as an exposition of existing approaches. Ultimately, however,
it can be argued that whereas the humanist approach fails to take sufficient account of the colonial context in which the lecture was written, the
2
See, in particular, Conor Cruise OBrien, Camus (Glasgow: Fontana, Modern

Masters, 1970). In a 1951 letter to the Algerian Kabyle writer Mouloud Feraoun,
Camus explained the absence of Arab characters in La Peste as follows: Dont think
that if I didnt speak of the Arabs of Oran, it is because I feel separate from them. Its
because, in order to present them, you have to speak of the problem that is poisoning
the lives of all of us in Algeria: you would have had to write a different book from
the one that I wanted to write. Quoted by Hamid Nacer-Khodja in Albert Camus
Jean Snac ou le fils rebelle (Paris: Paris-Mditerrane, 2004), p.116.
See especially Thierry Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane: gnalogies et reprsentations, in Jean-Claude Izzo and Thierry Fabre, La Mditerrane franaise (Paris:
Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000), pp.5560 (Bertrand) and pp.7378 (Maurras).
53
postcolonial approach is reductive in its focus on colonialism as the only

relevant context, and anachronistic in judging Camus from a retrospective
rather than a contemporary viewpoint.
Camus himself clearly identifies what he sees as the immediate ideological and political contexts of his lecture. Writing against the background
of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain, he refers not only to
Hitler and Mussolini, but also to Italys invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and
the Spanish Civil War, which had broken out in July 1936. Camus is equally
explicit about his ideological allies and opponents. On the one hand, he
makes clear his opposition to Maurras and the doctrine of Latinity, and to a
manifesto signed by a number of Western intellectuals defending Mussolinis
invasion of Ethiopia. In asserting, on the other hand, that what is most
essential in the Mediterranean genius springs from the encounter between
East and West, Camus acknowledges the influence of Audisio, who had
published two volumes of essays under the title Jeunesse de la Mediterrane
in 1935 and 1936 respectively.4 An adequate account of Camuss lecture
clearly needs to take all of these factors into consideration. First, however,
a more detailed examination of humanist and postcolonial approaches to
Camuss lecture is called for.
Camus as Mediterranean Humanist

In 2000, the Israeli critic David Ohana published a Hebrew-language study
whose title summed up the traditional view of Camus as a Mediterranean
humanist: Humanist Ba-Shemesh: Kami Veha-Hashraah Ha-YamTikhonit (Humanist in the Sun: Albert Camus and the Mediterranean
Inspiration).5 Regrettably, I am unable to discuss Ohanas book, as it has
4
5
Gabriel Audisio, Jeunesse de la Mediterrane (Paris: Gallimard, 1935, rpt 2002);

Jeunesse de la Mediterrane II: Sel de la mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1936, rpt 2002).
Jerusalem: Carmel, 2000.
54
chapter 3
not been translated. In 2003, however, he followed it up with an Englishlanguage article on Mediterranean humanism in which he argued that
Camus and his fellow Mediterranean writers Albert Memmi, Tahar BenJelloun, Jorge Semprn, Najib Mahfouz and Edmond Jabs are exemplars
and intellectual seismographs of the Mediterranean humanist current.6
Since the work of these other writers post-dates The New Mediterranean
Culture, there is no question of their writings forming part of what Skinner
would call the intellectual context of the lecture. Nevertheless, Ohana
claims that the writers in question share an opposition to violence, integral nationalism,7 dictatorship and ideological radicalism, an anti-racism
[], a multicultural outlook [] and an affirmation of dialogue [].8
Understandably, given the number of writers he discusses, Ohana only
deals briefly with Camus and only touches on his lecture, in which, he
writes, [Camus] formulated his humanistic vision for the first time.9 By
way of illustration, Ohana quotes the passage in which Camus says that
the principle of the West is no longer Christian, but man, and rejects the
idea of a Mediterranean nationalism (I, 566).
Although Ohanas discussion of Camuss lecture ends at this point, his
argument can be taken further. The lectures Mediterranean humanism is
evident, for example, in the way in which Camus credits the Mediterranean
with the ability to humanize rigid religious and political doctrines. Early
Christianity, Camus says, was closed, harsh, exclusive and uncompromising, but when it encountered the Mediterranean and took on the form of
Catholicism, it adapted to man (I, 567). Similarly, on the political level,
Camus claims that fascism has a more human face in Italy than it does in
Germany: it is a miracle of the Mediterranean that it allows men who think
humanly to live without oppression in a country with inhuman laws (I,
568). He identifies the struggle for a Mediterranean collectivism distinct
6
7
8
9
Mediterranean Humanism, Mediterranean Historical Review, 18 (2003), 5975

(p.59).
The term nationalisme intgral originated with Maurras, who used it to describe his
own political philosophy.
Ohana, Mediterranean Humanism, 59.
Ibid., 60.
55
from the Russian model with the battle for man (I, 570), and makes it
clear that his essential commitment is to human beings rather than a political ideology: Politics is made for men and not men for politics (I, 571).
Speaking against the background of the Spanish Civil War, he implies that
the fight against fascism is also a fight for humanism: the essential role that
cities such as Algiers and Barcelona can play is to serve, in their modest
way, that aspect of Mediterranean culture that encourages man instead of
crushing him (I, 570).
As regards the shared attitudes that Ohana attributes to the writers he
identifies as Mediterranean humanists, the views that Camus expresses in
his lecture correspond to these almost exactly. Camus makes clear his opposition to both the mindless violence (I, 569) of dictators like Mussolini
and the ideological radicalism of right-wing doctrinaires like Maurras.
Although the lecture is not explicitly anti-racist, Camuss representation
of the Mediterranean includes what he refers to as Arabs10 alongside
Europeans and clearly attempts to affirm both dialogue and multiculturalism. He describes Mediterranean culture as variegated (bariole, I,
569) and North Africa as one of the only lands where East and West (i.e.
Arabs and Europeans) live side by side. He tells his audience that they are
all the better prepared for the task of encouraging the diverse aspects of
Mediterranean culture for being in direct contact with this East that can
teach us so much in this respect (I, 570).
The only point where Camuss lecture might be said not to match
Ohanas model of Mediterranean humanism is on the question of nationalism, or rather regionalism. Although Camus describes nationalisms as a
sign of decadence and rejects the principle of a Mediterranean nationalism
outright (I, 566), there are clear indications of his pro-Mediterranean and
anti-Northern/Central-European bias. Whereas he credits Francis of Assisi
with making Christianity into a hymn to nature and nave joy, for instance,
he holds the Nordic Luther responsible for what he calls the only attempt
10
In the terminology of the period [Arabe] meant the Algerians, whether of Arab or
Berber origin, Emmanuel Robls, Saison violente, quoted by Dunwoodie, Writing
French Algeria, p.296 (Dunwoodies translation).
56
chapter 3
that has been made to separate Christianity from the world Protestantism,
which he describes as Catholicism torn away from the Mediterranean (I,
567). Similarly, he supports his argument that Mediterraneans share a
common temperament and taste for life by favourably contrasting their
lack of inhibitions with the stiffness he encountered during a two-month
trip to Central Europe, from Austria to Germany: People were always
buttoned up to the neck. They didnt know how to let themselves go. They
didnt know what joy is [] (I, 567). What one sees first in a German,
he claims, is the Hitlerian, while in an Italian it is an affable and cheerful
man. Camus can obviously be accused here of lapsing into anti-Nordic
prejudice and regional/national stereotyping. These slippages suggest that
a Mediterranean identity, like any other identity, can only be constructed
in opposition to an Other or Others,11 raising the question of whether
a specifically and self-consciously Mediterranean humanism can claim to
be truly universalistic.
Although Camuss lecture initially appears, then, to conform to Ohanas
definition of Mediterranean humanism in virtually every respect, a closer
examination reveals a Mediterranean particularism that is at odds with
humanisms implicit claim to universalism. In one respect, Ohana does
acknowledge Camuss particularism, albeit not in relation to his lecture.
Referring to Camuss opposition to Algerian independence during the
Algerian War, Ohana claims that Camus who favoured a federal solution to the Algerian problem did not succeed in freeing himself from
nationalism.12 What Ohana refers to as nationalism, however, would be
described by postcolonial critics as colonialism, and it is for this, rather
than for its Mediterranean particularism, that they have criticized Camuss
lecture.
11
12
In asserting that la Patrie is a taste for life through which one can feel closer to a
Genoese or a Majorcan than a Norman or Alsatian (I, 567), Camus also defined the
identity of French Algerians in opposition to the French of northern France.
Ohana, Mediterranean Humanism, 61. For Camuss outline of the federal solution
proposed by Marc Lauriol, see LAlgrie nouvelle (IV, 39194).
57
Camus as Well-Meaning Colonizer

From the viewpoint of one line of postcolonial interpretation, it is not the
pro-Mediterranean bias of Camuss lecture that lays it open to criticism,
but its apparently unquestioning acceptance of French colonial rule in his
native Algeria. In 1957, at the height of the Algerian War, Albert Memmi
another of the writers Ohana identifies as a Mediterranean humanist
published a sympathetic but provocative article with the title Camus ou le
colonisateur de bonne volont (Camus or the Well-Meaning Colonizer).13
Earlier that year, Memmi had published his classic study Portrait du colonis,
Portrait du colonisateur (Eng. tr. The Colonizer and the Colonized),14 which
contained a section on le colonisateur qui se refuse the colonizer who
refuses to acknowledge himself as such or the colonizer in denial and
it was this concept that provided the basis for the first extended postcolonial study of Camus and his work, by Conor Cruise OBrien.15 According
to OBrien, Memmis point in this section was that left-wing intellectuals
such as Camus unconsciously shared the assumptions of a colonialism
which they consciously rejected. Although Camus was a communist at
the time he gave his lecture, OBrien argues, he evolved a conception of
Mediterranean culture which in fact served to legitimize Frances possession of Algeria.16
As I shall demonstrate, OBriens evidence for this assertion is largely
based on a single section of Camuss lecture. As David Carroll has pointed
out, however, referring to Edward Saids chapter on Camus and the French
13
14
15
16
Albert Memmi, Camus ou le colonisateur de bonne volont, La Nef, 12 December

1957, pp.9596.
Portrait du colonis, prcd du Portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1985
[1957]).
Ironically, OBrien mistranslates Memmis phrase as the colonizer who refuses
(Camus, p.13), although this does not affect his interpretation.
Ibid.
58
chapter 3
imperial experience in Culture and Imperialism,17 it is always possible to

go further in attacks of this kind.18 With this in mind, I shall now examine
the lecture from a postcolonial perspective, relating it to the socio-historical
context of French colonialism in Algeria.
The first point that needs to be stressed here is that, despite criticizing
both British and Italian imperialism in his lecture, Camus never explicitly
acknowledges that he is speaking in part of the French Empire. Although he
cites India as an example of a civilization that has retained its unity despite
two centuries of English [sic] domination (I, 566), he fails to draw the
obvious parallel with Frances century-long domination of Algeria. And
whereas he condemns a manifesto supporting Italys supposedly civilizing work in Ethiopia (I, 568), he seems blind to the parallel with Frances
so-called civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice) in Algeria, the centenary
of whose conquest had been celebrated just seven years before. In both of
these cases, Camus appears to bear out Stendhals dictum that the eye that
sees does not see itself.
The second point that needs to be made is that Camus seems to see
the Mediterranean from a peculiarly Western perspective. In the second
section of his lecture entitled vidences, or obvious facts Camus
defines the Mediterranean as a basin linking ten or so countries (I, 566).
Disregarding Portugal and the countries around the Black Sea, however,
there were actually fifteen countries bordering the Mediterranean at the
time yet apart from Ancient Greece, the only Mediterranean countries
that Camus refers to in his lecture are France, Italy, Spain, Algeria and
Tunisia (then a French protectorate). An indication as to which countries
Camus appears to exclude from his notion of the Mediterranean is provided
by his claim that Catholicism was born from the encounter (I, 567) of an
essentially Judaic early Christianity with the Mediterranean. This suggests
that Camus sees neither early Christianity nor Judaism as Mediterranean
17
18
Edward W. Said, Camus and the French Imperial Experience, Culture and Imperialism
(London: Vintage, 1994), pp.20424.
David Carroll, Camuss Algeria: Birthrights, Colonial Injustice, and the Fiction of
a French-Algerian People, MLN 112 (1997), 51749 (p.522).
59
religions, which seems to confirm that what he calls the Mediterranean is

in fact the western Mediterranean and excludes the Middle East. (Despite
devoting two paragraphs of his lecture to Christianity, it is notable as a
number of critics have pointed out that Camus makes no explicit reference to Islam.)19
A further example of apparent exclusion is evident in Camuss claim
that Spaniards, Genoese, Marseillais and what he describes as the curious
race that lives on our coasts (I, 56667) come from the same family. This
observation not only implicitly excludes non-European Algerians, but also
reflects two noteworthy facts about the European population of Algeria at
the time. First, this population was concentrated in the fertile coastal strip,
the indigenous population having been displaced from their land and driven
back into the largely barren interior. Second, the European population was
of diverse origins, not only French, but also (among others) Italian, Maltese
and particularly Spanish. Camus himself was of mixed French and Spanish
blood, and as early as 1917, it was estimated that only one in five European
Algerians could be counted as being of true French descent.20 From a postcolonial viewpoint, Camuss appeal to a common Mediterranean identity
can thus be seen as an attempt, drawing on a topos of French colonialist
discourse on Algeria,21 to cement the unity of the European community
in the face of the majority Muslim population.
Although Camuss Mediterranean appears to exclude the Middle
East, and Arabs from the family of Mediterraneans, he argues paradoxically in the fourth section of his lecture that it is the East that the true
19
Germaine Bre, Climates of the Mind: Albert Camus 19361940, in Bettina

L. Knapp, ed., Critical Essays on Albert Camus (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1988),
pp.8899 (p.91); Susan Tarrow, Exile From the Kingdom: A Political Re-Reading of
Albert Camus (Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985), p.27. Nor, as
Jean Sarocchi also points out, does Camus make any reference to the Greek Orthodox
tradition (La Mditerrane est un songe, monsieur, Variations Camus, p.295).
20 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 19541962, rev. edn (London: Papermac,
1996), p.51.
21 See Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, p.120.
60
chapter 3
Mediterranean resembles, not the Latin West. In doing so, however, he

makes a distinctly questionable claim:
North Africa is one of the only lands where East and West live side by side. And at
this meeting-point [confluence] there is no difference between the way of life of a
Spaniard or Italian of the Algiers waterfront, and the Arabs who surround them. What
is most essential in the Mediterranean genius springs, perhaps, from this encounter,
unique in history and geography, born between East and West. (I, 569)
As noted in Chapter 2, Camuss assertion that there is no difference between

the lifestyle of Arabs and Europeans on the Algiers waterfront may be
derived from Grenier. It appears to ignore, however, not only differences
of culture, language and religion, but also the vastly inferior economic,
legal and political status of native Algerians at the time. From a postcolonial viewpoint, moreover, Camuss reference to individual Europeans
being surrounded by Arabs can be seen as reflecting the racial reality of
colonial Algeria and the fears of the European minority.
Indeed, although characteristic of European Algerian discourse at the
time, Camuss very use of the term Arabs here is problematic. It can be taken
to suggest that the native Algerians in question were, in one sense, as much
immigrants as the European population that, to put it another way, they
were in the Mediterranean, but not (originally, at least) of it. Thus Rabah
Belamri, in a study of Louis Bertrand and colonialist ideology, suggests: The
term Arab helps the colonizer satisfy his desire to push the colonized out
of society. The term refers to a foreign country, a distant country, Arabia.
It is designed to remind Algerians that their ancestors arrived in Algeria as
colonizers, thirteen centuries earlier.22 Although Camuss use of the term
Arab may carry these connotations, however, it clearly does not reflect
any desire on his part to push the colonized out of North African society,
since the essence of that society, as he defines it, is precisely the encounter
22
Rabah Belamri, Luvre de Louis Bertrand: miroir de lidologie colonialiste

(Algiers: OPU, 1980), pp.2001, quoted by Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria,
p.4 (Dunwoodies translation). Ironically, in identifying Algerians exclusively with
Arabs, Belamri similarly denies any separate identity to Berbers, the long-established
Jewish community and other ethnic groups.
61
between Europeans and Arabs. This encounter could not take place if the
Arabs were pushed out of Algerian society nor, indeed, if both they and
Europeans had not colonized Algeria in the first place.
The existing postcolonial case against the lecture, however (or at least
that of one strand of postcolonial criticism) hinges on a passage in which
Camus gives examples of what he sees as the unity of Mediterranean culture: This culture, this Mediterranean truth exists and is apparent everywhere: (1) linguistic unity ease of learning a Romance [latine] language
when one already knows another one; (2) unity of origins prodigious
collectivism of the Middle Ages order of knights, monastic order, feudal
system, etc. (I, 569).
In this passage, OBrien suggested in 1970, [Camus] reveals himself as
incapable of thinking in any other categories than those of a Frenchman.23
As OBrien notes, Camuss use of Romance languages as an example of
Mediterranean cultural unity was made in a country where most of the
inhabitants spoke Arabic; for OBrien, it is not excessive to speak here
of hallucination on Camuss part. OBrien also observes that the terms
in which Camus defines the supposed unity of origin of Mediterranean
culture all seem to be European and related to the Crusades (OBrien
evidently assumes here that the orders of knights to which Camus refers
are orders such as the Knights Hospitallers and Knights Templar). He
points out that the lectures only mention of any non-European contribution to Mediterranean culture is a single vague reference to Oriental
thought,24 and concludes: It is quite clear, though never explicitly stated,
that [Camuss] Mediterranean culture is a European one and in Algeria a
French one, and that the Arabs who have a part in this culture will have
become French Arabs.
OBriens interpretation remains widely accepted. In a 1997 article, for
example, Emily Apter cited OBriens commentary on the passage quoted
23 Quotations from OBrien in this paragraph are taken from Camus, pp.1214.
24 In fact, the young Camuss interest in Eastern thought was far less superficial than
this might suggest: see Jacqueline Baishanski, LOrient dans la pense du jeune Camus
(Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 2002). See also Chapter 8.
62
chapter 3
above and concluded that the unity that Camus affirmed was a blinkered image of regional identity that leaves out what is Arab or Moslem
in Mediterranean culture.25 Similarly, in his 1998 book Writing French
Algeria, Peter Dunwoodie referred to the same passage as evidence of an
implicit Eurocentrism, [] effectively excluding the Islamic world.26 And
in a prize-winning article published in 2002, the postcolonial historian
Patricia Lorcin cited the passage as proof that Camuss Mediterranean
effectively excludes unassimilated Arabs and Berbers, and makes no allowances for non-Western traditions.27
Camuss use of the hackneyed example of Romance languages as evidence of the unity of the Mediterranean can, of course, be seen as a further
appeal to the solidarity of European Algerians. His reference to the collectivism of the Middle Ages, on the other hand which was clearly not
exclusive to the Mediterranean may more plausibly be viewed as rhetorical
preparation for his argument in favour of a specifically Mediterranean form
of economic collectivism in the next section of his lecture. The passage in
question, moreover, is the most perfunctory part of Camuss argument, as
is suggested by the fact that it consists of a single sentence in note-form
and ending with etc.28 To adapt F.H. Bradleys definition of metaphysics,
this seems to be a case of Camus finding bad reasons for what he believes
upon instinct. Even if Camuss views here were or are as Eurocentric as
some postcolonial critics claim, however, this is clearly not the main thrust
of his argument.
Emily Apter, Out of Character: Camuss French Algerian Subjects, MLN 112 (1997),
499516 (p.511).
26 Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, p.188. Dunwoodie has recently reiterated this
point in From Noces to Ltranger, p.153.
27 Lorcin, Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algerias Latin Past, French
Historical Studies 25 (2002), 295329 (p.325). Lorcins use of the phrase effectively
excludes suggests that her assessment is based on Dunwoodies.
28 The subtitle of The New Mediterranean Culture, it should be recalled, describes
the text as the outlines of Camuss lecture.
25
63
The Humanist Discursive Contextualization of

Camuss Lecture: French Discourses on the Mediterranean
Writing after Saids Orientalism and his chapter on Camus in Culture and
Imperialism, Carroll broadly accepts OBriens criticisms, but does not
draw the same conclusion. He admits that the scenario of East meeting
West outlined by Camus in the fourth section of his lecture is certainly
[] imaginary and that the terms Camus uses to describe it may seem
highly problematical and heavily indebted to Orientalist assumptions.
As Carroll argues, however, this scenario is central to Camuss view of the
Mediterranean: Whatever the naivet and political limitations of Camuss
vision, it is not European culture [] per se that Camus defends in his
speech but [] Europes encounters with the non-European East.29
Similarly, Thierry Fabre who, unlike Carroll, takes no account
of postcolonial criticisms of the lecture argues that the vision of the
Mediterranean that Camus defends is based on a possible alliance between
East and West.30 Whereas Carroll discusses the lecture in the context of
Camuss notion of Algeria, Fabre places it in the broader context of previous French discourses on the Mediterranean.31 What emerges clearly from
Fabres study is not only that the relationship between East and West had
been a topos of such discourses for at least a century, but also that different approaches to this topos reflected two fundamentally opposed views:
The confrontation over representations of the Mediterranean hinges on
legacies, and in particular on the acceptance or refusal of the Semitic East,
in other words the Jewish and Arab contribution.32
For Fabre, the anti-Semitism of the right-wing ideologues Charles
Maurras and Louis Bertrand is opposed to the inclusive vision of the
29 Carroll, Camuss Algeria, 522.

30 Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, pp.6263.
31 See also mile Tmime, Un rve mditerranen: des Saint-Simoniens aux intellectuels
des annes trente (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002).
32 Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, p.66.
64
chapter 3
Mediterranean of a line of thinkers stretching from Saint-Simonians of the

1830s such as Michel Chevalier and mile Barrault, through the geographer
and anarchist lise Reclus, to Camus and three senior contemporaries
whom Fabre identifies as Mediterranean humanists:33 Gabriel Audisio,
the poet Paul Valry and Jean Ballard of the periodical Cahiers du Sud, in
the August 1937 issue of which Audisio quoted extensively from Camuss
lecture.34 Thus Fabre explicitly contrasts the idea of the Mediterranean
expressed in Camuss lecture and Audisios Sel de la mer (the second volume
of Jeunesse de la Mediterrane) with that held by Bertrand, which, he says,
merges with the colonial project.35 It is at this point, as I shall discuss, that
Fabres humanistic discursive contextualization of Camuss lecture overlaps with the postcolonial discursive contextualization of the lecture. But
whereas Fabre opposes Audisio and Camus on the one hand to Bertrand
on the other, some postcolonials in effect deconstruct this opposition by
arguing that their apparently antithetical discourses are ultimately two
sides of the same colonialist coin.
The Postcolonial Discursive Contextualization of

Camuss Lecture: French Colonial Discourses on Algeria
As we have seen, one postcolonial approach to Camuss lecture relates it
directly to the colonial context in Algeria. Another approach, however, also
places the lecture in the ideological context of French colonial discourses
on Algeria.36 As Ena C. Vulor puts it: Any attempt to recuperate [sic]
34 Audisio, Vers une synthse mditerranenne: culture mditerranenne, Cahiers du
Sud 196 (August 1937), 45760 (pp.45758).
36 See Dunwoodies Writing French Algeria, Lorcins Rome and France and Ena
C. Vulors Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria: An
Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed
65
Camuss works within the Algerian colonial discourse (that is the discourse
of the colonizers and the colonized) involves a double thematic, namely
the Francophone literary tradition of North Africa and the Algerian sociopolitical context [].37 Whether or not the lecture is regarded as directly
or indirectly legitimizing Frances possession of Algeria, its attempt to
forge a unifying myth of Mediterranean identity has been seen from this
perspective as evading the reality of colonialism.
The origins of this approach can be traced back to a 1974 book-length
article on the colonial novel and colonial ideology in Algeria by Hubert
Gourdon, Jean-Robert Henry and Franoise Henry-Lorcerie.38 Drawing
on earlier histories of French-Algerian literature, Gourdon et al. divided
Algerian colonial fiction into three broad and overlapping currents (75).
The first current, up until around 1900, was that of metropolitan exoticism, in other words French fiction about Algeria. The second, from 1898
to 1940, was that of Algerianism, in which Algerian-based novelists, most
notably Louis Bertrand and Robert Randau, attempted to assert a specifically European-Algerian identity. The third and final current, from
1935 until the emergence of a specifically Muslim-Algerian novel in the
1950s, was that of the so-called cole dAlger, which adopted a universalist,
humanist approach in reaction to the regionalism and colonialism of the
Algerianists (88). The leading representatives of the prewar incarnation of
this group, which centred around the Algiers publisher Edmond Charlot,
were Audisio and Camus.
37
38
Dib (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000); see Chapter 2, Lcole
dAlger: Universalist Humanist Dilemma, Mediterranean Myth and Colonial Malaise,
pp.2967. As Christine Margerrison has pointed out, Vulors book draws heavily
on Azzedine Haddours Camus: the Other as an Outsider in a Univocal Discourse
(unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sussex, 1989), often without due
acknowledgement; see Margerrison, Two Recent Studies of Camus, French Studies
Bulletin 83 (2002), 1617.
Vulor, Introduction, Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses, pp. xxxxi.
Hubert Gourdon, Jean-Robert Henry and Franoise Henry-Lorcerie, Roman colonial et idologie en Algrie, Revue Algrienne des Sciences Juridiques, conomiques
et Politiques 11:1 (1974), 3252. Further references to this article are incorporated in
the body of the text.
66
chapter 3
Although Gourdon et al. only examined the second and third of these
currents, they saw a fundamental continuity between them, arguing that
the novelists of the cole dAlger did not succeed in freeing themselves from
the orbit of Algerianism. While these novelists opposed the ideas of their
predecessors, they did not manage to find a new language: it is still the
colonizing population (la colonie de peuplement) speaking; but the language
is no longer cynical or conquering, it has become unhappy or shameful
under the pressure of objective contradictions (8889). The contradictions
in question, of course, were those of a colonial system whose treatment of
the Muslim majority completely denied the supposedly universal principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, let alone democracy, on which the
French republic itself was based. The writers of the cole dAlger, Gourdon
et al. argued, may have asserted universalism in their non-fictional writings and here they singled out Audisios Jeunesse de la Mditerrane and
Camuss lecture but their depiction of Algerian society in their novels
(notably Camuss Ltranger, which centres on the shooting of a native
Algerian by a European Algerian) showed this universalism to be impossible in the colonial context (118).
In particular, Gourdon et al. saw the notion of a Mediterranean
patrie put forward by Audisio in Jeunesse de la Mditerrane as part of a
series of myths and counter-myths used by various writers in the context
of colonial Algeria (152). This analysis was developed in a 1977 article by
Jean Djeux, who drew a distinction between Bertrands myth of a Latin
Africa and Randaus Algerianist myth of a supposedly common FrancoBerber heritage,39 but followed Gourdon et al. in seeing the multicultural
Mediterraneanism of the cole dAlger as no less mythical in an Algeria in
which the indigenous population continued to be marginalized. As Djeux
put it: This transition to the universal appears to be a way of distancing
39
In a wide-ranging study of prewar novels set in Algeria, however, Leila Benammar

Benmansour has convincingly argued that the Algerianist movement that developed
around Randau was itself far from homogeneous. Lalgrianit, ses expressions dans
ldition franaise (19191939): Et le livre devint mdia (unpublished doctoral
thesis, Universit Panthon-Assas (Paris II), 2000.
67
oneself from immediate political realities. It also appears as a sort of generous and liberal utopia, but at the same time as an illusion too.40
More recently, Djeuxs analysis has been taken up in turn by Azzedine
Haddour, who argues that Camus overlooked the colonial conflict in
his lecture, finding refuge in a utopia, outside history and politics.41
Apparently independently, Ray Davison has adopted a broadly similar
approach in a study which presents the lecture as central to what he calls
Camuss Mediterraneism. Davison places the lecture in three contexts:
the colonial situation in Algeria, with the problems of identity this posed
for a European population including Camus himself of diverse origins; the literary-historical context of Algerianism, which had failed to
resolve these problems by asserting a specifically (European-)Algerian
identity; and Camuss work as a whole, where Davison sees the lectures
Mediterraneanism as the enabling myth of much of his later writing. On
a psychological level, Davison sees Camuss Mediterraneanism as being
designed to address and resolve the instability of his own cultural and
political identity, neither wholly Algerian nor wholly French, nor in
terms of literary affiliation Algerianist.42 On a political level, Davison
sees Camuss promotion of his idea of Mediterranean culture as offering a
40 Jean Djeux, De lternel mditerranen lternel Jugurtha, Revue algrienne des

sciences juridiques, conomiques et politiques 14:4 (1977), 658728 (p.691). For Fabre
and Tmime, by contrast, Audisios and Camuss Mediterranean utopia is an ideal
that remains relevant to this day: see Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, pp.6768
and Tmime, Un Rve mditerranen, pp.23334. See also Edwige Tamalet Talbayev,
Between Nostalgia and Desire: lcole dAlgers Transnational Identifications and the
Case for a Mediterranean Relation, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 10:3
(2007), 35976.
41 Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), p.29. See Chapter 2, Mythopoetics and Politics: Colonial
Algeria in Myths and Counter-Myths, pp.2441. Even Jacqueline LviValensi, whose
approach to Camus is humanistic rather than postcolonial, sees the lecture as a way
of transcending the question of Algerian nationalism. See Lentre dAlbert Camus
en politique, in Jeanyves Gurin, ed., Camus et la politique (Paris: LHarmattan,
1986), pp.13751 (p.146).
42 Davison, Mythologizing the Mediterranean, pp.7879.
68
chapter 3
mythical Third Way between European fascisms and Russian collectivism and as the embryo of a new international humanism mythical in the
sense that his ideas, despite being a response to the very real problem of
the iniquities of the French colonial regime in Algeria, appear to operate
as an evasion or flight into unreality.43
Camuss lecture can certainly be accused of youthful idealism: he was
only twenty-three at the time. There is also evidence to suggest, however,
that Camus was not carried away by his own rhetoric. As he observed in a
notebook entry apparently dating from May 1936: God Mediterranean:
constructions nothing natural (II, 809). To see his lecture as a way of
evading immediate political realities without examining in detail what
those realities were, on the other hand, is to be guilty of the very sin of
abstraction for which postcolonial critics in effect blame Camus himself.
These political realities will be discussed, after other, discursive contexts
for the lecture, in Chapter 8. First, however, a closer look at the so-called
cole dAlger is called for.
The cole dAlger and the Myth of Greek Origin

As we have seen, a number of postcolonial commentators regard Camuss
notion of Mediterranean culture as that of a literary school, the cole
dAlger, which they view as emerging in reaction to the earlier school of
43 Ibid., p.78. In a further, albeit sympathetic variant on the postcolonial approach,
Jean-Jacques Gonzales sees the Mediterranean utopianism of Camuss lecture both
as inclusive and as a solution to the problems of French Algerian identity and colonial legitimation: It is a question of rediscovering an us that will unify the whole
of the peoples of the Mediterranean. A way of not feeling oneself to be a foreigner
[tranger] in ones own country, of justifying a presence on Algerian soil []. JeanJacques Gonzales, Une utopie mditerranenne: Albert Camus et lAlgrie en guerre,
in Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, eds, La Guerre dAlgrie 19542004, la
fin de lamnsie (Paris: Laffont, 2004), pp.597620 (p.605).
69
Algerianism inspired by the novelist Louis Bertrand. Dunwoodies discussion of Camuss lecture, for example, forms part of a chapter subtitled The
Mediterranean of the cole dAlger, in which he claims that the lecture
constituted the cultural-political manifesto of a group of young writers,
artists and intellectuals who openly engaged with the principles of the
established Bertrand-inspired Algerianists, asserted their roots in Algeria,
and sought to articulate the colonys local, indigenous specificity and its
place within a wider, Mediterranean cultural network, as Audisio had been
doing for some years.44 If the lecture was a manifesto, however, it was a
manifesto for the Maison de la Culture rather than a so-called cole dAlger.
Indeed, the idea of an cole dAlger had not even been thought of in 1937,
as Dunwoodie himself makes clear when he goes on to describe Camus as
the spokesman for [a] group of young intellectuals [] who were to become
known as the cole Nord-Africaine des Lettres and, more lastingly, as the
cole dAlger.45 In fact, the idea of an cole dAlger was only launched
rashly, as he later admitted by Audisio after the war, and never really got
off the ground.46 In its prewar incarnation, the group in question simply
consisted of writers published in Algiers by Edmond Charlot: as one of
these writers, Jules Roy, later observed, Charlots gang became the cole
dAlger.47 Charlot himself, however, later dismissed the notion of a school
as bullshit (une foutaise).48
44 Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, p.185.

45 Ibid., p.187; my emphasis. Cf. pp.24849.
46 See Djeux, De lternel Mditerranen, p.698, note 189. As Haddour who ironically makes much use of the notion of an cole dAlger notes, the writers involved
met in 1946 to discuss the idea of establishing a school, but the project never materialized (Colonial Myths, p.23, note 87). See also Jean-Claude Xuereb, Lcole dAlger,
mythe ou ralit? in (coll.), Audisio, Camus, Robls, frres de soleil (Aix-en-Provence:
disud, 2003), pp.916.
47 Quoted by Guy Basset, In memoriam: en compagnie dEdmond (19152004),
Bulletin dInformation de la Socit des tudes Camusiennes 71 ( July 2004), 6164
(p.62).
48 See Hlne Rufat, Entretien avec Edmond Charlot, Bulletin dInformation de la
Socit des tudes Camusiennes 71 ( July 2004), 6567 (p.66).
70
chapter 3
According to Emmanuel Robls, another of the writers published

by Charlot, it was never really a question of a school in the strict sense
of the word, which he saw as implying a theory, a doctrine or a common
philosophy.49 Describing how a new generation of writers emerged who
broke with the Algerianists of the previous generation, Robls said that what
linked them above all was their feeling that they belonged to the entirety
of Mediterranean civilizations, and, to varying degrees, their emphatic
assertion of anti-colonialism which could be taken as meaning anything
ranging from strong support for reform to opposition to colonialism in
principle. In 193637, according to Robls, this group included (among
others) Camus, Claude de Frminville, Jean Amrouche, Gabriel Audisio,
Jules Roy and himself.
The Mediterraneanism of the so-called cole dAlger, however, can
also be explained in personal and commercial rather than purely ideological terms. Given their opposition to the Algerianist school, there was no
question of the writers involved asserting a specifically Algerian identity,
especially as a number of them were French not only Camuss friends
Claude de Frminville and Max-Pol Fouchet, who were born in Perpignan
and Normandy respectively, but also the Breton Jean Grenier and Gabriel
Audisio, who was born in Marseille of an Italian father and a French mother.
As Charlot later explained in an interview,50 it was Grenier his (and
Camuss) former philosophy teacher who recommended that he should
go into publishing and specialize in Mediterranean themes, adding that if
Charlot did this, he would give him something to publish.
The first book published by Charlot the script of Rvolte dans les
Asturies (Rebellion in Asturias), a play part-written by Camus came out in
May 1936.51 The second, and the first in a series entitled Mditerranennes,
49 See Roblss contribution to the Congrs mondial des littratures de langue franaise held
in Padua in May 1983, reproduced on the webpages of the exhibition Lcole dAlger
au temps des Vraies richesses, held at the Bibliothque Francophone Multimdia in
Limoges in 2003, <http://www.francophonie-limoges.com/dossiers-franco/ecolealger/index.html>, accessed 18 May 2010.
50 Rufat, Entretien avec Edmond Charlot, 67.
51 Lottman, Albert Camus, p.104.
71
was LAnnonciation la licorne (The Annunciation to the Unicorn), a book

of poetry by Ren-Jean Clt. The next two volumes in the series were by
Camus and Grenier, who, true to his word, brought Charlot the manuscript
of Camuss LEnvers et lendroit (Eng. tr. Betwixt and Between, or more
accurately, The Wrong Side and the Right Side) and his own Santa Cruz et
autres paysages africains (Santa Cruz and Other African Landscapes).52
These appeared in May and June 1937 respectively. At the time of Camuss
lecture, however, Rvolte dans les Asturies and LAnnonciation la Licorne
were the only two books that could, in theory, be attributed to any emerging group rather than its individual members.
Of those members, Grenier and Audisio were already established writers, Grenier having published Les les in 1933, and Audisio the two volumes
of Jeunesse de la Mditerrane in 1935 and 1936. It was Audisio and Grenier,
Charlot recalled in a 1984 interview, who advised him and helped him in
his new venture: our big aim was, helped by our friend Gabriel Audisio, to
gain a sufficient audience [] to be heard from the metropolis, to create a
fraternal publishing house, centred, following a suggestion by Jean Grenier,
on the Mediterranean and so of an essentially Mediterranean inspiration
to avoid too much dispersion.53 The Mediterranean focus of Charlots
publishing house, in other words, was an example of what is now known
as niche marketing, attempting to build on Audisios success and to reach
out to a French, rather than just a French-Algerian readership.
As mile Tmimes study of French-Mediterranean intellectuals of
the 1930s suggests,54 Charlots authors can be seen as forming a network
with like-minded individuals in the South of France, Morocco and Tunisia.
Thus both Camus and Audisio were in contact with Armand Guibert, who
(with Jean Amrouche) published the review Cahiers de Barbarie (193437)
in Tunis, and with Henri Bosco, who founded Aguedal in May 1936 in
52
53
Rufat, Entretien avec Edmond Charlot, 67.

See <http://www.algeriades.com/news/previews/article1507.htm> accessed 18 May
2010.
54 Tmime, Le rve mditerranen des annes trente, Un rve mditerranen,
pp.87174.
72
chapter 3
Morocco.55 Both Audisio and Grenier, meanwhile, were contributors to

the Marseille-based Cahiers du Sud, whose editor Jean Ballard attended
the founding meeting of the Maison de la culture in Algiers.56 Indeed, a
parallel can be drawn between what Fabre calls the cultural and intellectual
positioning of Cahiers du Sud compared with the Provenal orientation
of its early rival Le Feu, and that of Charlots authors in relation to the
Algerianists: It is not towards the interior that [the review] turns, but on
the contrary towards the exterior, towards the Mediterranean.57
However dubious the existence of an cole dAlger at the time of
Camuss lecture, some critics have used the notion to support a postcolonial interpretation of the text. Christine Margerrison, for example, identifies two competing myths of origin connected with Algerianism and the
cole dAlger respectively:
although the cole dAlger locates Algerian history in Ancient Greece in opposition to the Latin past proposed by Algrianisme (and as a resistance to the fascism
increasingly associated with Rome), this myth of origin likewise bypasses the intervening occupation of Algeria by a vast indigenous population. Each literary school
thus supplies a history for a new people which has none and establishes rights of
occupancy over the Algerian soil.58
In fact, however, neither Audisio nor Camus locates Algerian history in

Ancient Greece: indeed, it is difficult to see how they could have done
so even if they had wanted to, since the Greeks, unlike the Romans, had
no significant presence in Algeria. In Jeunesse de la Mditerrane, Audisio
55
56
57
58
See E, 131920 and Guy Basset, Rivages dAlger, La Revue des revues 23 (1997),
8597.
Todd, Albert Camus, p.138. Todd misspells Ballards name as Balard.
Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, p.79.
Christine Margerrison, Ces forces obscures de lme: Women, Race and Origins in the
Writings of Albert Camus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p.129. Similarly, Dunwoodie
suggests that Camuss lecture proposes an alternative founding narrative based on
the earlier Greek presence throughout the Mediterranean (Writing French Algeria,
p.186), while Vulor claims that lcole dAlger [] saw Algeria as a direct descendant
of Greece and that Audisio opposed Greece to Rome (Colonial and Anti-Colonial
Discourses, pp.33, 35).
73
stresses that the Greek miracle, like the Roman Empire and other generalizations imposed on his sea, is only a transitory aspect of the eternal
Mediterranean.59 In Sel de la mer, meanwhile, as I shall discuss in Chapter 5,
Audisio attempts to rehabilitate Carthage rather than Greece as a countermyth to Rome.60 If Camus can be said to present a myth of origin in his
lecture, on the other hand, it is a myth of the origin, not of Algeria, but
of Mediterranean culture, based first on the undeniable fact that Greek
civilization preceded Roman civilization and that the latter borrowed
from the former; and second, on his view that Greek culture was superior
to Romes. Unlike Bertrands myth of a Latin Africa, then, Camuss view
that Mediterranean culture began in Greece can hardly be said to establish
the rights of occupancy of European colonizers in Algeria.
To summarize, the arguments of postcolonial critics who place Camuss
lecture in the context of French colonial discourses on Algeria rest on the
assumption that the lecture was a product of the cole dAlger, and that the
Mediterranean orientation of this school was an evasion of colonial realities. As we have seen, however, the very existence of an cole dAlger a
term which only emerged in the postwar period is debatable, while the
Mediterranean focus of the writers published by Charlot in the prewar
period was influenced by three factors: commercial considerations; the
fact that a number of the writers concerned were born in France rather
than Algeria; and finally their sense of affiliation with other writers based
in the South of France and elsewhere in North Africa.
In effect, the so-called cole dAlger at the time of Camuss lecture is
seen as consisting of Audisio and Camus, whose lecture is regarded as a
virtual manifesto for the school, thus begging the question of its existence
at the time. As noted above, however, Camuss lecture was not a manifesto for a literary school the only references he makes to literature are
to Ancient Greek comedies and tragedies but an inaugural speech for
Audisio, Jeunesse, p.12. The phrase Greek miracle was first used by the historian and
Hebrew scholar Ernest Renan in his Prire sur lAcropole (Prayer on the Acropolis,
1865).
60 See the section of Sel de la mer entitled Le Sel de Carthage, pp.4775.
59
74
chapter 3
a cultural-political organization, the Maison de la culture. This, as we will

see in Chapter 8, specifically sought to include Muslim culture and incorporated a group that agitated for Muslim civil rights. In emphasizing, on
the other hand, the general similarities between Audisios and Camuss
views of the Mediterranean, postcolonial critics have tended to overlook
the differences between them. These are best brought out by a detailed
examination of Audisios contemporary writings on the Mediterranean,
which will be discussed in Chapter 5.
Finally, although the colonial context is clearly a crucial part of the
overall picture, it is far from obvious that the context of French colonial
literary (and particularly fictional) discourses on Algeria is the only or most
appropriate discursive context in which to place either Camuss lecture
or Audisios Jeunesse de la Mditerrane, both of which are non-fictional
works explicitly concerned with the Mediterranean rather than Algeria as
such.61 While bearing the colonial context very much in mind, the next
chapter will therefore examine how these texts have and can be situated in
the context of French discourses on the Mediterranean.
61
According to Dunwoodie, for example, the literary subtext with which Camuss
speech engages throughout is that of [] Bertrand (Writing French Algeria, p.186).
This seems doubtful: if Camuss lecture can be said to engage with any literary subtext, as we shall see, it is the neo-classical poetry of Maurras, rather than the novels
of Bertrand, whom unlike Maurras Camus does not mention.
chapter 4
The Context of French Discourses on the

Mediterranean
The task of placing The New Mediterranean Culture in the context of

French discourses on the Mediterranean has been greatly facilitated by
two separate but overlapping historical studies by Thierry Fabre and mile
Tmime.1 Whereas Fabre includes Camuss lecture in a general overview
of French discourses on the Mediterranean up to the year 2000, Tmime
refers to it briefly in the context of the parallel he draws between the
Mediterranean utopianism of Saint-Simonian thinkers such as mile
Barrault and Michel Chevalier in the 1830s and that of a group of intellectuals including Audisio and Camus a century later. At a 2004 colloquium
on the Orientalism of the Saint-Simonians, Tmime claimed that what he
described as Audisios dream of a permanent dialogue between East and
West in the Mediterranean takes up that of the Saint-Simonians, sometimes in identical words.2 At the same colloquium, meanwhile, Michel
Levallois drew a direct parallel between Camus and the Saint-Simonian
Thierry Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane: gnalogies et reprsentations, in JeanClaude Izzo and Thierry Fabre, La Mditerrane franaise (Paris: Maisonneuve &
Larose, 2000), pp.13152, subsequently referred to as MF; mile Tmime, Un rve
mditerranen: des Saint-Simoniens aux intellectuels des annes trente (Arles: Actes
Sud, 2002). A virtually identical version of Fabres study is available as a working
paper at <http://periples.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/med-representations/textes/fabre/fabre1.
html> accessed 18 May 2010.
Tmime, Rves mditerranens et prsence franaise en Orient au milieu du XIXe
sicle, in Michel Levallois and Sarga Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens
(Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006), pp.1931 (p.30)
76
chapter 4
thinker Ismal Urbain, and welcomed a proposal for a further colloquium

on the affinity between them.3
My reasons for going over ground that Fabre and Tmime have already
covered are threefold. First, and most obviously, neither is primarily concerned with Camuss lecture, which only forms a small part of their narratives. Second, although Fabre makes some general references to the colonial
context at various points and Tmime examines the collapse of what he
describes as the Mediterranean dream during the Algerian War, it can be
argued that neither gives sufficient emphasis to the colonial dimension of
French discourses on the Mediterranean. Finally, and following on from this,
although I draw heavily on the material presented by Fabre in particular, my
account also qualifies it considerably by introducing evidence from other
sources: to this extent, what follows is as much a critique as an exposition.
Bonapartes Expedition to Egypt

Fabre does little more than quote at length from Camuss lecture, placing it in the general context of both the debate on colonialism and
the 1930s debate on fascism. One point he does stress, however, is that
[t]he vision of the Mediterranean that [Camus] defends is based on a
possible union between East and West (MF, 62) and that in defending it,
Camus is clearly taking on the symbolic power-relationships involved in
representations of the Mediterranean. As we have seen, however, Tmime
argues that the notion of the Mediterranean as the meeting-place of East
and West which Camus himself attributes to Audisio can be traced
back to Saint-Simonians such as Chevalier and Barrault writing a century
before. Despite the utopianism of the Saint-Simonians, Fabre recognizes
Michel Levallois Colonisation et association, postrit dUrbain dans la politique

coloniale en France, Levallois and Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens,
pp.25362 (p.260).
77
that there is a profound ambiguity (MF, 37) in the relationship between

their civilizing project and French power-politics.4 What he does not
always show, however, is how a similar ambiguity inevitably extends to later
French discourses on the Mediterranean, especially as regards Algeria.
Yet as Fabre himself makes clear, this ambiguity was already evident in
Bonapartes invasion of Egypt (17981801).5 Although Bonaparte himself returned to France in 1799 and the expedition ended in failure, it had
two lasting effects. As Fabre suggests,6 it not only marked the invention
of the idea of Frances civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice),7 but also
aroused a passionate interest in France in all things Oriental, a term that
was used to refer to the Middle as much as the Far East (thus Bonaparte
named the expeditions flagship the Orient and called his troops the Arme
de lOrient.) For although the invasion was born out of his ambition and
Drawing a distinction between the Saint-Simonians expedition to Egypt and their

role in the colonization of Algeria, Levallois and Moussa talk of the need not to
deny the criticism of Orientalism (in the Saidian sense of a discourse revealing a
will to domination by the West over the East), but rather to keep in mind the idea
of a possible ambiguity (LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens, introduction, p.6;
emphasis in original). Levallois himself distinguishes between five different phases in
the Saint-Simonians attitude to the East (Essai de typologie des orientalistes saintsimoniens, ibid., pp.93112). Adopting a Saidian perspective, however, the Swiss
historian Pascal Kaergi sees no such ambiguity (LOrient des Saint-Simoniens
dans les Enseignements dEnfantin et Le Globe (. Barrault, M. Chevalier), entre fin
novembre 1831 et mi-fvrier 1832, ibid., pp.11329).
French-language studies of the expedition to Egypt include Henry Laurens, Lexpdition
dgypte (Paris: Seuil, 1998 [1989]) and Orientales I: autour de lexpdition dgypte
(Paris: CNRS, 2004); and Robert Sol, Bonaparte la conqute de lgypte (Paris:
Seuil, 2006). The expedition is also discussed in Saids Orientalism, pp.7987.
Fabre, MF, 2627, citing Henry Laurens, Le royaume impossible: la France et la gense
du monde arabe (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), p.16, and Emma C. Spary, Linvention
de lexpdition scientifique: lhistoire naturelle, Bonaparte et lgypte, in Linvention
scientifique de la Mditerrane (Paris: ditions de lEHESS, 1998), p.127.
See Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France
and West Africa, 18951930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Conklin,
who stresses the ambiguity of the mission civilisatrice, traces it back to the ideals of
the French Revolution. See pp.1618.
78
chapter 4
personal fascination with the Middle East on the one hand, and Frances
commercial and imperial rivalry with Britain on the other, Bonaparte presented it not only as an act of liberation, but also as a project of enlightenment for both Egypt and France itself.
First, with the help of doctors, engineers and technicians, modern
civilization was to be brought to a benighted nation that had once had a
great civilization of its own. As the geographer Edm-Franois Jomard,
one of the 170-odd team of non-military personnel who accompanied the
expedition, put it: France, by going to deliver Egypt from the yoke of the
Mamelukes, was also going [] to carry back the light and the civilization
that Europe had formerly received from the East.8 Second, the military
expedition was also made into a scientific expedition, with archaeologists,
artists, biologists and scholars being entrusted with the task of recording
their findings. The publication of their research, first in the press and later in
the monumental Description de lgypte (Description of Egypt, 180928),
aroused intense interest, and set the pattern for later scientific expeditions
to and in Algeria after it was invaded in 1830.
The Saint-Simonians
As Denise Brahimi has shown, the Description de lgypte had a particular
influence on the Saint-Simonians, seventy of whom would mount their
own, peaceful expedition to Egypt between 1833 and 1836.9 Their leader
was Barthlemy-Antonin le Pre Enfantin, who cited the precedent of
8
9
Quoted by Anouar Louca, Les contacts culturels de lgypte avec lOccident in

Lgypte daujourdhui: permanence et changements 18051976 (Paris: ditions du
CNRS, 1977), p.124, cited by Fabre, MF, 27.
Denise Brahimi, Linspiration saint-simonienne dans la Description de lgypte, in
Magali Morsy, ed., Les Saint-Simoniens et lOrient: vers la modernit (Aix-en-Provence:
Edisud, 1990), pp.1927. More generally, see Philippe Rgnier, Les Saint-Simoniens
en gypte 18331851 (Giza/Cairo: Abdelnour, 1989).
79
Bonapartes expedition to Egypt in a letter he wrote in January 1833 to his

fellow Saint-Simonian mile Barrault. Echoing Jomards view of the relationship between East and West, Enfantin declared that he could hear the
East waking up, not singing yet, but crying out. [] The East illuminated
the West in years gone by; let us send light back to it.10 Enfantins principal aim in going to Egypt was to interest the new Pasha, Mohammad Ali,
in the construction of what would become the Suez Canal, a project that
Bonaparte himself had investigated during his own expedition. Acting,
like Bonaparte, against the background of Franco-British commercial and
geopolitical rivalry, Enfantin summed up what he sought to achieve as follows: It is up to us to build one of the two new routes from Egypt towards
India and China. We will thus place one foot on the Nile and the other on
Jerusalem. Our right hand will stretch towards Mecca, our left arm will
cover Rome and will lean on Paris too.11 After Mohammad Ali rejected
the plan and turned against the French, however, Enfantin wrote a letter
to a fellow Saint-Simonian in which he called for Egypt to be occupied by
French and British troops.12
The most extensive statement of Saint-Simonian thinking on the
Mediterranean was made before the Egyptian expedition by the economist Michel Chevalier. In Systme de la Mditerrane (System of the
Mediterranean, 1832), Chevalier wrote that for thirty centuries the
Mediterranean had been an arena, a closed field in which East and West
had done battle:13 Henceforth, the Mediterranean must be like a vast
forum on all points of which nations that have been divided up until now
will unite. The Mediterranean is going to become the wedding-bed of
10
11
12
13
Quoted by Tmime, Un rve mditerranen, pp.3738.

See Philippe Rgnier, ed., Le Livre nouveau des saint-simoniens: manuscrits dmile
Barrault, Michel Chevalier, Charles Duveyrier, Prosper Enfantin, Charles Lambert,
Lon Simon et Thomas-Ismayl Urbain (Tussot, Charente: Du Lrot, 1991), p.283. I am
grateful to Philippe Rgnier for supplying me with a reference for this quotation.
Manuscript of a letter written by Enfantin to Arls-Dufour in 1836, cited by Kaergi,
LOrientalisme des saint-simoniens, p.127.
See Tmime, Un rve mditerranen, Chapter 3, Pax Mediterranea: une utopie saintsimonienne, pp.3351.
80
chapter 4
East and West.14 Far from seeing the Islamic world as alien, Chevalier saw
Arabs, Jews and Westerners as part of the same family, sharing the same
religious roots: Arabs [] are Westerners [because] their traditions are
ours or those of the Jews; [] for them, Moses and Jesus are prophets.15
For Chevalier, the coming together of East and West would be the first
step towards UNIVERSAL ASSOCIATION.16 After breaking with the
Saint-Simonians shortly afterwards, however, Chevalier was greatly influenced by a visit to the United States. In 1863, he would give a speech to
the French Senate calling for large-scale colonization in Algeria and an
American-style free market in land there.17
The ambiguity of the Saint-Simonians attitude towards the colonization of Algeria is foreshadowed by the description Saint-Simon himself
gave in 1814 of the future task of a united Europe: to populate the globe
with the European race, which is superior to all the other races of men; to
make it travelable and habitable like Europe, that is the enterprise through
which the European parliament will have to continually exercise Europes
activity.18 A similar attitude was displayed by Enfantin, who, having initially opposed the conquest and colonization of Algeria, came to realize the
opportunities it presented for putting Saint-Simonian ideas into practice.19
After visiting Algeria between 1840 and 1842 as a member of a scientific
14
15
16
17
18
19
Chevalier, Politique industrielle. Systme de la Mditerrane (Paris: n.p., 1832), p.126

<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k85502w> accessed 18 May 2010. Quoted by
Fabre, MF, 29.
Quoted by Philippe Rgnier, Le mythe oriental des Saint-Simoniens, in Morsy, ed.,
Les Saint-Simoniens et lOrient, p.38, quoted by Fabre, MF, 36.
Chevalier, Systme, p.131, quoted by Fabre, MF, 30.
See Augustin Bernard, LAlgrie. Histoire des colonies franaises et de lexpansion de
la France dans le monde II (Paris: Plon, 1931), p.348 <http://aj.garcia.free.fr/site_
hist_colo/livre3/L3p348.htm> accessed 18 May 2010.
Saint-Simon, De la rorganisation de la socit europenne (1814), quoted by Tzvetan
Todorov, Nous et les autres: la rflexion franaise sur la diversit humaine (Paris: Seuil,
1992), p.51.
Philippe Rgnier, Le colonialisme est-il un orientalisme? propos dEnfantin et de
son essai Colonisation de lAlgrie (1843), in Levallois and Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme
des Saint-Simoniens, pp.13155 (p.147).
81
commission that was clearly inspired by the similar commission that had
accompanied Bonapartes expedition to Egypt,20 Enfantin published an
independent study entitled Colonisation de lAlgrie (1843). In an early
formulation of Frances mission civilisatrice, he declared that the conquest
of Algeria, unlike previous conquests, must have as its aim an association
with the vanquished that is, in the end, as advantageous to him as to the
victor. [] [I]n our century, the legitimacy of our conquest or at least of our
occupation of Algeria, can only be sustained if we are the powerful agents
of civilization in Africa.21 At the same time, however, Enfantin spoke of
constituting the government of Algeria with a view to the domination of
the natives by France, and at the same time, to preparing and beginning
European colonization and the civil and agricultural organization of the
natives.22 Despite Enfantins talk of association, it was clear that he saw the
natives very much as junior partners, supposedly for their own good.
Another Saint-Simonian, mile Barrault, who had accompanied
Enfantin on his Egyptian expedition, spoke strongly in favour of an egalitarian approach to the relationship between East and West. In Occident
et Orient (East and West),23 written between 1833 and 1834, Barrault
argued that the East wanted to be assimilated into Western civilization,
but explicitly warned against seeing it as Europes colonial world: it is
important to repeat that the East [] can never accept [] the invasion
of their laws, of their customs, of their manners.24 For Barrault, it was not
a question of Western domination of a barbarous East, but of a mutual
20 See Monique Dondin-Payre, La Commission dexploration scientifique dAlgrie: une
hritire mconnue de la Commission dgypte (Paris: De Boccard, Mmoires de
lAcadmie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1994).
21 Enfantin [sic], Colonisation de lAlgrie (Paris: Bertrand, 1843), p.42 <http://gallica.
bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k284770> accessed 18 May 2010. For a discussion of Enfantins
work, see Rgnier, Le colonialisme est-il un orientalisme?.
22 Enfantin, Colonisation de lAlgrie, p.42, quoted by Fabre, MF, 37; Enfantins
italics.
23 mile Barrault, Occident et Orient: tudes politiques, morales, religieuses pendant
18331834 de lre chrtienne, 12491250 de lhgire (Paris: Dessart, 1835) <http://
gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k855900> accessed 18 May 2010.
24 Barrault, Occident et Orient, p.251, quoted by Fabre, MF, 33.
82
chapter 4
learning process: the civilization of the West, mingling today with the
effervescent and disordered civilisation of the East,25 is destined to enrich
itself: and from this blend will emerge a rejuvenated civilization, no longer
Eastern or Western, but human.26 Although Barrault described Greece as
the mother of European civilization, he added that Europe was not just
the daughter of Greece, but had also sucked the milk of the East. To bring
about the harmony of East and West, Europe should not just set out to
make the East in its own image, but also seek to make itself in the image
of the East.27
These remarks, however, need to be set against other comments made
by Barrault and his personal involvement in the colonization of Algeria.
Referring to the magnificent colony of Algiers, Barrault spoke of Frances
dazzling participation in the task of civilizing the East, asking rhetorically is it not in the proselytization of everything that seems good to it,
idea or action, that France [] finds the fullness of its glory and its life?28
France, he wrote, has an imperishable external mission29 another early
formulation of the mission civilisatrice and the East needed France just
as France needed the East. Describing Algeria as the promised land of the
chosen people, that is the socialist people,30 Barrault was later involved
in a scheme that encouraged unemployed workers to colonize Algeria,
leading a group of about 800 settlers to a project near Blidah in 1848.31
25
Cf. Camuss description of the Mediterranean, in the fourth section of his lecture, as
diffuse and turbulent, like those Arab quarters or those ports of Genoa and Tunisia
(I, 569).
26 Barrault, Occident et Orient, p.254, quoted by Fabre, MF, 34.
27 Ibid., p.126, quoted by Fabre, MF, 35.
28 Barrault, Occident et Orient, p.241.
29 Ibid., p.244.
30 Kay Adamson, Understanding Post-Independence Visions of Economic Prosperity
in Algeria through the Mirror of the Second Napoleonic Empire, Topics in Middle
Eastern and North African Economies 7 (September 2005) <http://www.luc.edu/
orgs/meea/volume7/adamson.pdf> accessed 18 May 2010, p.7, quoting Marcel
Emerit, Les Saint-Simoniens en Algrie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1941), p.163.
31 Adamson, Understanding Post-Independence Visions, p.6.
83
He himself unsuccessfully attempted to farm near Algiers and went on to

become a deputy for the city.
Ismal Urbain
In contrast to the idealistic sentiments that these Saint-Simonians sometimes expressed, an early form of the doctrine of Latinity that Camus
attacks in his lecture emerged during the reign of Napoleon III, when
ideologues promoted the idea of a union of Latin races in the service of
European imperialism. In 1857, for example, Arthur de Grandeffe published a book whose title spoke for itself: LEmpire dOccident reconstitu
ou lquilibre europen, assur par lunion des races latines (The Empire of
the West Reconstituted, or European Equilibrium, Ensured by the Union
of Latin Races).32 Similarly, in an 1862 pamphlet entitled La Fdration
latine, Charles de La Varenne wrote: The centre of [the] Latin race is in
France today [] Paris represents, in modern centuries, the capital of the
Caesars. The genius of the Latin race is military, Catholic and warlike.33
Napoleon III himself, however, came under the influence of a SaintSimonian who had been a member of Enfantins Egyptian expedition, the
Guyanese-born Ismal (formerly Thomas) Urbain.34 Although the ideas of
Urbain that will be discussed here are concerned specifically with Algeria
rather than with the Mediterranean in general, they show a clear continuity
with earlier Saint-Simonian thinking on the subject. Himself the son of a
French father and a mulatto mother, Urbain sought to realize the Saint32
33
Paris: Ledoyen, 1857.

La Fdration latine par les units franaise, italienne et ibrique (Paris: Dentu, 1862),
quoted by Tmime, Un rve mditerranen, p.44.
34 Tmime only mentions Urbain briefly (Un rve mditerranen, pp.4849), Fabre not
at all. For a detailed study of Urbains involvement in Algerian affairs, focusing on
the years between 1837 and 1848, see Michel Levallois, Ismal Urbain (18121884):
une autre conqute de lAlgrie (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001).
84
chapter 4
Simonian ideal of uniting East and West in his personal life by becoming
a Muslim while remaining a Christian and marrying two Muslim women
(the second after his first wife died). Having learnt Arabic, he became an
army interpreter in Algeria, but was sickened by the military pacification
of the country and became a tireless advocate for the indigenous population
as a civil servant and journalist. Although Urbain did not oppose colonization as such, which he saw as synonymous with development,35 he thought
that it should be based on the Saint-Simonian principle of association and
safeguard the interests of the natives rather than favouring settlers.
In an 1847 article based on an earlier official report he had drawn up,
Urbain referred explicitly to Frances civilizing mission.36 In two later pamphlets, LAlgrie pour les Algriens, published under a pseudonym in 1861,
and LAlgrie franaise (1862),37 which strongly influenced Napoleon III,
Urbain argued for the right of the natives not to be dispossessed of their
land and to become French nationals without renouncing their cultural
identity.38 According to the leading Urbain scholar Michel Levallois,39
the passing of a snatus-consulte (senatus consultum) in 1863 recognizing
the traditional property rights of Algerian tribes marked the triumph of
Urbain and the Arabophiles. It also, however, laid the basis for a radical
change in the land system by making provision for the delimitation of the
territory of each tribe and for the reallocation of this delimited territory to
new administrative units known as douars or communes.40 Writing in the
Levallois, Ismal Urbain, p.588.
Algrie, gouvernement des tribus, Revue de lOrient et de lAlgrie 2 (October/
November 1847), 24159 (242), quoted by Levallois, Ismal Urbain, p.587.
37 Ismal Urbain, LAlgrie pour les Algriens, ed. Michel Levallois (Paris: AtlanticaSguier, 2000), though I will refer to the online edition <http://gallica.bnf.fr/
ark:/12148/bpt6k732162> accessed 18 May 2010; and LAlgrie franaise: indignes
et immigrants, ed. Michel Levallois (Paris: Atlantica-Sguier, 2002).
38 Tmime, Un rve mditerranen, pp.4849.
39 Levallois, Ismal Urbain, p.622.
40 A further provision for the recognition of any existing private ownership of land was
never implemented. For a clear account of the land issue, see Kjell H. Halvorsen,
Colonial Transformation of Agrarian Society in Algeria, Journal of Peace Research
15 (1978), 32343.
35
36
85
1930s, the historian Augustin Bernard described the long-term effects and
intent of the 1863 snatus-consulte as follows: The snatus-consulte was not
only a law on property: it was a great political and social upheaval, leading
to the dissolution of the tribal system. [] The final goal was the establishment of individual property, with, as a consequence, the disappearance of
the power of the great chiefs, of the native aristocracy.41
Urbain himself had spoken of breaking up tribes in order to annex
them to European communes in civilian territory, and of using collective
ownership as a transition to a system of individual property.42 Enfantin,
by contrast, had argued in Colonisation de lAlgrie that settlers should
adopt the indigenous practice of collective ownership of agricultural
land. He too, however, had recommended [f ]avour[ing] the dissolution
of the large tribes, and on the contrary, vigorously constitut[ing] douars.43
Inevitably, the Saint-Simonians dream of developing and modernizing
Algeria involved the destruction of the traditional social structure in favour
of a European model.44
Urbains proposals also inspired the snatus-consulte of 1865, which
made Algerians French nationals. It only offered them French citizenship,
41 Bernard, LAlgrie, pp.34849.

42 LAlgrie pour les Algriens, online edition, p.154, note 1, and p.124. Denise Brahimi
has claimed that Urbain opposed cantonnement, or the demarcation of land;
LAlgrie coloniale, histoire dune impossible fusion, in Levallois and Moussa, eds,
LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens, pp.22336 (p.229). What Urbain opposed,
however, was the way in which cantonnement had hitherto been practised. Although
he argued that its potential dangers could only be averted through a cautious and
gradual approach, he described cantonnement as indispensable (LAlgrie pour les
Algriens, p.117).
43 Enfantin, heading for Part II, chapter I, section XVI of Colonisation de lAlgrie,
p.540; italics in original.
44 The coup de grce to the traditional order was administered by the loi Warnier of
1873, which abolished collective property in Algeria and privatized all land. This
even applied within families, who thereby became subject to disproportionately
expensive legal procedures and an easy prey for unscrupulous property speculators
and usurers. Warnier, ironically, was a former Saint-Simonian, who, in taking up the
cause of the settlers, became one of Urbains bitterest opponents.
86
chapter 4
however, on the condition that they renounced their personal status, in

other words their right to follow traditional Islamic law. The effect of this
was equally invidious, since it reduced all but the handful of Algerians
who were willing to renounce their beliefs in these matters to the status
of subjects rather than citizens.45 Urbain himself, it should be emphasized,
favoured the granting of French citizenship to Algerian Muslims without their having to renounce their personal status.46 Along with his other
undeniably progressive attitudes, this has led Levallois to present Urbains
legacy in an unequivocally positive light, talking of Urbains humanism
and comparing him with Camus.47 The ambiguity of Urbains position,
however, is underlined by his own description of how, when Napoleon III
consulted him in person on the bill for the 1865 snatus-consulte, he managed to interest the Emperor in his ideas on the naturalization of Algerians
(albeit too late to influence the bill directly): I expressed the opinion that
it would be opportune and politic to retain for the natives their religious
status [] and to take advantage of this concession to impose on them our
commercial law and the larger part of our laws on property.48 Despite
Urbains undoubted commitment to defending the interests of the natives
rather than those of the settlers, his commitment was inevitably expressed
within the overall context of French control.
45 On the 1865 snatus-consulte, see Michael Brett, Legislating for Inequality in Algeria:
the Senatus-Consulte of 14 July 1865, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies, University of London 51:3 (1988), 44061.
46 See Anne Levallois, Les crits autobiographiques dIsmal Urbain. Homme de couleur, saint-simonien et musulman 18121884 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005),
pp.7879.
47 Colonisation et association, postrit dUrbain dans la politique coloniale en France,
in Levallois and Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens, pp.25362, pp.254
and 260.
48 Quoted from manuscript by Michel Levallois, Ismayl Urbain: lments pour une
biographie, in Morsy, ed., Les Saint-Simoniens et lOrient, pp.5382, p.74; italics
added. Cp. Levallois, Ismal Urbain, p.624, which refers to the law on communes
(code de communes) rather than commercial law (code de commerce). I am grateful
to Michel Levallois for confirming to me that the latter is in fact correct.
87
lise and Onsime Reclus

Although Tmimes study establishes a persuasive parallel between the
multicultural Mediterranean utopianism of at least some Saint-Simonians
and that of French-Mediterranean intellectuals of the 1930s, it leaves the
obvious historical gap between them unfilled.49 Fabre, however, goes some
way to providing a missing link between the two groups through the
geographer lise Reclus. As Fabre notes, Reclus gave full recognition to
the non-European contribution to European civilization in his nineteenvolume Gographie universelle (Universal Geography, 18751894), a whole
part of which was devoted to the Mediterranean. (A leading anarchist,
Reclus would also later co-edit Bakunins Dieu et ltat (Eng. tr. God and
the State), whose possible influence on Camuss lecture will be discussed
in Chapter 9.)
Western civilisation, wrote Reclus, would never have been born were it
not for the fact that Egypt, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Spain and
Carthage all lay on its shores: Without this sea joining the three continental
masses of Europe, Asia and Africa, between the Aryans, the Semites and
the Berbers, without this great mediating agent [] that places peoples in
relation with each other, we Europeans would all have remained in primitive barbarism.50 Similarly, in an article published in 1894 which Fabre
does not mention, Reclus traced contemporary European hegemony back
to the geo-historical situation of the Mediterranean as the centre of trade
routes between East and West. The use of metals and domestic animals,
written language, industries, arts and the rudiments of science, metaphysical theories and religious myths all these, said Reclus, had come from
the East, but the West was able not only to exploit these innovations, but
also to develop them. Compared to Africa and Asia, said Reclus, Europe
49 As regards Algeria, however, see Levallois, Colonisation et association, which traces

Urbains legacy from his death to Camus and beyond.
50 Elise Reclus, Nouvelle gographie universelle, la terre et les hommes, lEurope mridionale (Paris: Hachette, 1887), p.34, quoted by Fabre, MF, 44.
88
chapter 4
revealed itself to be admirably disposed for elaborating elements received

from outside and, in a way, sublimating them.51 As we shall see, this was a
theme that would be developed later, notably by Paul Valry, not only in
relation to the Mediterranean, but also in the context of the interwar debate
about the relationship between East and West (see Chapter 7).
Something else that Fabre does not mention, however, is that despite
being a fierce critic of slavery, Recluss attitude to European colonialism
was deeply ambiguous. In this respect, his outlook was similar to that of
the colonial theorist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu,52 the son-in-law of the SaintSimonian Michel Chevalier, who along with Ismal Urbain and Victor
Schoelcher, the French equivalent of William Wilberforce, founded the
Socit Franaise pour la Protection des Indignes des Colonies in 1881.53
Like Leroy-Beaulieu, Reclus distinguished between colonies dexploitation
(colonies to be exploited) and colonies de peuplement (colonies for settlement), criticizing the former and supporting the latter, at least on a small
scale. Although he attacked British imperialism in India, as Camus would
do in his lecture, Reclus defended the right of individuals to emigrate to
colonies such as Algeria. Indeed, in his youth, he himself had been involved
51
52
53
Hgmonie de lEurope, La Socit nouvelle (April 1894), 43343 (p.434) <http://

gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k66024n> accessed 18 May 2010.
Leroy-Beaulieu was the author of De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris:
Guillaumin, 1874). The second (1882) edition (<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k245012> accessed 18 May 2010), whose praise of colonization as a force for
economic growth, national grandeur and civilization has made it a locus classicus of
colonial attitudes (see, for example, Saids Orientalism, p.219). For a positive view
of Leroy-Beaulieu, however, see Levallois, Colonisation et association, pp.256 and
258.
Among other things, this managed to defeat an 1883 parliamentary bill to expropriate
300,000 hectares of native Algerian land in order to build 175 villages for settlers,
and also opposed an 1884 decree that drastically reduced Muslim representation.
See Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de lAlgrie contemporaine II: De linsurrection
de 1871 au dclenchement de la guerre de liberation (1954) (Paris: PUF, 1979), p.41.
89
in abortive colonial enterprises in South America54 and had founded an

anarchist phalanstery on the Algerian coast at Tarzout.55
Fabre also omits to mention the fact that lise Recluss position is
thrown into relief by the attitudes of his brother Onsime (18371916),
also a geographer, who became a strong advocate of French imperialism.
It was Onsime Reclus, in his book France, Algrie et colonies (France,
Algeria and Colonies, 1880), who coined the term francophonie: we accept
as Francophones all those who are or seem to be destined to remain or to
become participants in our language: Bretons and French Basques, Arabs
and Berbers of the Tell of whom we are already the masters. However, we
do not include all of the Belgians in francophonie, although the future
of Flemish speakers is in all likelihood to be French Belgians one day.56
Onsime Reclus went on to write books and pamphlets whose titles speak
for themselves: Lchons lAsie, prenons lAfrique: o renatre? et comment
durer?57 (Let Us Let Go of Asia and Take Africa: Where Shall We Be
Reborn? And How Shall We Last?); Le partage du monde58 (The Sharing
of the World); and the posthumous Un grand destin commence. (Tout pour
lAfrique! La France doit faire en Afrique ce que Rome fit dans le monde ancien.
Unification du langage Grandeur future de lempire africain-franais.)59
(A Great Destiny is Beginning. (Everything for Africa! France Must Do
in Africa what Rome Did in the Ancient World. Unification of Language
The Future Greatness of the French-African Empire).) Together, then,
54 Axel Baudouin, Reclus colonialiste?, Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography /

Revue europenne de gographie 239 (26 May 2003), <http://cybergeo.revues.org/
pdf/4004> (pp.910), Reclus a Colonialist?, tr. Hilary Green, <http://cybergeo.
revues.org/index4004.html> (paras 4054) accessed 18 May 2010.
55 Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, p.95.
56 Onsime Reclus, France, Algrie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1880), pp.42223
<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k75061t> accessed 18 May 2010.
57 Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1904.
58 Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1906.
59 Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1917.
90
chapter 4
the Reclus brothers give a very clear illustration of the unacceptable face
of colonialism and colonialism with a human face respectively.60
Mistral, Maurras and Latinity

One of Camuss main targets in his lecture is the doctrine of Latinity
(see chapter 6). As we have seen, the notion of a union between Latin
races was invoked in an imperialist and nationalist context by Arthur de
Grandeffe and Charles de la Varenne during the reign of Napoleon III. It
was also revived in a regional context by the Provenal poet Frdric Mistral
(18301914), the co-founder and leading figure of the Flibrige movement,
which sought to revive the Provenal language and Provenal culture. As
Fabre notes, in a public proclamation at a festival in Montpellier in 1878,
Mistral spoke of the Latin idea, of the ambition of the flibres to link
the seven Romance-language nations and of constituting an Empire of
60 In a speech on francophonie given in 2004, Hlne Carrre dEncausse, the permanent

secretary of the Acadmie Franaise, linked Camus and Onsime Reclus through
quotations from both men. Quoting out of context the latters definition of
Francophones as all those who are or seem to be destined to remain or to become
participants in our language, she claimed that Reclus was not an unrepentant colonialist, but a man convinced of the importance of languages in creating links between
civilizations [sic]. In this way, she said, he foreshadowed the Francophone dream
of a virtual homeland of French-speakers, and joined Camus, whom she quoted
as saying that his homeland was the French language; Hlne Carrre dEncausse,
Le franais dans tous ses tats, Dfense de la langue franaise 218 (Oct.Nov.Dec.
2005), 37 (p.3) <http://www.langue-francaise.org/dlf218.pdf> accessed 18 May
2010. See IV, 1099 for Camuss original notebook entry, from 1950 or 1951: Yes, I
have a homeland: the French language.
91
the Sun.61 The next day, he read out an ode in Provenal to the Latin race,
with the refrain Rise up, Latin race, and spoke of fraternization beneath
the Cross.62 In other poems, he evoked the historical links between the
people of Provence and other Mediterranean peoples such as the Catalans,
and their conflicts with the Moors or Saracens.63
As Fabre notes, another Provenal associated with the flibres, Charles
Maurras, defended Mistral against those who criticised him for undermining the integrity of the French language by saying that they were forgetting to defend the French spirit against the agents of cosmopolitanism.64
Maurras, it will be recalled, is identified by Camus in his lecture as his main
ideological opponent, and it was largely thanks to Maurras that the doctrine
of Latinity acquired an explicitly racist and specifically anti-Semitic character. According to Fabre, the key element of Maurrass Mediterraneanism
was not so much a belief that its culture was essentially Roman as his conviction that the Mediterranean marked the dividing-line between civilization and barbarism, between the Greco-Roman West and the Asiatic and
Semitic (i.e. Judeo-Arabic) East.65 Indeed, as Camus himself would do
in his lecture, Maurras criticized Rome for imitating Greece in its decline
rather than Greece in its golden age.
Fabre, MF, 69. By contrast, as we have seen, Camus rejects the idea of a nationalism
of the sun. On Mistral and Latinity, see Marcel Decremps, Mistral et lide latine, in
Georges and Ilianca Barthouil-Ionesco, eds, La Latinit: hier, aujourdhui, demain
(Bucharest: Eminescu, 1981), pp.189202.
62 Frdric Mistral, A la race latine, in Andr Berry, ed., Anthologie de la posie occitane
(Paris: Stock, 1961), pp.23839, quoted by Fabre MF, 6970. See also Decremps, op.
cit., pp.19899.
63 Jean-Claude Bouvier, Strotypes de ltranger mditerranen dans la littrature provenale au XIX sicle: lexemple de Frdric Mistral (Aix-en-Provence: Universit de
Provence, 2003), quoted (without a page reference) by Fabre, MF, 7172.
64 Maurras, Mistral (Paris: Aubier, [n.d.] [1912]), p.9, quoted by Fabre, MF, 73.
65 It is a veritable obsession for Maurras, who traces a border, a dividing-line that
separates the Mediterranean between the civilized, Greco-Roman world, and the
barbarous Semitic world, where Jews, Arabs and other Levantines are found (Fabre,
MF, 76).
61
92
chapter 4
Whereas Camus celebrates the great Eastern philosophies (I, 569),

however, Maurras blamed the decline of Greece on Asiatic and Semitic
contamination. In a book of travel sketches published in 1901, Maurras
wrote:
There is much discussion of the services that Rome rendered the world. I reprimand
anyone who denies them, but I blame anyone who celebrates them. Rome propagated
Hellenism, and with Hellenism, Semitism []. What a lack of discernment among its
praetors and proconsuls! Not only were they unable to distinguish the pure Hellene
from the contaminated Hellene, but they encouraged Asiatic contagion.66
Similarly, in Le Voyage dAthnes (The Journey to Athens, 1929), Maurras

spoke of Semitic plagues [lpres]67 and attributed the decline of Greece
to the influence of Eastern religions: Exhausted by internal wars, Greece
extinguishes its flame when the Asia of Alexander communicates to its
conquerors, not the type of a new art, but a state of anxiety, of fever and
weaknesses maintained by the religions of the East.68 As Fabre puts it,
Maurrass Mediterranean wishes to remain unsullied by any adulteration and any cosmopolitanism, especially coming from the Semitic East.69
However Orientalist it may be, Camuss view that what is most essential
in the Mediterranean genius springs from the encounter between East and
West is diametrically opposed to Maurrass.
66 Charles Maurras, Anthina: dAthnes Florence (Paris: Flammarion, 1901), p.225,

quoted by Fabre, MF, 76. The reference is included in Fabres online working paper,
but not in the printed version.
67 Maurras, Le Voyage dAthnes (Paris: Flammarion, 1929), p.209, quoted by Fabre,
MF, 76.
68 Ibid., p.179, quoted by Fabre, MF, 75.
69 Fabre, MF, 75.
93
Louis Bertrand and the Notion of a Latin Africa

Another form of the doctrine of Latinity served to provide a historical
legitimation for French imperialism in Algeria, and to provide a common
myth of origin for its various European colonizers.70 Faced with the demographic weight of the natives, Fabre suggests:
it was a question of creating a form of cohesion between the different population
groups of European origin. What could have been more appropriate than to define
a common origin? The Latin Mediterranean became this founding principle, this
genealogical reference-point from which a common sense of belonging was constructed. (MF, 54)
Historians, archeologists and ideologues all contributed to this founding

narrative, with archaeologists creating a cult of Roman ruins in North
Africa.71
The central figure in popularizing the notion of a Latin Africa was the
prolific novelist, historian and essayist Louis Bertrand (18661941),72 who
came under the influence of Maurras early in his career. Initially, Bertrand
failed to take the flibres seriously, but a meeting with Maurras led to a
complete change in his way of thinking. As Bertrand recalled in 1931:
The flibrige was not at all what I thought it was []. It was something deeply serious:
the instinct of self-preservation of a people rising up against foreign invasion [].
Not to allow oneself to become contaminated, to expel the intruder, and, against
the stupid Anglomania and Germanomania which were predominant at that time,
to raise up the old Latin ideal, to exalt the Mediterranean, the mother of Western
70 The notion of the Latins of Africa, a new race formed of the intermingling of the
peoples of the northern shores of the Mediterranean, had seen the anthropological
light of day as early as 1873. Lorcin, Rome and France in Africa, 312, referring to
Louis Faidherbe and Paul Topinard, Instructions sur lanthropologie de lAlgrie,
Bulletin de la socit danthropologie de Paris, 2nd ser., 8 (1873), 60365, esp. p.654.
71 See Lorcin, Rome and France in Africa and Philippe Lucas and Jean-Claude Vatin,
LAlgrie des anthropologues (Paris: Maspro, 1975).
72 See Lorcin, op. cit., pp.31523.
94
chapter 4
civilizations: that was the programme, at once intellectual and political, that []
Maurras placed before my eyes [].73
Maurrass programme would largely become Bertrands own, with Algeria

where Bertrand taught classical rhetoric between 1891 and 1900
taking the place of Maurrass native Provence as the focus of his Latin
Mediterraneanism.74 Bertrands novels set in Algeria included Le Sang des
races (The Blood of the Races, 1899), the anti-Semitic La Cina (1901) and
Le Roman de la conqute (The Novel of the Conquest, 1930), published
to coincide with the centenary of the French invasion. He also wrote three
books on St Augustine and essays on the Mediterranean and various other
topics.75 In 1922, Bertrand was elected to the Acadmie Franaise, replacing
the similarly nationalistic Maurice Barrs. After attending a Nazi rally in
1935, however, Bertrand overcame his previous anti-German prejudices
sufficiently to write an admiring book on Hitler, in which he asked: Why
dont we have anything like this back home?76
In the preface to one of his essay collections, Les Villes dor (Cities
of Gold, 1921), Bertrand summed up what he saw as one of his central
achievements as follows:
By returning to Africa, all we did was recuperate a lost province of Latinity. []
Simply by having highlighted this idea, I restored to our settlers their titles of nobility and first occupiers. Inheritors of Rome, we invoke rights prior to Islam. In the
Bertrand, La Rivira que jai connue, Revue Universelle (1 March 1931), quoted by
Stephen Wilson, Action Franaise in French intellectual life, Historical Journal 12:2
(1969), 32850 (p.345).
74 Cf. Bertrands 1931 lecture la recherche de lesprit mditerranen: lAlgrie notre
autre grande France, Conferencia 25: 16 (1931), 15767.
75 These included Le Mirage oriental (The Oriental Mirage, 1909); Le Sens de lennemi
(The Sense of the Enemy, 1917), which contained sections on The Enemy Without
and the Enemy Within, Islam and The Latin Eagle; and Les Villes dor: Algrie et
Tunisie romaines (Cities of Gold: Roman Algeria and Tunisia, 1921). On Bertrands
work in general, see Belamri, Luvre de Louis Bertrand.
76 Hitler: A View of the 1935 Reichsparteitag by a Member of the Acadmie Franaise, tr.
Dan Desjardins (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2005), p.17; originally published
as Hitler (Paris: Fayard, 1936).
73
95
face of the usurping Arab and even the Native enslaved and remoulded by him, we
represent the descendants [] of the true masters of the soil [].77
Whereas Rome, Bertrand claimed, had brought centuries of prosperity

to North Africa, and had given it a semblance of unity for the first time,
together with an intellectual and political personality, all the Arabs had
brought was wretchedness (misre), endemic war and barbarism.78
In Devant lIslam (Facing Islam, 1926), Bertrand inadvertently laid
bare the legitimizing function and supremacist presuppositions of Frances
mission civilisatrice when he attacked what he saw as the Orientalist tendency to idealize the defeated natives:
By what miracle did squalor, filth, wretchedness and ugliness, pure stupidity and
barbarity become admirable as soon as they were Arab or Oriental? [] But if this
praise of the native were true, all we could do is leave! It would be a crime to enslave
a race that was our equal, or even that was superior to us, and to want to impose on
it a civilisation that was far from being worth its own.79
To justify French imperialism, in other words, it was necessary to uphold

the notion that the indigenous populations were racially inferior hence
the need to civilize them. By conquest, said Bertrand in a 1931 lecture on
the Mediterranean spirit and Algeria, I mean above all a civilizing task.80
In 1935 the same year in which Mussolini and his supporters justified the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the name of civilization Bertrand wrote:
Civilization must prove its superiority by its charity. We must not limit
ourselves to preventing the barbarian from doing harm and doing harm to
himself, we must also try to make him less wretched. We can only justify
77 Louis Bertrand, Les Villes dor: Afrique et Sicile antiques (Cities of Gold: Ancient
Africa and Sicily) (Paris: Fayard, 1921), preface p.9, quoted by Djeux, De lternel
Mditerranen, p.666.
78 Bertrand, Les Villes dor, p.23, quoted by Fabre, MF, 57.
79 Bertrand, Devant lIslam (Paris: Plon, 1926), pp.13536, quoted by Fabre, MF, 59
(my emphasis).
80 Bertrand, la recherche de lesprit mditerranen, p.163.
96
chapter 4
our presence on this enemy land [i.e. North Africa] by doing good there.81
This is what Rome had done, and the French were the descendants and the
continuers of their Empire.
Bertrands apparent confidence in Frances civilizing mission, however,
masked a profound anxiety. In 1907, Bertrand had published LInvasion
(The Invasion), a fictional account of the influx of Italian immigrants
into Marseille, and in a foreword to a new edition of the novel in 1921,
he wrote that his subject was the eternal invasion, the assault against the
City of all times by a younger and more vigorous conqueror, and, more
generally, by the forces of anarchy and decomposition that were always on
the look-out. The affinity with Maurras was obvious: At a time like this,
when Western civilisation is threatened by the raging madness of bloodthirsty brutes, behind which one smells all the Asiatic barbarities with
the incurable messianic and revolutionary restlessness [bougeotte] of the
Jew, such a subject is of the greatest topicality.82 Two years later, in Devant
lIslam, Bertrand confessed that he was haunted by the nightmare of invasion. Alluding to the Christian reconquista (reconquest) of Andalucia,
he declared that Spain remained the Wests ultimate defence against the
invasion of Oriental plagues.83 As with Maurras, then, the foundation of
Bertrands Latin Mediterraneanism was an anti-Orientalism and an antiSemitism directed against both Jews and Arabs.
81
82
83
Bertrand, Vers Cyrne, Terre dApollon (Paris: Fayard, 1935), p.272, quoted by Fabre,
MF, 58.
Bertrand, Avant-propos, LInvasion, new edn (Paris: Plon, 1921), p.4, quoted by
Fabre, MF, 77.
Devant lIslam, pp.72, 259, quoted by Fabre, MF, 78.
97
Jean Ballard and Cahiers du Sud

In a letter to his mentor Jean Grenier of 26 July 1936, Camus told Grenier
how much he had enjoyed Sagesse de Lourmarin (Lourmarins wisdom),
an article that Grenier had published in the May 1936 issue of Cahiers du
Sud.84 The same issue of Cahiers du Sud contained an article by Armand
Lunel on Valry, the Mediterranean and humanism. Referring to Valrys
1933 lecture Inspirations mditerranennes (Mediterranean Inspirations),
which had been collected in Varit III (1936), Lunel observed: The
Mediterranean is in fashion at the moment. Perhaps, even more than a fashion that is spreading, it is a myth in a state of gestation [].85 As evidence
of this phenomenon, Lunel cited Audisios Jeunesse de la Mditerrane;
a conference on Mediterranean humanism held in Monaco in October
1935 by the Acadmie Mditerranenne; Fernand Benots study LAfrique
mditerranenne (1931); the founding by Jean Desthieux (sc. Franois JeanDesthieux) of a group called Amitis mditerranennes; and finally Cahiers
du Sud itself.86
In fact, the Marseille-based Cahiers du Sud (formerly Fortunio) had
been oriented towards the Mediterranean since its inception over a decade
before. Run by its co-founder Jean Ballard, one of its notable features, as
Fabre notes, was an attitude towards Islam that contrasted strongly with
that of Maurras and Bertrand. In 1932, Ballard wrote to the Orientalist
mile Dermenghem about his plans for a special issue on Islam and the
West, which was eventually published in 1935.87 With a group of other
writers, Ballard spoke of having dreamt of putting together
84 Albert Camus Jean Grenier. Correspondance 19321960, ed. Marguerite Dobrenn

(Gallimard 1981), p.25, henceforth referred to as Corr. JG.
85 Armand Lunel, Paul Valry, la Mditerrane et lhumanisme, Cahiers du Sud 183
(May 1936), 4017 (p.401).
86 See Alain Paire, Chronique des Cahiers du Sud (Paris: IMEC, 1993), esp. Un syncrtisme mditerranen, pp.23639.
87 Cahiers du Sud 175 (August/September 1935), reissued with additions in 1947.
98
chapter 4
a contribution which would have tended to strengthen a considerably broader notion
of Mediterranean culture and would have shown at the heart of old civilisations
from which rhetors like Maurras have derived canons and exclusive formulae, such
as the Latin genius an essentially Dionysiac and Pythic spirit that is found in
all the literatures and all the sacred books of these peoples. [] All this teemed,
fermented, lived on the edges of this vat, and isnt it absurd to conjure up so many
disparities, so many opposites under the fallacious determination of Greek miracle
or Latinity?88
Similarly, Audisio, who was a regular contributor to Cahiers du Sud, would

later write in Jeunesse de la Mditerrane (1935) that the Greek miracle, like
the Roman Empire and other generalizations imposed on his sea, was only
a transitory aspect of the eternal Mediterranean.89 In 1933, in another letter
to Dermenghem, Ballard asked: May one dream of a Mediterranean neoclassicism [] in which Islam would intervene, as in the Middle Ages, to
soften and refine Greco-Latin intelligence and to assist in the creation of a
new syncretism of which our sea would be the site and the magic vehicle?90
The affinity between Ballard on the one hand and Camus and Audisio on
the other is underlined by the fact that, as we have seen, Ballard attended the
first meeting to organize the Maison de la culture in Algiers,91 while Audisio
was apparently not only on the editorial board of the Maisons newsletter,
Jeune Mditerrane92 which clearly took its name from Audisios Jeunesse
de la Mditerrane but quoted Camuss lecture approvingly and at some
length in the August 1937 issue of Cahiers du Sud.93 In the EastWest debate
of the 1920s, however, as we shall see in Chapter 7, Ballards multicultural
Mediterraneanism came uncomfortably close to Western supremacism,
88
89
90
91
92
93
Paire, Chronique des Cahiers du Sud, p.237, quoted by Fabre, MF, 80.
Gabriel Audisio, Jeunesse de la Mditerrane (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), p.12.
Paire, Chronique, p.238, quoted by Fabre, MF, 8081.
See chapter 3.
Ouahiba Hamouda, Albert Camus lpreuve dAlger rpublicain (Algiers: OPU,
1991), p.154.
Audisio, Vers une synthse mditerranenne: culture mditerranenne, Cahiers du
Sud 196 (August, 1937), 45760 (pp.45758).
99
as it did with one of the most famous contributors to Cahiers du Sud, the
poet Paul Valry.
Paul Valry and the Centre Universitaire Mditerranen

Valry, who was born in Ste of a Corsican father and a Genoese mother,
influenced both the young Camus and his teacher and mentor Jean Grenier.
Thus Grenier successfully asked Valry for permission to use Inspirations
mditerranennes, the title of Valrys 1933 lecture, as the title of a collection of essays that Grenier published in 1940;94 by the time of Camuss
lecture, Grenier had published six of these essays as articles.95 In the same
year as Valry gave his lecture, on the other hand, the 20-year old Camus
wrote an untitled poem on the Mediterranean (I, 97678), whose reference to cimetires marins (graveyards by the sea) was an obvious homage
to Valrys famous poem Cimetire marin (1920).
Also in 1933, Valry became the administrator of a new Centre
Universitaire Mditerranen in Nice,96 which he inaugurated with another
lecture. In it, Valry rejected a purely Greco-Roman conception of the
Mediterranean, expressing an inclusive Mediterranean humanism similar
to that of the Cahiers du Sud (to which he himself was a contributor):
But it has happened that certain Mediterranean values have obscured others: for
example, the great glory of Greece and the great glory of Rome have led to many
other sources of civilisation being forgotten or neglected. A systematic exploration
will certainly find that there were in the Mediterranean many more things that must
be taken into account than our habits allow us to think.97
94 Jean Grenier, Inspirations mditerranennes (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).
95 See J.S.T. Garfitt, The Work and Thought of Jean Grenier (18981971) (London:
Modern Humanities Research Association, 1983), p.104.
96 Fabre, MF, 85.
97 Paul Valry, Le Centre universitaire mditerranen, in Regards sur le monde actuel
et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Ides, 1945), pp.33459 (p.354). On Valry
100
chapter 4
In this way, Fabre suggests (MF, 87), Valry indicated that the syllabus of the
Centre was open to non-European influences. Fabre links Valrys lecture
not only to lise Reclus, through Valrys notion of the Mediterranean as
being a machine for making civilization,98 but also to Chevaliers Systme
de la Mditerrane, through Valrys use of the phrase Mediterranean
system.99 According to Fabre, Valry projects a universalist vision of the
Mediterranean (MF, 86).
A rather different picture of Valrys Mediterranean humanism, however, had emerged from his 1924 essay Note (ou lEuropen) (Note (or the
European)). This had first been published, under the title Caractres de
lesprit europen (Characteristics of the European Mind), in Henri Massiss
conservative periodical La Revue universelle, and was subsequently included
as a sequel to Valrys famous 1919 essay La crise de lesprit (Crisis of the
Mind) in the first volume of Varit.100 In particular, Valry returned to a
point he had made in his earlier essay: the factors that had led to the preeminence of Europe, in which he included the whole of the Mediterranean
coast, including Smyrna and Alexandria.101 The role of the Mediterranean
in the creation of the European mind, said Valry, had been marvellously
effective. In its Eastern basin, it had witnessed the establishment of a kind
of pre-Europe: Egypt and Phoenicia followed by the Greeks, the Romans,
the Arabs and the original Iberians. The inclusiveness of Valrys vision
of the early Mediterranean, however, did not extend into the modern
age, since he went on to claim that it was in the Mediterranean that the
division of humanity into two ever more dissimilar groups had gradually
taken place.
98
99
100
101
and the Mediterranean, see Paul Valry 6. Mare nostrum: Valry et le monde mditerranen, ed. Huguette Laurenti (Paris: Minard/Revue des lettres modernes, 1989) and
Patricia Signorile, ed., Valry et la Mditerrane (Aix-en-Provence: disud, 2006).
Valry, Le Centre universitaire mditerranen, p.348.
Ibid., p.353. See Fabre, MF, 86.
Valry, Caractres de lesprit europen, La Revue universelle, 15 July 1924, pp.129
42, republished as Note (ou lEuropen) in uvres, Vol. 1, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris:
Gallimard, La Pliade, 1957), pp.100014. On La crise de lesprit, see Chapter 7.
Valry, La crise de lesprit, in uvres, Vol. 1, pp.9881000 (pp.99697).
101
According to Valry, one group, which occupied the largest portion

of the globe, remained as though motionless in its customs, its knowledge
and its practical power; it no longer progressed, or progressed only imperceptibly. By contrast, the extraordinarily rapid development of the other,
European group led it, in time, to conquer other lands. Valry compared
this triumphant Europe of exchanges, cooperation and competition, both
material and cultural, to a market on which goods arrived from distant
countries. On the one hand, America, Oceania, Africa and the Far East sent
their raw material for it to be transformed; on the other, the knowledge,
philosophies and religions of Asia came to feed European minds, and this
powerful machine transformed the conceptions of the East and extracted
their usable elements. Here Valrys analysis echoed that of lise Reclus
in his article on European hegemony thirty years earlier, but for Valry, it
was as if the rest of the world only existed for the benefit of Europe.
Having begun as a Mediterranean market, said Valry, Europe had
become a vast factory, both industrial and intellectual. Some Europeans
grabbed everything novel and exaggerated its value, while others contrasted
the invasion of novelties with the brilliance and solidity of existing treasures a comment that can be seen, at the cultural level, as an allusion to
the different attitudes to the East that were being expressed in a contemporary debate about the relationship between East and West (see Chapter
7). Valry, however, did not idealize European man in comparing him with
what he called the more simple types of humanity: he described Homo
europaeus as a kind of monster, who sometimes derived from his pessimism
a hard and formidable will, a paradoxical motive for actions based on a
scorn for men and life.102
In the second part of his article, which broke off with a tantalizing
Etc., Valry specified the three essential conditions he saw as defining a
genuine European. Giving the term a more than geographical significance,
he suggested that it applied to every race and land that had been successively Romanized, Christianized and submitted to the mental discipline
of the Greeks. In his conclusion, Valry summarized by saying that as far
102 Valry, Note (ou lEuropen), p.1007.
102
chapter 4
as power and precise knowledge were concerned, Europe or rather the

European Mind, which had also created America still weighed much
more than the rest of the globe. According to Valry, what he called this
astonishing inequality obviously stemmed from the average quality of
Homo europaeus an explicit reiteration of the racism implicit in his earlier
comment that among the human dreams that were against ethnic givens
and fatalities was the dream of racial equality.103 Despite its apparent multiculturalism, Valrys Mediterranean humanism was in fact what Lunel
called a white humanism.104
LAcadmie Mditerranenne:
Franois Jean-Desthieux vs Louis Bertrand
Valrys Centre Universitaire Mditerranen was not the first academic
institution devoted to the Mediterranean to have been based in Nice. As
Fabre notes, an earlier institution, the Acadmie Mditerranenne, had
been founded there in 1926. In 1935, however, the Acadmie moved to
Monaco, where, in the same year, it held a conference on Humanism and
the Mediterranean. In preparation for the conference, a questionnaire
was circulated that referred to three types of civilisation Greco-Latin,
Christian and Jewish / Islamic and asked whether one could establish
which spiritual values they had in common, and whether these could be
called universal, constituting the essential elements, not of Mediterranean
civilizations, but of Mediterranean civilization as such. The questionnaire
went on to ask whether it was desirable to try to extract from such research
the ideal elements of a Mediterranean humanism that might help to solve
103 Ibid., pp.1014, 1003.

104 Lunel, Paul Valry, p.406.
103
the world crisis.105 Although the conference was held in November, shortly
after Mussolinis invasion of Ethiopia, the President of the Academy, M.
Labande, specifically requested the participants not to pass any judgement
on contemporary political matters.106
Despite the attempt to bring together the conferences participants
under the banner of Mediterranean humanism, the proceedings highlighted a conflict between two very different ideas of what this meant.
Franois Jean-Desthieux,107 the secretary-general of the Academy and general rapporteur for the conference, declared:
Humanism as it has been conceived has contributed to narrowing the field of knowledge relating to the origins of civilisation because it has excessively neglected Semitic,
Christian and Islamic contributions to the benefit of the Greco-Latin stock of knowledge alone. And it is thus that one has arrived at the anti-geographical and inequitable
notion of a Mediterranean reduced to the sole dimensions of a Latin lake.108
In reply, however, the Honorary President of the Academy none other than
Louis Bertrand declared that he could only see vexations (contrarits),
if not hostilities, between the peoples of the Mediterranean. Adapting
Barrss boast that he had made Lorraine as others had made the Republic,
Bertrand repeated his claim that he had made lAfrique latine. That was
why, he said, he had faith in those who wanted to make the Mediterranean
and establish the principles of a Mediterranean humanism.109
Although Bertrand did not define what he meant by this, JeanDesthieux made clear in his report to the conference that, in his view,
such a humanism could only be inclusive: Humanism as I conceive it
as the Conference [] has defined it, simultaneously embraces Greece
105 LHumanisme et la Mditerrane: congrs de 1935, 31 octobre, 1 et 2 novembre (Monaco:

Acadmie Mditerranenne, Cahier II, 1936), pp.3, 4, quoted by Fabre, MF,
8788.
106 Ibid., pp.8, 9, quoted by Fabre, MF, 88.
107 In 1936, Jean-Desthieux to whom Fabre refers as Jean Desthieux published a
book entitled La Conscience Mditerrane (Paris: Parisis, 1936).
108 LHumanisme et la Mditerrane, p.90, quoted by Fabre, MF, 88.
109 Ibid., pp.91, 92, quoted by Fabre, MF, 89.
104
chapter 4
and Islam, Carthage and Judea, as well as the Latin. The Mediterranean
is no more exclusively Latin than it is Semitic. It is no more Christian
than it is pagan. It is no more Jewish than it is Saracen.110 Humanism, he
continued, was and must be seen as being in opposition to every doctrine
that divided men and nations, and he warned his audience against giving
support to racism by restricting their discussions to Latinity. Despite this
appeal, according to Fabre, the tendency of the Academy seemed to be to
assimilate the Mediterranean mind to Greco-Latin civilisation.111
In his report to the conference, Jean-Desthieux made a number of
references to Audisios writings on the Mediterranean, though he also
emphasized that previous French writers including Bertrand had made a
great contribution to the maintenance of the values of a Latin humanism.112
As we shall see in the next chapter, Audisio himself boycotted the conference, but Camuss mentor Jean Grenier was reported as having sent a note
arguing for the need for a Mediterranean humanism, on two conditions:
first, that it should be stripped of any academic and bookish formalism,
and second, that it should be a question of Greek humanism in particular,
since only the Hellenic legacy was universal.113
110 Franois Jean-Desthieux, LHumanisme et la Mditerrane: rapport gnral prsent

au congrs de 1935 (Monaco: Acadmie Mditerranenne, Cahier IV, 1936), p.153,
quoted by Fabre, MF, 89.
111 Fabre, MF, 89. It is notable, however, that the Europeanized Egyptian Gaston
Zananiri, whom Tmime mentions in passing (Un rve mditerranen, p.127), presented a paper on Semitism at the conference, published as Communication sur le
smitisme (Alexandria/Cairo: La Semaine Egyptienne, 1935).
112 Jean-Desthieux, LHumanisme et la Mditerrane: rapport gnral, pp.1718. See also
pp.14556, note 1.
113 LHumanisme et la Mditerrane, p.57. Grenier published the full text of his reply as
an article entitled Humanisme mditerranen, Rveil dAntibes (27 November 1935)
and Progrs dAntibes (30 November 1935). I am grateful to Toby Garfitt for providing
me with a partial transcription of this.
105
Audisio and Camus

Fabre deals with both Audisio and Camus in a section on the Mediterranean
and the colonial project (MF, 5368), linking Camuss lecture with Audisios
Sel de la mer and opposing both to Bertrands view of the Mediterranean.
Suggesting that the latter merges with the colonial project (MF, 60), he
argues that a different representation of the Mediterranean the pre-war
incarnation of what other critics refer to as the cole dAlger took shape
in the 1930s around the publisher Edmond Charlot, Audisio and Camus.
This new configuration of the Mediterranean, says Fabre, was inscribed,
not only within a debate about colonialism, but within a larger political
and international context: the political, ideological and cultural debate on
fascism, which was brought to a head by Mussolinis invasion of Ethiopia
in October 1935.
According to Fabre, Audisios representation of the Mediterranean
was very clearly opposed to Bertrands idea of the Latin Mediterranean,
which was based on racial inequality (MF, 6465). As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Fabre similarly sees Camus as defending a vision of
the Mediterranean based on a possible union between the West and the
(Semitic) East. From this viewpoint, both Camus and Audisio can be
regarded as belonging to a tradition of progressive French intellectuals,
stretching back to the Saint-Simonians, who were sympathetic to the East
in general, and Arabs in particular. However, none of the progressive
predecessors of Audisio and Camus identified by Fabre was opposed to
colonialism in principle, while many of them, as we have seen, were personally involved in colonialism in practice. With this in mind, the next
chapter will take a closer look at the Mediterranean humanism of Audisio,
whose mid-1930s writings on the Mediterranean were the single greatest
influence on Camuss lecture.
106
chapter 4
Postscript: The Ambiguous Mediterraneanism of

Nicolas Sarkozy
An examination of the history of French discourses on the Mediterranean
since Camuss lecture is beyond the scope of this study.114 Given his obvious
desire to associate himself with Camus,115 however, it seems appropriate to
take a brief look at what the current French President Nicolas Sarkozy has
said on the subject, specifically in the February 2007 election campaign
speech in which he first launched the idea of a Mediterranean Union.
At that time, an embryonic pan-Mediterranean grouping was already
in existence, in the shape of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (also
known as the Barcelona Process), which had been initiated in 1995 and
included non-Mediterranean EU member states. Although he was subsequently forced to revert to this model now renamed the Union for the
Mediterranean Sarkozys original conception of a grouping restricted
to Mediterranean-rim countries sought to further a number of strategic
objectives, including keeping Turkey out of the EU and controlling immigration from North Africa.116 From this viewpoint, his February 2007
114 For the period up to 2000, see Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane. For general
accounts which bring the story up to Sarkozy, see Jean-Franois Daguzan, Frances
Mediterranean Policy: Between Myths and Strategy, Journal of Contemporary
European Studies 17:3 (2009), 387400, and Jean-Paul Gourvitch, Le Rve mditerranen, dUlysse Sarkozy (Paris: ditions Luvre, 2009).
115 The most obvious example of this was Sarkozys wish that Camuss remains should
be transferred to the Panthon in Paris, a wish frustrated when Camuss son Jean
opposed the move. Sarkozy had previously invited Camuss daughter Catherine to
lunch at the Elyse to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Camus receiving the Nobel
Prize for Literature. He had also quoted Camus in speeches and made a pilgrimage
to Tipaza, the site which inspired Camuss lyrical essay Noces Tipasa, during a
state visit to Algeria.
116 It was in the framework of a Mediterranean Union, said Sarkozy, that we had not
only to envisage the relationship between Europe and Turkey, but also to rethink
what used to be called Frances Arab policy; he also spoke of a Eurafrican strategy
of which the Mediterranean would inevitably be the pivot. Nicolas Sarkozy, Speech
107
speech given in Toulon, the home of a large pied-noir community and a

former stronghold of Jean-Marie Le Pens far-right, anti-immigrant Front
national party sent decidedly mixed messages to Muslims, combining
evocations of Al-Andalusian convivencia and repeated references to dialogue
with Islamophobic insinuations and an apologia for French colonialism.
To put it another way, it was as if a schizophrenic Sarkozy or rather his
speechwriter Henry Guaino were blending Ballard and Bertrand in an
attempt to appease different audiences.
Sarkozy began his long and wide-ranging speech by declaring that
France was doubting itself, its identity, its role and its future. In a long
list of things that he said could not go on he included, on the one hand,
forced marriages, the law of older brothers, polygamy and female genital
mutilation practices that he evidently associated with Islam and to which
he referred again later in his speech and on the other, the scorning of
French values, the repudiation of French history and the denigration of
the nation. What he had come to tell the French, however, was that their
future was being played out in the Mediterranean. Drawing on a wide range
of historical references that included the knight crusaders and Alexanders
dream of a universal empire uniting East and West, Sarkozy said that we
were the children, not only of Socrates, Augustus and Jesus whom he
referred to, not by name, but as a humble Jew but also of Cordoba
and Granada, of Arab scholars who had enriched and passed on to us
the inheritance of the Ancient Greeks. For too long, our great error had
been to have turned our back on the Mediterranean, which he described
as the hinge of North and South, East and West: The Algerian drama, the
occultation of the colonial past, the fashion for repentance have contributed to making us strangers to what had for so long and so naturally been
a continuation of ourselves.
According to Sarkozy, however, Europes future lay in the South:
in Toulon, 7 February 2007 <http://sites.univ-provence.fr/veronis/Discours2007/

transcript.php?n=Sarkozy&p=2007-02-07> accessed 18 May 2010; all further references are to this webpage.
108
chapter 4
The European dream needs the Mediterranean dream. It shrank with the shattering
of the dream which in the past set the knights of all Europe on the roads to the East,
the dream which attracted so many emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and so
many kings of France towards the south, the dream that was the dream of Bonaparte
in Egypt, of Napoleon III in Algeria, of Lyautey117 in Morocco this dream which
was not so much a dream of conquest as a dream of civilization.
We should stop blackening the past, said Sarkozy, by which he meant

Frances colonial past. Yes, the West had been guilty for a long time of arrogance and ignorance, and many crimes and injustices had been committed.
But most of those who went off to the South, according to Sarkozy, were
men and women of good will who thought in good faith that they were
working for an ideal of civilization. Although they had never exploited
anyone, they had lost everything after being driven from a land (i.e. Algeria)
where their work had given them the right to live in peace among a population, Sarkozy claimed, to whom they were fraternally joined. By what
right, Sarkozy asked, did those who called for repentance for colonialism
ask the sons to repent for the sins of their fathers sins, he said, that often
only existed in the imagination of their accusers?
At this point, Sarkozy enlisted Camus as a spokesman for European
Algerians, quoting a passage from Chroniques algriennes (Algerian
Chronicles) in which Camus expressed his love for his native land (IV,
379). Without identifying them as such, Sarkozy pointedly declared that
if France had a moral debt, it was to the exiled pieds-noirs; that if France
owed apologies and reparations, it was to the children of harkis (Algerians
who fought on the French side during the Algerian War). To veterans of
the armed forces from Frances former colonies, he offered the countrys
gratitude; to North Africans who had come to live in France, he offered
not repentance, but understanding and respect providing that they in
turn showed love and respect for France and its history (which implicitly
included its colonial history).
117 Hubert Lyautey was Military Governor of French Morocco (19071912) and then
Resident-General of Morocco when it became a French protectorate (19121925).
109
More generally, and having earlier spoken of the threat of the clash
of civilizations, Sarkozy suggested that the humanism shared by Muslim
and Christian scholars in the past could provide the basis for North and
South, East and West to come together in a new Renaissance.118 He went
on to say, however, that it was Europe and not, by implication, Islam
that offered the only chance to avoid the death of a certain idea of man
that the Mediterranean had passed down to us. I want, he declared at
the end of his speech, to be the President of a France which will set the
Mediterranean on the path of its reunification after twelve centuries of division and rifts. Here Guaino seemed to be drawing, directly or indirectly,
on the highly influential interpretation of the Belgian medieval historian
Henri Pirenne, according to whom the unity of the Roman Mediterranean
had been destroyed, not by the Barbarians, but by the Muslim conquest
of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries, turning the western Mediterranean into what Pirenne described as a
Muslim lake.119
Although Sarkozy described those who called for repentance for colonialism as rewriting history, it was a charge that could more accurately
be levelled at Sarkozy and Guaino themselves. Their speech attempted to
legitimize the project of a Mediterranean Union by presenting it as the
realization of a dream that had haunted the European imagination from
Alexander through the Crusades to French colonialism in North Africa,
which they sought to rehabilitate by identifying it with a pan-European, but
predominantly Gallic mission civilisatrice. Not only was Sarkozys speech, as
Jean-Franois Daguzan suggests,120 a synthesis of previous French discourses
118 What Sarkozy or rather Guaino may have had in mind was not so much the
Italian as the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth to ninth centuries.
119 Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1992 [1935], p.215. On Pirenne and
his influence on Braudel and other French historians, see Fabre, La Mditerrane
franaise, pp. 1079.
120 Exaggerating somewhat, Daguzan claims that [e]very myth and concept developed by French intellectuals from the nineteenth century or modern-day politicians can be found in Sarkozys vision (Frances Mediterranean Policy, p.394; see
pp.39497).
110
chapter 4
on the Mediterranean both inclusive and exclusive, multicultural and

nationalistic it also confirmed the impossibility of extricating current
discourse on the subject from Frances colonial past.
chapter 5
Gabriel Audisios Mid-1930s Writings on the

Mediterranean
In this chapter, I shall examine a selection of texts by the writer Gabriel

Audisio which were published in the two years before Camuss lecture
on The New Mediterranean Culture. Camus explicitly acknowledges
Audisios influence in a passage where he suggests, referring particularly
to North Africa, that what is most essential in the Mediterranean genius
springs from the encounter between East and West, adding in brackets:
In this connection one can only refer to Audisio (I, 569). As Jacqueline
Lvi-Valensi has suggested,1 Audisios influence was also apparent in the
name of the bulletin of the Algiers Maison de la culture in which Camuss
lecture first appeared, Jeune Mditerrane (Young Mediterranean). In
1935, Audisio had published a collection of essays under the title Jeunesse
de la Mditerrane (Youth of the Mediterranean), which he followed
with a series of related articles that formed the basis of a second volume
with the same title, published in 1936 and subtitled Sel de la mer (Salt of
the Sea).2
These articles, which contain material not included in Sel de la mer,
have not been discussed by previous critics.3 Their interest here lies in the
1
2
3
Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi, Albert Camus, ou la naissance dun romancier, 19301942,

ed. Agns Spiquel (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), p.345.
Jeunesse de la Mditerrane (Paris: Gallimard, 1935); Jeunesse de la Mditerrane II: Sel
de la mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1936). All further references to these editions, abbreviated as JM and Sel respectively, have been incorporated into the body of the text.
The only full-length study of Audisios work appears to be Max Alhaus Un crivain
mditerranen: Gabriel Audisio, doctoral dissertation, Universit de Paris 3, 1982, the
basis of his subsequent article Gabriel Audisio et la Mditerrane, NRF 513 (1995),
112
chapter 5
light they shed on the polemical context in which both Sel de la mer and
Camuss lecture were written, for just as Camuss lecture needs to be seen
in relation to Audisios earlier writings on the Mediterranean, so Audisios
texts themselves need to be seen in relation to what contemporary writers had said on the subject. My discussion of Audisios texts will therefore
focus on two areas. First, I shall give an exposition of Audisios central
ideas in their immediate intellectual context: the ideas of other writers in
relation to whom Audisio defines his own position on certain key issues.
Second, I shall examine the similarities and differences between Audisios
stance on these issues and that adopted by Camus in his lecture, which
will help to identify Camuss own position more precisely. Hitherto, critics of both a humanist and a postcolonial persuasion have assumed that
both writers shared the same outlook, usually identified as that of a whole
literary school, the so-called cole dAlger.4 While this is broadly true, there
are also significant differences between Camuss and Audisios viewpoints
that can only be brought out by careful comparison. This is particularly
true of their attitudes to colonialism, where I shall discuss Audisios views
separately, as the basis for a later examination of Camuss own position on
this question.
Given that relatively little has been written on Audisio in his own
right, a few words should be said first about his background. This seems
particularly appropriate in view of Jean Djeuxs claim that Audisios vision
of the Mediterranean is a myth created partly in response to his personal
situation.5 As Audisio himself reveals in Jeunesse de la Mditerrane, he
was born (in 1900) of mixed blood Piedmontese, Romanian, Flemish
and Niois (JM, 41). After living in Algiers where his father was director
of the Municipal Opera between the ages of ten and thirteen, Audisio
studied law and Muslim civilization in Strasbourg, but returned to Algeria
to work as a drafter, first in Constantine and then in Algiers at the Governor
4
5
8791. However, neither Alhau nor any of the many other critics who discuss Audisio
refers to the articles that Audisio published between the two works.
See Chapter 4.
Djeux, De lternel Mditerranen , p.691.
113
Generals office. As a secretary and librarian in the Palais des dlgations

financires, he was responsible for native affairs,6 and then became the manager of the Office Algrien dAction conomique et Touristique (OFALAC),
spending his time between Algiers and Paris.7 A poet and novelist in his
spare time, he won the Algerianist Prix littraire de lAlgrie for Trois hommes
et un minaret (Three Men and a Minaret, 1926), a comic novel of FrancoMuslim relations, and later published, among many other works, the historical study La Vie de Haroun-al-Raschid (The Life of Haroun-al-Raschid,
1930).
In Amour dAlger (Love of Algiers, 1938), Audisio described himself
as having become something of an Algerian national8 and said that he
had written almost nothing that had not been more or less inspired by
Algeria.9 Having joined the French Resistance during the Occupation, he
was arrested and briefly imprisoned; after the war, he worked as a cultural
adviser at the Department of Algerian Affairs. In 1957, during the Algerian
War, he published Feux vivants Algrie Mditerrane (Living Fires
Algeria Mediterranean), an essay in which he expressed his love of Algeria
and his sorrow that his dream of a multiracial society there had not been
realized. He died in 1978.
Two points in particular from this brief biographical sketch should be
borne in mind in what follows: first, Audisios cosmopolitan background
and consequent commitment to what would now be called multiculturalism; and second, his position as a civil servant in the colonial administration, which may have affected what he said and what he could say as a
writer.
6
7
8
9
Tmime, Un Rve mditerranen, p.95.

Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, p.210; Tmime, Un Rve mditerranen,
p.101.
Amour dAlger (Algiers: Charlot, 1938), p.9, quoted by Dunwoodie, Writing French
Algeria, p.181; Dunwoodies translation.
Quoted by Djeux, De lternel Mditerranen , p.686.
114
chapter 5
The Polemical Context of Jeunesse de la Mditerrane

In Patrie Mditerrane (Mediterranean Homeland), the first of the essays
that make up Jeunesse de la Mditerrane, Audisio outlined his conception
of a Mediterranean homeland (JM, 924). Contrasting the differences that
separated Frenchmen from different regions of France with the similarities that linked the different nationalities of the Mediterranean, Audisio
presented the Mediterranean as a supranational patrie, and its inhabitants
as a distinct race. Looking forward as the Saint-Simonians had done earlier to the eventual unification of Europe and the world, he offered the
intermarriage between different Mediterranean nationalities in colonial
Algeria as a model for the future:
thanks to realities as concrete as Mediterranean similarities, the unity of a new
world may develop around this sea that has experienced its own gathering together
[rassemblement] several times. Here is an example for what it is worth: Algeria (I am
not saying the Algeria that was conquered but the Algeria that has been colonized) is
much less the result of an idea than of a natural commingling of bloods. (JM, 11).
I shall be returning to the question of Audisios attitude to colonialism

later. In the meantime, however, it should be noted that Audisio is careful
to disassociate his view of Algeria from that of the colonialist ideologue
Louis Bertrand. Alluding to the title of Bertrands 1899 novel Le Sang des
races (The Blood of the Races), Audisio shows that he is well aware of the
latters Latin-supremacist notion of Algeria as a Mediterranean meltingpot the cauldron in which the blood of races simmers (JM, 12). He
asks to be spared from facile Latinity (Audisios emphasis), mocking the
elation with which Bertrand dismisses the twelve centuries of Islam that
he (Bertrand) saw as having weighed down on the Maghreb.
Audisio also expresses his impatience with other generalizations
Hellenic, Byzantine or Phoenician imposed on his sea, describing them
as only transitory aspects of the eternal Mediterranean. He emphasizes,
however, that his main target is Bertrands doctrine: it is particularly this
Latinity, polemical and provocative, that annoys me (JM, 12). Quoting
115
his fellow Marseillais, the poet Louis Brauquier (My Arab blood and my
Phoenician blood, JM, 13) and talking of the confusions that make a race,
he is careful to distance his conceptions of a Mediterranean patrie and a
Mediterranean race from any hint of nationalism or racism:
Do not confuse patrie and nationalism. I protest against la mar nostre of the
Provenaux, against il mare nostro of the Italians, an evil legacy of the mare nostrum
of the Latins. [] No, there is only one Mediterranean.
And I would protest just as strongly against those who would seek, from this
feeling of race, to derive another racism. I wish to retain from [the notion of ] race
only the fraternal gathering together and not the opposition. (JM, 23)
Although he only makes a neutral reference (JM, 16) to Maurras in this

opening essay, Audisio also positions himself by saying that he took issue
with Valrys assertion, in his outline of the syllabus for what Audisio calls
the Centre dtudes mditerranen [sc. Le Centre universitaire mditerranen],
that the Mediterranean was bordered by three parts of the world (i.e. Africa,
Asia and Europe).10 In arguing that the Maghreb is not yet Africa, and that
Turkey and Syria are not Asia (JM, 18), Audisio seems to be attempting
to detach the countries concerned from their respective continents and
bring them inside the circle of the Mediterranean, rather than relegating
them to the margins.
As its title suggests, however, the most important point to emerge
from Patrie Mditerrane is the notion of the Mediterranean as a nonnationalistic homeland, one that brings together the members of a mixed
race in a loose, fraternal community. The Mediterranean, says Audisio, has
never separated those who live on its shores: it has even mitigated, rather
than fired, the great religious divisions and the spiritual conflict between
East and West (JM, 21). Jews and Marseillais, he says, have been eternal
agents de liaison, carrying on trading in spite of wars and religions, linking
East and West even during the Crusades (JM, 2122). Acknowledging his
own national and local loyalties even as he rejects particularist notions of
10
Paul Valry, Le Centre universitaire mditerranen [1933], Regards sur le monde

actuel, 3rd edn (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Ides, 1945), pp.33459, p.345.
116
chapter 5
his sea, Audisio declares his ultimate allegiance to a maternal, thalassic

Mediterranean rather than to the masculine and territorial concept of a
national fatherland: No. There is only one Mediterranean, a mother to
all her children [maternelle tous les siens]. [] [I]f France is my nation, if
Marseille is my city, my homeland [patrie] is the sea, the Mediterranean,
from end to end (JM, 24).
The Polemical Context of Audisios Articles on the

Mediterranean (19351936)
In an article on humanism and Latinity published in Europe in November
1935,11 Audisio responded to what he saw as misunderstandings of Jeunesse
de la Mditerrane, and in particular of his position on the question of
Latinity. Emphasizing that he had tried to avoid confusions between patrie
and nationalism, and between ethnic community and racism, he referred
to the recent conference on Humanism and the Mediterranean that had
been held in Monaco by the Acadmie Mditerranenne. Although Audisio
did not attend the conference, he presented what he would have suggested
as points for discussion regarding what he describes as this terribly topical problem.12
Much of what Audisio had to say on this subject was reworked in Sel
de la mer, the second volume of Jeunesse de la Mditerrane, published in
1936. He also, however, made some remarks that did not reappear in his
book, but which evoked the specific ideological and political context in
which it was written. Whereas humanism, Audisio argued, was made for
man and would go as far as deifying man in himself, the exact opposite
could currently be seen in a certain zone of the Mediterranean where the
11
12
Humanisme et latinit, Europe: revue littraire mensuelle (November 1935),

41114.
Ibid., p.411.
117
notion of the totalitarian State reigned, paradoxically combined with the

cult of an individual an obvious allusion to Mussolinis Italy. Self-styled
Mediterranean humanists, wrote Audisio in quotation marks, would do
well to ponder on this point, in the very likely case that certain defenders
of the West wanted to draw them towards fascist proselytization.13 This
was clearly a reference to Pour la dfense de lOccident (For the Defence
of the West), a manifesto in support of Mussolinis invasion of Ethiopia
that had been published in Le Temps just over a month previously.14 Thus, in
Rome, lunique objet ,15 a short February 1936 article whose title he later
used for an essay in Sel de la mer, Audisio clearly identified the manifesto
and its signatories as his principal target in both the articles opening line
The defenders of the West have spoken and its conclusion, in which
he addressed those who signed manifestos in defence of the West.
Audisio returned to the attack in a March 1936 contribution to a regular column in Cahiers du Sud entitled Vers une synthse mditerranenne
(Towards a Mediterranean Synthesis).16 Quoting from Humanisme et
latinit, he referred once again to the conference on Mediterranean humanism held in Monaco by the Acadmie mditerranenne. This time, however,
he explained why, although he had the greatest respect for two or three
members of the Acadmie and thought the programme was excellent, he
had not attended the conference: I could not help noticing that it mainly
brought together the imposing majority for whom the Mediterranean
spirit constitutes the synthesis of reaction, conservatism and Mussolinian
(sometimes Hitlerian) sympathies. Quoting from the passage cited above
on certain defenders of the West, he commented parenthetically: their
13
14
15
16
Ibid., p.412.
See Chapter 6. The manifesto is reproduced in Jean-Franois Sirinelli, Intellectuels
et passions franaises: manifestes et ptitions au XXe sicle (Paris: Fayard, 1990),
pp.9294.
Rome, lunique objet , Vendredi, 21 February 1936, p.5. Audisios title alludes to
Camilles famous tirade against Rome in Act IV, scene 5 of Corneilles Horace: Rome,
lunique objet de mon ressentiment (Rome, the sole object of my resentment).
Vers une synthse mditerranenne. Documents sur lesprit mditerranen, Cahiers
du Sud 181 (March 1936), unpaginated.
118
chapter 5
manifesto had just appeared and there were a lot of them at the conference
another clear allusion to Pour la dfense de lOccident.
According to Audisio, his fears were only too justified. With one or
two exceptions, he claimed, all the speeches and replies at the conference
that had been published showed the tendencies that he had denounced
in advance. Here he singled out the writer Paul Morand as having spoken
in a spirit entirely contrary to both the meaning of the Mediterranean
genius and the spirit of the conference by criticizing the civilizations of the
Mediterranean East. According to Audisio, this was an attitude that readers of Cahiers du Sud which had published a special issue on Islam and
the West the previous summer would find shocking. (In fact, as Audisio
acknowledged in a later column, he had confused the contents of an earlier
publication by the Acadmie mditerranenne with the proceedings of the
conference, which had yet to appear.)17 In addition, Audisio pointed out,
the same individuals had collaborated on numerous special issues of publications notably the literary review La Phalange that had supported
the Italian Fascist government in the Ethiopian conflict.
An authentic Mediterranean, said Audisio, was entitled to speak out,
and this is what he had done in Rome, lunique objet , which had had
the polemical accents that the circumstances required. He then quoted
a passage which described how Roman hatred and jealousy had led to
the destruction of Carthage, with salt being spread on the site to prevent
anything growing there. Together with the sack of the Spanish city of
Numancia and Jerusalem, according to the passage, the obliteration of
Carthage formed a trilogy showing how cruelly implacable Rome could
be when it had decided to do away with a race that inconvenienced it.
Audisio then revealed that the passage in question had been written by
Camille Mauclair, who was not only a member of the Acadmie mditerranenne, but also a signatory of Pour la dfense de lOccident which
17
Vers une synthse mditerranenne. Document sur lesprit Mditerranen, Cahiers

du Sud 183 (May 1936), 42729. Since the conference proceedings were published as
Cahier 2 de lAcadmie Mditerranenne, Audisio was evidently referring to Cahier 1
of the same (Monaco: Acadmie Mditerranenne, 1935).
119
Audisio finally identified by name and a particularly enthusiastic contributor to La Phalange. As Audisio noted, Mauclair had expressed the
wish that the Ethiopians might be defeated by Rome for their own good
(Audisios emphasis).
The overtly polemical articles on the Mediterranean that Audisio published between the two volumes of Jeunesse de la Mditerrane clearly had a
decisive effect on the content of the second volume, Sel de la mer. Rome,
lunique objet would become the title of one of the two longest essays in
the book, while a further article, Le sel de Carthage18 obviously inspired
by what Mauclair had written on the subject, and published in Europe in
September 1936 provided the title of the other. This confirms that both
Jeunesse de la Mditerrane and especially Sel de la mer need to be seen in
the immediate polemical context of contemporary texts on Latinity, the
Mediterranean and Mediterranean humanism.
The Polemical Context of Sel de la mer

In the final essay of Sel de la mer (1936), Audisio explained his intention
in writing the book. This was to show that Latinity was only a moment of
lternelle Mditerrane; that there were brilliant civilizations before and
after Rome; that the Latin spirit does not form all of the genius of the
Mediterranean and that this genius cannot be explained if the Semitic East
and Islam in particular are excluded from it (Sel, 213). Audisio thus made
clear that his vision of the Mediterranean, unlike Bertrands, specifically
included Arabs and Jews.
As Audisio himself admitted, however, he too had once believed in
the notion of a Latin Africa (Sel, 213). Without naming Algerianism as
such, he confessed that he had once been sympathetic to the movement
18
Le sel de Carthage, Europe: revue littraire mensuelle 165 (September 1936),

1424.
120
chapter 5
that had developed in Algiers under Bertrands influence some fifteen years
before (in other words, around 1920). Although he recognized that the
notion of lAfrique latine had been productive in literature, he described
its proponents idea of persuading the natives of their supposed Latin
traditions as an illusion. Here Audisio appears to be alluding to Bertrands
preface to his historical study Les Villes dor (Cities of Gold, 1921). Far from
being hostile to the Native of today, Bertrand had claimed, the idea that
French Africa was a reincarnation of Roman Africa re-established the link
between autochthonous Africans and Latins of the West: In what way is it
to offend the Algerian or the Muslim Tunisian to remind him of his Latin
forebears? Just as Egyptians were proud of the Pharaohs achievements in
Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, so our Arabs, according to Bertrand,
could look at Roman ruins in North Africa and say Thats what our ancestors, the Romans, did!19
Elsewhere in his final essay, Audisio seemed to be responding once
again to the manifesto Pour la dfense de lOccident, which had dismissed
Ethiopians as a hotchpotch [amalgame] of uneducated tribes.20 While
not denying the importance of what the Romans had achieved, Audisio
claimed, referring to Africa, that the mixture of races, [] the hotchpotch [amalgame] that makes up this astonishing people is better (Sel,
214, Audisios emphasis). Audisios suggestion, in an earlier essay of Sel de
la mer, that there was no better symbol of the mixing of races and peoples
than Aeneas, the Trojan who founded what would become Rome, points
to a further polemical opponent. For Audisio, Aeneas was an anti-racist,
the archetype of the wog [mtque], to borrow the language of patriots
(Sel, 87). Audisios target here was Maurras, who popularized the use of the
word mtque from the Ancient Greek metoikos (metic), the term for an
alien with limited rights of citizenship as a term of abuse for immigrants,
whose allegiance to France, Maurras believed, could not be trusted.21
Louis Bertrand, preface to Les Villes dor: Afrique et Sicile antiques (Paris: Fayard,
1921), quoted by Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, p.56.
20 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions franaises, p.93
21 The modern, pejorative sense of the term originated with Maurras, who first used it in
a newspaper article in 1894, the year that the Dreyfus Affair began. See Eugen Weber,
19
121
Audisios reaction against the doctrine of Latinity is most evident,

however, in the two longest essays of Sel de la mer, Le sel de Carthage
and Rome, lunique objet.22 In Le sel de Carthage which, as we have
seen, was clearly inspired by Mauclairs description of Romes destruction
of the city Audisio sought to rehabilitate Carthage as a conscious counter-myth to the myth of Rome propagated by the proponents of Latinity.
After giving a series of examples of the way in which the Carthaginians
had been maligned, Audisio claimed that the reason for this systematic
denigration was because Carthage was seen as Jewish, or virtually so: In
the end, the whole quarrel about Carthage comes down to a dispute about
Semitism, to the conflict of East and West (Sel, 49). (It should be noted
that Audisio uses the term Semitic in its primary sense, to refer not only
to Jews, but also to Arabs.).
For Audisio, this dispute was exemplified by the debate between French
historians over the importance of Semitic influences in the development
of Mediterranean civilizations. Whereas the anti-Jewish Stphane Gsell
(the author of a monumental eight-volume Histoire ancienne de lAfrique
du Nord (191328) and a key influence on Bertrands notion of lAfrique
latine)23 rejected any such influence, for example, Victor Brard who
had written a two-volume study of the Phoenicians and the Odyssey saw
the Mediterranean as owing everything to Phoenicia, and Semitism as the
golden key to civilizations of the sea. Audisio went on to explicitly identify
22
23
Action Franaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1962), p.13.
Sel de la mer, pp.4775 and 89123
As Lorcin notes, it was Gsell who introduced Bertrand to the Roman ruins at Tipasa,
which had a decisive role in confirming Bertrands notion of a Latin Africa (Lorcin,
France and Rome in Africa, pp.31516). Lorcin argues that, despite obvious differences, there is an essential continuity between Bertrands epiphany at Tipasa and the
sensual epiphany Camus famously described in Noces Tipasa (Nuptials in Tipasa):
quoting a symbolic passage in which Camus describes how the ruins are overrun with
flowers, Lorcin concludes that the Roman past has become an integral part of the
colonial present (p.326). She overlooks, however, a draft in which Camus appears
to consciously distance himself from Bertrand: Of course, there were Romans here,
but I cannot say how indifferent this leaves me (I, 1235).
122
chapter 5
Latinity with anti-Semitism, arguing that there was nothing to prevent a

new Mediterranean synthesis apart from anti-Semitism, and with it, what
is called Latinity. / For East and West are still translated as Semitism and
Latinity (Sel, 5758). Similarly, alluding once again to Pour la dfense
de lOccident, Audisio recalled that self-styled French Westerners took
the side of Italian Latinity during the Ethiopian war against Abyssinians
whom they insinuated were only Jews, although in fact they were mostly
Christians (Sel, 58).24
In Rome, lunique objet, contrary to his admission that he had once
believed in the notion of lAfrique latine (Sel, 214), Audisio claimed that he
had been against Rome and on the side of its enemies and victims for as long
as he could remember (Sel, 91). He had returned to his schoolboy hatred
of Rome, he said, because its admirers had forced him to take sides:
Why? Because the sycophants of Latinity speak through a thousand mouths about
their conferences, their gazettes, their academies. [] Because their delirious love
for Rome makes them write the craziest absurdities. They flatter themselves on
scanning their verse to the march of the legions []. They are reduced to setting
the West, which they audaciously identify with Latinity, against the East, instead of
understanding that the great secret of the Mediterranean is the conciliation of East
and West. They are reduced to racism.25 (Sel, 9394)
Their conferences, their gazettes, their academies [] their verse Audisios

target here is twofold: Maurras, the co-founder of the neoclassical cole
romane or Romanic school of poetry, who had begun his career as a journalist writing for the Gazette de France; and Bertrand, a member of the
Acadmie franaise and the honorary president of the Acadmie mditer-
24 Audisio seems to overstate his case here. The relevant passage of Pour la dfense de
lOccident attempted to justify its claim that Ethiopia was one of the most backward
countries in the world by saying that even Christianity has remained ineffective there
(Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions franaises, p.93). It did not say or imply, however,
that Ethiopians were Jewish, or even Semitic.
25 Audisio referred in a footnote to the Italian governments plan to separate whites
from blacks in Ethiopia and to prohibit mixed marriages.
123
ranenne, whose conference on Humanism and the Mediterranean had

been held the previous year.
Audisios brand of Mediterranean humanism, then, is a reaction against
the Latin humanism of Bertrand, the former teacher of classical rhetoric,
and Maurras, the neoclassical poet. It is they and their allies who are the
target in the following passage from Rome, lunique objet:
I maintain that the Mediterranean genius refuses to be reduced to the Latin genius
and its humanism to the humanities. To the Latinism of erudition and regular verse,
in which Virgilian mythology takes the place of conventional language, I oppose the
indisputable romanticism of the Mediterranean. To this shrivelled Latinity, I oppose
everything that makes Mediterranean civilization: Greece, Egypt, Judas, Carthage,
Christ, Islam. And, in a word, true Latinity itself ! (Sel, 9495).26
The attempt to make people believe that humanism and Latinity were
one and the same, said Audisio, was a confidence trick: If one looks into
it a little more closely, one discovers how odd the humanism that most
of the Latins are proposing to us is. One notices that it is made for the
use of races of the West, and, among the Whites, for certain privileged
Whites (Sel, 117). For Audisio, such so-called humanism was not what
he imagined the contribution of the Mediterranean to a notion of Man
to be (Sel, 11718). Here Audisio can be seen as responding once again to
Pour la dfense de lOccident, which had presented the consequences of
imposing sanctions on Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia as constituting a
threat to the very notion of man.27
Pour la dfense de lOccident had been unashamedly particularist,
denouncing the false juridical universalism that places [] the civilized
and the barbarian on an equal footing.28 Audisio, by contrast, declared that
humanism was a universal value: It essentially excludes racism, which, by
definition, opposes one human family to the others (Sel, 118). While only
26 Ironically, Audisios criticism of Latinist poetry applies perfectly to the poem on the
Mediterranean that Camus wrote in 1933 (I, 97678), which referred to Virgil and
Melibus, a character in Virgils Eclogues. See Chapter 6.
27 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions franaises, p.93. Italics in the original.
28 Ibid.
124
chapter 5
Europeans went into Bertrands Mediterranean melting-pot, Audisio added

Arabs, Jews and Blacks to his. Referring to Mistrals ode la race latine,
Audisio denied that there was such a thing as a Latin race:
On the other hand, I do see a Mediterranean race, but it is the typical example of the
impure race, made up of every contribution and every mixture: exactly the opposite
of those ethnic units who would like, believing themselves to be specific, to derive
from this the justification for a universal imposition. Scratch your Latins a little: the
Jew, the Moor, and sometimes the Black are not far away. (Sel, 118)
Similarly, whereas Bertrand feared miscegenation, seeing it as a threat to

Latin supremacy, Audisio positively welcomed it. In Sur les routes du Sud
(1936), the fourth volume of his autobiography, Bertrand wrote:
I am not far from believing with Gobineau that race is a spiritual and even a metaphysical entity, and that this original and irreducible character makes it resistant to
any mixing [mlange]. When it degenerates [sabtardit], authority and with it power
pass into other hands. Let us stay Latins to keep the Empire. [] [A] race that degenerates, which loses its own qualities, becomes incapable of defending itself.29
Audisio, by contrast, saw racial intermingling in Africa as a model for

the rest of the world: [Africa] teaches that one must not ask her [] for
any race other than the beauty of mixed races. Mixing and illegitimacy
[le mlange et la btardise] are the shining truth here: a youth that is
shaping itself, a face of the world of the future (Sel, 18). And whereas
Bertrand, again following Gobineau, believed in the fundamental, essential and irremediable inequality of human races,30 and Pour la dfense de
lOccident had denounced the dangerous fiction of the absolute equality
29 Bertrand, Une destine, IV: Sur les routes du Sud (Paris: Fayard, 1936), p.218, quoted
by Djeux, De lternel Mditerranen , p.672.
30 Fundamental, essential and irremediable inequality of the human races: one always
has to come back to this idea, after a serious observation of man. Gobineaus masterpiece, that admirable Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, is more topical than
ever before. Bertrand, Devant lIslam (Paris: Plon, 1926), p.46, quoted by Fabre, La
France et la Mditerrane, p.65.
125
of all nations,31 Audisio made his own commitment to human rights and
racial equality clear. If the Mediterranean could teach the world a lesson
about race, he wrote, it was precisely that of a human community that
transcended the barriers of blood and national borders: A Mediterranean
constitution, in its first article, would proclaim the rights and equality of
races. For myself, I am a citizen of that Mediterranean, providing that I
have as fellow-citizens all the peoples of the sea, including Jews, Arabs,
Berbers and Blacks (Sel, 11819).
Audisio and Camus: Similarities and Differences

As we have seen, Camus refers to Audisio by name after claiming that
what is perhaps most essential in the Mediterranean genius springs from
the encounter between East and West.32 Audisios influence on Camuss
lecture, however, goes well beyond this, most obviously in the notion of
a peaceful, supranational Mediterranean homeland that Audisio outlines
in Patrie Mditerrane and reiterates at the end of Rome, lunique objet
(Sel, 12122). Audisios insistence, for example, that his idea of such a homeland has nothing to do with nationalism (JM, 22) and his description of
the Nation as an abstraction (Sel, 119) are echoed by Camuss assertion,
referring to the Mediterranean, that la Patrie is not the abstraction that
31
32
Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions franaises, p.93.

Audisio and Camus were not alone in expressing such views. Jean-Pierre Faure, for
example, talked of Algerias vocation to be [a] meeting-point for Europe and Africa
on the one hand, and of the West and Islam on the other. Faure, Alger capitale (Paris:
Socit franaise dditions littraires et techniques, 1936), p.88, quoted by Andr
Abbou and Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi (CAC3, p.101). Unlike Camus, on the other
hand, Audisio is explicit in his focus on the western Mediterranean, making clear
that he has only fished in the Mediterranean that belongs to the West, and not the
Adriatic, the Levant, the Aegean and the archipelagi (JM, 153).
126
chapter 5
precipitates men into massacre, but a certain taste for life that is common
to certain beings (I, 567).
As the following table illustrates, it is possible to identify at least four
other significant areas of common ground between the attitudes Camus
expresses in his lecture and with those expressed by Audisio in Jeunesse de
la Mditerrane and especially Sel de la mer:
Audisio
Camus
1. Assertion of a Mediterranean family identity

A bargee from Carqueirannes
is closer to a Cypriot fisherman
than to a paysan from the
Dauphinois (JM, 1516).
one can feel closer to a Genoese

or a Majorcan than to a Norman
or Alsatian (I, 567).
The evening express trains leaving

Paris for the Mediterranean take
on a smell of anchovy sauce and
a real family likeness. Cant it
be expressed? Can it be felt? Of
course it can! (JM, 14).
Thats what the Mediterranean

is, that smell or scent that it is
pointless to express: we can all
feel it with our skin (I, 567).
2. Rejection of an anti-Nordic Latin particularism

If, for example, one wished to
go further and set a Latin racism
against Germanic racism, I ask
myself how one would go about
it (Sel, 118).
To serve the cause of a

Mediterranean regionalism
may seem, [] taking up
fascism in reverse, to be setting
Latin peoples against Nordic
peoples. There is a constant
misunderstanding here (I, 565).
127
3. Rejection of Latinity, Rome and force

to identify the Latin
phenomenon with the
Mediterranean phenomenon is a
serious confusion (Sel, 103).
The whole mistake comes from

confusing Mediterranean and
Latinity (I, 565).
In the name of the

Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean genius, I rise up
against the exclusive worship of
Rome (Sel, 94).
[The Mediterranean] is the very

negation of Rome and the Latin
genius (I, 568).
The Mediterranean is not Rome

(Sel, 101).
Here we are with the

Mediterranean against Rome
(I, 570)
that is where the disciples of

Rome are taking us: the worship
of force and the success of force
(Sel, 104).
this much-vaunted [Latin] order

was the order that is imposed by
force and not the order that is
exuded in intelligence (I, 568).
4. Criticism of Western support for Mussolinis invasion of Ethiopia

Havent we seen, in the
Ethiopian War, Frenchmen
christening themselves Western
taking the side of Italian Latinity
against the Abyssinians []?
(Sel, 58).
It is in the name of this Latin

order that, in the Ethiopian affair,
twenty-four Western intellectuals
signed a degrading manifesto
praising Italys civilizing work
[uvre] in barbaric Ethiopia
(I, 568).
128
chapter 5
Beyond these specific similarities, however, there are also significant

differences between Audisios and Camuss attitudes, some obvious, some
less so. Where Camus, for example, identifies the true Mediterranean
with the golden age of Greece, Audisio sets up Carthage as a conscious
counter-myth to Rome33 and stresses that the Greek miracle, like the
Roman Empire and other generalizations imposed on his sea, is only a
transitory aspect of the eternal Mediterranean (JM, 12). Where Audisio
is explicitly anti-racist and anti-anti-Semitic, referring (as we have seen) to
Jews, Arabs, Berbers and Blacks as fellow-citizens,34 Camus focuses on antifascism, in response to the worsening international situation, most notably
the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. And where Camus opposes life to
abstraction, Audisio attacking the racism of his opponents opposes
life to purity, delighting in the fact that life makes almost nothing pure,
neither human races, nor animal species: All mixtures, which are the secret
of fecundities, heighten the sense of life in me (Sel, 87). He not only sees
miscegenation as characteristic of the Mediterranean race, but positively
welcomes it as a trend.
Rather than being explicitly stated, Camuss position on the question
of race is implicit in his view of the relationship between East and West,
which in an Algerian context clearly referred to the relationship between
Arabs and Europeans. While Camus acknowledges his indebtedness to
Audisio on the East/West issue, there are subtle differences in the way in
which the two writers talk about it. This can be illustrated by comparing
the quotations to which emphasis has been added where appropriate
in the following table:
33
Audisios choice of Carthage as a counter-myth to Rome partly reflects the genesis

of Sel de la mer: as Audisio reveals in his preface (Sel, 9), he wrote it after an official
invitation to go to Tunisia, the site of the ancient city.
34 It is notable that whereas Audisio uses the term race to refer to Mediterraneans in
general, Camus reserves it for European Algerians (the strong and curious race that
lives on our coasts, I, 56667).
129
Audisio
Camus
Tunis and maritime Tunisia

remain a marvellous meltingpot for the fusion of the
bodies of East and West [].
Nothing prevents the synthesis
of the Mediterranean from
taking place again. Nothing is
opposed [] to this essential
reunion [rassemblement].
(Sel, 57)
the Mediterranean is of all regions

perhaps the only one that links up
with [rejoigne] the great Eastern
philosophies (I, 569).
East and West set against each

other, that is the evil. They
were once united, and they can
be so again. I am waiting for
a new message to bring them
together again [rassembler]
instead of opposing them
(Sel, 58).
North Africa is one of the only

regions where East and West live
together (I, 569).
the great secret of the

Mediterranean is the
conciliation of East and West
(Sel, 94).
this unique encounter []

between East and West (I, 569);
we are in immediate contact with
this East (I, 570).
that is the true Mediterranean

and it is the East that it resembles
[se rapproche] (I, 569).
Where Audisio talks of East and West having once been united and
bring[ing] them together again, of synthesis and even the fusion of
bodies in a melting-pot, Camus speaks of the Mediterranean linking up
with and resembling the East, and of East and West liv[ing] together,
encounter[ing] each other and being in immediate contact. Although
Fabre argues that the vision of the Mediterranean that Camus defends is
based on a possible union between East and West, Camuss phrasing here
130
chapter 5
suggests their ultimate separateness. As Dunwoodie puts it: Cohabitation

is not fusion.35
In general terms, Audisios vision of the Mediterranean is more cosmopolitan and wide-ranging than that expressed by Camus in his lecture
(and indeed elsewhere). This can partly be explained by the very different
nature of the texts in question. Camuss lecture was an inaugural speech for
a cultural-political institution associated with the Popular Front. Audisios
essays, on the other hand, were above all a form of personal expression,
giving him the freedom to celebrate cultural diversity the range of exotic
food on display in an Armenian shop in Marseille (JM, 22), for example
as well as making polemical points of a non-party-political nature. And
where Camus, drawing on contemporary left-wing political discourse in a
direct attack on fascism, talks of collectivism and internationalism, Audisio
whose criticisms are mainly aimed at fellow French writers talks of
humanism and universalism.
Audisios Colonial Attitudes

Camuss criticism of certain aspects of colonialism in Algeria, notably in
his prewar journalism for Alger Rpublicain, is well known. In The New
Mediterranean Culture, however, as shown in Chapter 3, Camus does not
question the French colonial presence as such. Camuss position on this
and related matters at the time of his lecture will be discussed in detail
in Chapter 8. By way of preparation for this, I shall now examine where
Audisio, as Camuss single greatest influence in the lecture, stood on the
issue.
Audisio concluded Rome, lunique objet, one of the two longest essays
of Sel de la mer, by outlining an idealistic alternative to the Mediterranean
35
Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, p.62; Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria,

p.188.
131
imperialism propounded by the apostles of Latinity. This took the form

of what he described as:
a Mediterranean unity based on a shared spirit [esprit] and the respect for human
truths, a homeland [patrie] of the Mediterranean that will be made by the soul of
an International of the peoples of the sea, offered as an example to the world, to all
other human families, for greater gatherings. (Sel, 122)
Audisio freely admitted that his vision might seem utopian. He insisted,
however, that the utopia of today is the oxygen of the future (Sel, 123).
Fabre, in a section on the Mediterranean and the colonial project, quotes
an extended version of this passage in support of his claim that Audisios
representation of the Mediterranean is firmly opposed to any nationalist
or imperialist perspective. For Fabre, Audisios Mediterranean is utopian
in the positive sense that the philosopher Paul Ricoeur gives to the notion,
opposing it to ideology: If ideology preserves and conserves reality, utopia
calls it essentially into question. Utopia, in this sense, is the expression of
all the potentialities of a group that find themselves repressed by the existing order.36 For Audisio, claims Fabre, the existing order was the colonial
order, and the Mediterranean appeared to offer a way of escaping from it,
of transcending it.
If any group had its potentialities repressed by the colonial order,
however, it was not the colonizers but the colonized, not the Europeans
of Algeria but the indigenous Muslim population. Audisios failure to
address this issue in the two volumes of Jeunesse de la Mditerrane has led
some postcolonial critics to see his vision of the Mediterranean as evasive
in this respect. Djeux, for example, says that while Audisio is in no sense
a racist writer, his shift to the universal appears to be a way of distancing
himself from immediate political realities: It appears as a sort of generous and liberal utopia, but at the same time as an illusion too.37 Indeed,
36
37
Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, pp.6768, quoting Ricur, as cited by Olivier

Mongin, Paul Ricur (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p.120.
Djeux, De lternel Mditerraneen, p.691. As this suggests, what is at stake in this
critical difference of opinion are two opposing conceptions of utopia: utopia as ideal
and utopia as illusion.
132
chapter 5
Audisio himself seemed to acknowledge this in his 1957 essay Feux vivants,
written during the Algerian War, in which he reiterated his utopian vision
of the Mediterranean, but spoke of dissipat[ing] an illusion that I shared
for many years: [] the Algerian community scarcely ever existed; the
mixing of bloods [i.e. between Europeans and Arabs] never took place
(my emphasis).38
Quoting these passages, Dunwoodie describes Audisios essay as an
admission of defeat, relieved in extremis by an appeal to the future.39 In effect,
however, he also argues that while Audisios multicultural Mediterranean
humanism offered a way of escaping from and transcending the fascist,
nationalistic and racist Mediterraneanism of Latinity, his vision remained
blinkered by an essentially colonial world-view. Postcolonial critics, of
course, lay a similar charge against Camus. As far as Audisio is concerned,
however, the question is whether Dunwoodies description of Audisios
Amour dAlger (1938) applies equally to the two volumes of Jeunesse de la
Mditerrane: [] Audisios text remains contaminated by the prejudices
of current colonial discourse, despite the overtly oppositional stance.40
It can of course be argued that it would be remarkable if Audisios
texts, like Camuss, were not contaminated in some way by contemporary
prejudices and the dominant colonial discourse. After all, Audisio was
writing in the 1930s and as a member of the colonial administration to
boot whereas Dunwoodies criticism, made fifty years later, is expressed
in postcolonial discourse, which inevitably has preconceptions of its own.
Be this as it may, the contamination that Dunwoodie describes is certainly
evident in an essay from the first volume of Jeunesse de la Mditerrane entitled Miroirs dAlger (Mirrors of Algiers), where Audisio twice refers to
Algeria as though it did not exist before the French invasion of 1830:
38
Audisio, La Communaut algrienne nexiste pas (The Algerian Community Does

Not Exist, in Feux vivants Algrie Mditerrane (1957) Le Temps des hommes (2
March 1958), pp.1339, reprinted as Algrie Mditerrane. Feux vivants (Limoges:
Rougerie, 1958), pp.26, 27, quoted by Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, pp.214,
215.
39 Dunwoodie, op. cit., p. 214.
40 Ibid., p.213.
133
A hundred years is a fine youth for a country. And it is its youth that touches me.
There is something exciting about studying the emergence of a race. (JM, 96).
This country and its people have only just celebrated their first hundred years! What
a funeral knell for a human being, but what a peal of bells for a race! (JM, 99).41
Elsewhere, Audisio explicitly includes the indigenous Algerian population in this new race. The words fusion and synthesis, which he uses
to describe the possible relationship between East and West, also appear
in the context of a discussion of Algeria, where he talks of the fusion of
races (JM, 112) that is beginning to occur:
Algeria is the only one of our overseas territories where one has really succeeded in
making a bit of France. [] For lack of one ethnic tradition, it has twenty: with its
heterogeneous people made up of Languedociens and Provenaux, of Catalans and
Corsicans, of Andalusians and Neapolitans, of Balearic islanders and Maltese, of
Arabs and Berbers, it constitutes a mixture in the process of settling down, which
will soon be the Algerian, a synthesis of border races cemented by French culture.
(Cagayous et Goya, JM, 112)
The Algerian, argues Audisio, is already conscious of his ethnic and mental
particularity, and does not hesitate sometimes to find something Berber
(one could also say something Arab) in himself: He knows that he is a
specific mixture (JM, 113).42 Although Audisio talks here of Arabs and
41 Audisio made similar remarks in Amour dAlger (p.81): A hundred years. Might
one say there is something paradoxical about celebrating the youth of a centenarian? Everyone knows that, for the beginnings of a people, a hundred years is merely
a few mornings (quoted by Dunwoodie in Writing French Algeria, p.213) and in
LAlgrie littraire (Paris: ditions de lEncyclopdie coloniale et maritime, 1942),
p.14: everyone knows that Algeria is a recent invention: it dates from 1830
(quoted by Benmansour, Lalgrianit , p.104).
42 Cf. Djeuxs comment: Latinity is rejected, but one does not escape from the mixing
of bloods, of races to the point of forming a new ethnicity. Here Audisio is the
companion of Randau and Pomier, in short of Algerianism (Djeux, De lternel
Mditerranen, p.688). Audisios notion of a Mediterranean patrie, on the other
hand, stands in clear contrast to Randaus notion of an Algerian patrie.
134
chapter 5
Berbers as part of the Algerian people, he clearly sees the Algerian as being
of primarily European origin and culturally French.
There is no doubt, moreover, as to which country, like Morocco and
Tunisia, Audisio regards Algeria as belonging. He refers to our three possessions of North Africa as the Province of Mediterranea (JM, 21), and
in Sel de la mer, to our Barbary (Sel, 21). Nor, as the reference above to
French culture cementing the various races suggests, is there any doubt as
to whose civilization Audisio regards as superior. He claims that several
centuries of absence of civilization make up a kind of tradition for the
African (Sel, 19) and writes: Except for small coastal zones, the African
landscape lacks deep civilization, a sort of human density; it is less population and the hand of man that are absent, than his mind [esprit]. []
Is it then part of the fate of this country to always retain a sort of barbarism? (Sel, 19192). By referring to Africa in terms of barbarism and lack
of civilization, Audisio shows that his thinking remains firmly within the
paradigm of Frances mission civilisatrice.
This is clearly brought out by the contrast Audisio draws between
French and Italian/Roman colonialism in both the essay entitled Rome,
lunique objet and his earlier Vendredi article of the same name. In the
latter, Audisio justified his description of Paul Morand as the new apostle of racism, the integral Aryan, the one hundred per cent defender of
the West and virtue by quoting what he presented Morand as saying the
Mediterranean had done for the white race: Byzantium against Asia, Rome
against the Barbarians, the Holy See against the Infidels, Venice against
the Turks, Granada against the Arabs, etc .43
Audisios quotation, however, seems to have been highly selective.
Although he does not mention its source, the same passage later reappeared
in an essay in Morands Mditerrane mer des surprises (The Mediterranean:
Sea of Surprises, 1938), in which Morand declared that to be unaware of
everything that the Mediterranean had done for our race was to misjudge
the past and the very direction (sens) of the planet. Audisios omissions
are indicated by italics:
43 Rome, lunique objet [n.p.].
135
Athens and Byzantium against Asia, Rome against the Barbarians, the Holy See
against the Infidels, Venice against the Turks, Granada against the Arabs, [] finally
France, protecting our values in the Levant, France which, not only the length of the
Mediterranean, but in all parts of the world has asserted the excellence of the White
Man.44
Audisios omission of Morands reference to Athens could be taken as

reflecting a Hellenistic bias, while his failure to include the continuation
of the sentence could perhaps be explained by a desire not to offend the
patriotic sensibilities of his readers. This second omission, however, can also
be taken to suggest a reluctance on Audisios part to call French imperialism into question. This latter interpretation is confirmed by the conclusion of the article, where Audisio himself a naturalized Frenchman of
part-Italian parentage invokes the Italian-born but naturalized French
explorer and colonial administrator Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (born
Pietro Savorniano di Brazz), whom he describes as the man who gave the
Congo to France. Alluding to the methods employed by Mussolinis troops
in Ethiopia, Audisio reminds those who sign manifestos for the defence
of the West by aerial torpedos, bombing ambulances and asphyxiation of
Blacks of the inscription on de Brazzas tomb in Algiers: His memory is
unsullied by human blood.
From a postcolonial viewpoint, the ideological work done here by
Audisios text goes beyond simply opposing the supposedly civilized
approach of French colonialism to the barbaric methods of Fascist imperialism. It can ultimately be seen as helping to legitimize the French colonial
project itself by omitting to mention the comparable atrocities committed
in the name of Frances civilizing mission. For among the techniques of
pacification employed by the French army in Algeria in the 1840s was precisely the asphyxiation in caves of men, women and children in rebel areas,45
44 Paul Morand, Mditerrane mer des surprises (Tours: Marne, 1938), p.19, quoted by
Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane, p.93.
45 See Sadek Sellam, Algrie: des colons aux colonels: camps, extermination, radication, in Catherine Coquio, ed., Parler des camps, penser les gnocides (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1999), pp.32248. An extract from Sellams study is available, under the title
Conqute de lAlgrie: crimes de guerre et crimes contre lhumanit, on the website
136
chapter 5
while in 1871, as a young French navy ensign, de Brazza himself had been
shocked by the sight of French soldiers shooting Kabyle insurgents.46
Although Audisio may not have been aware of these specific facts, he
was clearly aware of the dark side of colonialism. In one of the essays of Sel
de la mer, for example, he talks of slavery in our European colonies (Sel,
64). In Rome, lunique objet, on the other hand, he resorts to euphemism
and irony rather than openly criticizing colonialism: Of course, European
colonization, our own like that of other countries, is not evangelical [in
the sense of conforming with the Gospels]. At least it brings a few liberal
slogans, with capital letters, through which it means to justify itself (Sel,
116). Although Audisio qualifies his assertion in a footnote by saying that
there are exceptions, a further quotation of the epitaph on de Brazzas tomb
(see above) inevitably implies that he believed that, in the vast majority of
cases, the memory of colonization was sullied by human blood.
On the whole, however and again this may reflect his position as a
member of the colonial administration Audisio stresses what he clearly
sees as the acceptable face of (French) colonialism rather than condemning colonialism as such. It is to the honour of our colonization, he says,
that French has become more widespread among the natives and has had
more influence on their vocabulary than Latin did during six centuries of
Roman domination (Sel, 9899). Rome colonized Italy itself, destroying
the original Etruscan civilisation (Sel, 105), and as a colonial power, it did
nothing to relieve human miseries unlike France (Sel, 11516). It may be
said, Audisio writes, that the liberal slogans of French colonialism are facesaving alibis, but the fact remains that unlike in the Roman Empire there
are colonial doctors, native nurses and primary-school teachers doing their
job in the most obscure outposts (bleds) (Sel, 116). While not denying the
virtues of the official heroes, saints and martyrs of colonization doctors,
priests, soldiers and settlers themselves he praises the work of dedicated
of the Ligue des droits de lhomme de Toulon <http://www.ldh-toulon.net/article.

php3?id_article=182>.
46 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa 18761912 (London: Abacus, 1992),
p.34.
137
administrators and considers it to be the height of injustice that nothing is

said of the lonely and discreetly heroic existence of colonial primary-school
teachers (Sel, 181): they keep alive the taste for freedom and a belief in
justice here. [] amidst everything that was created almost exclusively by
self-interest, they represent the Mind [lEsprit] (Sel, 183).47
Despite mocking the capital letters used in liberal slogans to justify colonization, Audisios own use of the upper case here reinforces the impression
that, notwithstanding his criticisms of the unacceptable face of colonialism,
he himself ultimately subscribes to the principle of la mission civilisatrice.
Ironically, Audisio says that Africans have always been the best champions
of popular protest against the Empires yoke, including provincial emperors (Sel, 111). In support of his argument that socialism is as natural to the
Mediterranean genius as authoritaritan fascism is contrary to it (Sel, 121),
Audisio also cites the collective ownership of land in Muslim North Africa
as an example of Mediterranean communitarianism (Sel, 120). He is either
unaware of or ignores the fact that, as shown in Chapter 4, the effect of
French colonial policy in Algeria in the second half of the nineteenth century had been to break down this system and replace it with one of private
ownership, partly in order to facilitate the acquisition of land by settlers
and partly to undermine the tribal system that went with it.48
In Jeunesse de la Mditerrane, as we have seen, Audisio criticizes the
illusions of lAfrique latine, which, he says, led writers to convince themselves for thirty years that every Arab and Berber was a Latin without
realizing it. He also says, however, that it is just as much an exaggeration
to see the Muslim as a victim murdered by European civilization (JM,
47 Compare the tribute paid to his French teachers, at the end of the Algerian War, by
the moderate nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas. Describing them as missionaries, Abbas
writes: the teachers were unaware of racism and only sought the success of the pupil,
whatever their origin might be. There are exceptions. They take away nothing from
the value and the conscientiousness [haute conscience] of our schoolmasters. Ferhat
Abbas, La nuit coloniale (Paris: Julliard, 1962), quoted by Gourdon et al, Roman
colonial, p.70. As Abbas continues, however: It was difficult, in the age of illusions,
not to be affected by the mirage (my emphasis).
48 See Chapter 4 and, for example, Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, pp.1519.
138
chapter 5
120). This, according to Audisio, is another aspect of the quarrel between

East and West, a quarrel in which he claims to take no sides. Alluding
to a passage of Louis Bertrands Les Villes dor, in which Bertrand had
argued that the symbolic monument of the region was not the mosque
but the arc de triomphe,49 Audisio states despite his avowed repudiation
of Latinity that Algeria was shaped first by Rome, then by Islam: there
is Trajans arch and there is the mosque of Sid-bon-Mdine. Between the
two, the heart is always torn [le cur se balance toujours]. The truth lies
perhaps very much between the two (JM, 12021). The same may be
said of the question of whether Audisio is a Mediterranean humanist or a
well-meaning colonizer.
49 Bertrand, preface to Les Villes dOr, p.9, quoted by Fabre, La France et la Mditerrane,
p.56.
chapter 6
Maurras and Latinity

As shown in Chapter 3, some postcolonial critics have interpreted The
New Mediterranean Culture by situating it in a literary-historical context.
In their view, Camuss lecture is to be understood as a virtual manifesto
for the so-called cole dAlger, a loose literary grouping born in reaction
to the previous school of Algerianism, which was in turn influenced by
the writer Louis Bertrand. The emphasis on Algerianism and Bertrand as
counter-influences on Camuss thinking, however, has overshadowed the
role of the one counter-influence Camus explicitly identifies in his lecture,
Charles Maurras.
An essayist, poet and political journalist, Maurras was the spiritual
leader of the notorious far-right Action Franaise movement, whose origins
can be traced back to the Dreyfus Affair. Its far-ranging influence has been
summed up by Eugen Weber: between 1899 and 1944 [Action Franaise]
provided the fundamental doctrines of practically the whole Extreme Right
in France and of important nationalist and traditionalist groups in Belgium,
Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania and Switzerland, as well as the theoretical
background of the National Revolution of Vichy.1 Camus would have been
familiar with Maurrass ideas through his uncle, Gustave Acault, with whom
Eugen Weber, Action Franaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-century France

(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1962), Preface, p. vii. See also Stephen
Wilson, Action Franaise in French intellectual life, Historical Journal 12:2 (1969),
32850. On Maurras himself, see Michael Curtis, Three against the Republic: Sorel,
Barrs and Maurras (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).
140
chapter 6
he lived between 1931 and 1933. Although Acaults favourite author was the
Dreyfusard and later socialist Anatole France, he also quoted Maurras and
read LAction Franaise, the newspaper of the movement, of which Maurras
was the co-editor.2 The key elements of Maurrass political philosophy were
a xenophobic nationalism that regarded non-Latins as barbarians and an
anti-democratic belief in the value of hierarchy and tradition, expressed
in a pragmatic support for both monarchism and despite his own lack
of faith the Roman Catholic Church.
These key elements of Maurrassian ideology are implicitly challenged by Camus in the introduction to his lecture. Having suggested
that Mediterranean culture has been monopolized by right-wing doctrinaires such as Maurras, Camus goes on to describe the dominant idea of
Mediterranean culture from which he wishes to disassociate the Maison
de la Culture:
To serve the cause of a Mediterranean regionalism may seem, indeed, to be restoring an empty traditionalism without a future, or to be extolling the superiority of
one culture over another, and, for example, taking up fascism in reverse, to be setting Latin against Nordic peoples. There is a constant misunderstanding here. The
aim of this lecture is to try and clear it up. The whole mistake comes from people
confusing Mediterranean and Latinity, and from placing in Rome what began in
Athens. (I, 565)
By fascism here, Camus clearly means Nazism, seeing Latinity as the mirror-image of Aryan supremacism. He uses the term Latinity itself, on the
other hand, to refer to a Latin supremacism grounded in the idea of Roman
civilization as the fons et origo of Mediterranean culture, and more generally
of Western civilization as a whole. Like Audisio, Camus himself appears to
have been initially influenced by this doctrine, at least in its aesthetic form.
In October 1933, for example, at the age of 20, he had written a poem (I,
97678) which described the Mediterranean as a Latin pearl and went
on to refer to Latin esprit, Latin life and the Latin earth.3
2
3
Lottman, Albert Camus, p.49.

The influence of aesthetic Latinity is also evident in two art reviews that Camus
published in Alger tudiant in February and April 1934 respectively. In the first,
141
In France, as we have seen, two of the leading exponents of Latinity

were Louis Bertrand, the ideologue of a Latin Africa, and Maurras. In
addition to being a leader of Action Franaise, Maurras was also one of the
principal members of the neoclassical cole romane or Romanic school of
poetry, a manifesto for which was published in Le Figaro on 14 September
1891 by the Greek-born poet Jean Moras (Iannis Papadiamantopoulos).
Renouncing the Symbolism with which he had previously been associated,
Moras announced a new literary school more in keeping with his own
origins, placing it in a tradition stretching back through the Middle Ages
to Ancient Rome and Greece.4 Along with Maurras and the other members
of the school, Moras was reacting against what he saw as the decline of
French and Latin Classicism in the face of Nordic and German-influenced
Romanticism.5 In his own poems, Maurras took his inspiration from the
Renaissance, and especially from the sonnets of the sixteenth-century
French poet Ronsard, who in turn drew his inspiration from Classical
poets. Camus appears to allude to this in his lecture when he says that it
seems, wrongly, that Mediterranean culture is the reflection of that Latin
antiquity that the Renaissance tried to rediscover through the Middle Ages,
and states: It is this Latinity that Maurras and his followers [les siens] are
trying to annex (I, 568).
For purely practical reasons, it is difficult to identify a specific
Maurrassian text or texts to which Camuss lecture might be seen as a
response. As a daily contributor to LAction Franaise, Maurras wrote literally thousands of newspaper articles, and by 1937 he had published some
4
5
Camus praised the Virgilian gentleness of a painting of Bouzarah by Ren-Jean

Clt (I, 556); in the second, he described Pierre Boucherle as painting lines as pure
and as satisfying as a Romanesque dome in a Latin sky (I, 559).
See Marcel Raymond, De Baudelaire au Surralisme, new edn (Paris: Jos Corti,
1963), pp.5859.
See Maurras, Barbares et Romans, 18911915, in Ltang de Berre (Paris:
Flammarion, 1928), pp.31828 and Jean-Marie Seillan, Nord contre Sud. Visages
de lantimridionalisme dans la littrature franaise de la fin du XIXe sicle, Loxias
1: Idiomes, fleurs obscures <http://revel.unice.fr/loxias/document.html?id=6>
142
chapter 6
thirty books, mostly based on his journalistic writings.6 Nevertheless, a

sense of some of the relevant tenets of Maurrassian ideology here may be
gained from three texts. The first is Barbares et Romains (Barbarians and
Romans) a famous and subsequently anthologized article that Maurras first
published in LAction Franaise of 15 December 1906, in which he proudly
proclaimed his Roman identity:
I am Roman because, if my forefathers had not been Roman as I am, the first barbarian
invasion, between the fifth and tenth centuries, would have made me today into a kind
of German or Norwegian. I am Roman because, if were not for my tutelary Romanity,
the second barbarian invasion, that of the sixteenth century, the Protestant invasion,
would have made of me a kind of Swiss. [] Through [the] treasure that it received
from Athens and entrusted to our Paris, Rome unquestionably means civilization
and humanity. I am Roman and I am human are two identical propositions.7
Although, like Camus, Maurras sees civilization as ultimately originating in

Ancient Greece, he identifies both civilization and humanity with Rome
and implies that non-Latins here Germans and Scandinavians are subhuman barbarians. As noted above, however, Camus rejects the idea of a
Mediterranean culture that sets Latin against Nordic races. And whereas
Maurras, in identifying Protestantism with barbarism, implicitly associates
civilization with Roman Catholicism, Camus declares that the principle
of the West is no longer the papal Rome of the Holy Roman Empire. The
principle is man (I, 566).8
The second text is a 1916 article on Latin civilization from LAction
Franaise. Arguing that Latinism or Latinity must not be understood in
6
7
8
At the time of Camuss lecture itself, Maurras was serving an eight-month prison sentence as a result of various incitements to murder he had made in LAction Franaise,
notably against the Jewish Popular Front prime minister Lon Blum and deputies
who had voted for sanctions against Italy following its invasion of Ethiopia.
Charles Maurras, Barbares et Romains, in La Dentelle du rempart, choix de pages
civiques en prose et en vers (18861936) (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1937), pp.15657;
Maurrass italics.
As Maurice Weyembergh notes (Camus et Saint Augustin, p.136), Camus seems to
feel an antipathy towards Protestantism similar to Maurrass. His reasons for doing
so, however, are very different.
143
the Boche (Kraut) sense of a physical kinship and an ethical or material

unity, Maurras declared:
Our great bond stems from the kinship of languages, from their common origin,
from the idea of education and tradition created and maintained by the lessons of
literature, philosophy, law, politics and higher morality inherited from the Athenian
and Roman school, then revived and transformed by the religious culture of which
Catholicism is the definitive expression.9
Although Camuss similar use of Romance languages in his lecture to illustrate the unity of Mediterranean culture could be seen as reflecting his
own residual Latinity, it seems more likely, as previously argued, that it
is a makeshift example drawing on a Eurocentric cultural clich. More
importantly, where Maurras sees an unbroken tradition handed down from
Greece to Rome to Roman Catholicism, Camus relegates the Catholic
contribution to the past and repudiates the Roman heritage in favour of
an Attic Hellenism.
The third passage comes from Barbarie et posie (Barbarism and
Poetry, 1925), in which Maurras wrote:
The word tradition does not mean the transmission of just anything. It is the transmission of the beautiful and the true. The word revolution does not mean sudden
change whatever it may be. It means something like that, and, in addition, something
else: the dragging down of the superior by the inferior.10
What Maurras regarded as superior in this context was, of course, the tradition of Greco-Roman civilization passed down through the Renaissance to
Latins, and especially the French. Camus, by contrast, states that there can
be no question of the superiority of Mediterranean culture, and declares:
We cannot be a slave to traditions and bind our living future to exploits
that are already dead. A tradition is a past that distorts [contrefait liter9
10
Civilisation latine, esprit latin, LAction Franaise, 22 October 1916, reprinted in

Maurras, Gaulois, Germains, Latins (Extraits), Les Cahiers de lOccident 1 (1926),
pp.7779.
Charles Maurras, Barbarie et posie: vers un art intellectuel 1 (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie
Nationale, 1925), p. III.
144
chapter 6
ally counterfeits] the present (I, 566). Last but not least, whereas Maurras
preached the doctrine of integral nationalism, Camus dismisses the notion
of a nationalism of the sun and rejects the principle of a Mediterranean
nationalism, claiming that historically, nationalisms always appear as signs
of decadence and that it is internationalism that is trying to restore the
Wests true meaning and vocation.
The Manifesto Pour la dfense de lOccident

The doctrine of Latinity acquired a new significance with the rise of fascism
in Italy, where Mussolini laid claim to the Roman heritage even before he
came to power. In an article published in his newspaper Il Popolo dItalia
in April 1921, for instance, Mussolini wrote: We dream of a Roman Italy,
orderly and strong, disciplined and with an empire. What was the immortal
spirit of Rome is, for the most part, being born again in fascism; the lictorian
fasces are Roman, our organization is Roman, our pride and our courage are
Roman: civis romanus sum.11 Mussolinis imperial ambitions were clearly
signalled by his invasion, on 3 October 1935, of Ethiopia, the only African
country apart from Liberia to have remained free from European control.
Although this aggression was condemned by the League of Nations, it also
found support outside Italy, as Camus makes clear: It was in the name of
this Latin order that, in the Ethiopian affair, twenty-four intellectuals of
the West signed a degrading manifesto praising the civilizing work of Italy
in barbarous Ethiopia (I, 568).
This degrading manifesto has not been identified by previous critics. With the exception of the precise number of intellectuals involved,
however, Camuss description matches the manifesto Pour la dfense de
lOccident (For the Defence of the West), which was published in the
11
Quoted by Jean-Luc Pouthier, Rome et la latinit, La Pense de midi 1 (2000), 4043

(p.41).
145
French newspaper Le Temps on 4 October 1935 (see Chapter 5). Defending

what it described as the civilizing conquest of one of the most backward
countries in the world, the manifesto bore the names of sixty-four (later
more than 850) signatories.12 These included twelve (later sixteen) members of the Acadmie franaise (notably Louis Bertrand), a number of writers who would become notorious collaborators during the Occupation
(Robert Brasillach, Alphonse de Chteaubriant, Drieu La Rochelle) and
Maurras.13
Unsurprisingly, the manifesto provoked a strong reaction. A countermanifesto, whose signatories included Malraux, Andr Gide and Louis
Aragon, appeared in Luvre the next day, under a heading that referred
to the 64 intellectuals who had signed Pour la dfense de lOccident.
Explaining that among the several hundred people who had become aware
of the manifesto were a certain number of intellectuals who had found
themselves gathered together at the Maison de la culture in Paris, the counter-manifesto accused the earlier text, among other things, of abusing the
notions of the West and intelligence.14 Together with a third manifesto
signed by Catholic intellectuals calling for justice and peace, the two manifestos were republished in the left-wing reviews Europe and Commune,
which again referred to the 64 original signatories of Pour la dfense de
lOccident, while Commune later printed Rponse aux 64 (Reply to the
64), a speech given by Malraux one of Camuss idols at the time at the
12
13
14
Pour la dfense de lOccident, Le Temps, 4 October 1935, p.2, reproduced in JeanFranois Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions franaises: manifestes et ptitions au XXe sicle
(Paris: Fayard, 1990), pp.9294. Further references to this edition will be abbreviated
as IPF. In the next edition of Le Temps, the manifesto was retitled Le manifeste des
intellectuels pour la paix en Europe et la dfense de lOccident (p.92).
See Ren Rmond, Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982), p.460,
whose list of signatories, like Sirinellis, is incomplete, but includes more names.
Quotation marks in the original. Les 64 intellectuels groups autour de M. Henri
Massis ne reprsentent pas le sentiment des masses [] ni celui de tous les intellectuels dclarent de nombreux crivains et artistes franais, Luvre, 5 October 1935,
p.2, reproduced in Sirinelli, IPF, 9697.
146
chapter 6
first meeting of the Association internationale des crivains pour la dfense

de la culture.15
As a reader of both Europe and Commune, it is inconceivable that
Camus would have been unaware of Pour la dfense de lOccident.
According to Max-Pol Fouchet, Camus was reading Europe in the early
1930s (E, 1173), and when Claude de Frminville drew up plans in 1934 for
a literary-political magazine for Algiers, he pencilled in Camus to cover
Europe in a regular survey of current French periodicals.16 Commune, on
the other hand, had been founded in 1933 as the organ of the Association
des crivains et artistes rvolutionnaires (AEAR), which was also responsible for founding the first Maison de la culture in Paris in 1934. By the late
summer of 1936, Camus is reported as being a member of a group, formed
in February that year, called Amis de Commune,17 before going on to
co-found and become the general secretary of the Maison de la culture
in Algiers the following year.18 Finally, as we saw in the previous chapter,
Audisio had referred explicitly to Pour la dfense de lOccident in the
March 1936 issue of Cahiers du Sud.
The immediate political context of Pour la dfense de lOccident was
the threat of French and British sanctions against Italy following Mussolinis
invasion of Ethiopia on 3 October 1935. Its immediate polemical context,
however, was an earlier left-wing manifesto, crivains et artistes contre la
guerre dEthiopie (Writers and Artists against the Ethiopian War)19
15
16
17
18
19
Trois manifestes, Europe, 15 November 1935, 44956; Lintelligence franaise devant

la guerre dthiopie, Commune, 27 November 1935, pp.33747; Andr Malraux,
Rponse aux 64, Commune, December 1935, pp.41016, also published as Occident
et Orient. Rponse aux 64 intellectuels dOccident, Crapouillot, special issue ( January
1936), pp.6364. See Nicole Racine-Furlaud, Bataille autour dintellectuel(s) dans
les manifestes et contre-manifestes de 1918 1939, in D. Bonnaud-Lamotte and J.-L.
Rispail, eds, Intellectuel(s) des annes trente: entre le rve et laction (Paris: ditions
du CNRS, 1989), pp.22336 (pp.22930).
Lvi-Valensi, Albert Camus, p.311.
The fact that this referred to writers and artists rather than intellectuals may suggest that by this point, the latter term, previously associated with the Left, had been
successfully appropriated by the Right.
147
signed, among others, by Aragon, Henri Barbusse and Paul Nizan that
had appeared in the September 1935 edition of Commune. Published shortly
before the war, the Commune manifesto condemned Mussolinis attempt
to legitimize the invasion of Ethiopia in advance by appealing to notions
of civilization and culture: Italian fascism is on the verge of attacking
the last independent people of Africa. It wants to justify its aggression by
ignoble idealist lies, to pass itself off as the champion of civilization. We
deny the fascists of Rome the right to speak in the name of the culture
that they are crushing in Italy.20 Referring to Italian prison-camps and the
murder of a socialist deputy, the signatories also refused to acknowledge
the fascists right to treat the Ethiopians as barbarians.
Pour la dfense de lOccident, on the other hand, warned that to
impose sanctions on Italy risked unleashing war between the great European
states. The manifesto declared: When the actions of men, to whom the
destiny of nations is entrusted, risk placing the future of civilization in
peril, it is the duty of those who devote their labours to matters of the
intelligence to vigorously make heard the protest of the mind.21 Referring
to the inhabitants of Ethiopia as a hotchpotch of uneducated tribes (un
amalgame de tribus incultes), the manifesto denounced what it called a false
juridical universalism that treated as equals the superior and the inferior,
the civilized and the barbarian. It described Italy, on the other hand, as a
nation in which some of the essential virtues of higher humanity (la haute
humanit) had been affirmed and strengthened over the past fifteen years
a clear allusion to Mussolini, who had entered the Italian parliament in
1921 and became prime minister the following year.
As intellectuals, the signatories claimed that it was their duty to protect culture, and appealed to all the forces of the mind (lesprit) to prevent
what they saw as a suicidal attack on Western civilisation.22 For to seek to
forbid Rome, as the manifesto put it, from pursuing its policy in Africa
ran counter to the colonial mission of nations such as England [sic] and
20 crivains et artistes contre la guerre dEthiopie, Commune, September 1935, p.27.

21 Sirinelli, IPF, 93.
22 Ibid., p.94.
148
chapter 6
France itself. Thus the manifesto expressed astonishment that a nation

i.e. Britain whose colonial empire occupied a fifth of the globe should
oppose Italys ambitions, and subscribe to the dangerous fiction of the
absolute equality of all nations, which was the ideology of revolutionary
forces that opposed the Italian regime and sought to overturn the status
quo in Europe as a whole. The manifesto was thus an apologia for imperialism, fascism and racism and a thinly disguised attack on communism in
the guise of a defence of civilisation, intelligence and lesprit.
Although Camus gave his lecture sixteen months after Pour la dfense
de lOccident was published, it can be seen in part as a reaction to the
latters attempt to justify Mussolinis aggression in the name of the mind
(lesprit), intelligence and culture. This is especially evident in the final
section of the lecture, where Camus attempts to reappropriate the words
culture, mind and intelligence that had been exploited in the original
manifesto. Implicitly acknowledging the danger of being confused with
the right-wing intellectuals who signed Pour la dfense de lOccident,
Camus suggests that in our time, the role of the intellectual is a difficult
one and that great courage is needed today to declare ones fidelity to
matters of the mind (aux choses de lesprit). The essential task, he argues,
is to rehabilitate the intelligence [], to give back to the mind all of its
true meaning by restoring to culture its true face of health and sunlight
(I, 571). He then goes on to associate the use by Mussolinis supporters of
the words culture, esprit, intelligence with violence and death, and his own
use of the same words with life:
There is only one culture. [] Not the one that justifies the abuses and deaths of
Ethiopia and which legitimates the taste for brutal conquest. [] But the one that
lives in hills, trees and men. (I, 571)
our task [is to let it be known] that culture can only be understood when it is placed
in the service of life, that it is possible for the mind not to be the enemy of man. []
The effort of human intelligence must be a common heritage and not a source of
conflicts and murders. (I, 572)
On a more general level, the emphasis Camus places in his lecture on

the East can be seen as a reaction to the Western supremacism of Pour
149
la dfense de lOccident. Thus Camus stresses that it is the East that the
true Mediterranean resembles, not the Latin West (I, 569). Telling his
Algiers audience that one of their tasks is to encourage the various aspects of
Mediterranean culture, he declares: We are all the better prepared for this
task for being in immediate contact with this East that can teach us so much
in this respect. Here we are with the Mediterranean against Rome (I, 570).
Camus may appear to be excluding indigenous Algerians when he calls at the
end of his lecture on men of the West (I, 572) to build a new Mediterranean
culture and politics, but in suggesting that European Algerians have much
to learn from their non-European counterparts, he is appealing to a notion
of the West that is diametrically opposed to that of Pour la dfense de
lOccident. Whatever else it may be, The New Mediterranean Culture
was also a belated intervention in a cultural-political polemic between proand anti-fascist French intellectuals over the Ethiopian War.
The Broader Argumentative Context of Pour la dfense de

lOccident: French Cultural Politics in the Interwar Period
As we have seen, Camuss lecture is in part a response to Pour la dfense
de lOccident, which was itself a response to crivains et artistes contre
la guerre dEthiopie. These two manifestos, however, need to be seen in
turn as part of a protracted war of words between two camps of French
intellectuals: the right-wing nationalist camp of Maurras, Henri Massis and
their associates, and the left-wing internationalist camp of Romain Rolland,
Henri Barbusse and their followers. The contested concepts of civilization,
culture, esprit, patrie, intelligence and intellectual all of which are central to Camuss lecture played a key role in this ideological battle, which
can be traced back to World War I, and beyond that to the Dreyfus Affair
and ultimately to opposing views of the French Revolution.
This clash between Left and Right would lead to the formation of
the Popular Front, on the one hand, and the National Revolution of the
150
chapter 6
Vichy regime whose slogan of Travail, Famille, Patrie (borrowed from

the right-wing league the Croix de Feu),23 was an explicit repudiation of the
republican Libert, galit, Fraternit and the Popular Fronts Pain, Paix,
Libert on the other. Addressing what he called lIntelligence nationale
in LAvenir de lintelligence (The Future of Intelligence), published in 1906,
the year of Dreyfuss eventual release, Maurras declared: for the continuance [dure] and progress of a threatened civilization, all hopes float on the
ship of a Counter-Revolution.24 When he was found guilty of collaboration
during the Second World War in 1945, Maurras gave the notorious response:
Cest la revanche de Dreyfus! (Its the revenge of Dreyfus!).
The author of Pour la dfense de lOccident was the right-wing
Catholic critic and journalist Henri Massis, who borrowed its title from his
earlier book Dfense de lOccident (Defence of the West, 1927). A disciple of
the nationalist Maurice Barrs, Massis had first made a name for himself as
the co-author, with Alfred de Tarde, of two highly selective and tendentious
opinion-surveys that were published under the joint pseudonym Agathon:
LEsprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (The Spirit of the New Sorbonne, 1911)
and Les jeunes gens daujourdhui (Young People of Today, 1913).25 The first
subtitled La Crise de la culture classique, la crise du franais (The Crisis
in Classical Culture, the Crisis in French) is described by Robert Wohl
as mounting a brilliantly successful campaign against the professors of the
New Sorbonne whom they accused of germanizing French culture and
of replacing classical learning with Teutonic sociology.26 The subtitle(s) of
the second summed up its altogether more optimistic findings: Le Got
de laction. La Foi patriotique. Une Renaissance catholique. Le Ralisme
Roderick Kedward, La Vie en Bleu: France and the French Since 1900 (London: Allen
Lane, 2005), p.212.
24 Maurras, LAvenir de lintelligence, 2nd edn (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1937
[1906]), p.104.
25 See Phyllis H. Stock, Students versus the University in pre-World War Paris, French
Historical Studies, 7:1 (1971), 93110, and Robert Wohl, France: the Young Man of
Today in The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),
pp.541, esp. pp.518.
26 Wohl, op. cit., p.6.
23
151
politique. (The Taste for Action. Patriotic Faith. A Catholic Renaissance.

Political Realism.) The younger generation was thus presented as being not
only, like Massis himself, devout and patriotic, but also oriented towards
action and politically tough-minded, qualities that would be particularly
valued when the First World War broke out the following year.
Massiss next book, Romain Rolland contre la France (Romain Rolland
against France, 1915), was an attack on the eponymous novelist, a former
Dreyfusard. Earlier that year, Rolland, who was living in exile in Switzerland,
had published Au-dessus de la mle (Above the Fray), a collection of newspaper articles that condemned the war as barbaric and called on intellectuals to agitate for peace, maintaining that the future of mankind mattered
infinitely more than national interests.27 Naturally, Massis heavily criticized
Rolland for expressing such unpatriotic views.
This, however, marked only the beginning of a protracted war of
words between Massis and Rolland and their respective sympathizers.28
On 15 March 1918, Rolland published a manifesto, Pour lInternationale
de lesprit (For the International of the Mind) in LHumanit, while on
17 January 1919, the anti-war novelist Henri Barbusse published an appeal
for the foundation of an International of Thought in Le Populaire de Paris.
Together with other like-minded intellectuals, Barbusse formed what came
to be known as the Clart group (after Barbusses 1919 novel of the same
name) in May. This was followed by Dclaration dindpendance de lesprit
(Declaration of Independence of the Mind), a four-paragraph manifesto
by Rolland published in LHumanit on 26 June 1919.29 Its internationalist
character was evident from the fact that it was signed by among many
others Barbusse, Benedetto Croce, Einstein, Gorki, Heinrich Mann,
Bertrand Russell and Stefan Zweig.
See David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp.3943.
28 See Sirinelli, IPF, passim, and Nicole Racine-Furlaud, Bataille autour
dintellectuel(s).
29 Reproduced in Sirinelli, IPF, 4142. For discussion of Rollands manifesto, see
Fisher, Romain Rolland, pp.6165.
27
152
chapter 6
Addressed to workers of the Mind, Rollands manifesto stated that

the war had thrown intellectuals into disarray. Most of them had placed
their knowledge, their art and their reason in the service of governments.
They had made thought the instrument of passions, and perhaps unwittingly, of the selfish interests of a political or social clan, a State, a patrie
or a class. Rolland, however, called on intellectuals to honour truth alone,
without racial or caste prejudice and to work for Humanity as a whole:
We do not recognize peoples. We recognize the People single and universal [] the People of all men, all equally our brothers (IPF, 42). It
was in order to make the People aware of this fraternity that intellectuals
should, as Rolland put it, erect the Arch of Alliance the free Mind, one
and manifold, eternal.
On 19 July 1919, Massis responded with a much longer counter-manifesto, Pour un parti de lintelligence (For a Party of the Intelligence),30
published in Le Figaro and signed by fifty-four right-wing intellectuals,
including Bertrand and Maurras.31 The introduction to this counter-manifesto clearly identified it as a response to the earlier text, quoting from a
recent manifesto in which certain intellectuals the signatories, by contrast, described themselves as writers had reproached their colleagues
for having demeaned, debased, and degraded thought by placing it in the
service of the patrie (IPF, 43). Seeing this as a threat to intelligence and
society, the signatories intended to mount an intellectual defence against
the Bolshevism of thought (ibid). After referring to the immense task
of postwar reconstruction, the manifesto proper made a grandiose assertion: If we claim to be organizing the defence of French intelligence, it is
because we have in mind the spiritual future of the whole of civilization.
We believe and the world believes with us that it is the destiny of our
race to defend the spiritual interests of humanity (IPF, 44). After its victory in the war, Massis wrote, France wished to regain its sovereign place
in the order of lesprit, but such a hegemony could only be based on a patrie
30 Intelligence might also be translated here as intelligentsia.

31 Reproduced in Sirinelli, IPF, 4347.
153
with a sound foundation. The first principle was national intelligence in

the service of the national interest (ibid., italics in the original).
Unashamedly expressing their rejection of democracy and their belief
in nationalism and social order, the signatories of the manifesto claimed that
their political doctrines were in conformity with the lessons of life itself.
Nothing was better suited to establishing the International of thought
that the literary Bolshevists wished to monopolize than the classical spirit,
the essence of the doctrines of the whole of higher humanity (IPF, 44).
Their aim was twofold: the rebuilding of public spirit in France via the royal
roads of the intelligence and classical methods and the intellectual federation
of Europe and the world under the aegis of victorious France, the guardian
of all civilization (IPF, 45; italics in original). The future of civilization
itself was at stake: Frances intellectual superiority, lesprit and culture were
threatened by industrial modernism. Expecting nothing less than national
regeneration and the recovery of the human race, the signatories of the
manifesto declared: The party of intelligence is the party that we claim to
serve, in order to oppose it to that Bolshevism which, from the beginning,
attacks the mind and culture, the better to destroy society, nation, the
family and the individual (IPF, 46, italics in original).
That intelligence had become a contested concept in this polemic was
confirmed by Jacques Rivire, the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Franaise,
in an article on Le Parti de lIntelligence. As Rivire noted: Intelligence is
undoubtedly in fashion. There is no longer anyone who does not lay claim
to its favours; no manifesto appears in which it is not advocated as the first
of virtues.32 Yet although Rivire went on to criticize the manifesto for
subordinating intelligence to national interests, he agreed that there was
no greater and more urgent task than the defence of French intelligence,
and no task more profitable to the interests of the entire world, of universal
civilization. French intelligence, claimed Rivire, was incomparable: only
the French had been able preserve an intellectual tradition; only the French
still knew how to think.33
32
33
Jacques Rivire, Le Parti de lIntelligence, NRF 13 (Sep. 1919), 61218 (p.612).

Ibid., pp.61415.
154
chapter 6
Even this demonstration of Gallic chauvinism, however, was insufficient

for Henri Ghon, one of the signatories of Massiss manifesto. Responding
to Rivires criticisms, Ghon referred pejoratively to non-Western thought
as asiatisme and declared: Our victory is not that of democracies over
autocracies, but of true over false culture and, as Adrien Mithouard said in
an admirable lecture in 1918, of the West over the East.34 As this suggests,
the interwar debate on culture overlapped with a debate on the relationship
between East and West, which will be the subject of chapter 7.
The polemic on intelligence, as Sirinelli observes (IPF, 54), gave new
life to the battle between Left and Right and resulted in a new watershed.
On the Left, reviews such as Barbusses Clart, whose first issue appeared
in October 1919, and Europe (instigated by Rolland in 1923) followed the
same line as Rollands manifesto. On the Right and extreme Right, according to Sirinelli, themes such as the defence of civilization and the West
became a central part of the worldview of many French intellectuals (IPF,
50). In April 1920, Massis became the editor of a new review, La Revue
universelle, whose first issue alluded to For a Party of the Intelligence and
stated that the review would bring together the intellectual elements who
were committed to safeguarding civilization which of course, as Sirinelli
notes, meant Western civilization (IPF, 51). French nationalism, on the
other hand, became expanded to the West, as the enemy was no longer
just Germany, but also internationalist Bolshevism.
The next clash of manifestos between Left and Right was inspired
by the Rif War in Morocco (191926), where Spanish and later French
34 Henri Ghon, Rflexions sur le rle actuel de lintelligence franaise, NRF 13 (Nov.
1919), 95364 (p.963). Then mayor of Paris, Mithouard also described the city as the
capital of Western civilization (Paris capitale de lOccident (confrence du 22 mars,
1918), La Revue hebdomadaire, 13 April 1919, p.162). Mithouards Franco-Western
chauvinism and his firm belief in traditional Catholicism and the aesthetic values of
the Middle Ages anticipated Massiss. A religious poet, he founded the literary magazine LOccident in 1901, and later an important publishing house of the same name.
His essays included Trait de lOccident (1903), Les Marches de lOccident (1910) and
La Terre dOccident: essais sur la formation franaise (1917). More research is clearly
needed into his influence.
155
troops had intervened to put down a rebellion led by the Berber chief
Abd el-Krim. (The young Francisco Franco was first second-in-command,
then commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion during the campaign,
while the French troops were led by Marshal Ptain; the weapons used
included mustard gas.) On 2 July 1925, Barbusse published a manifesto in
LHumanit under the headline Les travailleurs intellectuels aux cts du
proltariat contre la guerre du Maroc (Intellectual Workers at the Side of
the Proletariat against the Moroccan War).35 Signed by (among others)
the editorial board of the now pro-communist Clart, the Surrealist group
and Rolland, the manifesto denounced the imperialist nature of the war
and proclaimed the right of all peoples to self-determination, whatever
their race (IPF, 6263).36
Five days later, on 7 July 1925, a counter-manifesto appeared on the
front page of Le Figaro, entitled Les intellectuels aux cts de la Patrie
(Intellectuals at the Side of the Patrie). According to Nicole RacineFurlaud,37 this marked the first time in French history that right-wing
thinkers had described themselves as intellectuals, a term that, since its
use during the Dreyfus Affair, had been applied exclusively to thinkers of
the Left.38 The counter-manifesto was explicitly presented as an attack on
Barbusses manifesto, whose authors were accused of having had the audacity
to distort the so lofty and so generous duty of progress and humanity that
France had taken on on African soil (IPF, 6465), and of having awarded
themselves the title of intellectual workers as though they were qualified
to speak in the name of French thought.
The signatories of Les intellectuels aux cts de la Patrie indignantly
rejected this claim: If a few intellectuals, or those who consider themselves
35
36
37
38
Reproduced in Sirinelli, IPF, 6268.

On Les travailleurs intellectuels, and the manifestos that followed it, see David
Drake, The PCF, the Surrealists, Clart and the Rif War, French Cultural Studies
17 (2006), 17388.
Racine-Furlaud, Bataille autour dintellectuel(s), p.228.
According to Kedward, the term intellectuel was first used (in a pejorative sense) by
Barrs in an article of 1 February 1898 attacking the Dreyfusards (La Vie en Bleu,
p.142).
156
chapter 6
as such, have placed themselves on the side of the revolution, the overwhelming majority of scholars (savants) and writers remain on the side of
the Patrie. (In fact, there were 175 initial signatories, followed by over 200
more, inevitably including Massis, but also Valry and Franois Mauriac
(IPF, 66, note 1).) After praising Frances civilizing enterprise in Morocco,
the signatories concluded by expressing their gratitude to and admiration of
the troops fighting for Right, Civilization and Peace. Marshal Lyautey, the
Resident General of Morocco, responded with a telegram of thanks published in Le Figaro of 9 July, which opposed revolution and la Patrie.
This opposition was confirmed by La rvolution dabord et toujours!
(Revolution First and Always!), a joint manifesto issued in August 1925
by various groups including Rvolution Surraliste and Clart.39 Even more
than patriotism described as a hysteria like any other, but more hollow
and lethal than any other what the signatories found repugnant was the
very idea of a Patrie. The manifesto went on to declare that it went without
saying that its signatories wholly approved and endorsed the manifesto of
the Comit daction contre la guerre du Maroc and denounced Les intellectuels aux cts de la Patrie, describing it as imbecilic and those who
had signed it as dogs trained to take advantage of the Patrie. In their final
point, the signatories proclaimed: We are the rebellion of lesprit; we consider bloody Revolution as the ineluctable vengeance of lesprit humiliated
by your works.40
While right-wing French intellectuals developed the theme of
the defence of Western civilization articulated by Massis in Dfense de
lOccident, left-wing intellectuals rallied round the slogan of the defence
of culture. (The emphasis on culture may suggest that civilization had
become a term associated with the Right.) In 1932, Barbusse and Charles
La rvolution dabord et toujours! in Jos Pierre, ed., Tracts surralistes et dclarations
collectives, 19221969, Vol. 1: 19221939 (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1980), pp.5456.
For commentary, see pp.395401.
40 Without referring to it by name, Camus would later quote possibly at second hand
from La rvolution dabord et toujours! in his critique of surrealism in LHomme
rvolt: History is governed by laws conditioned by the cowardice of individuals
(III, 142).
39
157
Vildrac formed the Association des crivains et des artistes rvolutionnaires

(AEAR), a French branch of the Moscow-based International Union of
Revolutionary Writers, with the aim of bringing writers and artists together
with workers to fight against fascism and for the creation of a socialist
culture.41 In 1933, the AEAR sponsored the review Commune, which was
advertised as La grande revue pour la dfense de la culture and whose
subtitle became Revue littraire franaise pour la dfense de la culture.42 In
1934, the same organization was responsible for founding the first Maison
de la culture, in Paris.
In June 1935, the Association internationale des crivains pour la dfense
de la culture held its first conference in Paris: organized by (among others)
Barbusse, Rolland, Gide and Malraux, it brought together 250 writers
from 38 countries.43 Among the speakers was Julien Benda, best known
as the author of La Trahison des clercs (1926, Eng. tr. The Betrayal of the
Intellectuals), whose contribution was published in January 1937 in a celebrated column of LHumanit called Dfense de la culture.44 (In 1937,
Camuss teacher and mentor Jean Grenier himself wrote an article entitled Pour la dfense de la culture, which subsequently became a chapter
of his Essai sur lesprit dorthodoxie.)45 On the political front, Barbusse and
Rolland organized a Congrs contre la guerre et le fascisme in Amsterdam in
41 See Lvi-Valensi, LEngagement culturel, pp.8384, and more generally, Nicole
Racine, LAssociation des Artistes et Ecrivains Rvolutionnaires (AEAR), Mouvement
social 54 ( Jan.Mar. 1966), 2947.
42 See Wolfgang Klein, Commune: revue pour la dfense de la culture, 19331939, tr.
D. Bonnaud-Lamotte and M.-A. Coadou (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1988).
43 The proceedings of the conference have now been reconstructed in Sandra Teroni
and Wolfgang Klein, eds, Pour la dfense de la culture: les textes du congrs international des crivains, Paris, juin 1935 (Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon, 2005). Its
ideological background is explored in Sandra Teroni, ed., Per la difesa della cultura:
Scrittori a Parigi nel 1935 (Rome: Carocci, 2002).
44 Anne Mathieu, Intellectuels contre la guerre dthiopie, Aden: Paul Nizan et les
annes trente 1 (2002), 199226 (pp.21213). The phrase dfense de la culture continues to be used as a slogan today, but usually in a particularist, anti-globalization
context.
45 Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1938, pp.13951.
158
chapter 6
August 1932, followed in June 1933 Hitler had come to power in January
that year by a Congrs antifasciste europen held at the Salle Pleyel concert
hall in Paris. These two conferences gave rise to the Comit mondial contre
la guerre et le fascisme, also known as Paix et libert and the AmsterdamPleyel movement. Camus is reported as being an active member of this at
the beginning of 1935,46 and in 1936 he gave at least two speeches on the
organizations behalf, one to Muslims in Kabylia.47 In the other, according
to a police report, Camus recalled the history of the Popular Front against
the background of Mussolinis invasion of Ethiopia and the rise of fascism
in Italy and Germany.48
In fact, the formation of the Popular Front was largely due to events
in France, where the threat posed by the Right had been brought home by
the events of 6 February 1934. Following a series of financial and political
scandals (including the notorious Stavisky affair) and the dismissal of the
right-wing Paris police chief Chiappe, a series of protests by the right-wing
leagues, notably Action Franaise and the Croix de Feu, culminated in a
mass anti-parliamentary demonstration in the centre of Paris. When the
demonstration turned into a riot and threatened the National Assembly,
the police opened fire; sixteen demonstrators were killed and some 1400
injured. Seeing this as an attempted coup by the Right, the left-wing parties were shocked into seeking closer ties, and in July, the Socialist party
accepted a proposal by leaders of the PCF (Parti communiste franais) for
joint action against fascism. A year later the two parties had a joint meeting with the Radical party, and on Bastille Day 1935, following the call of
the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, the three parties and dozens of prodemocratic organizations joined in a massive demonstration that led to
the formation of the Popular Front, which swept to victory in the French
general election of May 1936.
46 Quilliot, Politique et culture mditerranennes (E, 1314), citing Max-Pol

Fouchet.
47 Lottman, Albert Camus, p.112; Todd, Albert Camus, p.95.
48 Todd, ibid.
159
Manifesto and Counter-Manifesto during the

Spanish Civil War
Two months after the victory of the Popular Front in France, a rebellion of
army officers in the Spanish zone of Morocco marked the beginning of the
Spanish Civil War. Just as Italys invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 had
led to the publication of crivains et artistes contre la guerre dEthiopie
and Massiss Pour la dfense de lOccident, so the outbreak of the Civil
War in July 1936 led to a renewed battle of words between the same two
camps of French intellectuals. Later that year, Maurras wrote a preface for
Pierre Hricourts Pourquoi Franco vaincra (Why Franco Will Win),49
while Massis followed up his preface for Charles de Peyret-Chappuiss
LItalie a-t-elle besoin de colonies? (Does Italy Need Colonies?)50 with Les
Cadets de lAlcazar (The Cadets of the Alcazar),51 a propagandist account,
written with the future collaborator Robert Brasillach, of the Falangist
defence against the Republican siege of the Alcazar in Toledo. On the Left,
meanwhile, the theme of the defence of culture reappeared with specific
reference to the war in the manifesto La culture en danger, issued at the
end of 1936 by the Association des crivains pour la dfense de la culture, and
signed by (among others) Aragon and Malraux; the counter-signatories
included Rolland, Gide and, notably, Audisio.52
49
50
51
52
Paris: Baudinire, 1936.

Paris: Les Presses de France, 1936.
Paris: Plon, 1936.
After initially appearing as a poster at the beginning of November 1936, La culture
en danger was published in Commune 40 (15 December 1936), 42426. As Aragon
noted elsewhere in the article that preceded it, the slogan La culture en danger! was
a variant of a revolutionary slogan used in 1793 (La Rpublique en danger!). See
Pour la dfense de la culture, Commune 40 (15 December 1936), 41823, reprinted
in [Louis] Aragon, Luvre potique VII: 19361937 (Paris: Livre Club Diderot,
1977), pp.25158 (p.258).
160
chapter 6
La culture en danger stated that the struggle of the Spanish people

against fascism put culture at stake, and with it the freedom, independence and human dignity that were the conditions of all creative activity.
It was of the utmost necessity that intellectuals should follow this battle
in which the very future of intelligence was heroically being forged.53 The
blood being shed in the barbaric assaults of those who were launching
mercenary troops against Spain, the manifesto declared, was the blood
of the people, the creator of the authentic culture that gave Spain its universal significance among the civilizations of the world. The signatories
asked writers everywhere to realize that the struggle of the Spanish people
did not call into question the future of a people, but the future of man.54
Similarly, the manifesto Pour la dfense de lOccident had said that the
risk of European war posed by the imposition of sanctions on Italy following its invasion of Ethiopia threatened the very notion of man.55
Although it was published ten months after Camuss lecture, a manifesto in support of Spanish intellectuals that appeared in the December 1937
issue of the Franco-Spanish periodical Occident should also be mentioned
here. As Sirinelli notes,56 this expressed solidarity with Spanish nationalist
writers in reaction to the second, peripatetic Congrs pour la dfense de la
culture that had been held in Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris successively earlier that year. It can also, however, be seen as a belated response
to La culture en danger. Although the signatories including Bertrand,
Paul Claudel, Drieu la Rochelle, Massis and later Maurras claimed to
place themselves above politics, their sympathies were clear. Invoking the
ties of race, tradition and culture that linked them, as Frenchmen, to their
Latin sister, the signatories declared: we cannot do otherwise than wish
for the triumph in Spain of what currently represents civilization against
La culture en danger, reprinted in Aragon, Luvre potique VII, pp.26770
(p.267).
54 Ibid., p.269.
55 Sirinelli, IPF, 93.
56 Ibid., pp.1089. See also Les intellectuels, la propagande et la guerre des libells,
in David Wingeate-Pike, Les Franais et la guerre dEspagne (Paris: PUF, 1975),
pp.23743.
53
161
barbarity, order and justice against violence, tradition against destruction.

[] We therefore salute the men who, in a time of appalling adversity, represent the intelligence and the culture of their country with such dignity. 57
Civilization, culture and intelligence, along with order, tradition and
violence the same contested concepts and normative terms that Camus
had used in his lecture in attacking the pro-fascist doctrine of Latinity were
used by the proponents of Latinity to defend Franco in his war against the
Spanish republic.58
It is essential, then, to replace Camuss lecture in its cultural-political
context. As a branch of a Popular Front organization, the Maison de la
culture in Algiers that the lecture inaugurated was above all a cultural vehicle for the anti-fascist struggle. As the local Communist party newspaper,
La Lutte sociale, put it, announcing both the founding of the Maison and
Camuss lecture: it is a question of nothing less than forming a Cultural
Front, a counterpart to the Popular Front.59 Camuss rhetorical deployment of the terms civilization, culture, esprit, patrie, intelligence and
intellectual reflects his intervention in the long-standing struggle over
these contested concepts between left- and right-wing French intellectuals in the interwar years. His use of these terms needs to be seen not only
in the immediate polemical context of the manifesto Pour la dfense de
lOccident, but also in this broader argumentative context.
57
58
59
Manifeste aux intellectuels espagnols, Occident: le bi-mensuel franco-espagnol 4 (Dec.

1937), p.4, reproduced in Sirinelli, IPF, 1089. See also Gisle Sapiro, La Guerre des
crivains 19401953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p.272.
The debate over intelligence also continued into the Vichy period: see Sapiro, La
Guerre des crivains, pp.192203.
Lvi-Valensi, LEngagement culturel, p.95, quoting La Lutte sociale of 6 February
1937.
162
chapter 6
Coda: Massiss Career after Pour la dfense de lOccident

In 1939, Massis published a book of sympathetic interviews with three Latin
dictators: Mussolini, Franco and Antonio Salazar of Portugal.60 Although
Massis, as a Germanophobe, was opposed to collaboration, he supported
Ptain; after serving briefly in the Vichy administration, he drafted the
final declaration that Ptain gave before going into exile in Germany in
August 1944.61 Having come through the post-Liberation purges more or
less unscathed, he was elected to the Acadmie franaise in 1960. In 1961,
he published a collection of further interviews with Salazar62 and gave a
lecture in Madrid on the Spanish Civil War and the defence of the West.63
Dfense de lOccident, meanwhile, was adopted as the title of a neo-fascist
review published between 1952 and 1983 by the critic and Holocaust denier
Maurice Bardche. Bardche was the brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach,
the anti-Semitic editor of the notorious weekly Je suis partout, with whom
Massis had written Les Cadets de lAlcazar and who was shot for collaboration in 1945. Massis himself contributed to Dfense de lOccident and in
1963 published a memoir of Brasillach.64 He died in 1970.
60 Chefs, les dictatures et nous: entretiens avec Mussolini, Salazar, Franco (Paris: Plon,
1939).
61 Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 19401944 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982 [1972]), pp.35758.
62 Salazar face face: trois dialogues politiques (Geneva: La Palatine, 1961).
63 La Guerre dEspagne et la dfense de lOccident (Lige: Dynamo, 1962).
64 Le Souvenir de Robert Brasillach (Lige: Dynamo, 1963).
chapter 7
In The New Mediterranean Culture, as we have seen, Camus claims that

what is most essential in the Mediterranean genius springs from the encounter between East and West. In this context, he refers explicitly to Audisio,
whose mid-1930s texts on the subject can in turn be seen as interventions
in a contemporary polemic about the Mediterranean and Mediterranean
humanism. Audisios and Camuss comments on the relationship between
East and West in the Mediterranean, however, also need to be seen against
the background of a broader interwar debate on EastWest relations that
coincided with a sense of crisis in Western (i.e. European) civilization
after the collective trauma of the First World War.
In 1925, both Audisio and Camuss philosophy teacher and mentor
Jean Grenier had contributed along with many other writers, intellectuals and academics to Les Appels de lOrient (The Calls of the East),1 a
special double issue of the periodical Les Cahiers du Mois that was devoted
to the EastWest question. (As I shall demonstrate later, this was not the
only contribution that Grenier made to the debate, in which he played a
seminal role.) Although the EastWest debate reached its height in the
mid-1920s and was increasingly overshadowed by the rise of fascism, a
continuing interest in the subject was evident, for example, in special issues
of Cahiers du Sud devoted to Islam and the West (1935) and India (1941),
to which Grenier contributed an article on the relationship between the
Indian and Western mentalities.2 Indeed, as I shall discuss, Jean Ballard,
1
2
Les Appels de lOrient, Les Cahiers du Mois 9/10 (February/March 1925).

Islam et lOccident, Cahiers du Sud 175 (August/September 1935); Message actuel de
lInde, Cahiers du Sud, 236 ( June/July 1941); Jean Grenier, Rflexions sur la mentalit
indienne dans ses rapports avec la ntre, ibid., 32955.
164
chapter 7
the editor of Cahiers du Sud, had himself made a significant contribution

to the original debate.
In his lecture, Camus describes the Mediterranean as perhaps the only
region (i.e. of the West) to link up with the great Eastern philosophies
(penses) (I, 569). OBrien sees this as evidence of Camuss Eurocentrism:
Although [] Camus refers to many European names and achievements,
he has nothing to say of any other contribution to the culture of the area
except for [this] single vague reference.3 Apart from referring to India as a
great civilization, however, Camus stresses that there is much to be learnt
from the East about Mediterranean culture (I, 570), while a contemporary
newspaper report on the lecture by Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, an associate of
the Camus circle, suggested that he saw Spain as an aid to understanding
North Africa, insofar as it maintains between Mediterranean Europe and
Africa the survival of their common origin, which is the East.4
Camuss interest in Eastern thought was also much less superficial than
his vague remarks might suggest. As he himself later told Carl Viggiani,
he had studied Hindu philosophy during his university years (193036),5
while Jacqueline Baishanski has written a whole book on the influence
of Eastern thought on the young Camus, and in particular on his novel
Ltranger (1942).6 Daniel Charles, meanwhile, has suggested that the
attitude towards the absurd that Camus expresses in his philosophical essay
Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Eng. tr. The Myth of Sisyphus) was strongly influenced
by the account given by the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo, in the first
3
4
OBrien, Camus, p.12.

Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, Une culture mditerranenne est-elle ralisable?, LEcho
dAlger, 10 February 1937, p.4. What exactly Camus might have meant by this is not
clear, but it could be seen as referring to Christianity and the Muslim conquests of
North Africa and then much of the western Mediterranean, notably the Iberian
Peninsula.
Questionnaire de Carl A. Viggiani (IV, 643). Two of Camuss philosophy teachers were familiar with Eastern thought: Grenier and Ren Poirier, who had studied
Oriental languages for two years and was interested in Buddhism and especially
Vedantism (Todd, Albert Camus, p.63).
LOrient dans la pense du jeune Camus. Ltranger: un nouvel vangile? (ParisCaen:
Lettres ModernesMinard, 2002).
165
volume of his Propos sur le temps (Remarks on Time, 1928), of the Japanese
Samurai warrior code of Bushido.7 In particular, Charles demonstrates an
uncanny resemblance between Shuzos and Camuss unorthodox conception of a happy Sisyphus.
On the other hand, as we have seen, although much of Camuss
lecture reflects the influence of Audisios contemporary writings on the
Mediterranean, it is also in part a polemical response to Henri Massiss
1935 manifesto Pour la dfense de lOccident (see Chapter 6). The title of
Massiss manifesto, however, was itself borrowed from a book that Massis
had published eight years earlier, Dfense de lOccident (Eng. tr. Defence of
the West),8 which was the single most important expression of the Western
supremacist viewpoint in the EastWest debate. Much of Dfense de
lOccident in turn consisted of reworkings of earlier articles mostly with
Occident in the title that Massis had written as interventions in the
debate, including a contribution to Les Appels de lOrient volume mentioned
above. Whether from the perspective of Audisio and Grenier as immediate
influences on Camus or Massiss manifesto as the main counter-text for
Camuss lecture, then, the interwar EastWest debate provides a further
argumentative context in which the lecture must be placed.9
8
9
Daniel Charles, Camus et lOrient (Notes sur le Mythe de Sisyphe), in Anne-Marie

Amiot and Jean-Franois Matti, eds, Albert Camus et la philosophie (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1997), pp.24156 (p.256). Shuzo was based in Europe from
1921 to 1929, and had originally given the text of his pamphlet as a lecture at the 1928
session of the Dcades de Pontigny, a series of colloquia. After the war, Camus himself
told a Japanese interviewer that, although it was new in the West, my philosophy
of the absurd is familiar in the East. See Hiroshi Mino, Le dbat sur Ltranger au
Japon, in AC14, pp.15562 (p.161).
Paris: Plon, 1927. The version published in Massiss collection LOccident et son destin
(Paris: Grasset, 1956) differs in some respects from the original text I shall refer to
here.
For general studies of the overlapping interwar debates on the postwar crisis in
European/Western civilisation and on the EastWest relationship, see the items by
Cadwallader, Ifversen, and Trbitsch listed in the bibliography. Despite the time
limits implied by her title, Gisle Sapiro places the two debates in a broader historical
context in her wide-ranging study La Guerre des crivains 19401953 (Paris: Fayard,
166
chapter 7
My discussion of this debate will take in a number of texts that have

tended to be overlooked or neglected in previous studies. It will focus on
those of its participants who can be related to Camus in some way, either
as ideological opponents (Massis) or actual or possible influences (Audisio,
Ballard, Grenier, Malraux and Valry on the one hand, and the Russian
thinker Nikolai Berdyaev and Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline
of the West, on the other). In particular, it can be argued that whether or
not Camus was personally aware of Massis as an ideological opponent,
Massiss views were diametrically opposed to Camuss own, to the extent
of constituting a near-perfect mirror-image of them. Critics often refer to
the young Camuss formative intellectual influences, especially Grenier and
Nietzsche. The importance of Massis in this context, however, is that he
can be seen as personifying the contemporary ideas and attitudes against
which Camus reacted in his lecture.
1999). See Sapiros section on Le Gnie Franais, pp.10661, esp. La dfense de

lOccident, pp.14261. Baishanskis LOrient dans la pense du jeune Camus, on the
other hand, examines the broader current of interwar French intellectual interest in
the East rather than the EastWest debate itself, making no mention of either Les
Appels de lOrient or Massis, for example. See Chapter 2, En France aprs 1418: la
tentation de lOrient (pp.3970).
For more specialized studies focusing on the significance of the East for various
participants in the EastWest controversy, see the items by Bonnet (the Surrealists),
Cornick (the Nouvelle Revue franaise) and Lardinois (Orientalists). The contributions of Malraux and Massis have been discussed by Sapiro (LIntroduction du
relativisme culturel en France), Thornberry and Michel Toda, Henri Massis: un
tmoin de la droite intellectuelle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987; see Un dfenseur
de lOccident, pp.25577). Although it contains important material that cannot
readily be found elsewhere, Todas biography suffers from an uncritical approach to
its subject Toda is evidently an admirer of Massis and a lack of bibliographical
references.
167
Valry and the Crisis of the Mind

Although the editors of Les Cahiers du Mois themselves gave two slightly
different accounts of the history of the EastWest debate,10 its origin in
France at least can be traced back at least as far as the second part of Paul
Valrys two-part essay La crise de lesprit (The Crisis of the Mind).11 As
Massis would write in Dfense de lOccident, the famous and oft-quoted
pages of Valrys essay were the common point of departure of any reflection on the subject.12
The carnage of the First World War created an acute sense of crisis
in Western i.e. European civilization, which was exacerbated by the
Russian revolution of 1917, increasing unrest in European empires and
the emergence of the USA and Japan (which had defeated Russia in the
Russo-Japanese war of 19045) as world powers. The response of Valry
in La crise de lesprit was simultaneously apocalyptic and profoundly
conservative. Beginning with the dramatic statement We civilizations
know now that we are mortal, Valry said that the military crisis might be
over, but that the illusion of a European culture had been lost. He traced
the roots of the problem to the intellectual state of Europe in 1914, which,
he suggested, had reached the limits of a modernism characterized by
cosmopolitan heterogeneity.13 In the final section of the first part of his
essay, Valry pictured the European intellectual as Hamlet looking at the
10
11
12
13
See the notes to the introduction to the Cahier de la rdaction (p.335) and Le
mouvement asiatique dans les revues franaises (pp.38387).
La crise de lesprit (1919), in Paul Valry, uvres I (Paris: Gallimard, La Pliade,
1957), ed. Jean Hytier, pp.9881000. Camus may well have been deliberately echoing
the title of Valrys essay when he gave the title La Crise de lhomme (Eng. tr. The
Human Crisis) to a lecture he gave in the United States in 1946 on the aftermath of
the Second World War (II, 73748).
Dfense de lOccident, p.3, note 1.
On the relationship between modernism, the First World War and its aftermath,
see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
(London: Bantam, 1989).
168
chapter 7
spectres of millions of dead, deciding that the world no longer needed

him and concluding: we will finally see the miracle appear of an animal
society, a perfect and definitive ant hill.14
Although Valry puts this phrase into the mouth of his Hamlet-figure,
the terms animal and ant hill clearly reflected his own view of the masses.
This was confirmed by the second part of Valrys essay, in which he returned
to a problem he had raised in the first, that of establishing peace insofar as
it concerned the intellect and things of the intellect. For us, he wrote, the
idea of culture, of intelligence, of masterworks (uvres magistrales) had
long been associated with the idea of Europe. Other parts of the world
had had admirable civilizations, but none had possessed Europes singular
property of uniting the most intense emissive power with the most intense
absorbent power: Everything has come to Europe and everything has come
from it. Or almost everything.15
According to Valry, however, the present time posed the question
of whether Europe was going to retain its pre-eminence: Will Europe
become what it is in reality [Valrys italics], in other words a small cape
of the Asiatic continent? Or will Europe remain what it appears to be, in
other words: the precious part of the terrestrial universe, the pearl of the
sphere, the brain of a vast body? The inequality between the regions of
the world that had been the basis of European predominance, said Valry,
was tending to gradually disappear, precisely as a result of the spread of the
European science and technology on which that inequality had been based.
The balance that had been in Europes favour was beginning to tip in the
other direction or as Valry revealingly put it: We have rashly restored
the proportional forces to the masses!16
Suggesting that this phenomenon was paralleled within each nation
by the diffusion of culture among ever greater categories of individuals,
Valry concluded by asking whether the European mind or at least its
most precious content was totally diffusible:
14
15
16
Valry, La crise de lesprit, p.994.

Ibid., p.995; Valrys italics.
169
The phenomenon of the exploitation of the globe, the phenomenon of the levelling of techniques and the democratic phenomenon, which point to a deminutio
capitis [the Roman term for a loss of civil rights] by Europe must these be taken
as absolute decisions of fate? Or do we have some freedom against this threatening
conjuration of things?17
Valrys anti-modernism, then, was elitist and reactionary in more ways

than one: in its concern to retain Europes supremacy in the world and a
cultural hierarchy within Europe it was anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian
and patently racist.
Massis and the City of the Mind

Valrys diagnosis clearly made an impression on Henri Massis, the future
author of the most significant antecedent counter-text of Camuss lecture,
the manifesto Pour la dfense de lOccident. In 1937, Massis published
LHonneur de servir (The Honour of Serving), an anthology of his writings which included a section La Crise de lesprit (1920) that was
obviously named after Valrys essay. This in turn included the text of a
lecture that Massis had given that year entitled La Cit de lesprit (The
City of the Mind),18 which, although it is briefly mentioned in Todas
biography of Massis,19 seems to have been overlooked in previous studies
of the EastWest debate.
After giving a lengthy quotation from La Crise de lesprit, Massis took
Valry to task for his fatalism: what was needed was a return to tradition
as the basis for both civilization and culture, which was threatened by an
obsession with novelty. The themes of what Massis described as the propa-
17
18
19

Massis, La Crise de lesprit (1920), in LHonneur de servir: textes runis pour contribuer lhistoire dune gnration, 19121937 (Paris: Plon, 1937), pp.18793.
Toda, Henri Massis, pp.25758.
170
chapter 7
ganda of France democracy, progress and freedom were threadbare,

and needed to be replaced with those of order, authority and truth. Young
people were suffering from a new mal du sicle,20 and some were being
tempted by irrational metaphysical belief-systems which exploited spiritual
dissatisfactions, and whose bait of exoticism, poetry or mystery masked
what Massis called the savage appetites of the rivalry of the races.
Other voices and here Massis quoted one of his personal btes noires,
Romain Rolland21 were inclining youth towards a catastrophic vision
of the universe: The great nations of the West are on the verge of ruin,
Romain Rolland prophesies. [] If these rabid dogs persist in tearing
each other apart, the heavy stick of destiny will know how to separate them
[]. For Massis, however, the crisis that Valry and Rolland had identified could be averted: to defeat the perils that threaten us, one must be
able to name them. To be precise, they are called Germanism, Bolshevism,
Asiaticism. Civilization as a whole is reduced to defending itself against
this opaque barbarism, which is very powerfully organized.22 Quoting a
passage from Maurras that alluded scornfully to Rollands Au-dessus de
la mle,23 Massis called for a new mobilization of the intelligence.24 The
20 Massis, La Crise de lesprit (1920), p.191.

21 See Chapter 6.
22 La Crise de lesprit, p.192, Massiss emphasis. Ironically, the pejorative term
Asiaticism originated in nineteenth-century Russia, as an antonym of Europe(an)
ism, reflecting the contemporary division in the country between Slavophiles
and Europhiles: see Denis [Dany] Savelli and Rgis Poulets entry for Asiatisme/
Asiaticism in the online Dictionnaire International des Termes Littraires (<http://
www.flsh.unilim.fr/ditl/Fahey/ASIATISMEAsiaticism_n.html> accessed 18 May
2010). According to Le Trsor de la Langue Franaise, the first recorded instance of
asiatisme in French dates from 1923; as shown in Chapter 6, however, the term was
used by Henri Ghon in 1919. Interestingly, Massis uses the term Europisme in
Dfense de lOccident (p.118).
23 Nobody can take refuge above the universal fray without injustice or opprobrium.
Massis, ibid., quoting Maurrass preface to Stendhals Rome, Naples et Florence (Paris:
Champion, 1919).
24 On the metaphorical mobilization of French intellectuals in support of la patrie
during the First World War, see Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au
171
moral unity of Europe had to be remade, the philosophy of order spread,

and the notion of man and God made manifest in ideas and morals. To
restore these great lost spiritual goods, claimed Massis, France was the most
necessary of all nations: It is not only the physical form of European civilization that would crumble with the ruin of France; but more profoundly
still, it is the spiritual being of the West that would find itself affected at
the same time. The day we no longer held our position in the universe,
when we allowed our reason for living to be lost, the Centre of the moral
world itself would be shaken.25 As the previous quotation suggests, however, Massiss ludicrously inflated sense of Frances position in the grand
scheme of things was combined with an acute, near-paranoid sense of the
fragility of that position. For Massis, merchants of doom and gloom such
as Rolland and Valry were, wittingly or unwittingly, in unholy alliance
with the barbarians at the gates, and France faced a triple threat from the
East Asia, Germany and revolutionary Russia.
Spengler and the Intellectual Crisis in Postwar Germany

Contemporary reports on German intellectual life appeared to confirm
Massiss diagnosis. In November 1920, Bernard Groethuysen reported in
La Nouvelle Revue Franaise on what he described as an intellectual crisis
in Germany, claiming that the name of Oswald Spengler, author of The
25
nom de la patrie:les intellectuels et la premire guerre mondiale (19101919) (Paris:

La Dcouverte, 1996).
In a footnote (p.193), Massis quoted the social philosopher Georges Sorel, the
theorist of revolutionary syndicalism, to the effect that the elite who possessed the
incomparable treasures of classical culture and Christian tradition should cultivate
the most noble forces of their mind, without worrying about what democratic
mediocrity might think about them.
172
chapter 7
Decline of the West, was on the lips of every intellectual in the country.26
With its gloomy prognosis for Western (i.e. European) civilization, the
publication in 1918 of the first volume of Spenglers magnum opus which
he had actually conceived three years before the war had indeed caught
the mood of the times. According to Spenglers theory of world history,
all great cultures went through a natural life-cycle of growth and decline
comparable to the seasons of the year. In Spenglers view, however, socalled civilization, far from being a culminating achievement, represented
the decline of genuine culture. Western/European civilization, according
to Spengler, was no exception to this pattern: its period of inevitable and
irreversible decline had begun in the nineteenth century, as shown by its
increasing materialism, artistic decadence and democracy, which he identified with the rule of money.
At this point a brief excursus on Spenglers possible influence on Camus
is called for. We know from Camuss notebooks that he read at least some
of the first part of The Decline of the West in 1937.27 The evidence that he did
so before giving his lecture, however, is inconclusive. Following Herbert
Lottman, Raymond Gay-Crosier has pointed out that the chronology of
the first of Camuss notebooks, covering the period May 1935 to September
1937, cannot be relied on with any certainty.28 According to Gay-Crosier,29
however, an entry apparently dating from February 1937 Camus gave his
26 Bernard Groethuysen, Lettre dAllemagne, NRF 86 (Nov. 1920), 792805. In a later

report under the same title (NRF 91 (April 1921), 497508), Groethuysen discussed
Spenglers Preussentum und Sozialismus (Prussianism and Socialism, 1920). Both
articles have been reprinted (as Spengler) in Groethuysen, Autres portraits, ed.
Philippe Delpuech (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp.17199.
27 The French translation of the first part of The Decline of the West had appeared in
1931 (Le Dclin de lOccident (Paris: Gallimard, 1931)). A translation of the second
part followed in 1933.
28 Camus cut up the notebook and reassembled it, presumably to remove entries referring to the break-up of his marriage to his first wife, Simone Hi. See Gay-Crosier,
[Carnets 19351948] Note sur le texte (II, 1384); Lottman, Albert Camus, p.689,
note 16.
29 Gay-Crosier, op. cit. (II, 1386), note 12.
173
lecture on the 8th suggests that he was in the process of reading Spengler,
or beginning to read him:
Civilization does not reside in a more or less high degree of refinement, but in an
awareness common to a whole people. And this consciousness is never refined. It is
even quite straightforward. To make of civilization the work of an elite is to identify
it with culture, which is something quite different. There is a Mediterranean culture.
But there is also a Mediterranean civilization. On the other hand, do not confuse
civilization and people. (II, 813)
Ironically, one of the many criticisms that Jean Sarocchi has made of
Camuss lecture is precisely that it confuses the concepts of culture and
civilization.30
Be this as it may, an elliptic notebook entry under the heading
Civilization against culture, apparently dating from June 1937, confirms
that Camus saw a connection between Spenglers distinction between culture and civilization and the ideas on the Mediterranean that he himself
expressed in his lecture:
Imperialism is pure civilization. Cf. Cecil Rhodes. expansion is all civilizations are
small islands Civilization as the inevitable result of culture (cf. Spengler).
Culture: the cry of men in the face of their destiny.
Civilization, its decadence: mans desire in the face of wealth. Blindness.
On a political theory of the Mediterranean. []
*
Economic facts (Marxism).
spiritual (Germanic Holy Roman Empire). (II, 81617)
As we have seen, Camus refers to the spiritual unity of the Holy Roman
Empire in his lecture (I, 566); the first part of this passage (up to Blindness),
on the other hand, refers directly to the text of The Decline of the West.31
Whether or not Camus had actually started reading Spengler before his
30 LHumanisme de Camus au risque de Jean Grenier, Variations Camus (Biarritz:

Atlantica-Sguier, 2005), pp.91124 (p.124).
31 The Decline of the West, trans. by Charles Francis Atkinson (London: Allen and Unwin,
1932). Spenglers references to imperialism and Cecil Rhodes are on pp.3637.
174
chapter 7
lecture, however, he had probably already been introduced to Spenglers

ideas by Grenier, who had discussed The Decline of the West in an article
published in 1924 (see below).
The huge popularity of Spenglers book in Germany coincided with a
growing interest in the East. In December 1920, the Francophile German
literary critic Ernst-Robert Curtius published an article in the Frenchlanguage Revue de Genve with the self-explanatory title Les influences
asiatiques dans la vie intellectuelle de lAllemagne daujourdhui (Asiatic
Influences in the Intellectual Life of Germany Today).32 Among the influences Curtius identified were Taoism, Vedic and Buddhist mysticism, the
Nobel prize-winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, Dostoevsky and
the Travel Diary of a Philosopher (1918), by Count Hermann Keyserling,
whose experiences in India had inspired him to found an Eastern-style
School of wisdom in Darmstadt. This and subsequent articles by Curtius
would be much cited by commentators in the EastWest debate.
In August 1921, meanwhile, the historian Maurice Muret the author
of LEsprit juif: essai de psychologie ethnique (The Jewish Mind: An Essay in
Ethnic Psychology) and future author of Le Crpuscule des nations blanches
(The Twilight of the White Nations) published an article on German
thought and the East in La Revue universelle, whose co-founder and editor
was none other than Henri Massis.33 After discussing the significance of
Spengler, examining the dubious role of German Jews in propagating this
new Orientalism and identifying the leading figures both German and
Asian in the movement, Muret concluded that the only defence against
the danger of Asiaticism lay in Greco-Latin humanism and the Christian
tradition, which remained the source of all renovation and intellectual
restoration for the West, and the guarantee of all moral progress. There
was no other salvation for Europe.
32
33
Les influences asiatiques dans la vie intellectuelle de lAllemagne daujourdhui, Revue

de Genve (December 1920), 89095.
Maurice Muret, LEsprit juif: essai de psychologie ethnique (Paris: Perrin, 1901); Le
crpuscule des nations blanches (Paris: Payot, 1925); La pense allemande et lOrient,
La Revue universelle (15 August 1921), 41528. Cf. Cadwallader, Crisis of the European
Mind, pp.8587.
175
Massis and Maritain: Forward to the Middle Ages

The next intervention in the debate by Massis himself took Murets argument a stage further. In October 1923, Massis and his fellow neo-Thomist,
the philosopher Jacques Maritain, gave a joint interview to the journalist
Frdric Lefvre for Les Nouvelles littraires.34 Massis warned that the
future of the West was once again in peril because of an upsurge in German
Orientalism. Through Spengler, according to Massis, a defeated Germany
was proclaiming the decadence of the West, while Curtius, Hermann Hesse
and Thomas Mann were announcing the end of the European era and
greeting the advent of a new religious faith in the East. As further evidence, Massis cited the huge popularity of Keyserlings Travel Diary of a
Philosopher and the frenzied crowds that had followed Tagore during his
visit to Germany.
In France itself, Romain Rolland had become the apostle of Gandhi,
whom Massis described as the missionary of non-resistance to evil. Thus,
claimed Massis, with the help of Germano-Slavic despair, the worst Asiatic
ferments were beginning to disunite our culture and to de-Westernize us.35
Citing Valrys La crise de lesprit again as an example of a new mal du
sicle, Massis also referred to the importation of Russian writers he saw as
anti-Western. These included Dostoevsky and the French-based religious
philosopher Lev Shestov, who had written an essay on Pascal36 which,
Massis claimed, demonstrated how much our Catholic and Latin mind
was impervious to these barbarians. Faced with the combined threats of
Germanism and Asiatic Slavism, which he described as equally inhuman,
Massis concluded, Frances spiritual mission was clear: to stamp out these
34 Une heure avec Jacques Maritain et Henri Massis, Les nouvelles littraires, 13 October
1923, rpt in Lefvre, Une heure avec , Premire srie (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Franaise,
1924), pp.4363 (p.60).
35 Lefvre, p.61 (italics in original).
36 Lon Chestov, La Nuit de Gethsmani: essai sur la philosophie de Pascal (Paris: Grasset,
1923).
176
chapter 7
destructive doctrines, it was necessary to go back to civilizing our Europe

through the teaching of Aristotle and Saint Thomas [Aquinas].37
Rolland and Valry were not the only French writers whom Massis
saw as enemies within, and here we see how Massiss antipathies offer
a mirror-image of Camuss enthusiasms. In the same year as Massis and
Maritains joint interview for Les Nouvelles littraires, an admiring study of
Dostoevsky was published by Andr Gide, whose aesthetics and morality
Massis had repeatedly attacked following the publication of Gides novel
Les Caves du Vatican (Eng. tr. The Vatican Cellars) in 1914.38 In a review
article published in the Revue universelle, Massis said that, in his search for
God, Gide was turning to the East, towards the land of Nirvana, towards
the God of Mani [the founder of Manichaeism] and Persian sufis. He
spoke of the secret scorn with which Gide talked of our Latin logic, our
Mediterranean codes, Rome and Catholicism and claimed that he was
involved in the most specious undertaking of Protestant, Nietzschean
heresy to de-Westernize us and de-Catholicize us.39
In contrast to Massis, the young Camus was an enthusiastic reader of
Gide, Shestov and Dostoevsky. Camus later wrote in a tribute that Gide
ruled over [his] youth,40 while in April 1933, he compared Shestovs impact
on him to that of reading Proust (so many things no longer to say).41
Although Camus criticizes Shestov in Le Mythe de Sisyphe for escaping from
the absurd by making a leap of faith (I, 24244), Marie-Louise Audin and
Louis Faucon have pointed out that, elsewhere in his essay, Camus draws
on no fewer than four of Shestovs works.42 In addition, Camus would later
re-read almost all of Shestovs available works in preparation for writing
37
38
39
Lefvre, pp.62, 63.

Dostoevsky (Paris: Plon, 1923).
See Andr Gide et Dostoevsky <http://www.gidiana.net/MASS6.htm> accessed
18 May 2010.
40 Rencontres avec Andr Gide (III, 882).
41 Notes de lecture [April 1933] (I, 957).
42 See Audins notes to Le Mythe de Sisyphe (I, 128791, passim). See also Peter
Dunwoodie, Chestov et le Mythe de Sisyphe, AC4, pp.4953.
177
LHomme rvolt.43 As for Dostoevsky, Camus would devote sections of

Le Mythe de Sisyphe (I, 29096) and LHomme rvolt (III, 10713) to the
characters of Kirilov (The Possessed) and Ivan Karamazov (The Brothers
Karamazov) respectively, and go on to write a theatrical adaptation of
The Possessed (1959). Indeed, both Peter Dunwoodie and Ray Davison
have argued that a significant part of Camuss uvre takes the form of a
dialogue with the Russian writer.44
Jean Grenier, the Calls of the East and the Crisis of the
European Mind
As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the high point of the
interwar EastWest debate in France was marked by a special issue of the
periodical Les Cahiers du Mois entitled Les Appels de lOrient. The origin
of this title was indirectly acknowledged by the editors of Les Cahiers du
Mois, who referred twice in their accounts of the genesis of the debate to
the key role played by Le nihilisme europen et les appels de lOrient
(European nihilism and the calls of the East), a 1924 article by one Jean
Caves.45 In fact, Jean Caves was a pseudonym for none other than Camuss
mentor Jean Grenier (grenier = attic, caves = cellars).46
43 See Roger Quilliots commentary on LHomme rvolt (E, 1625).

44 Peter Dunwoodie, Une Histoire ambivalente: le dialogue CamusDostoevski (Paris:
Nizet, 1996); Ray Davison, Camus: The Challenge of Dostoevsky (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1997).
45 Jean Caves, Le nihilisme europen et les appels de lOrient (two parts), Philosophies
1 (March 1924), 5165; 2 (May 1924), 18596. After referring to the article in Le
cahier de la rdaction (Les Appels de lOrient, p.335), the editors of Les Cahiers du
Mois quoted from it in their overview of previous coverage of the Eastern question,
Le mouvement asiatique dans les revues franaises (pp.38384).
46 Cornick, In search of the Absolute, 30, note 3.
178
chapter 7
Grenier began his article with an 1887 epigraph from Nietzsche

Camuss favourite philosopher on the growing anguish and will to catastrophe in European civilization. He went on to discuss what he called
Spenglers Ruin of the West which, he noted, had already reached its
forty-seventh edition in Germany, making it an important guide to contemporary German thought. After giving an overview of Spenglers ideas,
Grenier quoted Nietzsche again on the will to self-destruction, the will to
nothingness, and said that the evil was not limited to Germany: Europe was
dying, and Germany was turning towards the East hence the popularity
of Keyserling and his Travel Diary of a Philosopher, the growing number
of theosophist sects and the popularity of Tagore. Most importantly, there
was a similar feeling of decadence and of nostalgia for the East in Russia,
where Grenier saw what he described as the evil as having its origin.
In the second part of his article, Grenier discussed Russian nihilism, giving an analysis that anticipates Camuss remarks on the subject in
LHomme rvolt.47 For Grenier, Russian nihilism was the boldest putting
into practice and the most logical outcome of the fundamental ideas of
the eighteenth century [] the absolute negation of all accepted principles, the firm will to destroy everything.48 He cited Peter Stepanovitch in
Dostoevskys The Possessed: what did spilt blood matter provided that the
model society that the West inspired Russians to dream of was realized?
Grenier also quoted Lenin: There are more than a hundred million men
in Russia. Even if our doctrines, as people claim, would make half of them
perish, there would be enough left to realize communism.49 Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, Grenier suggested, had seen clearly that Russian nihilism was
only the extreme development of European nihilism. It was in vain, he said,
that Russian nihilists declaimed against capitalism and tyranny: they did so
in the name of the same principles (progress) and with the same weapons
(violence). To use injustice and oppression to fight against injustice and
47 See, in particular, the section on Le terrorisme individuel (III, 188212).

48 Le nihilisme europen, Philosophies 2, p.186.
49 Ibid.
179
oppression was pointless; it only perpetuated the evil. Revolutionaries,

Grenier concluded, were messianic nihilists.
Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, said Grenier, had condemned Western
civilization. But whereas Dostoevsky saw salvation in a return to orthodoxy and traditional autocracy, Tolstoy sought salvation in the wisdom
of the East: Russias mission, according to Tolstoy, was to learn from the
East and act as a mediator between the West and Asia. In his final years,
Grenier noted, Tolstoy had kept up a voluminous correspondence on this
subject with Muslims, Japanese, Chinese and Hindus, and had exercised
a decisive influence on Gandhi, as Gandhi himself acknowledged. It was
Tolstoy, according to Grenier, who had given Gandhi the idea of nonresistance, which had formed part of the subject of their correspondence,
while Gandhi too had repeatedly rejected Western civilization in his newspaper Young India.
Grenier also cited the case of Kou Houng Ming in China who, like
Gandhi, had studied in England, but who, according to Grenier, had the
ambition of bringing Europe back to true wisdom.50 But whereas Gandhi
and Kou Houng Ming retained elements of spiritual nationalism, Tagore
whose influence was growing all the time in both Europe and Asia wanted
to save the West from itself, as shown in his Letters from Abroad (1924).
Grenier hoped that the East too would listen to Tagore, although it was
currently divided between an aggressive nationalism on the Japanese model
and a brutal internationalism on the Russian model. India and China, said
Grenier, were wondering whether to follow the example of Tokyo or to
give in to the suggestions of Moscow, but either would be to open the door
to European nihilism. The fate of humanity was at stake, Grenier declared
dramatically, for if the West converted the East to its so-called civilization,
the battle was lost forever. If Europe, on the other hand, refused to follow
the ancient wisdom of the East, those who no longer believed in civiliza-
50 Massis would later draw on Grenier (or perhaps the same source(s) as Grenier)
for his account of Tolstoys and Kou Houng Mings views in Dfense de lOccident.
Compare Le nihilisme europen, Philosophies 2, 18990 and 19192, and Dfense
de lOccident, p.128 and pp.15152, note 1 respectively.
180
chapter 7
tion would either enter into power-politics or take refuge in systematic

abstention and a life of contemplation.51
It was at this point that professional Orientalists began to intervene in
the EastWest debate, most notably the independent scholar Ren Gunon,
an initiate of Sufi mysticism. In 1924, Gunon published Orient et Occident
(Eng. tr. East and West),52 a critique of modern Western civilization from
the viewpoint of traditional Eastern thought, for which he became the de
facto spokesman against its French detractors. Grenier, still writing under the
pseudonym Jean Caves, gave Gunons book a largely sympathetic review
in an article whose title La crise de lesprit europen53 (The Crisis of the
European Mind) once again evoked Valrys seminal article. According
to Grenier, Gunon saw the main cause for the decadence of the West as
lying in a materialism that had originated in the Renaissance and which had
been accompanied by intellectual regression. Among the many illusions
that Gunon saw as symptoms of this regression was the Western idea of
civilization and above all progress as being inevitable, continuous and
universal: the myth of a golden age was placed in the future rather than in
the past, hence the innumerable messianisms that had emerged in the nineteenth century. (Here it should be recalled that Camus himself described
Progress as a harmful toy (I, 572) in his lecture, and that he too would
condemn messianic views of history, notably in LHomme rvolt.)54
For Gunon, wrote Grenier, the West could only save itself by following the example of Eastern civilization, which was based on the primacy of
Intelligence (by which, apparently, Gunon meant a mystical form of metaGreniers remarks here anticipate the title-essay of Arthur Koestlers The Yogi and
the Commissar (translated into French in 1946), which influenced Camuss political
thought in the postwar period.
52 Gunon, Orient et Occident (Paris: Vga, 1924). On Gunon, see Mark Sedgwick,
Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the
Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
53 Jean Caves [Grenier], La crise de lesprit europen, Vie des lettres 17 (1924), 3336.
54 In his 1946 travel diaries, for example, Camus wrote: The idea of messianism [is]
the basis of all fanaticisms (II, 1060). In LHomme rvolt, meanwhile, he criticized
Marxist doctrine as a combination of the most valid critical method and the most
disputable utopian messianism (III, 221).
51
181
physical knowledge). According to Grenier, however, Gunon had failed

to take account of the resistance to Eastern thought among many Western
intellectuals, for some of whom the real danger was the possible influence of
the East itself. Here Grenier quoted the example of a member of the Italian
parliament who had declared that the traditional meaning of Latinity was
in peril, and that a slow wave of corrosion was advancing from the depths
of Asia. He also referred to Massis, who condemned Eastern doctrines as
destructive, lumping together Bolshevism, Tolstoyism, Germanism, Judaism
and Indianism.55 Agreeing with Gunon that the call for the West to return
to tradition was unrealistic, Grenier claimed that Eastern culture was based
on the same principles as the culture of the Middle Ages, but had the merit
of still being alive, unlike the Scholasticism favoured by neo-Thomists such
as Maritain and Massis. We must turn towards the East, Grenier concluded,
but without wishing for complete assimilation.
Massis and the Germano-Asiatic Attack on Western Culture

Greniers comments on Massis were amply confirmed by Massiss July 1924
article Loffensive germano-asiatique contre la culture occidentale (The
Germano-Asiatic Attack on Western Culture).56 Massis began with a
quotation from Romain Rollands foreword to the French translation (by
Rollands wife Madeleine) of the Indian writer Ananda Coomaraswamys
55
56
A footnote in which the Jewish mind is described as always having been a dissolvent and, as such, harmful to all civilization, whether it be of the East or the West
is presumably explicable as Grenier relaying Massiss views without making this clear
(La crise de lesprit europen, p.35, note 1). Cf. Murets book on the Jewish mind,
referred to above.
Massis, Loffensive germano-asiatique contre la culture occidentale, Journal littraire, 19 July 1924, rpt in Almanach de lAction Franaise pour lanne 1925 (Paris:
Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925), pp.16773 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k2052626> accessed 18 May 2010.
182
chapter 7
The Dance of iva: Fourteen Lessons on India: There are a certain number
of us in Europe for whom the civilisation of Europe is no longer enough
There are some of us who are looking towards Asia.57 It was in these terms,
wrote Massis, that Rolland whom he went on to describe as the apologist
of Tagore, Gandhi and Coomaraswamy was striving to propagate the
return to Asia that had become a sort of slogan in Germany. Rolland was
seeking to import doctrines whose aim was the definitive dispersion of the
heritage of our culture to the benefit of an equivocal asceticism, in which
all mans strengths are dissolved into a mysticism of doubtful worth a
phrase that Massis silently appropriated from Maritain.58
After referring again to Spengler and Keyserling, Massis drawing
on a recent article by Rgina Zabloudovsky on the crisis of intellectual
culture in Germany59 cited as further evidence the growing number
of German books on Asian art, languages and philosophy. This interest
in the East, claimed Massis, was the fruit of a bitter resentment, a secret
aversion for the culture and mind of the country that had triumphed (i.e.
in the war). In short, it was Germanys sour grapes for its failure to defeat
France that led it to proclaim the ruin of the West, and to cultivate the
germs of a corrupting Asiaticism to spread them through the limbs of a
ravaged Europe.60 At the risk of seeing civilization itself disappear, German
intellectuals were doggedly discrediting the victorious French mind, which
Massis saw as the incarnation of the Western mind itself. Massis went on
to quote a Neue Merkur article by Curtius, in which Curtius spoke of
German youth turning towards the East Russia, India and China. Massis
also quoted another article by a Dr Paquet from the Neue Rundschau of
57
Massis, Loffensive germano-asiatique, p.167, quoting Rollands Avant-propos to

Coomaraswamy, La Danse de iva: quatorze leons sur lInde, tr. Madeleine Rolland
(Paris: Rieder, 1922), p.7.
58 Maritain, quoted by Lefvre in Une heure avec Jacques Maritain et Henri Massis,
p.61.
59 La crise de la culture intellectuelle en Allemagne, Mercure de France, 15 July 1924.
Zabloudovskys article, and its connection with Malrauxs ideas of the time, are discussed by Cadwallader in Crisis of the European Mind, pp.1025.
60 Massis, Loffensive germano-asiatique, p.168.
183
March 1921. This described the columns of Germano-Latin civilization,

which had been erected on Roman foundations, as trembling: the work
of Slavic-Germanic reconstruction was beginning.
The meaning of such comments, according to Massis, was that it was
better that the West should perish than that Germany should give up
being the world of the Law. The turn back to Asia, supported by what
Massis described as a Realpolitik of Germano-Slavic domination,61 scarcely
disguised a tenacious will to power. Germany dreamt of becoming a new
Rome, the capital of a Eurasia uniting Eastern Europe with the Asiatic
steppes, to the exclusion of Latinity. It was aided in this enterprise, said
Massis, by all the doctrines that had weakened the very being of the West
for more than a century (in other words, since the French Revolution).
What was needed was a complete restoration of the essential principles of
Greco-Latin civilization and Christianity that had been obscured by an
exclusive concern with material satisfaction.
Jean Ballard and the Defence of the West

The title Dfense de lOccident, which Massis used first for a 1925 article
and then for his 1927 book, had been used in 1924 for a two-part article
published in Fortunio (the original name of Cahiers du Sud) by the journals
co-founder Jean Ballard.62 (See Chapter 4 for Ballards connection with
Camus and contribution to the interwar debate on the Mediterranean.)
Although the editors of Les Appels de lOrient refer to the EastWest debate
having been pursued in Fortunio, among other publications, Ballards article
61 Ibid., p.172.
62 Dfense de lOccident (two parts), Fortunio 58 ( July 1924), 67993, and 59 (August
1924), 76286. Further references to these articles will be incorporated in the body
of the text.
184
chapter 7
has been overlooked by previous commentators.63 It began dramatically

by saying that a cry of alarm was rising on all sides: the West was dying
and people were turning towards the East. Having begun in Germany, the
rumour had invaded Latin homes. According to Ballard, there had been
several Asian infiltrations before in Greco-Latin civilization, but never
had there been so many Orientalists seeking to evangelize Europe according to the gospel of Buddha and Tolstoy. A whole literature on the subject
had emerged, as an example of which Ballard cited Greniers Le nihilisme europen and les appels de lOrient. He went on to refer to Spengler,
Curtius, Keyserling and Gunon, whom he described as mounting the most
formidable indictment against Western civilization (687).
Ballard began the second part of his article by quoting from Massiss
Loffensive germano-asiatique contre la culture occidentale, which had
been published the previous month. He argued that despite certain similarities between Massiss and Gunons views, there was a fundamental
difference between them: whereas Massis (and Maritain) were cultural
protectionists, Gunon was a kind of free-marketeer who wanted to open
his mind to Hindu thought. While he dismissed Massiss chauvinism,
Ballard acknowledged that there was a crisis in intellectual culture and that
the case Keyserling and Gunon had made against Western civilization
deserved to be answered. There was a huge difference, however, between
this and adopting their viewpoint and conclusions.
At this point, Ballard made his own views clear: We do not believe in
our obsoleteness. [] [I]ntellectual internationalism, degenerating quickly
in France into immoderate favour for the foreign, into discredit for the
native land, will never make us fear the collapse of the humanities or of the
Latin genius (765). Here, despite his earlier criticism of Massiss chauvinism,
Ballard nonetheless demonstrated his own nationalistic feelings and his
63
Les Appels de lOrient, p.386. The only discussion of Ballards article (albeit not in the
context of the EastWest debate) appears to be by Michle Coulet in la recherche
de lhumanisme mditerranen de Jean Ballard, in the exhibition catalogue Jean
Ballard et les Cahiers du Sud (Marseille: Ville de Marseille, 1993), pp.23147.
185
support for a form of Latinity.64 He also went on to show his Orientalism,

in the Saidian sense, in his comments on Hinduism:
This cosmic consciousness to which Asian man aspires, or rather this sinking [naufrage] into a cosmic consciousness, is profoundly repugnant to Western individualism. It can only produce scorn for the human and that lethargy into which the East
has been sinking [sabme] for centuries. To this the Latin consciousness opposes
love and passionate research into human creatures, their environment, matter and
thought. (76667)
Gunon, he speculated, had doubtless not seen the squalor of Calcutta and
the sewers of Canton, where, as Ballard put it, a scrawny Asia swarmed,
with its procession of opium addicts, lepers and plague-sufferers (768).
Whether Ballard himself had seen these things, he did not reveal, but he
declared that until Gunon revealed the mystical secrets of which he spoke
in his books, we were entitled to challenge what he said.
Ballard went on to do just this in relation to Gunons attack on the
Western cult of science which, like Valry before him, Ballard saw as a
uniquely Western achievement (only the European has created science,
776). Ballard also took issue with Gunons criticism of the Wests preoccupation with the material aspects of civilization, comparing the disregard
for human life shown in India and China with the concern for public health
in Europe. Anticipating the objection that the war had shown the Wests
disrespect for life, Ballard countered that war was not a phenomenon
restricted to the West: evoking Genghis Khan, he said that it was not a
European export or speciality (779).
64 Ballard also went on to say, however, that the West owed almost everything to Greece
(p.785, see below), while according to Coulet, From 1935 on, in Cahiers [du Sud],
Greece appears as foundational (in relation to the Latin genius) (Lhumanisme
mditerranen, p.236). One may infer that this change of emphasis was in response
to political developments, and especially the attempted right-wing coup in Paris of 6
February 1934: like Audisio and indeed Camus himself, Ballard would have wished
to distance himself from a Latinity that was becomingly increasingly identified with
fascism.
186
chapter 7
If he could, said Ballard, Gunon should preach his gospel of mysticism

in words that people could understand, as Asia had done twice before to
the West a reference to Judaism and Christianity. On the first occasion,
as Ballard put it: The mystic soul of the Semite could not unsettle the
Latin mind (780). With the Nicene Creed, however, the anarchy of the
Christian gospel was transformed into a precise, powerful and canonical
doctrine: The Church became Catholic and Roman (781, Ballards italics). Strongly marked by the Jewish ideal of justice and Buddhist chastity,
however, the Church taught that truth was not of this world and preached
renunciation to the faithful, following in this the ascetic traditions of the
East. Yet after two thousand years, Latin reason had come to reject the
notion of original sin and life as suffering.
As for Islam, Ballard claimed that what he described as its warlike zeal,
fanaticism and cruelty aroused hatred in the West: Muhammad, with his
scorn for effort and his harsh, intolerant thought, was even less suited to
the true mind of the West than Christ. Anticipating the viewpoint that
would be articulated a decade later in the special issue of Cahiers du Sud
on Islam and the West, Ballard said that Moorish gentleness and the scepticism of Averros might have been able to bring together Christianity and
Islam around the twelfth century, but that the Spanish Inquisition on the
one hand, and a revival of Islamic orthodoxy and above all Turkish aggression on the other had set the two religions against each other up until the
present day (782).
According to Ballard, however, Western thought had broken the grip
of mysticism and followed the path of science, while recognizing that
scientific knowledge was not everything. Here, echoing Spengler, Ballard
proposed Faust as the hero of the West, for his never-ending attempt to
establish the harmony between struggling flesh and the dreaming mind.
This, said Ballard was the ideal of the Greek people to whom the West
owes almost everything, [] the balance [] that must be preserved at
all cost [] (785). Although the notion of balance that Ballard appeals
to here is closely related to Camuss Greek-derived concept of measure,
he also revealed an attitude towards the Wests cultural relationship with
the East similar to that adopted by both Valry and Grenier. Once again,
the East was seen as providing food for Western thought: Let us annex
187
everything that the mind can assimilate without corrupting it, let us transfer inside us what our consciousness adopts, but in so doing subordinate
these conquests to Latin discipline and order (78586). Similarly, Ballards
cultural supremacism was evident in his conclusion, in which he declared
that we should never misally our genius (Ne msallions jamais notre gnie):
remaining masters of our thought, let us greet the Devas at the threshold
of our high chamber decorated with trophies (786).
The Calls of the East: Valry, Gide and Massis;

Grenier and Audisio
Les Appels de lOrient, the special 1925 double issue of Les Cahiers du Mois
devoted to the EastWest debate, was divided into three sections, each
of which showed the broad spectrum of opinion on the subject. The first
included articles by both academic Orientalists (including Ren Gunon,
Sylvain Lvi and mile Senart)65 and intellectuals (from Massis, Valry
and Gide to Audisio, Jean Caves/Grenier and the Surrealists Ren Crevel
and Philippe Soupault). The third section consisted of extracts from and
commentaries on writers ranging from Rolland and Tagore on the one
hand, to Gobineau, the author of the notorious Essai sur lingalit des
races humaines (185355, Eng. tr. Essay on the Inequality of Human Races),
and the right-wing nationalists Maurice Barrs and Maurras on the other,
together with brief reviews of a range of recent books relating to the East
West question.
The second section published the responses to a survey that had been
sent to a number of intellectuals, and which posed five questions on the
65
Senart had translated the Bhaghavad-Gita and several Upanishads, which Camus
recommended to Claude de Frminville in 1935 (see Todd, Albert Camus, p.69).
188
chapter 7
relationship between East and West.66 These set up Gunon and Massis
as the principal representatives of the pro- and anti-Eastern viewpoints
respectively. While the first of the questions asked, following the Belgian
poet Maeterlinck, whether or not the respondents thought that the West
and the East were mutually impenetrable, the second reflected Massiss
analysis, though not his fear, of the threefold spheres of Eastern influence:
If we are open to the influence of the East, what are the means Germanic,
Slavic, Asiatic through which it seems to you that this influence is likely
to be most profoundly exercised on France? The third referred explicitly
to Massis: Do you share the opinion of Henri Massis that this influence
of the East may constitute a grave peril for French thought and art, and
that we should fight against it as a matter of urgency, or do you think that
the liquidation of Mediterranean influences has begun and that we can,
following Germanys example, ask for an enrichment of our general culture
and a renewal of our sensibility from knowledge of the East?67 A later
note (387) revealed that the phrase liquidation of Mediterranean influences originated with Gide, who had used it in the course of a discussion
about Dostoevsky. As previously noted, both Dostoevsky and Gide were
anathema to Massis, and in whatever context Gide had used the phrase, it
must have confirmed Massiss worst fears.
In what must have appeared to be an implicit dismissal of Massiss
xenophobia, the fourth question was based on the assumption that the
influence of East would be beneficial, asking in which area arts, literature or philosophy it seemed likely to give particularly fruitful results.
Although the fifth and last question was more neutral, it referred explicitly
66 It should be noted that the account of the survey given by Said in Orientalism (p.250)
is highly tendentious, since he quotes from only three of the five questions (1, 2 and
5) and omits the second half of these, giving the false impression that they were all
posed from a Western supremacist viewpoint. I hope to return to this and related
matters in a later article.
67 Les Appels de lOrient, pp.24041. Further references to this edition will be incorporated into the body of the text. The phrase knowledge of the East alludes to Paul
Claudels Connaissance de lEst (1900; expanded edition 1914), a collection of prose
poems about China.
189
to Gunon, who was thus cast in the role of Massiss principal opponent in
the debate. Making clear that their question was prompted by their reading
of Gunons works, the editors asked:What do you feel are the Western
values that constitute the Wests superiority over the East, or what are the
false values that, in your opinion, impair our Western civilization? (241).
The respondents to the survey included Barbusse, Breton and Rolland
if only to say that where Henri Massis was, Romain Rolland could not be
(322) and the Orientalists Paul Masson-Oursel, Louis Massignon68 and,
once again, Ren Gunon. The discussion of Les Appels de lOrient that
follows, however, will focus on articles contributed by writers with a close
connection to Camus: Valry, Gide, Grenier and Audisio.
In Puissance de choix de lEurope (Europes Power of Choice,
1617),69 Valry began by reiterating the point that he had made in Note
(ou lEuropen) about the balance of power that Europe held (or had
held) over the rest of the world. The problem, according to Valry, was
that the knowledge on which this power was based was diffusible, and now
Europe had to deal not only with its own creation, America, but also with
the ancient continents that it had disturbed, awakened, educated, armed
and annoyed. Thought had to be given to what would happen to Europe
once Asia was organized and its industry equipped. On the cultural level,
on the other hand, Valry saw little to fear currently at least from
Eastern influence; indeed, Europe owed all the beginnings of its arts and
knowledge to the East. It was a question of digestion, which had been the
characteristic of the European mind through the ages. Our role was to
maintain this power of choice and of transforming material into our own
substance, which had made us what we were. The Greeks and Romans, said
Valry, had shown how to handle what he called the monsters of Asia,
and what juices one could extract from them: The Mediterranean basin
68 An expert on India, Masson-Oursel would go on to write one of the most balanced
contributions to the EastWest debate, OrientOccident (NRF 150 (1926), 26779)
and LEnseignement que peut tirer de la connaissance de lInde lEurope contemporaine
(The Lesson that Contemporary Europe Can Draw from the Knowledge of India,
1928). Massignon would become the doyen of French Orientalists.
69 Puissance de choix de lEurope (Appels, pp.1617).
190
chapter 7
seems to me to be a closed vessel in which, from time immemorial, the

essences of the vast East have come to be condensed (17). From Valrys
Mediterranean-supremacist perspective, it was as if Asia existed only for
Europe to exploit for its own purposes.
With no apparent irony he was of course homosexual Gides untitled contribution (1821) suggested that the profound mutual penetration
of East and West was inevitable, though the civilization of the Far East
would find much more to take from the West than the West did from the
East. The East could learn from the West how to organize itself, to arm
itself, to defend itself, perhaps even to attack. While the West should realize that it was not the only civilization, there was good reason to hope that
some Western minds, rather than allowing themselves to be dissolved and
absorbed by Eastern civilization, would react to contact with it, and thereby
gain a sharper awareness of their value and their role.
These comments were followed by a selection of brief extracts from
Gides writings. Whether these were chosen by Gide or (more likely) by the
editors of Les Cahiers du Mois is not clear, but the final extracts from the
recently published Incidences (Effects, 1924) revealed a different aspect
of Gides attitude to the East, or at least the Middle East. After a lyrical
passage on a Turkish mosque, Gide writes of his disgust for the country
and of being cured of his desire to see the Euphrates and Baghdad. For too
long, he says, he thought that there was more than one civilization, more
than one culture that could lay claim to our love and which deserved to
be fallen in love with: Now I know that our Western (I was going to say
French) civilization is not just the finest; I believe, I know that it is the
only civilization yes, that of Greece, of which we are the only inheritors
(21).
Massiss copiously annotated Mises au point (Clarifications, 3040)
began with the same quotation from his arch-enemy Romain Rolland that
he had used as an epigraph to Loffensive germano-asiatique . Summa
rizing his position in what he called the great debate, Massis explained
that what he was attacking was not the Eastern mind which he did not
believe existed as such but rather some old errors of the West that were
being offered up in the guise of a second-hand Orientalism (3031). All the
pseudo-Asiatic ideas that were in the air had been galvanized by their contact
191
with Western heresies that were, for the most part, of Germanic or Slavic
origin. It was, Massis emphasized, Western ideologues Keyserling, Hesse
and inevitably Rolland were later mentioned who should be denounced
for betraying both Western civilization and their own vocation, on the
pretext of opening up Western minds to the ideas of the East. Moreover,
almost all the Asian allies of these ideologues Tagore, Coomaraswamy
(whose name was spelled as Cooromaswamy) and Gandhi were the
products of European universities, and it was our own ideas or rather
our worst follies that they were giving back to us.
At this point, Massis seemed to contradict his claim that it was Western
ideologues who were his main target by claiming that the aim of the political
propaganda of their Eastern allies was our extinction (anantissement) (31).
He went on to reiterate, however, that it was false, not genuine Orientalism
that he was attacking, and that it was in the West that the true creators of
the crisis of the Western mind and of the mind tout court were to be
found (32). Where the calls from Asia should be heeded was when they
advised the West to return to its own spirituality, which for Massis meant a
Catholicism that would enable it to rediscover its moral unity. At present,
said Massis, the unity of Europe lay in its suffering, though what he saw it
suffering from and here Massis showed that he shared Valrys distaste
for the heterogeneity of the modern world was its diverse thoughts, its
different faiths, its various sciences, its private moralities, its different educations (3334); what it was thirsting for was a great ordering truth. The
advice that the East was giving to the West, according to Massis, was one
of traditionalism, and he claimed that it was notable that there was not
one of its diatribes against European materialism that did not exalt medieval Europe and the Christian civilization of the thirteenth century. But
Asia was no less far removed than Europe from the sources of its spiritual
integrity, and only reconciliation in Christianity could remake humanity. In the meantime, Massis feared that there were too many signs that
pseudo-Oriental doctrines were only serving to revive the dissensions
that had rained down on the European mind since the Reformation, and
that Asiaticism, like Germanism before it, was only the first message of
the barbarians.
192
chapter 7
Like Massiss contribution, Jean Caves/Greniers Le charme de

lOrient (The Charm of the East, 6974) sought to provide some
clarifications, though in Greniers case, of Eastern thought rather than his
own. He began by gently poking fun at Maritains and Massiss response to
the growing influence of Eastern ideas, and in particular Massiss proposed
remedy of a return to Aristotle and Aquinas. He then discussed the case of
the nineteenth-century diarist Henri-Frdric Amiel, who half a century
before had seemed to be the victim of Eastern ideas, specifically Buddhism
and Hinduism, which had appeared to encourage his own morbid tendency
to inaction. According to Grenier, however, the truth was that Amiel had
understood nothing about Eastern thought and that his example proved
nothing. Quoting from both the Bhagavad-Gita and the Buddha, Grenier
argued that neither Hinduism nor Buddhism preached inaction. Amidst
the intellectual nihilism of the postwar period, however, Grenier thought
that knowledge of true Eastern wisdom could perhaps restore the lost
serenity of a few minds.
In quilibre (Equilibrium, 1039), Gabriel Audisio began by observing that the East was a vague and relative term: one was always to the
west of someone else, and while travel agencies and colonial novelists were
inviting people to discover the East in Morocco, Muslims referred to it as
the Moghreb-el-Aqa, or Far West (103). Audisio refused to believe that
there was one Asia and that invoking it would be sufficient to calm all our
worries. Yes, he admitted, European civilization was going through a crisis
of the mind (another reference to Valrys essay) and needed to restore
the eminence of the Soul (me), but which Asia was supposed to provide
a new gospel? Here Audisio revealed his rejection of both the colonialism of other European countries and what he saw as Islamic imperialism
by saying that he was loath to think that Islam, which held all of the Near
East, part of English India (quotation marks in the original) and was
spreading every day from the Dutch East Indies (ditto) to Japan, could
ever give us a lesson in idealism (1034). In effect, he concluded, the East
on offer was the India of Tagore and Gandhi, although it was being said
that the whole of Asia was opening up its school of wisdom to us (an
allusion to Keyserling).
193
Audisio went on to place the interest in Asia into historical perspective

by recalling two earlier Asiatic waves in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Europe. He confirmed his anti-Islamic views, however, when he stated
and here it is worth recalling that Audisio had studied Muslim civilization
at Strasbourg University that Arabs had little to offer Europeans: One
must resign oneself to thinking of their philosophy as often being silly,
their historians colourless and their poetry insubstantial. Islam played its
role with respect to Christian civilization a long time ago (105). Audisio
was similarly dismissive of the potential contributions of Confucian China
and Buddhism. The real problem was postwar European guilt, but it was
wrong for Europeans to overburden themselves alone with universal sin.
Had we taught Asia to kill? Were we responsible for Genghis Khan, and
had we forgotten the pax romana? Should we be seeking lessons in idealism from a militaristic Turkey that was unveiling its women and driving
out the Caliph, from a hired Arabia, from the Japan of battleships, from
a China fighting a civil war with aeroplanes, and even from an India that,
despite Gandhis mortifications, might kill tomorrow? (1056).
Audisio accepted the familiar criticisms made of modern European
man or the Westerner his false values and his excessive belief in Progress
and science. Nevertheless, he remained optimistic. The alarm that was
being expressed about French thought and art ignored the fact that influences were the very stuff of the history of the French genius, beginning with
Christianity, Aristotelianism and Hellenism. Echoing Valrys comments
about Europe, Audisio said that France absorbs, digests and nourishes
itself (107), though unlike Valry, he suggested that the wise thing to
say was that Asia could give us lessons just as it could take lessons from
us. At the same time, however, Audisio warned that under certain conditions, outside influences could become toxic, and it was as well to be
prepared to fight them if necessary and, assured of the treasures of the
race, [] to turn resolutely towards this Mediterranean that remains our
cradle (1089).
194
chapter 7
Malraux and the Temptation of the West

The following year saw the entry of a new participant into the EastWest
debate. In 1926, Andr Malraux whose novel Le Temps du mpris (The
Time of Contempt) Camus would adapt for his first theatrical production in January 1936 (I, 108594) published La Tentation de lOccident
(The Temptation of the West),70 a dialogue in the form of letters between a
Chinese man visiting Europe and a Frenchman visiting China. In a letter
to his publishers written in late 1925, Malraux emphasized the advantage
of announcing the title of his forthcoming book as soon as possible, if only
to take position against Massis.71 Massis had already written two articles
entitled La crise de lOccident and Dfense de lOccident respectively, and
had let it be known that he was working on a book on the same theme.72
The title of La Tentation de lOccident was deliberately ambiguous,
referring to both the temptation for the Chinese to become Westernized
and the temptation for Westerners to adopt Oriental ways of thinking. In
an article that appeared a few days after his book was published, however,
Malraux made clear that although Westerners could learn about themselves
through an encounter with the East, they should resist the temptation to
follow the Eastern path: What Western youth is searching for is a new
concept of man. Can Asia tell us something about this? I dont think so.
Rather it can help us to discover what we are. One of the strongest laws
of our mind is that it transforms defeated temptations into knowledge.73
70 Andr Malraux, La Tentation de lOccident (Paris: Grasset, 1926).

71 Robert S. Thornberry, LOrientalisme chez Malraux et Massis, in Christine Moatti
and David Bevan, eds., Andr Malraux: unit de luvre, unit de lhomme (Paris:
La Documentation Franaise, 1989), pp.14752 (p.148). In fact, La Tentation de
lOccident would be published in July 1926, Dfense de lOccident in April 1927.
72 La crise de lOccident, in La Vie des lettres 20 (1925); Dfense de lOccident, La
Revue universelle, 15 October 1925, pp.14558.
73 Andr Malraux et lOrient [Les Nouvelles littraires, 31 juillet 1926], in Malraux,
uvres compltes Vol. 1, ed. Pierre Brunel (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque de la
Pliade, 1989), pp.11314.
195
As we shall see, although Malraux clearly influenced the young Camuss

conception of the relationship between East and West, the question of his
influence on the lecture is more problematic.
Henri Massis and the Defence of the West

In 1927, Massis finally published Dfense de lOccident, a summation
based on a number of previously published articles of his views on the
EastWest question.74 The opening words of Dfense de lOccident were
as dramatic as those of Valrys Crise de lesprit, to which Massis referred
in his introduction:75 The destiny of Western civilization, the destiny
of man tout court are today under threat (1). Massis went on to identify
three threats in particular: a Germany that was seen as turning increasingly
towards the non-European East after the trauma of defeat in World War
One; Bolshevism, seen as a resurgence of irrational pan-Slavism; and an
awakening Asia, the source of equally irrational doctrines such as Buddhism.
Particularly noteworthy here is a passage that Massis quoted from a 1925
article by Curtius on civilization and Germanism. In effect, this argued that
Germanism was a reaction against Latinity, which by its nature excluded
Germany: If Latin civilization and the idea of humanity are identical,
Germany is inhuman and outside humanity. It is nature in the raw, barbarism, Germanism (33, n. 1).
Massis spoke of the peril of Asiaticism and the formidable problems posed by the awakening of the peoples of Asia and Africa, set against
Western civilization by Bolshevism. Here he quoted Maurras to the effect
74 In addition to the aforementioned Crise de lOccident and Dfense de lOccident,

Massis had published La Russie contre lOccident (Russia against the West) in La
Revue universelle, 1 November 1926, pp.25774.
75 Henri Massis, Dfense de lOccident, p.3, note 1. Further references will be incorporated into the body of the text.
196
chapter 7
that, whereas the nineteenth century had sought to multiply civilization by

using barbarian manpower, barbarism was now arming itself and becoming
increasingly threatening (34, 78). As a socialist and internationalist, on
the other hand, Rolland was clearly seen by Massis as being responsible for
spreading dangerous Eastern ideas in France. Thus Massis cited Rollands
forewords to the French translations of Coomaraswamys The Dance of iva
(2627) and Gandhis Young India (14041),76 and used a quotation from
the former as the epigraph to one of his chapters: Asia will overcome us,
as Rome and Athens overcame in the past, through lesprit (176).
The bulk of Massiss book consisted of arguments that were familiar
from his previous articles. In his conclusion, Massis quoted Coomaraswamy
and vague pronouncements by Gandhi and Tagore to support his claim that
the East itself was advising the West to return to its own traditional values.
It was not, he argued, the Eastern ideal and the Western ideal that should
be pitted against each other, but the ideal of the Middle Ages against the
modern ideal, the idea of perfection and unity against that of progress
and divisive force (253, 25556). According to Massis, this idea of a new
return to the Middle Ages was exercising the minds of the European elite,
among whom he numbered the exiled Russian religious philosopher Nikolai
Berdyaev, Keyserling and Maurras (260). Massiss own solution to the crisis
was predictable. Calling for a total restoration of the principles of GrecoLatin civilization and Catholicism, Massis claimed that Christ alone could
reconcile East and West (250, 269).
The reception of Dfense de lOccident including critical reactions
from Ernst-Robert Curtius and Ren Gunon, and approving letters from
the Orientalist Ren Grousset and Mussolini, to whom Massis sent a dedicated copy of his book has been examined in Michel Todas biography of
Massis.77 My discussion here will focus on the response of two writers who
can be directly linked to Camus: Malraux and Berdyaev, whose book Un
nouveau Moyen ge: rflexions sur les destines de la Russie et de lEurope
76 Gandhi, La Jeune Inde (1924). Rolland went on to write a three-volume Essai sur la
mystique et laction de lInde (192930).
77 Toda, Henri Massis, pp.26577.
197
(A New Middle Ages: Reflections on the Destinies of Russia and Europe,

Eng. tr. The End of Our Time)78 had been published in the same year and
at the suggestion of Jacques Maritain in the same series as Dfense de
lOccident.
Berdyaevs book also dealt with the East/West question, but from
a Russian Orthodox rather than a Catholic perspective, and although
Massis referred favourably to Berdyaev a number of times in Dfense de
lOccident,79 Berdyaev gave it a highly critical review in the Russian migr
journal Put (The Way), under the title The Accusation of the West.80
European culture, Berdyaev insisted, was Romano-Germanic rather than
Latin, and France itself did not consist solely of Latin elements: Massiss
glorification of Catholicism and the Latin mind betrayed his fear of a
chaotic irrationality supposedly coming from the East, from Dostoevsky
and other Russians.81 Later, at a meeting of the Salon franco-russe in Paris
in 1930, Berdyaev gave a paper on East and West in which he argued that
the rift between East and West could only be healed through the reconciliation of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.82 Massis was invited
to attend, but presented his excuses at the last minute.
78 Paris: Plon, 1927.
79 Dfense de lOccident, pp.76, 120, 257.
80 Berdyaevs article was later translated into German as Des Westens Anklage: zu
Henri Massis, Dfense de lOccident, in the periodical Orient und Occident 4 (1930),
612.
81 Antoine Arjakovky, La gnration des penseurs religieux russes (The generation of
Russian religious thinkers) (KievParis: LEsprit et la Lettre, 2002), p.184, quoted
in an anonymous review of Arjakovkys book at <http://www.sombreval.com/
La-generation-des-penseurs-religieux-de-l-emigration-russe_a163.html> accessed
18 May 2010.
82 LOrient et lOccident, in LOrient et lOccident. Textes suivis de dbats, Cahiers
de la quinzaine 20: 9 (1930), 5560. A rudimentary English translation of Berdyaevs
paper, by Fr. S. Janos, is available at <http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_
lib/1930_353.html>. For a brief account of the colloquium, see Tatiana Victoroff,
Lmigration, lieu de rencontres culturelles: le Studio franco-russe, tribune libre
des annes 1930, colloque Les premires rencontres de lInstitut europen Est-Ouest,
Lyon, ENS LSH, 24 December 2004 <http://russie-europe.ens-lsh.fr/article.
php3?id_article=58> accessed 18 May 2010.
198
chapter 7
The importance of Berdyaev in this connection is that Camus was

both familiar with and influenced by his works, albeit not necessarily at the
time of his lecture. In a 1939 review of Berdyaevs biography of the Russian
thinker Konstantin Leontiev,83 Camus remarked that Berdyaev had written two or three studies on the religious essence of Russian communism
that had shown the Soviet mystique in a singularly harsh light. Although
this may suggest that Camus had read them after his exclusion from the
Communist party and thus after his lecture the two or three studies
in question were presumably among the following, all but the last of which
had been translated before the lecture: Le Marxisme et la religion (Marxism
and Religion, 1931); Le Christianisme et la lutte des classes (1932, Eng. tr.
Christianity and Class War); Problme du communisme (The Problem
of Communism, 1932), a collection of essays which included The Truth
and Lies of Communism and The Psychology of Russian Nihilism and
Atheism; and/or Les Sources et le sens du communisme russe (1938, Eng. tr.
The Origin of Russian Communism). Samantha Novello84 has shown that
Camus drew on the latter for his critique of nihilism, totalitarianism and
Soviet communism in LHomme rvolt, for which, according to Quilliot
(E, 1625), he also read Berdyaevs Le Sens de lhistoire (1948, Eng. tr. The
Meaning of History).
Berdyaev was not the only critical reviewer of Dfense de lOccident
who influenced Camus. In his review for the NRF,85 Andr Malraux poked
fun at Massis, whom he described as having been defending himself for
years against a constant temptation, which Massis sometimes called Ernest
Renan and sometimes Gide, and to which he had also given the name
Satan. Now it was Asia that Massis saw as the latest incarnation of the
spirit of disintegration, in other words of the devil. On a less frivolous
note, Malraux quoted Massis to the effect that personality, unity, stability,
continuity and authority were the mother-ideas of the West. As Malraux
83 Les crivains et leurs critiques (I, 84142).
84 See Samantha Novello, Du nihilisme aux thocraties totalitaires: Les Sources et le
sens du communisme russe de Berdiaev dans les Carnets de Camus, AC20: Le Premier
Homme en perspective, pp.17594.
85 Dfense de lOccident, par Henri Massis (Plon), NRF 28: 165 ( June 1927), 81319.
199
pointed out, however, unity, stability, continuity and authority were only
characteristics of the West to the extent that they were based on the Western
idea of personality in all other respects, China, for example, possessed
them to a much higher degree than Europeans in general, and Latins in
particular. What the West was seeking in the East was precisely to get rid
of certain notions that seemed false and unacceptable, and in particular
the notion of personality as presented by Massis. The East could help us
to free ourselves from what, Malraux, drawing an analogy with painting,
called a certain academicism of the mind. European thought had always
expressed itself through the creation of coherent myths, and was now trying
to create a new one.
Greniers and Malrauxs Influence on Camuss View

of the East
Malrauxs views on the potential of Eastern ideas to liberate Westerners or
at least Western intellectuals from stale and outmoded ways of thinking seem to have been shared by Camuss mentor Jean Grenier. In 1930,
Grenier published a three-part article entitled Sur lInde (On India), parts
of which provided the basis for the essay LInde imaginaire (Imaginary
India) in his 1933 collection Les les.86 (Camus later said that he had read
Greniers book at the age of twenty, i.e. in 1933, the year it was published.)87
In both versions of the text, Grenier made his own receptiveness to Eastern
ideas clear, using the same kind of alimentary metaphor as Valry, Audisio
and Ballard had used before him: it is necessary to broaden knowledge,
86 Sur lInde, NRF 35: 2024 ( JulySep. 1930), 5569, 17085, 33855; LInde imaginaire, in Les les (Paris: Gallimard, 1977 [1933]), pp.11142. Greniers writings on
India have been collected in Jean Grenier, Sur lInde, ed. Olivier Germain-Thomas
(Cognac: Fata Morgana, 1994).
87 Prface aux les de Jean Grenier (IV, 621).
200
chapter 7
to know at least that there is a different type of humanity from that of

Greece and Rome. Leafed through for too long, ancient history has become
made up simply of stereotypes. A new (and for this purpose older) food
is needed.88 Suggesting that what was needed was a complete renewal
similar to the one which Negro and pre-Colombian art was providing for
our art, Grenier argued that the thought of India too was old enough to
yield something completely new. This implied, however, that Grenier, like
Malraux, saw the East primarily in terms of the intellectual stimulation its
thought could bring to the West.
Although Grenier stated in the introduction to his original article
that his notes on India only used current events as a pretext, what Martyn
Cornick describes as the polemical tone of Greniers essay marks it out as
a further intervention in the EastWest debate.89 Thus Grenier included
a section in which he discussed Keyserlings Travel Diary of a Philosopher
and books by the Orientalists Ren Gunon, Ren Grousset, Paul MassonOursel and Sylvain Lvi, all of whom had contributed to Les Appels de
lOrient.90 Of particular interest here is Greniers claim that India has always
escaped any influence, although it was conquered91 and part of a quotation
he took from Lvis LInde et le monde (India and the World, 1926): India
has neither unity of language nor unity of race, but only unity of belief .92
These passages are echoed by Camus in his lecture in the contrast he draws
between the West and India. Whereas the West, he suggested, had failed to
regain the unity [of ] belief it had had under the (Holy) Roman Empire,
he cited India as an example of a civilization whose spiritual principle had
88 Sur lInde, 352; Les les, pp.11314.
89 Cornick, In search of the Absolute: the Nouvelle Revue franaise, and uses and meanings of the Orient (19201930), Modern and Contemporary France 14: 1 (February
2006), 1532 (p.30).
90 Voyageurs et orientalistes (Travellers and Orientalists), Sur lInde, NRF 35: 204,
pp.34150. For a discussion of Greniers article as a whole, see Cornick, pp.2528.
91 LInde imaginaire, Les les, p.127. Grenier had enlarged on this point in Sur lInde:
Moreover India has been conquered in turn by the most different peoples and all
these peoples have been absorbed after a certain time by Brahmanic civilization (Sur
lInde, NRF 35: 203, p.171).
92 Sur lInde, NRF 35: 202, pp.6061; Les les, p.117.
201
enabled it to retain its unity: India [] has kept its own character, even
after two centuries of English domination (I, 566).
The influence of both Greniers Les les and Malrauxs La Tentation de
lOccident is evident in a letter which Camus sent to Claude de Frminville
in 1934 or 1936, together with an article he had written on Malraux:93
It isnt gratuitous to oppose East and West. Its a fact of thought. You aspire to the
human solution: Im not aware of it, except as an idea. Whereas I do know the
Eastern solution and I know that its impossible for us Europeans. Have you read
La Tentation de lOccident? Malraux talks about the two positions and their irremediable separation better than I do.94
He went on to recommend some further reading to de Frminville: Read

the pages on India in Grenier (Les les). More than about China, it was
about India that I was thinking in these pages [i.e. of his article on Malraux].
[] I tell you that there is a gulf [foss] between us that nothing can fill:
nothing, not even communism and revolution. The nature of the gulf to
which Camus refers is suggested by a passage from Les les in which Grenier
describes India as an inhuman country, where nothing is to our measure
as it is in Greece.95
The article on Malraux, on the other hand, can be identified as
propos dAndr Malraux (About Andr Malraux), to which Camus originally gave the subtitle Orient et Occident (East and West). Referring
to mainly to Malrauxs novel La Condition Humaine (1933, Eng. tr. Mans
Estate), which was set in Shanghai, Camus argued that despite his attraction
to Eastern thought an attraction which he evidently shared Malraux
93
In his notes to the Pliade edition, Gilles Philippe suggests that the article in question
dates from 1934 (IV, 1573). Todd, however, quotes another letter to de Frminville,
written in late 1935, in which Camus mentioned that his plans for the coming year
included an essay on Europe and the East, about Malraux (Albert Camus, pp.97
and 778, note 19 to p.98) presumably the same essay on Malraux to which he
refers in a notebook entry apparently dating from May 1936 (II, 809). No later text
on Malraux has come to light.
94 Todd, p.69.
95 Le chat Mouloud, in Les les, p.53.
202
chapter 7
felt that from Them [the Chinese] to us there is no common measure

(IV, 1333). Malraux knew, for example, that Orientals have a radically different conception of time, of God and of the relationship between the
individual and the world. Whatever we do, according to Camus, we are
Greeks and Christians whether we try to organize the world around
man, or rather a man, or whether through meditations on the tortured
body of a God we make from the universal and harmonious suffering of
the East an individual [particulire] suffering which is ours. Camus concluded that whatever sympathy, alas, one might feel for Eastern thought,
the gulf [foss] remains (IV, 1334).
At some point before his lecture, then, Camus was talking about the
irremediable separation and unbridgeable gulf between East and West.
Yet in the lecture itself, he defined the Mediterranean as the meetingpoint of East and West and told his audience that they had much to learn
from the East. There would seem to be two possible ways of resolving this
apparent contradiction. First, the two Easts may not be the same: when
Camus talks about the East being irremediably separated from the West, he
may be referring to the Far East (India and China), whereas when he talks
about the Mediterranean as being the meeting-point of East and West, he
may be referring to the Middle East. The other possibility, of course, is that
under the influence of Audisio rather than Malraux, Camus may simply
have changed his mind.
The latter hypothesis is adopted by Baishanski, who argues that within
a few months of his letter to de Frminville, Camus no longer seemed to
think that the Eastern solution was impossible, since he went on to create
the character of Patrice Mersault in his posthumously published novel
La Mort heureuse (Eng. tr. A Happy Death).96 According to Baishanski,
Mersaults attitudes and behaviour exemplify the fundamental ideas of
Eastern philosophies.97 Indeed, Baishanski herself goes on to quote a
notebook entry, apparently dating from May 1936 made directly before
96 The genesis of La Mort heureuse can be traced back to March 1936. See Camuss notebook entries from that month, featuring a character identified as M. (II, 805).
97 Baishanski, LOrient dans la pense du jeune Camus, p.108.
203
Camuss description of the Mediterranean as a construction (II, 809) in

which Camus, apparently thinking of the protagonist of his novel in the
making but also perhaps of himself, spoke of a [c]onciliation of the Hindu
sage and the Western hero (II, 809).
In November 1936, however, Camus reaffirmed the radical differences
between East and West in a notebook entry that, in other respects, would
find direct echoes in his lecture three months later:
Carnets
Nationalities appear as signs

of disintegration. Religious
unity of the Germanic Holy
Roman Empire scarcely broken:
nationalities. In the East, the
whole remains.
Internationalism is trying
to give the West back its true
meaning and vocation. But the
principle is no longer Christian,
it is Greek. Humanism today: it
still affirms the gulf [foss] that
existed between East and West
(Malraux case). But it restores
a strength [il restitue une force].
(II, 812)
Nationalisms always appear in

history as signs of decadence.
When the vast edifice of the
[Holy] Roman Empire crumbled,
when its spiritual unity []
disintegrated, then and only then,
at the time of its decadence, did
nationalities appear. Ever since
then, the West has failed to regain
its unity. At the present time,
internationalism is trying to give
the West back its true meaning
and vocation. Only the principle is
no longer Christian, it is no longer
the papal Rome of the Holy
Roman Empire. The principle is
man. (I, 566)
Whereas in his notebook Camus had identified the current principle of the
West as Greek, he now identified it as man, though his earlier reference
to humanism suggests that this was just a question of terminology. More
importantly, however, he defined the Mediterranean as the meeting-place
of East and West, rather than reaffirming the gulf between them. In the
204
chapter 7
absence of further evidence, perhaps the safest conclusion that one can draw
is that Camuss position on this question was not consistent, and that his
remarks on the EastWest relationship in the lecture reflect the influence
of Audisios Sel de la mer.98 What is clear, however, is that when Camus
gave the lecture, his frame of reference went beyond the Mediterranean
to the broader EastWest debate in which some of his most important
influences and Massis as one of his primary counter-influences in the
lecture had played a leading role.
98 Sel de la mer seems to have been published towards the end of 1936, Audisios article
Le sel de Carthage having been published in September of that year.
chapter 8
Fascism, Latinity and Anti-Semitism in 1930s

Colonial Algeria
As shown in Chapter 3, one of the main criticisms that has been made
against The New Mediterranean Culture is that it evades the reality of
colonialism. Among other things, this glosses over the fact that Camuss
lecture explicitly addressed another inescapable political reality in his lecture: the rise of fascism. For Azzedine Haddour, Camuss emphasis on
fascism rather than colonialism is to be explained by his membership of
the Communist party, which had been ordered by Moscow to abandon
its attacks on French imperialism in favour of anti-fascism after the 1935
Franco-Soviet pact.1 In accusing Camus of overlooking the colonial conflict,
however, Haddour himself overlooks the fact that Camus conspicuously
departs from the party line in the fifth part of his lecture. Thus Camus states
that [a] Mediterranean collectivism will be different from a Russian collectivism and that the opponents of the group he represents do not have
the right to judge the future it is working for in the name of the past, even
if it is that of Russia (I, 570).
Another aspect of Camuss lecture that has been overlooked is the significance of his attack on fascism in an Algerian, as opposed to a European
context. According to a newspaper report on the lecture by Lucienne JeanDarrouy, a friend of the Camus group,2 Camuss main object was to
1
2
Haddour, Colonial Myths, pp.2829.

Todd, Albert Camus, p.122.
206
chapter 8
reject the mystique of Latinity as it is exploited by fascist propaganda.3

As Charles-Robert Agerons standard history of the period makes clear,
Latinity had a special significance in French Algeria, where anti-Semitism
had been a major factor in European-Algerian political life since the nineteenth century.4 At both the local and national level, right-wing politicians
appealed to the notion of Latinity to unite Mediterranean Europeans
from different backgrounds against the sizeable Jewish minority, who
potentially held the balance of political power. In Oran, where there were
more electors of Spanish than of French descent, a Dr Molle founded a
Ligue Latine and then Unions Latines, which dominated the political life
of Oranie between 1926 and 1932. After Molles death in 1931, his mantle
was assumed by the charismatic Abb Gabriel Lambert, an unfrocked priest
who formed an organization variously known as Amitis Lambert and
Amitis Latines, and who was elected mayor of Oran in 1934. Like Molle,
Lambert was backed by the virulently anti-Semitic Le Petit Oranais, just
one of several specifically anti-Jewish newspapers in the country, of which
there were four in Algiers alone.
The right-wing leagues such as Action Franaise and the Croix de Feu
that mushroomed in France in the 1930s were also strong in Algeria, with a
combined membership that outnumbered that of left-wing parties by more
than ten to one. (In the spring of 1936, the Communists and Socialists had
fewer than 3,000 members between them.)5 In Algiers, the 1935 mayoral
election was won by Augustin Rozis, a Croix de Feu member with openly
fascist and racist views. An admirer of both Hitler and Mussolini, Rozis
attempted to prevent any expression of sympathy for Republican Spain
3
4
Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, Une culture mditerranenne est-elle ralisable?, Lcho

dAlger, 10 February 1937, p.4.
Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de lAlgrie contemporaine, II, De linsurrection de
1871 au dclenchement de la guerre de libration (1954) (Paris: PUF, 1979), p.366.
Except where indicated, this section draws on Agerons chapter Forces politiques
et vie politique des Europens dAlgrie de 1924 1938, pp.36278.
Jean-Louis Planche, Le projet Blum-Viollette au temps du Front Populaire et du
Congrs Musulman, in Franoise Gaspard, ed., De Dreux Alger: Maurice Viollette
18701960 (Paris: LHarmattan, 1991), pp.13549 (p.138).
207
when the Spanish Civil War broke out. In the spring of 1936, he prevented
the performance of Rvolte dans les Asturies (Rebellion in Asturias), a play
co-written by Camus about the 1934 miners rebellion in Asturias, which
had been brutally put down by Franco with the help of Moroccan troops.
In June 1935, the leader of the Croix de Feu, Colonel de la Rocque, visited the capital and gave a speech to a 12,000-strong audience, while 15,000
Croix de Feu members assembled for a rally at Oued-Smar, thirteen kilometres from the city.6 In July, the Algiers section of the Comit de Vigilance
des Intellectuels Antifascistes responded by flying Malraux in to give a public
speech, attended by Camus, against de la Rocque.7 By late 1935, some circles in the administration in Algiers thought civil war was imminent. The
Croix de Feu was feared to be planning to march on the capital and occupy
key buildings; all public meetings were banned and police and troops were
put on alert.8 In December, the anti-Semitic Algerian deputy Michel Pars
gave a speech in the French Parliament against the sanctions that had been
imposed on Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia: the speech was written by
Amedeo Landini, an Italian government agent, who also orchestrated
demonstrations against the sanctions by the Unions Latines.
Feelings continued to run high during the legislative election campaign
of May 1936, which was accompanied by violent clashes between Left and
Right and a further rise in anti-Semitism. The Latin leagues and some
so-called national parties claimed that the Jews were all members of the
Popular Front, which lAbb Lambert described as a manifestation of Jewish
imperialism. Some candidates presented themselves as simply anti-Jewish
and one as anti-Judaeo-Masonic. In the event, the Right and Centre won
six of the ten Algerian seats, with four of the successful candidates having
been endorsed by the Croix de Feu, while one was a leader of the movement.
6
7
8
Jean-Louis Planche, Une jeunesse algroise: Albert Camus 19141940, Europe 846
(1999): 1739 (p.28); Sean Kennedy, The Croix de Feu, the Parti Social Franais,
and the politics of aviation, 19311939, French Historical Studies 23 (2000): 37399
(p.381).
Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (London: Picador, 1981), pp.86
and 689, note 21.
Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp.9697.
208
chapter 8
The Popular Fronts victory in France was followed in Algeria by violent

political demonstrations and attacks on Jews. Although the right-wing
leagues were dissolved by the new government on 18 June 1936, most of
the Algerian press supported the right-wing parties that emerged in their
wake: the Parti Populaire Franais (PPF) of Jacques Doriot and the Parti
Social Franais (PSF), a reincarnation of the Croix de Feu.
The political temperature was raised still further by the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, especially in the dpartement of Oranie,
where lAbb Lambert praised Franco and called for aid to be given to
what, alluding to the Christian reconquest of Moorish Spain, he called the
Reconquista. Similarly, the PSF proclaimed the justice of Francos liberating
Reconquista movement against the Asiatic barbarism of the Soviets,9 while
the Unions Latines sent money, supplies and volunteers to help Falangists
in the Spanish Moroccan enclave of Melilla. On 29 January 1937, ten days
before Camus gave his lecture, the Secretary of State in the Ministry of the
Interior complained in the French Senate that loudspeakers in the town of
Perrgaux, in the Constantinois, were playing the Italian Fascist anthem
and praising Franco, that swastikas were painted on shops and cars, and
that there were frequent shouts of Long live Hitler!. Two months after
Camuss lecture, meanwhile, the Algerian Communist partys newspaper
La Lutte sociale published a front-page article by the French Communist
leader Maurice Thorez. Thorez referred to the Hitlerian agents who are
openly organizing civil war in Algeria and denounced the various manifestations of fascism in the country:
Enough of the swastikas [] on walls and buildings.
Enough of these demonstrations of the Rassemblement national [the right-wing
European-Algerian counterpart to the Popular Front] where people sing La
Giovinezza [Youth, an Italian Fascist anthem] and display Italian or Hitlerian
emblems.
Enough of the hateful anti-Semitic provocations and the crimes committed in Oranie
and elsewhere by those who dream of imitating Franco and of making Algeria into
the base for aggression by international fascism against France.10
9
10
Quoted by Ageron, Histoire de lAlgrie, p.374.

Maurice Thorez, Le Pain, la Paix et la Libert, La Lutte sociale, 3 April 1937, p.1.
209
Given that Algeria lay between Spanish Morocco to the west where the
Spanish Civil War had begun with a rebellion by army officers in July 1936
and Italian-controlled Libya to the east, Mussolinis imperial ambitions
and his support for Franco posed a very real threat.11
Far from being a purely European problem, then, fascism was part of
everyday political life in Algeria at the time of Camuss lecture. As regards
the link between Latinity and anti-Semitism, this was underlined by Audisio
(whose influence, as we have seen, Camus explicitly acknowledges in the
lecture) in the second volume of Jeunesse de la Mditerrane:
Whether one likes it or not, for many contemporary minds, Latinity equals antiSemitism. Have we not seen, at election-campaign time, an anti-Semitic party of
Algeria make itself out to be a Latin party? Have we not seen such-and-such a newspaper, in the same place, declare itself to be an anti-Jewish organ of Latin action and
its writers flatter themselves on being sons of Latinity and not of Judea?12
Seen against this background, it is clear that any appeal that Camus
makes in his lecture to the solidarity of European Algerians of different
Mediterranean origins was made in the face, not of the Muslim majority,
but of a parallel appeal by the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist far Right in the
country. While Camuss attack on Latinity was explicitly aimed at Maurras
and his supporters, the clear connection he established between Latinity
and fascism had a particular resonance in the Algerian context that would
not have been lost on his audience.
11
12
Although it dates from eight months after Camuss lecture, a March of Time newsreel
gives a particularly vivid overview of the situation. See Crisis in Algeria, March of
Time (29 October 1937) [video] <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/mot/
html/mediterranean.htm> accessed 18 May 2010.
Audisio, Sel de la mer, p.58. The political party referred to by Audisio was probably LUnion Latine, which put up eight candidates for the municipal elections
in Algiers in 1935; see Mahfoud Kaddache, La vie politique Alger de 1919 1939
(Algiers: SNED, 1970), p.264. The newspaper in question can be identified as La
Libre Parole dAlger, for which Ageron (Histoire, p.378) gives a circulation of 2,000.
Another newspaper, Lclair Algrien, described itself as a National-Socialist organ
of French union against Jewish domination (ibid., p.368).
210
chapter 8
The Maison de la culture, Muslims and the Projet Viollette

If fascism was one of the immediate political realities in Algeria at the time
of Camuss lecture, the other, of course, was colonialism an issue that the
lecture does not address. To accuse Camus of evading the issue, however,
fails to take account of the policy and activities of the Maison de la culture,
of which he was the general secretary and the leading light. According
to a press release, most likely written by Camus himself, one of the purposes of the Maison was to lay the foundations of a Mediterranean and
in particular a native [indigne] culture.13 Indigne here clearly meant
indigenous to Algeria. Like the English native, however, the connotations
of the French word indigne can vary from neutral through paternalistic
to derogatory, depending on the context: in French colonial parlance, for
example, les indignes referred to the natives. The paternalistic implications
of the term, on the other hand, were evident in a manifesto for the Maison
de la culture announcing that its activities would include the organization
of a Popular Arab Theatre and the study of native customs.14
Paternalism notwithstanding, this shows that the Maisons notion of
native culture specifically included the Muslim population. Given the
connotations of indigne in both official and popular language of the time,
indeed, it seems more than probable that the activists of the Maison de la
culture were deliberately attempting to reappropriate the term by applying it
to their own cultural activity, as both an affirmation of their own Algerian
identity15 and as a gesture of solidarity with the Muslim majority. It is no
coincidence, in this respect, that Camuss lecture was published under the
13
14
15
Quoted by Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi, Lengagement culturel, AC5, pp. 83106

(p.95).
Lottman, Albert Camus, p.130. The Maison also organized a concert of native Algerian
music (Todd, Albert Camus, p.141) and an exhibition of the work of young Muslim
illuminators (Lottman, p.134).
In his conclusion to Chroniques algriennes, published in 1958 during the Algerian
War, Camus would declare: The French of Algeria are natives [indignes] too, and
in the strong sense of the word (IV, 389).
211
heading La culture indigne in the first issue (April 1937) of the Maisons
monthly magazine, Jeune Mditerrane. Although Paul Siblot incorrectly
assumes that this heading was part of the lectures title, his remarks on its
significance remain valid:
From the title on, La Culture indigne [] displays a double claim through the
hijacking of a key term of colonial vocabulary: an affirmation, in conformity with the
etymology of native, of an original autochthonous culture, freed from the Parisian
government of belles lettres; a provocative display, turning round the normal pejorative
connotations of the term, of a nativism which shows the wish for a full integration
of the colonized and his culture into Mediterranean regionalism.16
Siblots interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the May 1937 issue of
Jeune Mditerrane contained the translation of some Arabic poems under
the same heading,17 thereby treating Arab and European contributions
as part of the same native culture.
This inclusive attitude of the Maison de la culture extended into the
political arena. One of the organizations that came under the Maisons
umbrella was the Union Franco-Musulmane, run by Camuss friend
Claude de Frminville, which published pamphlets on the representation
of Muslims in parliament.18 According to Marguerite Dobrenn, another
friend of Camuss who was an active member of the Maison, this was actually
founded by Camus.19 In addition to the Arabic poems already mentioned,
the second issue of the Maisons newsletter contained a manifesto in favour
of the French Popular Front governments Viollette Bill (also known as
the Blum-Viollette Bill).20 Drawn up by the reformist ex-governor general
Paul Siblot, Les palimpsestes du texte ou les fantmes de linterdiscours, Cahiers

de praxmatique 33 (1999), 11343 (p.127). Siblot, however, goes on to argue that
Camuss claim that there is no difference between the way of life of Europeans and
Arabs on the Algiers waterfront is self-refuting, insofar as it speaks of the existence
of a distinct universe of the colonized (p.128).
17 Pomes arabes indits (tr. J. Aboulker), Jeune Mditerrane 2 (May 1937).
18 Lottman, Albert Camus, p.100; Todd, Albert Camus, p.139.
19 Quoted by Roger Quilliot (E, 1316).
20 Manifeste des intellectuels dAlgrie en faveur du projet Viollette (I, 57273).
16
212
chapter 8
of Algeria, Maurice Viollette, this proposed to give full French citizenship and lifetime voting rights to an elite of between 20,000 and 25,000
Algerian Muslims,21 out of a total Muslim population of around 6 million.
Although this figure may seem derisory, it should be noted that Viollette
himself envisaged the progressive incorporation of all the natives of Algeria
into the French electoral body as soon as their evolution brought them to
think French.22 How it was to be judged when particular natives were
thinking French is not clear, but in March 1938, the Commission du suffrage universel, which the Blum government had entrusted with the task of
scrutinizing the bill, adopted its first article with considerable amendments,
extending the vote to some 200,000 Algerians.23 As the European electorate numbered just under 203,000, the Commissions intention was clearly
to establish electoral parity between the two communities.24 After the
mayors of Algeria resigned en masse in protest, however, the Commission
announced that it was suspending work on the bill indefinitely.
These developments, of course, could not have been foreseen by the
self-styled intellectuals of Algeria who signed the manifesto supporting
the Viollette Bill. Although the names of its signatories were only available on request, the manifesto was presented as an initiative of the Maison
This was the figure quoted by Viollette himself in a 1936 Paris-Soir article, quoted by
Alain-Grard Slama in La Guerre dAlgrie: histoire dune dchirure (Paris: Gallimard
Dcouvertes, 1996), p.133. In his notes to the manifesto in the new Pliade edition
of Camuss works, Andr Abbou states that the rights in question were to be granted
only to those prepared to renounce Islamic law regarding certain aspects of civil and
private life (I, 136768). As the first article of the text of the Viollette Bill makes
clear, however, this is incorrect. See Fragments dun combat (co-edited by Abbou),
which reproduces the article in question (pp.14344).
22 Quoted by Ageron, Histoire de lAlgrie, p.430.
23 Planche, Le projet Blum-Viollette, p.148.
24 Planche (op. cit., p.148) claims that this would have given native Algerians an electoral majority, and indeed, in his 1936 Paris-Soir article, Viollette had talked of an
electoral college of between 150,000 and 180,000 Europeans (Slama, La Guerre
dAlgrie, p.133). According to Benjamin Stora and Zakya Daoud, however, the precise
number of European electors at the time was 202,749. See Stora and Daoud, Ferhat
Abbas: une utopie algrienne (Paris: Denol, 1995), p.59.
21
213
de la culture in Algiers. As general secretary of the Maison, Camus must

have endorsed its contents, and it is highly probable that he was at least
partly responsible for drafting it:25 indeed, Camus had given a talk on
intellectuals and the proposed reforms the previous month.26 Describing
the Viollette Bill as serving, rather than harming, French interests, the
manifesto referred to the new state of mind stemming from the Popular
Front government and stated that the bill constituted a minimum in the
task of civilization and humanity which must be that of the new France
(I, 573). From this viewpoint, the manifesto remained firmly within the
paradigm of Frances civilizing mission, not so much legitimizing Frances
possession of Algeria as taking it for granted.
Within this framework, however, the manifesto in effect demanded
that France should cease to apply double standards in Algeria and live up
to its own republican ideals. The only role of the intellectual, it declared,
was to defend culture, but culture could not live where dignity was dying,
and a civilization could not prosper under laws that crushed it: one cannot,
for example, talk of culture in a country where 900,000 inhabitants [i.e.
Muslim children] are deprived of schools, or of civilization, when one is
talking of a people diminished by unprecedented poverty and bullied
by special laws and inhuman regulations (I, 573). While in his lecture
Camus may seem nave in suggesting that there was no difference in the
way Europeans and Arabs lived on the Algiers waterfront, the manifesto
shows that he was under no illusion as to the inferior economic, legal and
political status of non-European Algerians. As Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi puts
25
Although Abbou (I, 1368) claims that the manifesto was written collectively, Todd
(Albert Camus, p.150) states that it was written by Camus himself, an attribution
which even Haddour one of Camuss harshest postcolonial critics accepts, referring to Camuss Manifeste (Colonial Myths, p.23, note 84). The fact that the names
of the manifestos signatories were not published can be taken as an indication of
the personal risk that this might have entailed.
26 Lvi-Valensi, Lengagement culturel, pp.9697.
214
chapter 8
it, the passage provides a flagrant denial of the accusations of ignorance of

Muslim living conditions that would later be made against Camus.27
The only way to restore the dignity of the Muslim masses, the manifesto continued, was to allow them to express themselves. In line with the
policy of not only the Algerian Communist and Socialist parties, but also
the Muslim Congress,28 the manifesto described the Viollette Bill as a stage
in the complete [intgrale] parliamentary emancipation of Muslims (I, 573).
In one crucial respect, the phrase is tantalizingly vague. Did this mean full
voting rights for Muslims within the existing system, in which the Algerian
electorate was represented by deputies sitting in the French parliament,
or as demanded by the toile Nord-Africaine (ENA), the nationalist
movement led by Messali Hadj, which was the only Muslim organization
to reject the Viollette Bill in a separate Algerian parliament?29
Although it seems highly unlikely that the signatories of the manifesto had the second possibility in mind, it can be argued that neither was
politically realistic at the time. On the one hand, there was little prospect
of the potential balance of power in the French parliament being given to
a greatly enlarged contingent of Algerian deputies, most of whom would
27
Lvi-Valensi, Lentre dAlbert Camus en politique, p.146. Contrasting the lecture

with Misre de la Kabylie (Kabylias Destitution) in 1988, for example, Germaine
Bre claimed that It was [Camuss] contact with the bedouins [sic] of Kabylia
which opened his eyes to another reality, far removed from his highly romanticized
Mediterranean culture (Climates of the Mind, p.94).
28 See Planche, Le projet Blum-Viollette, pp.14143. Together with the few indigenous members of the Communist party, the Muslim Congress brought together
the Fdration des lus Indignes (Federation of Indigenous Representatives), led by
Mohammed Bendjelloul and Ferhat Abbas, and the reformist Association des Oulmas
(Association of Ulama, or Islamic theologians), led by Sheikh Ben Badis and Sheikh
El Okbi.
29 It is important to note that until the latter part of 1936, the ENAs activities were
focused on North African migrant workers in France. It only began to gain broader
support in Algeria after Messali Hadj returned there and delivered an uncompromising speech to a mass rally held at the municipal stadium in Algiers in August that year,
receiving a rapturous reception. On the ENA and the Viollette Bill, see Benjamin
Stora, Des nationalistes algriens face au projet Blum-Viollette, in Gaspard, ed., De
Dreux Alger, pp.15160.
215
inevitably be Muslim. As the French President Albert Lebrun told the then
assimilationist Algerian political leader Ferhat Abbas in 1938: Sir, I do not
want any Muslim representation in the French parliament, because, after
Algeria, it would be Morocco, then Tunisia, then the rest. France would
become a minority in its own assemblies.30 On the other hand, as a Muslim
Congress leader pointed out in attacking Messalis stance, Algeria was tied
to France whether they liked it or not, and they could hardly expect to persuade French Algerians to allow themselves to be ruled by a non-European
majority.31 It was this impasse, of course, that made the independence
struggle inevitable: a fully democratic French Algeria was a contradiction
in terms.32 Be this as it may, the manifesto in favour of the Viollette Bill
went well beyond the bill itself, clearly supporting the principle of equality
in what had hitherto been an apartheid regime.33
This was not Camuss first involvement in the campaign for native
Algerian civil rights. While he was still at school, Camus had joined a group
that published Ikdam (Courage), an indigenous weekly newspaper that
sought to defend Muslim interests. As Lottman puts it: The papers line
30 Quoted by Stora and Daoud, Ferhat Abbas, p.94.
31 Mahfoud Kaddache, La vie politique Alger de 1919 1939 (Algiers: SNED, 1970),
p.337.
32 Stora (Des nationalistes algriens, pp.15859) warns against seeing the Viollette
Bill as a missed opportunity for solving the Algerian problem, arguing that the
rapid rise in popularity of the ENA after its rejection of the bill showed that the
future belonged to nationalists rather than assimilationists. Even if was inevitable
that Algeria would eventually gain its independence, however, it can be argued that
implementing the bill, especially in its amended form, could have paved the way for
peaceful (or at least considerably less violent) decolonization.
33 The uncompromising tone of the manifesto, it should be emphasized, also set it apart
from the French Communist Party, whose official viewpoint on the Viollette Bill
was expressed by Maurice Thorez in his April 1937 Lutte sociale article: Of course,
this bill only partially corresponds to the aspirations for justice of the communists,
who want genuine and complete liberty for oppressed peoples, but at the present
time, it is a question of reinforcing democracy in the face of the fascist danger and
of tightening the links of solidarity and fraternity between France and Algeria. Such
as it is, the Viollette plan, although inadequate, represents a measure of progress for
all the people of Algeria (Le Pain, la Paix et la Libert, p.1).
216
chapter 8
was quite radical for that time, demanding equality of Moslem and FrenchEuropean settlers [and] an end to special and discriminatory legislation for
the indigenous majority.34 According to an eyewitness account by Robert
Namia, Camus was later involved in editing and proofreading the newspaper of the ENA, presumably through his friend Claude de Frminville,
who was printing tracts and periodicals for Algerian nationalist organizations.35 Camus was also in contact with the reformist Association of Ulama,
or Islamic theologians, especially its vice president Sheikh El Okbi, with
whom he attended a rally of the Ligue internationale contre lantismitisme
in May 1937.36 Although Camuss lecture does not refer explicitly to the
colonial situation, then, he had been actively involved in the struggle for
Muslim rights for a number of years.
Within a matter of months, indeed, Camus was expelled from the
Communist party because of his opposition to its change of policy towards
Algerian nationalists. Under orders from Moscow, as previously noted, the
Party was stressing solidarity with the French Popular Front government
against fascism, rather than anti-colonialism. Abandoning its attacks on
French imperialism, the Party in effect supported the official government
policy of assimilation, and when the Blum administration, responding to a
request by the governor-general of Algeria, dissolved the ENA on 27 January
1937, just eleven days before Camuss lecture, the Parti Communiste Algrien
(PCA) which had been set up as a separate organization from the French
Communist party in October 1936 said nothing. Camus, who told Jean
Grenier in 1951 that when he had joined the Party, he had been given the
job of recruiting Arab militants and getting them to join the ENA,37 now

35 Ibid., p.100.
36 Ibid., pp.132, 150. As a reporter for Alger Rpublicain in 1939, Camus would later
report on El Okbis apparently trumped-up trial for murder, while El Okbi would
be present when Camus made his 1956 speech in Algiers calling for a civilian truce
during the Algerian War.
37 Corr. JG, 180 (letter of 18 September 1951). As Lvi-Valensi points out, this raises a
number of questions (Lentre dAlbert Camus en politique, p.144).
217
saw these same militants being arrested and imprisoned, while the PCA
was describing them as provocateurs and even fascists.38
As Camus told Grenier, when some Arab militants came to see him
to protest, he was indignant at what he saw as their betrayal, and made no
attempt to conceal his feelings from other Party members. When Camus
was summoned to Party headquarters and given the chance to mend his
ways, he reconfirmed his position. According to fellow party-member
mile Padula, this was that the Party had been right to support Moslem
nationalists earlier and it did not have the right to discredit them now,
thereby playing into the hands of the colonialists.39 Todd reports another
party member, Maurice Girard, as making the same point, albeit in rather
different terms: Camus, without ever evoking independence [and] insisting on civic and social rights, did not give way on the support owed to the
natives, which, he emphasized, had been precisely the Partys line.40
That Camus did not mention Algerian independence is not surprising. Todd, for example, describes Camuss friend Yves Bourgeois, who
came from France to Algiers in 1935, as wanting to stir up the Algerian
people to revolt, only to find that the idea of an armed rebellion met with
little response from either Europeans or Muslims.41 According to Camuss
contemporaries, indeed, it would have been inconceivable for a European
Algerian of the time to have thought that the only realistic way to end the
injustices of the colonial system was through independence. As Patrick
McCarthy observed as long ago as 1982:
One is tempted to reconstruct the whole of French Algerian history in the light of
the independence war. Yet this runs against the testimony of [] all of Camus friends
who repeat that in the 30s no European [i.e. no European Algerian] dreamed there
could ever be an independent Algeria. No one who studies Camus place in Algerian
history should make such a reconstruction.42
38
39
40
41
42

Ibid., p.78.
Patrick McCarthy, Camus: A Critical Study of his Life and Work (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1982), p.47.
218
chapter 8
Such a reconstruction, however, is precisely the basis of the postcolonial

approach, which gives a seriously distorted picture of Camuss position.
Most tellingly, with the exception of Haddour, not one of the postcolonial
critics of Camuss lecture that I have mentioned refers to the manifesto
in favour of the Viollette Bill, despite its being printed immediately after
the lecture in both the old and new Pliade editions of Camuss works.43
Haddour himself, giving neither date nor page-reference, only refers to the
manifesto in a brief footnote to a general discussion of Camuss position
on the Algerian problem, citing it as evidence for his claim that Camus
espoused and never relinquished the outdated assimilationist ideals of
Jeunes Algriens44 (the indigenous reformist movement that had emerged
before World War I).
To dismiss the ideals expressed in the manifesto as assimilationist,
however, fails to do justice to their radical egalitarianism. Those ideals can
only be described as outdated, on the other hand, from the retrospective
viewpoint of Algerian independence, and in comparison with the even
more radical and, at the time, certainly no less unrealistic demands
of Messalis ENA. If one is to claim, as Said does in a similar context, that
Camus was simply wrong historically,45 the same would ultimately have
to be said of the Messalistes, who were eliminated by the rival FLN (Front
de Libration Nationale) in a vicious power-struggle during the Algerian
War.46
43 Although Vulor (Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses, p.46) discusses Camuss
support for the Viollette Bill, she does not refer to the manifesto by name and relies
on the account given by Tarrow in Exile from the Kingdom, giving a misleading
impression of what the manifesto actually says.
44 Haddour, Colonial Myths, pp.17 and 23, note 84.
45 Edward W. Said, Camus and the French Imperial Experience, Culture and Imperialism
(London: Vintage, 1994), pp.20424, p.211. Camus himself utterly condemned the
belief that History is the judge of what is right or wrong, regarding it as a doctrine
that could be used to justify anything.
46 The term Messalistes is used as shorthand here for the successive nationalist movements led by Messali Hadj: the ENA, PPA (Parti du Peuple Algrien), MTLD
(Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Liberts Dmocratiques) and MNA (Mouvement
National Algrien). It was not until 1999, thirty-seven years after the end of the
219
In the next two chapters, I will examine the biographical context of

Camuss lecture and its legacy in his later writings. First, however, I will
draw some preliminary conclusions regarding its political significance. In
Chapter 3, I examined two opposing approaches to the lecture, humanist
and postcolonial. As I have shown, the humanist approach fails to take
sufficient account of Camuss Mediterranean particularism and the lectures colonial context. In focusing on colonialism as the defining context
for the lecture, on the other hand, the postcolonial approach disregards
or downplays the fact that the political problem that the lecture addresses
is the rise of fascism, and that, far from being a purely European problem,
it posed a very real threat in Algeria too. However, as is shown by the
pro-Muslim policy of the Maison de la Culture, Camuss other activities
and above all the manifesto in favour of the Viollette Bill, he was far from
ignoring the problem of colonialism. While he did not see independence
as the solution and indeed seemed to take the French presence in Algeria
for granted, his commitment to Muslim civil rights placed him among the
most progressive European Algerian voices of his time.
Such, at least, was the opinion of Amar Ouzegane, the secretary-general of the PCA, who was later imprisoned for his role in the independence struggle and who subsequently became an Algerian cabinet minister.
According to Ouzegane, Camus was in the avant-garde in 1935 (the year
Camus joined the Communist party);47 he was not a typical European
Algerian War, that Messali and Ferhat Abbas whose role in the independence
struggle had been expunged from the history-books by the FLN regime were finally
officially rehabilitated by President Bouteflika.
47 Quoted by Alain Vircondolet, Albert Camus: vrits et lgendes (Paris: ditions du
Chne/ Hachette, 1998), p.76. Ouzegane continued: I thought of [Camus] as one of
the Arabized Europeans who had accepted and identified with Arabs, with Algerians,
who thought that the struggle for the independence of Algeria took priority over
the struggle against fascism in Europe. Although his 1930s comrade Charles Poncet
described Camus as one of a very few European Algerians who did not fear Arab
ultranationalism (Todd, Albert Camus, p.147), Ouzegane was surely mistaken on
this latter point.
220
chapter 8
Algerian: he did not suffer from Western ethnocentrism.48 Yet as we have

seen, this is precisely the charge that some postcolonial critics lay against
Camus in his lecture. They, however, can be accused in turn of retrospectivism: the inability, to adapt OBriens comment on Camus, to think of
the past other than with the benefit of hindsight in this case, other than
from the perspective of Algerian independence in 1962.49 Memmis concept of the well-meaning colonizer, it should be remembered, did not
emerge until 1957, when the Algerian War had already been underway for
three years. In 1937, however, it was possible to be both a humanist and
a well-meaning colonizer,50 although in Camuss case it is important to
48 Todd, Albert Camus, p.149, quoting a letter from Ouzegane to Charles Poncet of
19 July 1976.
49 These points, which I originally made in my article Mediterranean Humanism or
Colonialism with a Human Face? have since been taken up and developed by John
Foley in his chapter on Camus and Algeria in Albert Camus: From the Absurd to
Revolt (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), pp.14169. I have substituted Foleys retrospectivism here for my original chronocentrism.
50 In a chapter whose very title In Search of a Colonial Humanism reinforces the
point being made here, the historian Raoul Girardet gives a revealing example of contemporary progressive attitudes in France. As Girardet outlines, a 1931 conference on
colonization and human rights held by the Ligue des Droits de lHomme heard a fierce
debate between two opposing views: whereas Flicien Challaye condemned colonization in principle, Albert Bayet and Maurice Viollette (the very same) condemned
colonial abuses, with Bayet defending Frances civilizing mission and Viollette the
policy of assimilation (Raoul Girardet, LIde coloniale en France 18711962 (Paris:
La Table Ronde, 1972), pp.18283). The conference voted in favour of Bayet and
Viollettes arguments by 1523 votes to 634; Section de Toulon de la Ligue des Droits
de lHomme, La LDH et le problme colonial, note 6 <http://www.ldh-toulon.
net/spip.php?article193,%2520note%25206> accessed 18 May 2010.
In 1936, meanwhile, a pamphlet on France and the Colonial Problem published by the Comit de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes described the colonial
enterprise as the product of self-interest and violence, but argued for progressive
emancipation, radical reforms and a democratic charter for the colonies rather than
immediate decolonization, on the grounds that this could only lead to anarchy and
foreign intervention (Girardet, LIde coloniale, pp.31415, note 17). As noted earlier,
the international situation gave every reason to fear such intervention.
221
emphasize that this extended to supporting equal rights and the principle
of one man, one vote.51
In comparison with the vast majority of European Algerians (and
indeed of the French themselves), the views Camus held in 1937 were ahead
of their time, and remained so in 1945 when he gave an interview to Servir.
Speaking seven months after the brutal military repression that followed
the abortive nationalist uprising in Stif and the Constantinois in May
that year52 generally regarded as marking the turning-point in relations
between colonizers and colonized in Algeria Camus called on France
to really establish democracy in the Arab countries that were then under
its control. Arguing that this would not only gain the support of North
Africa, but also of all the other Arab countries that traditionally trailed
behind the great powers, he appealed to enlightened self-interest: True
democracy is a new idea in Arab countries. For us, it will be worth a hundred armies and a thousand oil-wells (II, 660).
As the us indicates, Camus who had been a journalist for the
Resistance during the Occupation clearly identified himself as French
at this point.53 Once again, he did not mention independence, and given
the unwillingness of successive French governments, in the face of fierce
European-Algerian opposition, to grasp the nettle of radical reform,54 his
51
Women did not gain the right to vote in France until 1944 and in Algeria until
1962.
52 See, among other studies, Roger Vtillard, Stif, mai 1945. Massacres en Algrie (Paris:
ditions de Paris, 2008). Although Camus did not refer to the events of May 1945
in his interview, see the series of articles subsequently collected under the title Crise
en Algrie in Chroniques algriennes (IV, 33751).
53 During the Algerian War, Camus would describe himself as French by birth and,
since 1940, by deliberate choice (IV, 363). At various times, however, he also described
himself as Algerian and North African: see my article Arabes, Algriens et autres
appellations dans le discours camusien, Bulletin de la Socit des tudes Camusiennes
88 (2009), 3538 (p.38).
54 [T]hose who are really responsible for the impossibility of a Franco-Muslim Algeria
are those who, for a century, in Algiers and in Paris, knowingly put off any reform
of the colonial status of a people. Bernard Droz and Evelyne Lever, Histoire de
la guerre dAlgrie (Paris: Seuil, Points-Histoire, 1982), p.346, quoted by Denis
222
chapter 8
call for genuine democratization remained as quixotic in 1945 as it had

been in 1937, and as it would be during the Algerian War. Nevertheless, it
is tempting to speculate whether history might not have turned out rather
differently in the unlikely event that his words had been heeded.55
55
Charbit, Camus et lpreuve algrienne, Perspectives: revue de lUniversit hbraque

de Jrusalem 5 (1998), 15781 (p.180).
Once again, it should be emphasized that the question is not whether Algeria would
have gained independence, but how, and whether democratic reforms might not have
enabled a considerably less bloody transition from colonial rule.
chapter 9
In this chapter, I will examine how the attitudes that Camus expresses
in The New Mediterranean Culture were shaped by his life up to that
point, including not only his family background and education, but also
his reading and thinking. The evidence for this biographical contextualization of the lecture will be drawn primarily from Camuss own writings,
autobiographical and otherwise, but will also take in works by other writers Nietzsche and Grenier whose influence he explicitly acknowledged.
Whether intellectual, moral or political, Camuss attitudes were shaped
by a variety of factors: his early attitude to communism, for example, was
affected not only by his family background, but also by Grenier, by his
own thinking and by external events. It is for this reason that the title
of this chapter, in line with the multi-contextualist approach adopted
throughout, refers to biographical contexts in the plural, rather than the
biographical context.
To illustrate this point, I will begin by examining an example, taken
from the existing critical literature, of how focusing on a single biographical context can lead to a seriously distorted interpretation of the lecture.
I will then look at how Camuss family background affected his attitude
not only to patriotic rhetoric, but also to intelligence, before going on to
examine his attitude to communism during the period of his membership
of the Communist party. Finally, I will explore the possibility that, despite
being a communist at the time of his lecture, Camus was influenced by
anarchism, and in particular by the ideas of the Russian anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin.
224
chapter 9
A Case-Study in Mis-Contextualization
In his notes to the lecture in the new Pliade edition of Camuss works
(I, 136667), Andr Abbou places the text in the context of Camuss
increasingly strained relationship with and eventual expulsion from
the Algerian Communist Party (PCA) (see Chapter 8). As Abbou points
out, Camus, like many left-wing intellectuals of the time, was disturbed by
the publication, in November 1936, of Andr Gides Retour de lU.R.S.S.
(Return from the USSR), a highly critical account of his visit to the Soviet
Union, to which Gide had previously been sympathetic.1 Abbou states
that Camus was also disillusioned by the PCAs inability to build a fruitful
dialogue with the Algerian nationalists led by Messali Hadj (something
of an understatement, considering that the PCA remained silent when
Messalis toile Nord-Africaine party was proscribed by the Blum government on 27 January 1937). Less than a month after the lecture, according
to Abbou, Camus reacted increasingly badly to the orthodox directives of
his cell-leaders, and in May-June 1937, he was falsely accused by one of his
Party comrades of dipping into the funds of the Maison de la culture, which
Camus and his friends had in fact been subsidizing. Although Camuss
accuser ended up being excluded from the Maison, Camus himself as
we have seen was excluded from the Party not long after, after refusing
to resign following accusations of deviationism.
It is against this background that Abbou interprets the wording of
Camuss text. Abbou refers to its convoluted remarks, genuflections [artifices de rvrence] to the sacrosanct principle of the submission of the intellectual to the proletariat and strange and unusual assessments (I, 1367).
Unless Camus is to be considered a fanciful buffoon (baladin chimrique),
Abbou argues, some of these assessments in particular should be seen as
ideological and verbal slips (drapages). These slips, Abbou writes:
Camus read Gides book, and early in 1937, approved the holding of a public meeting
to discuss it, but then, for whatever reason, did not attend. See Todd, Albert Camus,
pp.14446.
225
give an impression of baroque thought tangled up in a cheap mythology. What,

indeed, is the value of the assimilation of Homeland to the spirit of terroir,2
ambiguous concepts like those of race and a closed, above all Judaic Christianity,
which became tolerant and universal with Catholicism? Is it a matter of seeming to
consent to the Spanish Church blessing arms of Italian and German origin which
kill Republicans, and of turning ones back on the devastating effects of Nazism in
Germany? (I, 1367)
As Abbou himself goes on to point out, however, thereby undermining

his own argument, Camus called later that month for armed support to be
given to the Spanish Republicans, while his opposition to Nazism was not
in doubt. Clearly struggling to make sense of what he sees as anomalies in
the lecture, Abbou concludes: Other deviations [carts] of thought and
pen, on Luther supposedly separating Christianity from the world, or on
Mussolinis fascism being milder than the Fhrers, lead one to think that
Camus is multiplying risky improvisations in order to test and accelerate
his exclusion from the Party (I, 1367). What Abbou does not explain, however, is why Camus, with his obvious personal commitment to the Maison
de la culture project, should have been trying to get himself excluded from
the Party rather than simply leaving it, and why he should have gone about
trying to achieve this goal in such a roundabout way.
In fact, Camuss suggestion that Italian fascism had a more human face
than its German counterpart was neither a slip nor a calculated provocation:
as shown by similar comments he made in the 1950s, it was what he actually
believed. In a draft passage of LHomme rvolt, for instance, Camus claimed
that the victory of German ideology over Mediterranean thought was only
provisional. Reiterating the view that he had expressed in his lecture, he
declared: Even today, each time that totalitarian doctrines approach the
Mediterranean, they receive from it a limit and thereby find themselves
transformed. Italian fascism appeared kind [aimable] next to Nazism and
Yugoslav communism is seeking a new way out of the contradictions of
2
The connotations of the untranslatable French word terroir (soil, land) are most
easily grasped in the context of its use in arguments to defend the superiority of certain French wines. Terroir sums up the unique characteristics that a wine is claimed
to derive from the equally unique locality in which it is grown.
226
chapter 9
Marxism (III, 1254). Camuss reference to totalitarian doctrines approaching the Mediterranean implies that, like communism, fascism had come
from outside, presumably from Germany, and that Mussolini had been
inspired by Hitler rather than the other way round. In fact, of course, fascism from the Italian fascismo, from fascio or political group, from the
Latin fascis or bundle first emerged as a political force in Italy: far from
being an ideological import, it was native to the Mediterranean. Camuss
blind spot in this area was confirmed when he returned to the subject in
a newspaper interview during his first visit to Greece in 1955. As Herbert
Lottman recounts in his biography, Camus expressed the view that Fascism
when it reached [sic] Italy hadnt shown the barbarity of German Fascism,
Communism in Yugoslavia becomes bearable.3 Nearly twenty years after
the lecture, in other words, Camus still seemed to believe that fascism originated in Germany rather than Italy a clear indication of his anti-Nordic
and pro-Mediterranean bias.
To return to Abbous account of the lecture, however, the criticisms
of Camus for assimilating la Patrie to the spirit of terroir and using the
ambiguous concept of race are also unfounded. As we have seen, Camus
follows Audisio in identifying la Patrie, not with a unique locality, but
with a certain taste for life (I, 567) common to certain people. While it
draws on a topos of French colonialist discourse and does not include the
indigenous population, on the other hand, the race (I, 566) of European
Algerians to which both Camus and Audisio refer is a melting-pot rather
than a fantasy of ethnic purity. As Camus would put it ten years later in his
essay Petit guide pour des villes sans pass (Small Guide to Cities without
a Past, 1947): The French of Algeria are a mongrel [btarde] race, made up
of unexpected mixtures. Spaniards and Alsatians, Maltese, Jews and Greeks
have encountered each other there. As in America, these brutal crossbreedings have had happy outcomes (III, 594). The quietly subversive sentence
that precedes this passage, meanwhile, serves as an indirect reminder of
Camuss solidarity with native Algerians, and ultimately of his consistent
Lottman, Albert Camus, p.548, citing the Athens newspaper To Vima of 28 April
1955.
227
commitment to their civil rights. The young people of Algeria, he writes,

are beautiful: The Arabs, of course, and then the others.4 A token gesture,
perhaps, but one should imagine a white South African of the apartheid
era perhaps the closest parallel with colonial Algeria praising the beauty
of young South Africans: The Blacks, of course, and then the others.
Abbous complaint about the ambiguity of Camuss reference to a
closed, above all Judaic Christianity becoming tolerant and universal
(Abbous words) with Catholicism is equally unjustified. Abbou seems to
be suggesting that Camuss remarks can be seen as anti-Semitic, as implying that Judaic Christianity and thus Judaism itself were bigoted in
comparison with Catholicism. In fact, Camus goes out of his way to choose
his words carefully here: although he describes early Christianity as being
uncompromising (ignorant les concessions), harsh and exclusive, he also
calls it moving and admirable (I, 567).
Why, then, does Camus describe this early Christianity as closed and
exclusive? The answer lies, I would suggest, in Camuss observations on
the subject in his postgraduate dissertation, Mtaphysique chrtienne et
noplatonisme, which he had completed the year before his lecture.5 In
his introduction, Camus wrote:
Compare Audisios comment, clearly restricted to European Algerians, in Amour

dAlger (1938): What first strikes anyone landing here is the youthfulness of the
race, the beauty of the girls, the strength of the boys (p.82, quoted by Dunwoodie,
Writing French Algeria, p.202; Dunwoodies translation). In Noces, Camus himself,
again clearly referring to European Algerians, says that he is proud to share his love of
the (natural) world with a whole race, born of the sun and the sea (Noces Tipasa,
I, 110), and that among the things that one can love in Algiers is the beauty of the
race (Lt Alger, I, 117; cf. I, 123).
It is worth pointing out that, just as Camuss lecture needs to be placed in the context of various intellectual debates, so his dissertation needs to be seen against the
background of a contemporary academic debate in this case, as Paul Archambault
has suggested, one that preoccupied the Socit franaise de philosophie for more than
a year between 1931 and 1932, and which centred on the question of whether or not
there was a Christian philosophy. Although Archambault, noting that Camus cites
the main texts of the debate in his bibliography, suggests that the problem with which
the dissertation deals derives from this debate, he claims that the dissertation makes
228
chapter 9
From a historical viewpoint, Christian doctrine is a religious movement, born in
Palestine and part of [inscrit dans] Jewish thought. At a time that it is difficult to
determine, but which is certainly contemporary with the moment at which Paul
authorizes the admission of Gentiles in principle and exempts them from circumcision, Christianity separates itself from Judaism. [] Between AD 117 and 130 the
epistle of Barnabus is already resolutely anti-Jewish. Christian thought then separates itself from its origins and completely pours out into the Greco-Roman world.
(I, 10034).
Camus refers later to this turning-point in Christian thought as its break

with Judaism and its entry into the Mediterranean mind (I, 1018). If he
describes early Christianity as closed and exclusive, then, it is precisely
because it was Jewish, and therefore inevitably excluded Gentiles.
Camuss dissertation also sheds light on his treatment of Catholicism
in the lecture. His assertion in the latter that Catholicism added a philosophical doctrine to the combination [ensemble] of sentimental aspirations (I, 567) of early Christianity is a direct echo of a passage in the earlier
text: the sentimental level on which the evangelical communities placed
themselves is alien to the classical aspect of the Greek sensibility. [.] In
the beginning, [Christianity] is not a philosophy that is opposed to a philosophy, but a combination [ensemble] of aspirations, a faith (I, 9991000,
my italics). The significance of this becomes apparent in a later passage
of the dissertation: history made it a necessity for Christianity to give
itself greater depth if it wanted to become universal. This meant creating
a metaphysics. [] The effort of conciliation inherent in Christianity will
be to humanize, to intellectualize its sentimental themes [] (I, 1021, my
italics). This, Camus claims in his conclusion, was the great achievement of
no direct allusion to it (Albert Camus et la mtaphysique chrtienne, in Albert

Camus 1980, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida,
c. 1980), pp.21017, pp.212 and 217, notes 7 and 8). In his introduction, however,
Camus states that it seems difficult to exclude any notion of a Christian philosophy
(I, 1003), referring in a footnote to the Bulletin de la Socit franaise de Philosophie
of March 1931 in which the debate began and two of the principal contributions to
it. In his conclusion, meanwhile, he observes that the question of whether there are
notions which are specifically Christian is a topical one (I, 1076).
229
St Augustine, who successfully combined elements of Neoplatonist metaphysics with Christianity. At Augustines death, Camus argues, Christianity
had become a philosophy, and Christian thought had thereby become
catholic that is, universal (I, 1310).
As this suggests, one of the things Camus is doing in his dissertation
is to describe the beginning of the process by which thanks to a series of
Mediterranean thinkers culminating in the Egyptian Plotinus, the father
of Neoplatonism, and the Algerian-born St Augustine what was originally a dissident Jewish sect was able to become a world religion. Hence
Camuss claim in his lecture that it was [t]hanks to the Mediterranean,
[that] Christianity was able to enter the world to begin the miraculous
career with which we are familiar (I, 567). Far from being anti-Semitic, as
Abbou implies, Camuss contrast between Catholicism and a closed, above
all Judaic early Christianity is firmly based in historical fact, even if he fails
to take into account the crucial role of the conversion of Constantine in
the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire.
I will return to Abbous criticisms shortly. In the meantime, however,
I would like to suggest that Camuss dissertation also helps to shed light
on the lectures vague reference to the Mediterranean as being perhaps
the only region to link up with the great Eastern philosophies [penses]
(I, 569). It is notable here that Camus uses the plural: even if he is alluding
to Islam which seems questionable given the conspicuous absence of any
reference to it either in the lecture or in his earlier writings6 it is not the
only such philosophy that Camus has in mind. To what, then, is he referring? The possible significance of Camuss seemingly casual remark becomes
apparent in the light of the description he gives in his dissertation of the
Early Christian period: In an extraordinary jumble [incohrence] of races
and peoples, the old Greco-Roman themes mingled with this new wisdom
6
The earliest remarks on Islam in Camuss writings appear in a sympathetic threeparagraph review of Abd-errahman Ben-el-Haffaf s Introduction ltude de lIslam
in the 5 March 1939 edition of Alger Rpublicain (I, 82324). A Dialogue EuropeIslam (II, 878) which Camus wrote in his notebook the following month consists of
an imaginary two-paragraph exchange between a European and a Muslim, in which
the European responds to the Muslims comments on European attitudes to death.
230
chapter 9
that came from the East. Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Persia sent thoughts and
thinkers to the Western world (I, 1001, my italics). According to Camus, it
was the Greco-Roman worlds exposure to Eastern religions that prepared it
to accept Christianity: once Christianity had become definitively detached
from Judaism, he says, it inserted itself into Hellenism through the door
held open by Eastern religions (I, 1022).
This point is emphasized in Camuss summary of the development of
early Christianity, where he writes:
The crucial event in this development is the break with Judaism and the entry into
the Greco-Roman world. From this moment, fusion takes place. Prepared by Eastern
religions, Mediterranean thought is about to be enriched [fconde] by the new civilization. If Neoplatonism can be considered as the artisan of this enrichment, it is also
because it was born from this Greco-Oriental syncretism. (I, 1074, my italics)
Which Eastern religions is Camus referring to? In his discussion of

Gnosticism which he describes as a monstrous Christianity combining Eastern religions and Greek mythology (I, 1268) Camus suggests a
parallel with Buddhism (I, 1024, note A) and says that Gnostic remarks
on the impossibility of describing God often make one think of the
Brahman of the Upanishads, which can only be defined by: no, no (I,
102930). He also refers to the influence of a number of Oriental speculations (I, 1038), and particularly the Zend-Avesta, the collection of the
sacred writings of Zoroastrianism, whose founder, the Persian prophet
Zoroaster or Zarathustra, was transformed by Nietzsche Camuss greatest philosophical influence into the hero of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
And as Camus mentions (I, 1063), St Augustine was originally an adherent of Manichaeism the syncretistic belief-system taught by the Persian
prophet Mani, which combined elements of (among others) Gnosticism,
Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Buddhism. Finally, in his conclusion,
Camus mentions Indian philosophies and the Zend-Avesta again alongside other influences that he says he has passed over in silence: Caballa and
Egyptian Theurgy (I, 1078).
The suggestion of an Indian link is reinforced by remarks made by
Grenier. In his essay on LInde imaginaire in Les les, for instance which,
as we have seen, exercised a seminal influence on Camus Grenier wrote
231
that Greek thought from Diogenes to Plotinus (one of the principal thinkers Camus discusses in his dissertation) is swollen disproportionately by a
breath coming from India.7 Similarly, in his comments on Camuss 1932
article Sur la musique (On Music) (I, 52240), Grenier wrote that
Nietzsche pushes Greece towards India (I, 1362). We may also recall that
Camus singles out India in his lecture as an example of a country that has
retained its spiritual unity: since the other belief-systems he mentions are in
effect dead religions, it might therefore be inferred that the great Eastern
philosophies he has in mind in his lecture are above all Indian, including Buddhism and Brahmanism. If this is the case, however, it is difficult
to see what connection, other than historical, these philosophies could
be said to have had with the Mediterranean, let alone the Algeria, of the
1930s. Although Camus himself was clearly influenced, through Grenier, by
Eastern thought, it is equally difficult to understand how Camus thought
that European Algerians had much to learn from what he described as
their immediate contact (I, 570) with the East (i.e. Arabs) unless this
included learning about Islam.
To return, however, to Abbous criticisms of the lecture, the remaining
slip that Abbou detects the assertion that Luther attempted to separate Christianity from the world (I, 567) also needs to be seen in the
context of Camuss other writings, in this case LHomme rvolt.8 By the
world here, Camus means the natural world, which he associates with the
Mediterranean. Thus he contrasts the Nordic Luther with St Francis of
Assisi, whom he explicitly identifies as a Mediterranean and whom he credits with making Christianity into a hymn to nature (I, 567). According to
Camus, however, Christianity subsequently turned away from nature, its
7
Les les, p.128 (Greniers italics). In a footnote to a discussion of Plotinus as a mediator between Platonic and Christian doctrines, Camus himself raises the question
of what he describes obviously in a non-Saidian sense as Plotinuss orientalism
(I, 1059). Plotinus himself, it should be noted, was an Egyptian.
Camuss negative view of Luther may well have been influenced by Nietzsche: see
the highly critical passages quoted by Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher,
Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974),
pp.34852.
232
chapter 9
Greek heritage and ultimately the Mediterranean itself. At the time of his
lecture, Camus evidently identified this decisive break with the Reformation,
hence his description of Luther as being responsible for the only attempt
that has been made to separate Christianity from the world (my italics),
and Protestantism as Catholicism torn away from the Mediterranean (I,
567). Probably under the influence of Simone Weil, however, he later came
to believe that this break had first taken place within Catholicism itself,
with the Albigensian Crusade of 12091229 and accompanying inquisition
against the Cathars of the Languedoc.9 In combination with Christianity,
Camus argues in LHomme rvolt, Hellenism gave rise to
the admirable Albigensian flowering on the one hand, and Saint Francis on the
other. But with the Inquisition and the destruction of the Cathar heresy, the Church
separates itself again from the world and beauty, and gives back to history its primacy
over nature. [] The entry, into this history, of the Nordic peoples, who do not have a
tradition of friendship with the world, hastened this movement. (III, 223, my italics)
Ironically, one of the central beliefs of Catharism was precisely that the material world is evil: the connection Camus makes here between Catharism
and a this-worldly Hellenistic Christianity is therefore highly dubious,10
as is his patently prejudiced remark about Nordic peoples. Nevertheless,
this passage confirms that Camuss comment about Luther in the lecture
cannot, as Abbou claims, be regarded as a slip designed to provoke his
9
10
Using the pseudonym mile Novis to conceal her Jewish identity, Weil contributed
two essays on Catharism and the Albigensian Crusade to the 1943 special issue of
Cahiers du Sud on Le Gnie dOc et lhomme mditerranen (Marseille: Rivages, facsimile edition, 1981 [1943]): Lagonie dune civilisation vue travers un pome pique
(The Agony of a Civilization Seen through an Epic Poem) (pp.99107) and En
quoi consiste linspiration occitanienne (In What Occitan Inspiration Consists)
(pp.15058). Although Camuss initial response to the latter in his notebooks was
dismissive (see II, 1000), both essays would subsequently be collected in Weils crits
historiques et politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), as part of the Espoir collection that
Camus himself directed.
As a Gnostic/Manichaean sect, on the other hand, the Cathars provided a living
link with the syncretic tendencies, combining elements of Christianity with Eastern
religions, to which Camus had referred in his dissertation.
233
exclusion from the Communist party. Once again, it is what Camus actually believed.
What leads Abbou astray in his attempt to give a biographical contextualization of the lecture is his assumption that it can be interpreted
in the light of a single contemporary episode of Camuss life. (There is an
obvious parallel here with the crude social contextualism that attempts to
relate the lecture directly to its contemporary colonial context.) Ignoring
the broader context of Camuss other writings, Abbou explains what he sees
as anomalies in the lecture in terms of Camuss subsequent expulsion from
the Communist party, as if what happened after the lecture were sufficient
to account for what Camus says in the lecture. To avoid the pitfalls of this
retrospective and inevitably reductive approach, it is therefore necessary
to take a longer view of where, as the phrase has it, Camus was coming
from, both personally and intellectually.
Mourir pour la patrie

When Camus attacked jingoistic rhetoric in his lecture by declaring that
La Patrie is not the abstraction that precipitates men into massacre (I,
567), he was making a point that was not merely political, but also had a
profound personal resonance. Camuss own father, Lucien Camus, had been
called up to fight for France in the First World War in 1914, only to die
that same year from shrapnel wounds he had sustained in the battle of the
Marne. The hospital where he died sent Camuss mother Catherine some
shell-fragments that had lodged in his flesh; she later received an official
notification which read: It was a glorious death because this soldier bravely
gave his life to his country.11
Although Camus was less than a year old when his father died, what he
subsequently learnt about the circumstances of his fathers death obviously
11
Lottman, Albert Camus, p.681, notes 10 and 12.
234
chapter 9
made a deep impression on him. He dealt with the subject in two heavily
autobiographical texts: first in Entre oui et non (Between Yes and No),
from LEnvers et lendroit, published in May 1937, and then some twenty
years later in his unfinished novel Le Premier homme (Eng. tr. The First
Man). In Entre oui et non, the stark contrast between the conventional,
euphemistic account of the fathers death He had died on the field of
honour, as they say (I, 49) and the narrators own, painfully suggestive
account provides a powerful example of rhetorical redescription: he had
gone off very enthusiastically. Skull split open at the Marne. Blinded, a week
to die: inscribed on the war memorial of his parish (I, 53).12 The reference
to the fathers enthusiasm underlines the disparity between the official
rhetoric of patriotic sacrifice and the reality of his experience: there is no
bravery, glory or honour here, only a distressing and drawn-out death.
In Le Premier homme, the hero Jacques Cormerys father, like Camuss,
is killed in the war after being called up to fight in the name of a patrie
that, as the narrator emphasizes, he has never seen (IV, 780).13 At school,
the young Jacques is absorbed by the long extracts from Roland Dorgelss
First World War novel Les Croix de bois (The Wooden Crosses) that his
teacher, Monsieur Bernard, himself a veteran, reads at the end of term
and whenever the timetable permits. Although the young Jacques does
not connect it, except at a theoretical level, with the father he never knew,
he sobs uncontrollably when Bernard eventually comes to the end of the
book (IV, 832). The central chapter of Dorgelss novel, which describes
the execution of a soldier by firing-squad for disobeying orders, is entitled
Mourir pour la patrie, after the refrain of Alexandre Dumass nineteenthcentury patriotic song Le Chant des Girondins (The Girondins Song,
1847): Mourir pour la Patrie / Cest le sort le plus beau, le plus digne denvie!
(To die for the Fatherland / Is the finest fate, the most worthy of envy!).
12
13
According to Lottman, however, it appears that Lucien Camus was not blinded
(at least initially), judging by a postcard he wrote from the hospital (Albert Camus,
p.18).
The autobiographical link is confirmed by a note made by Camus included in the
annexes to Le Premier homme: When my father was called up, he had never seen
France. He saw it and was killed (IV, 922).
235
This is the tune that the band strikes up as the firing-squad files past the
corpse of the man they have just shot.14 The end of the chapter reveals that
the man who was executed had two kids15 as did Lucien Camus.
It is not known whether Louis Germain, Camuss own teacher and
the model for Monsieur Bernard, read this particular passage to his pupils.
Later in Le Premier homme, however, Jacquess father is described as dying
in an incomprehensible tragedy far from his homeland of flesh and blood
[sa patrie de chair] (IV, 859), implying that the patrie in whose name he
died was an abstraction. That both the young Camus and his family had
a similar view of France is made clear by another passage from the novel.
Whereas one of Jacquess school-friends from a metropolitan background
refers to France as our patrie and accepts all the sacrifices that it might ask
for in advance, telling Jacques that his ( Jacquess) father died for la patrie,
the narrator writes: this notion of la patrie was meaningless to Jacques, who
knew that he was French, that this involved a certain number of duties, but
for whom France was an absent entity that one laid claim to and that laid
claim to you sometimes (IV, 866). This feeling, says the narrator, is even
more evident among the women in Jacquess family. When Jacques asks his
mother one day what la patrie is, she looks scared, as she does every time
that she doesnt understand something, and says that she doesnt know,
before hesitantly concluding that it means France.
Camus, then, would have had every reason to have reservations
about rhetorical invocations of la patrie. In the speech that he gave for
the Amsterdam-Pleyel / Paix et libert (Peace and Freedom) movement
on 2 April 1936, he referred to la patrie as a key word in fascist discourse:
Fascism has several means at its disposal to keep the people in the state
in which they find themselves. First, the power of certain words such as
FATHERLAND [Patrie], GLORY, HONOUR [].16 Within a
14
15
16
Roland Dorgels, Les Croix de bois (Paris: Albin Michel, 1931), p.198. Dorgelss narrator comments: Oh! To be forced to see that, and to keep, forever in ones memory,
his animal cry, that atrocious cry in which one felt fear, horror, prayer, everything
that a man who suddenly sees death before him can scream (p.197).
Ibid., p.199.
Todd, Albert Camus, p.95, emphasis in the original.
236
chapter 9
matter of months, however, the Communist party itself was adopting similar rhetoric in an attempt to establish its patriotic credentials as a partner of
the new Popular Front government. As Camus noted in October 1936, the
Party was putting up proclamations To the conscripts who are exalting the
unity of the army in the service of la patrie.17 Along with the similar aboutturn in the Partys policy towards Algerian nationalists (see chapter 8) and
the publication of Gides highly critical Retour de lU.R.S.S. in November
1936,18 this would have given Camus a further reason to feel disillusioned
with communism by the time he gave his lecture hence, as we shall see,
his departure from the Party line at certain points in his speech.
The Divided Self: Intelligence and Sensibility in

Louis Raingeard
Lucien Camuss death had a dramatic effect on Alberts mother, Catherine.
Accounts vary, but it appears that she had an attack of some sort: her sister
Antoinette said that her speech was affected, though it is not clear whether
the shock was also responsible for her partial deafness.19 Having moved back
in with her mother after Lucien was called up in Entre oui et non, the
grandmother is described as harsh and domineering (I, 49) Catherine
found herself forced to work as a domestic cleaner to supplement her warwidows pension and support her two young sons. At school, Albert proved
to be a gifted pupil, but his grandmother had to be persuaded to allow him
to take an entrance-examination that would enable him to continue his
17
18
19
Ibid., p.134, apparently quoting from a letter from Camus to his friends Marguerite
Dobrenn and Jeanne Sicard.
According to Lottman, Camus also objected to the Partys collaboration with the
Radical party in the Popular Front (Lottman, Albert Camus, p.156).
Lottman, Albert Camus, p.19, Todd, Albert Camus, pp.2425.
237
studies, rather than like his older brother going out to work at fifteen
to bring some more money into the household.
Camuss privileged position in the family left him with mixed feelings. In the first entry in his notebooks, dated May 1935, he set down his
thoughts about a fictional work he was writing. Clearly drawing heavily
on his own experience, he emphasized the importance of the relationship
between the central character and his mother:
What I want to say:
That one can be nostalgic without romanticism about a lost poverty. A
certain amount of years lived in poverty are enough to build a sensibility. In this
particular case, the odd feeling that the son bears towards his mother constitutes his
whole sensibility. The manifestations of this sensibility in the most diverse areas can
be sufficiently explained by the latent, material memory of his childhood (a birdlime
[glu] that clings to the soul).
Hence, for anyone who is aware of it, a gratitude and thus a guilty conscience.
[]
To a guilty conscience corresponds a necessary confession. The work is a confession, I must bear witness. (II, 795, Camuss emphasis)
Clearly, what Camus felt simultaneously grateful for and guilty about was
the fact that he owed his education and what it helped him become to his
mother and her daily drudgery. Camuss ambivalence does not end there,
however, for although he expresses an unromantic nostalgia about the
poverty of his childhood, his words also indicate a certain resentment. In
describing his memory of childhood as a birdlime that clings to the soul,
Camus implies that, like a bird that has managed to avoid being caught
by birdlime, he too bears the traces of the trap of ignorance, of menial
manual labour, of poverty from which he has escaped. As this metaphor
and the opposition between soul and material suggests, he would like to
fly free, but his past still clings to him.
The work to which Camus refers in this notebook entry can be identified as a fragmentary text written sometime between 1934 and 1936, and to
which Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi has given the title of its protagonist, Louis
238
chapter 9
Raingeard.20 In one passage, Louis is said to have made a life for himself
away from his mother, but to be aware of the vanity of his comfort and
books. (There were no books in Camuss home, it should be noted, until he
started bringing some back from school: in addition to being partially deaf
and suffering from a speech impediment, his mother was illiterate.)21 In a
continuation of the passage, which he later crossed out, Camus wrote:
[He was too proud not to recognize his intelligence, but he considered this as nothing in comparison with what he felt so deeply. Something slept at the bottom of
his soul that was made up of the smell of that infinite poverty []. It was this that
mattered in his eyes. And his mother was the living symbol of all this. That was his
whole sensibility. []] (I, 90)
As the revised version of this draft emphasized, on the other hand,

Louis/Camus feels that his intelligence has increasingly separated him
from his mother:
He was intelligent, as they used to say. And what separated him from her was
precisely his intelligence. Every book he discovered, every increasingly refined emotion, every discovery and every flower [sic] distanced them by degrees.
The living part, the heart of himself lay elsewhere, in that maids room where his
mother worked. (I, 9091).22
20 For a detailed discussion of Louis Raingeard, see Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi, Albert

Camus ou la naissance dun romancier (19301942), ed. Agns Spiquel (Paris:
Gallimard, 2006), pp.20786. In her notes to the text in the Pliade edition, LviValensi suggests that Camus probably based the name of his protagonist on that of
his primary-school teacher, Louis Germain (RAINGEard/GERmAIN) (I, 1224,
note 1). Raingeard also contains a near-perfect anagram of the surname of another
of Camuss teachers and father-figures, Jean Grenier (RaINGEaRd/GRENIeR).
21 Cf. Camuss dedication of the manuscript of Le Premier homme: To you who will
never be able to read this book (IV, 741).
22 Camuss sense of the gulf between himself and his mother is brought out by a passage from Louis Raingeard: If one considers this man on the one hand, educated
and active, and on the other hand, this deaf woman, incapable of saying more than
three sentences, incapable above all of the slightest thought, illiterate besides, one
hesitates to think that their relations could go beyond the world of hallo and good
evening (I, 92). Despite Camuss attachment to his mother, the description he gives
239
By associating the living part, the heart of himself with his mother
as she works, Camus implicitly associates his own mind and intelligence
with death. Camus, then, felt ambivalent not only towards his mother, but
also towards his own intelligence, precisely because it separated him from
her, thus creating a disjunction between his intelligence and his sensibility. As we shall see from some of his early writings, Camus dealt with this
ambivalence initially by adopting an anti-intellectualist stance, criticizing
intelligence and reason in favour of instinct and intuition.
Anti-Intellectualism in Briha, La philosophie du sicle

and Sur la musique
In his lecture, Camus talks of rehabilitating intelligence and of giv[ing]
back to the mind [esprit] all of its true meaning (I, 571). The effort of
human intelligence, he argues, must be a common inheritance and not a
source of conflicts and murders (I, 572). As this last sentence and his use
of the terms rehabilitate and true meaning suggest, Camus attempts to
draw a sharp distinction here between what he sees as two antithetical
conceptions of intelligence, one seen as bringing people together and the
other associated with division and lethal violence.
In some of his earlier writings, however, Camus had shown a marked
hostility to intelligence as such. In a note dated 1932 or 1933 addressed to
his friend Max-Pol Fouchet, Camus wrote a list of ten points responding to
comments that Fouchet had made on a fictional work that Camus had written.23 Although the work in question has not survived, it can be inferred that
the central character Briha, presumably an inverted variant of Camuss
own first name, Albert was at least partly a self-portrait. From the points
23
of her here seems detached, even dismissive a further indication of his ambivalence
towards her.
[Note Max-Pol Fouchet sur Briha] (I, 95354).
240
chapter 9
that Camus made in his reply, it is clear that Fouchet observed that both
Camus and his protagonist were logicians. Camus, however, denied this
and insisted that he (Camus) placed both Dream and Action the capitals
are in the original above logic: Because I see in logic pure, empty and
contemptible intelligence (I, 954). Although this appeared to leave open
the possibility of there being a form of intelligence that was not pure, empty
and contemptible, Camuss other writings of the period confirm that his
attitude to intelligence was overwhelmingly negative.24
In June 1932, Camus published two articles in the equivalent of a
sixth-form magazine, the literary and arts review Sud (South): Sur la
musique (On Music), an essay based on Schopenhauers and Nietzsches
ideas on the subject, and La philosophie du sicle (The Philosophy of the
Century), a review of the philosopher Henri Bergsons Les deux sources
de la moralit et de la religion (Eng. tr. The Two Sources of Morality and
Religion), which had appeared earlier that year.25 In La philosophie du
sicle, Camus wrote that Bergsonism was not only an apologia for direct
cognition and intuition, but also a warning against the dangers of analysis, in other words against intelligence and reason. Nothing, according to
Camus, was more appealing than this idea of dismiss[ing] intelligence
as dangerous, [and] basing a whole system on immediate cognition and
sensations in their raw state (I, 543). Such an anti-rational philosophy,
he claimed, could have released and expressed the religious feelings that
were latent in contemporary minds (including, by implication, his own).
To Camus, indeed, Bergsons philosophy seemed the most beautiful of
all, for it was one of the rare philosophies, with that of Nietzsche, to deny
everything to Reason (I, 544).
Camus went on, however, to confess that Les Deux sources had left him
disappointed. He admitted that Bergson was still trying to justify intuition
24 The young Camuss anti-intellectualism is evident in a number of his early writings.
In Intuitions from October 1932, for example, Camus / the narrator declares: I
convinced myself that the truth only lay where intelligence could not enter directly
[de plain-pied] (I, 950). It is particularly apparent, however, in the two essays which
I go on to discuss, hence my focus on these here.
25 For a discussion of these articles, see Lvi-Valensi, Albert Camus, pp.5358.
241
and putting intelligence on trial, showing that religion was a defensive reaction by nature against the power of intelligence Camuss own negative
opinion of which was apparent in his description of intelligence as corrosive for society and depressing for the individual (I, 544).26 According
to Camus, Bergson also remained true to a philosophy of intuition when
he showed that the truly religious were mystics, because their belief was
instinctive and unreasoned. For Camus, however, the problem was that
we already knew that instinct could give the whole truth: what we were
waiting for was the results of the intuitive method.
What Les Deux sources offered instead, Camus suggested, was analysis
to prove the dangers of analysis, intelligence to teach distrust of intelligence
[] and similar oppositions everywhere (I, 544). Bergson was perpetually
contradicting himself: how, asked Camus, could such an intelligent individual set himself up as an enemy of the intelligence? While he accepted
what he described as the homeopathic method by which Bergson used
intelligence to prove the danger of intelligence, he found it disappointing
and irritating that Bergson should use it to expound the applications of
his philosophy. Perhaps and here the adolescent Camus seemed to be
indulging in personal wish-fulfilment Bergson would have a younger,
bolder heir who would provide the philosophy-religion in the absence of
which the contemporary genius was going painfully astray.
Camus, of course, was just as self-contradictory in his review as he
accused Bergson of being in his book. By its very nature, his review succumbed to the very vice that he condemned, insofar as it was itself an
analysis, an exercise of the intelligence. What matters here, however, is
not the intellectual confusion of a precocious student, but what it reveals
about the young Camuss attitudes. On the one hand, belying the popular
26 From another viewpoint, what Camus refers to as intelligence can be associated with
a characteristically adolescent and morbidly introverted self-consciousness, leading
to a sense of isolation and depression. Clearly, however, this was exacerbated by his
personal circumstances, which included being diagnosed with TB then an incurable disease at the age of 17. See Camuss first published writings, Pome and Le
dernier jour dun mort-n, which appeared in the December 1931 issue of Sud (I,
51114), and for discussion of these, Lvi-Valensi, Albert Camus, pp.4551.
242
chapter 9
perception of Camus as a pagan or atheist, he shows strong sympathy with

both religion in general and mysticism in particular. On the other, he rejects
reason and shows an ambivalent attitude towards intelligence, describing
it as corrosive and depressing while praising Bergson for being intelligent
(and apparently seeing himself as his potential successor). Although it
would not be long before Camus resolved his ambivalence towards the
intellect, the ambiguity of his relationship with religion would remain to
the end of his life.27
In Sur la musique, the second of his contributions to the June 1932
issue of Sud, Camuss stated aim was to show that music, because it was the
most complete art-form, has to be felt rather than understood. In fact, his
essay went much further than this, drawing on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
to argue that art offered an escape from reality, suffering and suffocating
rationality into an ideal world of dream and forgetfulness. Using the upper
case for the central terms of his argument, Camus claimed that Art was
neither the expression of the Real nor a falsified embellishment of the Real,
but the expression of the Ideal, the creation of a Dream world, seductive
enough to hide from us the world in which we live and all its horrors (I,
524). According to Schopenhauer whose idea that Will was the governing principle of the Universe, Camus noted, was inspired by Buddhism
(I, 525)28 Art was the contemplation of things independent of Reason,
and the important thing for the artist was to create an illusion so attractive
and so perfect that the spectator or listener could not and did not want to
27
28
Cf., in particular, the pervasive Christian motifs in Camuss 1957 novel La Chute
(The Fall), which led some Catholic commentators to see Camus as ripe for conversion. In 2000, Howard Mumma, a former minister at the American Church in Paris
in the 1950s, published a book in which he claimed that, following a series of conversations between them, Camus had expressed the desire to be re-baptized shortly
before his death. See Howard Mumma, Albert Camus and the Minister (Brewster,
MA: Paraclete, 2000).
Grenier had published an article on Schopenhauer et lInde in the Annales de
lUniversit de Grenoble (Section lettres-droit) (nouvelle srie), 2 (1925), 14153. Camus
also suggests a parallel between his own view that music enables its listeners to create
an ideal world that is individual to each of them and the Hindu theory that the world
is the product of our desires (I, 536).
243
invoke their Reason. Giving his own personal twist to Schopenhauers ideas,
Camus said that Art was opposed to Reality in order to make us forget it,
and that music was the only art to completely fulfil its function. It formed
a world apart without expressing ugliness or suffering, thus allowing us to
attain an ideal World above Reality.
Moving on to discuss Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy whose full
title was originally The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music Camus
gave a somewhat garbled account of Nietzsches distinction between the
Apollonian and Dionysian principles in both art and the human psyche.
What Nietzsche called Apollonism, said Camus, was the need to transform Reality through Dream. Incorrectly and revealingly, however, Camus
equated this with the need to forget our individuality and identify ourselves with the whole of humanity (I, 529) in fact, Nietzsche identifies
the Apollonian with the principle of individuation.29 Camus was correct,
on the other hand, in stating that Nietzsche saw the Dionysian instinct as
making us forget our individuality through intoxication, and the combination of the two principles as making us forget what is painful in existence.
According to Nietzsche, said Camus, this was what happened in Greek
tragedy: the choruses forgot their personality when they danced to the
music that accompanied performances, actors lived their roles and the
spectators accepted the illusion without appealing to their Reason.
A direct connection with the ideas Camus expresses in his lecture
can be established at this point. In his lecture, Camus declares: It is not
the taste for argumentation [raisonnement] and abstraction that we lay
claim to in the Mediterranean, but its life courtyards, cypresses, strings
of peppers Aeschylus and not Euripides Doric Apollos and not the
Vaticans copies (I, 569). Camuss identification of Euripides with the taste
for argumentation and abstraction derives from Nietzsches explanation for
the decline of Greek tragedy, and that of Greek culture in general, which
he blames on the influence of Socratic rationalism. Thus Nietzsche refers to
[the] Socratic tendency with which Euripides combated and vanquished
29 The Birth of Tragedy, 1, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case
of Wagner, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). See p.36.
244
chapter 9
Aeschylean tragedy and describes what he calls Euripides rationalistic

method as the exemplification of aesthetic Socratism.30 The importance
of this point was underlined by Nietzsche in his intellectual autobiography
Ecce Homo, where he identified one of the two decisive innovations of
The Birth of Tragedy as being the understanding of Socratism: Socrates is
recognized for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a
typical decadent. Rationality against instinct. Rationality at any price
as a dangerous force that undermines life.31 According to A.J. Arnold, this
passage was marked by Camus in his copy of Ecce Homo, dated 1932.32
In his discussion of the Birth of Tragedy in Sur la musique, Camus
explicitly identified this Socratic tendency with argumentative reasoning.33
Using enthusiasm in its original sense of possession by a god, Camus
declared that Greek tragedy declined because the Greeks wanted to substitute reasoning [le raisonnement] for enthusiasm. Socrates, with his Know
thyself , destroyed the Beautiful. He killed the beautiful dream with his
unhealthy need for argumentation. Socrates had to be condemned (I, 531).
In his lecture, Camus sees the same argumentative reasoning as characteristic of both Ancient Rome and 1930s rationalizations of fascist aggression.
30 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 12, pp.82, 83. In opposing Aeschylus and
Euripides, it should be noted, Nietzsche (like Camus) disregards Sophocles, who
came between them and was in fact a contemporary of Socrates.
31 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann
and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p.271.
32 See A.J. Arnold, Camus lecteur de Nietzsche, AC9, pp.9599 (pp.9697). See
also Sur lavenir de la tragdie (On the Future of Tragedy), a 1955 lecture in which
Camus made similar comments about Aeschylus and Euripides (IV, 1112, 1117) and
argued that Nietzsche was right to see Socrates as the gravedigger of Greek tragedy,
to the extent that Descartes similarly marked the end of Renaissance tragedy (IV,
1118).
33 Ironically, Hegel Camuss philosophical bte noire took an equally dim view of
argumentative reasoning. Cf. Michael Inwoods comments on Hegels use of the
terms Vernunft (reason) and Rsonnement: Vernunft is distinct from its Frenchderived counterparts, Rsonnement (reasoning, argumentation) and rsonnieren
(to reason, argue), which are often, and in Hegel invariably, derogative: specious
or sophistical argument from grounds or reasons (Reason and Understanding,
Michael Inwood, The Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.242).
245
What Rome took from Greece, he says, was not its life, but puerile and argumentative abstraction (I, 568), a tendency which he also sees as underlying
the rhetoric of fascism and its intellectual apologists hence his reference
to the culture that feeds on abstractions and capital letters [], that justifies the abuses and deaths in Ethiopia and which legitimizes the taste for
brutal conquest (I, 571). Here Camus seems to be following Nietzsches
identification of Socratic rationalism with sophistry. Thus, according to
Nietzsche, Aristophanes portrays Socrates as the first and supreme Sophist
and depicts Euripides, in his contest with Aeschylus in The Frogs, as priding
himself that from him the people have learned how to [] debate []
with the cleverest sophistries.34
Camuss identification of argumentative reasoning with abstraction,
on the other hand, is implicit in Nietzsches association of abstraction with
Socratism and his opposition of both to myth, which he clearly associates
in turn with tragedy. Without myth, Nietzsche argues, cultures lose their
healthy natural creativity, to the point where the myths of the past can
only be reconstructed through scholarship and what he calls intermediary abstractions.35 Such, according to Nietzsche, was the case with the
culture of his time, which he saw as being dominated by a soul-destroying
rationalism. Thus Nietzsche talks of the abstract character of our mythless existence36 and writes that the present age has produced the abstract
man, untutored by myth; abstract education; abstract morality; abstract
law; the abstract state the result of a Socratism which is bent on the
destruction of myth.37
As Camus noted, however, when Nietzsche wrote the Birth of Tragedy,
he believed that the spirit of Greek tragedy had been reborn in Wagnerian
opera, whose combination of music and myth seemed to offer the possibility
of an escape from this suffocating rationalism. Famously, Nietzsche later
completely changed his mind about Wagner, but in the conclusion to Sur
34
35
36
37
The Birth of Tragedy, 13, p.87 (Nietzsches emphasis); 11, p.77.

The Birth of Tragedy, 23, p.135.
24, p.142.
23, pp.13536.
246
chapter 9
la musique, Camus argued that he was wrong to have done so: Wagners
mythology might be false and artificial, but it could make us dream and
forget, and he had realized the union of Myth and Music more completely
than any other composer. Having claimed earlier that all the arts came
from the same aspiration of the human mind towards a better world of
forgetfulness and dream, Camus called for Reason to be banished from
Music and every art: truly fruitful Music, he declared, will be a Music of
Dream that will banish all reason and analysis. [] Art does not tolerate
[ne souffre pas] Reason (I, 540).
Camuss lecture shows both continuities with and a radical change in
the attitudes that he expressed in Sur la musique. Although his view of
the mind (lesprit) is similarly positive in both texts the essay on music
refers to this life of the mind that must be the goal of each existence (I,
536) Camus explicitly assumes the identity of a left-wing intellectual in
his lecture, thus implicitly repudiating his earlier anti-intellectualism. And
although his Nietzschean suspicion of reason characterized in terms of
abstraction in the lecture remains unchanged, Camuss rejection of [the
culture] that feeds on abstractions and capital letters (I, 571) can likewise
be seen as a rejection of the kind of reification evident in his own repeated
use of the upper case for the central terms of his essay. Similarly, whereas
the Camus of Sur la musique followed Nietzsche in seeing myth-induced
illusion as a desirable phenomenon, the Camus of the lecture defines true
civilization as one that places truth above fable, life above dream (I, 57172)
a complete reversal of his earlier position.
Within a few years of his essays on Bergson and music, indeed, Camus
had explicitly repudiated his former tendency to demean intelligence,
seeing it as a sign of bad faith. In a draft preface for a collection of essays
that would eventually become LEnvers et lendroit, Camus wrote: If I
hear someone say [] Down with intelligence, I take it to mean: I cant
put up with my doubts. Because it bothers me that people cheat. And
the great courage is to accept oneself with ones contradictions (I, 73).
The implication is that Camus himself had previously denigrated intelligence because he had been unable to accept the doubts and contradictions
brought about by his intellectual self-consciousness. Sometime between
May and November 1936, he wrote in his notebooks: Intellectual? Yes.
247
And never go back on it. Intellectual = someone with a dual personality

[celui qui se ddouble]. I like that. I am happy to be both (II, 810). As the
lecture makes clear, however, the kind of intellectual that Camus could
now accept himself as being was not the argumentative [discuteur] and
abstract gentleman, incapable of connecting with life, and preferring his
personality to all the rest of the world a description that was an implicit
criticism of his own former narcissistic self-absorption but a member
of a politically and socially committed group of like minds: We want to
reconnect culture with life. [] we do not want to separate ourselves from
the world (I, 571).
Camuss Attitude to Communism 19351937

Initially, as we have seen, the young Camus dealt with his ambivalence
towards his intelligence by adopting an anti-intellectualist stance. By the
time that he gave his lecture, however, he had obviously found a way of
accepting himself as an intellectual. He did this, in effect, by distinguishing between a good and a bad intelligence and identifying the latter
with rationalism and abstraction, which he saw as intelligence separated
from life.
On 21 August 1935, Camus wrote to his teacher and mentor Jean
Grenier to announce that he was taking his advice to join the Communist
party. Although he said that he had serious objections to communism in
principle, notably its lack of a religious sense, he had decided to put them
to the test of practice: It seems to me that it is better to live the obstacles
that I oppose to communism.38 Adopting an empirical approach to the
problem, he described himself as undertaking an experiment that he would
never allow to be driven by Marxist theory: in the (honest) experiment that
I will attempt, I will always refuse to put a volume of Capital between life
38
Corr. JG, 22.
248
chapter 9
and man (Corr. JG, 22). Camus also made it clear that, despite his misgivings, he had a personal reason for joining the Communist party the fact
that it put him back in touch with his roots: Every doctrine can and must
evolve. That is enough for me to subscribe sincerely to ideas that take me
back to my origins, to my childhood friends, to everything that makes up
my sensibility (ibid) a sensibility that, as we have seen, he saw as wholly
constituted by his feelings towards his mother.
Camus went on to question a number of specific points of communist
doctrine: false rationalism linked to the illusion of progress, class-struggle
and historical materialism interpreted in the sense of a finality whose aim
is said to be the happiness and triumph of the working class alone (Corr.
JG, 22). He confirmed his commitment to the concrete and his suspicion of
abstractions by saying that it seemed to him that it was life more than ideas
that often led to communism (Corr. JG, 23). Beyond the appeal of a return
to his roots, his motivation for joining the Party was humanitarian, as his
letter to Grenier made clear: I have such a strong desire to see a reduction
in the sum of unhappiness and bitterness that poisons men (ibid).39
Camus continued to express scepticism about several aspects of communist doctrine as a party member, at least in private. In a draft that was
clearly written during this period, he reiterated his rejection of materialism, the cult of progress and rationalism, adding Hegel to the list: We
dont believe in Hegel, were not materialists, we dont serve the monstrous
idol of Progress. We hate all rationalism, were communists all the same.
[Its attempting the impossible. No.] Because we dont want to separate
doctrine from life.40 As the text in brackets crossed out in the original
indicates, Camus was aware that he was trying to square a circle: he might
39
There is a clear continuity here with the attitude Camus expressed even more vigorously in his postwar polemic with Emmanuel dAstier de la Vigerie over the anti-Stalinist position he adopted in Ni victimes ni bourreaux (Neither Victims Nor Executioners).
As Camus told dAstier, his only advantage over him was that he had pleaded, in the
name of my profession and in the name of all my folks, that the atrocious suffering
of men should be reduced here and now (II, 464; Camuss emphasis).
40 Quoted by Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi and Andr Abbou (CAC3, introduction,
pp.2021). The draft is not included in the new Pliade edition of Camuss works.
249
just as well have said that he was a communist without believing in communism. (Indeed, in a letter to Grenier of 26 July 1936, Camus said that a
position he could understand was frenzied communist action, combined
with total pessimism with regards to communism and the social question (Corr. JG, 26), implying that this position was close to his own.) The
important point here, however, is that once again, Camus gives priority
to the concrete over the abstract, to life over ideology. For in saying that
he did not want to separate doctrine from life, he implied that he rejected
Hegelianism, materialism, rationalism and the hypostasis of Progress
precisely because they were separated from life. Once again, he stressed the
importance of the human factor over Marxist doctrine, declaring that, for
him, communism meant his comrades much more than the third volume
of Capital: I prefer life to doctrine and its always life that triumphs over
doctrine (CAC3, 21).
Camus also reiterated the importance of his working-class origins, suggesting that they were the basis for his rejection of a rationalist approach
to politics:
you cant be born in a working-class family and expect to escape unscathed. I cant
bring myself to prefer a certain definition of intelligence to my folks [les miens]. It
seems to me that if I did, I would be betraying the real meaning of life, which lies in
the suffering and death of my folks. Its the idealism thats born of rationalism. And
its this idealism that I reject because its like the mark of original sin. (CAC3, 21)
What Camus rejects here is not intelligence, idealism or reason as such,

but a narrow-minded rationalism that would take no account of the suffering and death of individuals not individuals in the abstract, but those
Camus refers to as les miens his family, his people, his folks. His political
commitment is emotional rather than intellectual, not to communism as
an abstract ideology, but to a concrete community.41
41 Camus reiterated this commitment in a letter he wrote to Grenier on 18 June 1938,
following the publication of Greniers Essai sur lesprit dorthodoxie and less than a
year after his own expulsion from the Party. Acknowledging that Grenier was right
to have criticized communism, Camus wrote: My only excuse, if I have one, is that
I cannot detach myself from those among whom I was born and whom I could not
250
chapter 9
Camuss working-class roots were not the only factor that influenced
his attitude towards communism. Another factor was the influence of his
mentor Jean Grenier, who in spite of having advised Camus to join the
Communist party expressed an increasingly critical stance towards communism as a doctrine, culminating in Essai sur lesprit dorthodoxie (Essay
on the Spirit of Orthodoxy),42 which was published in 1938, the year after
Camus got himself expelled from the Party. With one exception, however
an unpublished letter to Andr Malraux on his novel LEspoir (Eng. tr.
Mans Hope) the Essai collected texts dated between 1935 and 1937, five
of which had been published before Camuss lecture.43 Camus, moreover,
was clearly aware of Greniers scepticism from the start. In the letter in
which he told Grenier of his decision to join the Party, Camus promised
that would remain clear-sighted and never give in blindly, telling Grenier
that he would be helped in this by his thought and his example.44
A comparison between Greniers Essai and the undated draft quoted
above shows the extent to which Camuss views on communist doctrine
coincided with his mentors. Everything that Camus had rejected in the
draft was also rejected by Grenier:
abandon. Communism has unjustly annexed their cause. I realize now that if I have
a duty, it is to give my folks [les miens] the best I have, I mean to try to defend them
against lies (Corr. JG, 31).
A similar commitment was evident in the statement misreported, often misquoted and usually taken out of context that was attributed to Camus at a press
conference he gave, during the Algerian War, after receiving the Nobel Prize for
Literature: that he believed in justice, but that he would defend his mother before
justice. Apparently, what Camus referring to FLN terrorism against European
Algerians actually said was: At this moment, bombs are being thrown into the
trams of Algiers. My mother may find herself in one of those trams. If thats what
justice is, I prefer my mother (IV, 1405).
42 Jean Grenier, Essai sur lesprit dorthodoxie (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), subsequently
abbreviated as Essai.
43 La Pense engage, Lge des orthodoxies, LOrthodoxie contre lintelligence,
Remarques sur lide de progrs and LIntellectuel dans la socit. See J.S.T. Garfitts
bibliography in The Work and Thought of Jean Grenier, p.153.
44 Corr. JG, 23.
251
We dont believe in Hegel

Although he acknowledged the historical importance of Hegel
for understanding fascism, nationalism and what he called neocommunism, Grenier saw Hegels influence as malign, declaring
that our times are given over to Hegel, as they are to cancer and
tuberculosis; 45
Were not materialists
Dismissing Marxisms claim to be scientific, Grenier wrote that
Marxs materialism can never be proved or refuted [] any more
than Hegels idealism can, and was equally scornful of the notion
of materialism Lenin put forward in Materialism and EmpirioCriticism;46
We dont serve the monstrous idol of Progress
Having referred to the myth of progress in Lintellectuel dans
la socit (The Intellectual in Society), Grenier devoted a
whole chapter to the subject Remarques sur lide de progrs (Remarks on the Idea of Progress, 1936) citing Georges
Friedmanns La Crise du progrs (The Crisis of Progress, 1936)
and Georges Sorels Les Illusions du progrs (The Illusions of
Progress, 1906) in support of his argument;47
45 Jean Grenier, Notes sur les Prcurseurs du matrialisme Marxiste (1937), Essai,
p.162. Even if Camus had not read this by the time of his lecture, it seems highly
probable that Grenier, as his philosophy teacher, heavily influenced his view of
Hegel.
46 Rponse un orthodoxe, Essai, pp.7677; Lorthodoxie contre lintelligence
(1August 1936), Essai, pp.5153.
47 Essai, p.130 and pp.16680. Camus himself cited Les Illusions du progrs in his notebooks in September 1937 (II, 83637). Referring to this notebook entry, Quilliot
suggests that Camus was following Grenier in his opposition to the spirit of progress
(E, 1317).
252
chapter 9
We hate all rationalism

Having argued that communism proceeds from a certain form of
mindset (esprit) the attempt to exploit nature as rationally as
possible for the benefit of all workers Grenier wrote: it seems
to me that it is reason, that reduction of the mind, that has caused
most of the evils of the last century and this one. It is not so much
matter that I will oppose to mind as reason.48 It was this rationalism, said Grenier, which was the true materialism.
In all these respects, there is a remarkable similarity between Greniers and
Camuss views. In the last two cases, it should be emphasized, this similarity
carries over into the lecture itself: thus Camus says that [i]t would be too
dangerous to handle that harmful toy called Progress (I, 572), and talks
of giv[ing] back to the mind [esprit] all of its true meaning (I, 571) the
meaning, in other words, denied by rationalism.
Bakunin and the Anarchist Alternative

As previously noted, Camus departs from the Party line at certain points in
his lecture. Declaring that the same region that transformed so many doctrines must transform the doctrines of today (I, 570), he tells his audience
that a Mediterranean collectivism will be different from a Russian one and
that their ideas will yield and adapt to the realities before their eyes. This is
why, he says, their opponents are mistaken in all their objections. Although
Camus does not specify what these objections are, his defence hints at a
critical attitude towards communism and a divergence from the Moscow
line: One isnt entitled to prejudge the fate of a doctrine and to judge our
future in the name of the past, even if it is that of Russia (I, 570). As the
context makes clear, the doctrine Camus is referring to is not communism
48 Lintellectuel dans la socit (1935), Essai, pp.132, 133 (my emphasis).
253
but collectivism: thus he claims that [t]he battle for collectivism is not being
played out in Russia: it is being played out in the Mediterranean basin and
in Spain at the present time (I, 570). If the kind of collectivism that Camus
was thinking of was not Russian communism, however, this suggests that
he was referring to the collectivist form of another political movement that
was strongly represented in the Spanish Civil War: anarchism.
The beginning of Camuss sympathy with the anarchist movement has
been traced back to his break with the Communist party and his subsequent involvement with the pro-syndicalist newspaper Alger rpublicain,
whose staff he joined in October 1938.49 As Pascal Pia, the newspapers
editor at the time, later recalled:
As far as I can tell, his sympathies from that point on went towards libertarians, to
conscientious objectors, to syndicalists of the Pelloutier50 school, in short to all
refuseniks [rfractaires]. I dont think he overestimated the real influence of anarcho-syndicalism in the thirties (it was only important in Spain at the time, with
the FAI [Federacin Anarquista Ibrica]), but however limited this influence was,
those who did their best to extend it certainly inspired him with more respect than
sworn Marxists.51
Camus, however, had previously been exposed to anarchist ideas through

his uncle Gustave Acault and his friends Claude de Frminville who
had read Proudhon and Tolstoy before becoming a communist and helping to persuade Camus to follow his example and Yves Bourgeois, who
49 Camuss known turn towards anarchism first began [] after his exclusion from
the Communist party (Die bewusste Hinwendung zum Anarchismus begann bei
Camus [] erst nach seinem Ausschluss aus der KP). Lou Marin, Ursprung der
Revolte: Albert Camus und der Anarchismus (Heidelberg: Graswurzelrevolution,
1998), p.27. See also Ian Birchall, The Labourism of Sisyphus: Albert Camus and
Revolutionary Syndicalism, Journal of European Studies 20 (1990), 13565, and Peter
Dunwoodie, Albert Camus and the Anarchist Alternative, Australian Journal of
French Studies 30: 1 (1993), 84104 (pp. 9396).
50 As general secretary of the trade-union organization the Fdration nationale des
Bourses du Travail, Fernand Pelloutier (18671901) became one of the leading figures
in the French anarcho-syndicalist movement.
51 Lettre de Pascal Pia Andr Abbou (I, 865).
254
chapter 9
described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist pacifist.52 Camuss own interest

in anarchist thought before his lecture is shown by the fact that he lent a
copy of a book by the German anarchist Max Stirner to Bourgeois in 193653
at which time, of course, he was a member of the Communist party.
The only work of Stirners that was available in translation at that
time and indeed the only full-length work that Stirner wrote was Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844, Eng. tr. The Ego and its Own), translated into French as LUnique et sa proprit.54 Camus would later discuss
Stirner in a section of LHomme rvolt (III, 11316).55 As the title of The
Ego and Its Own suggests, however, Stirner was an anarcho-individualist,
whereas the only political doctrine that Camus explicitly endorses in his
lecture is collectivism. This raises the possibility that he was influenced by
another anarchist thinker that he discusses in LHomme rvolt, the Russian
anarcho-collectivist Mikhail Bakunin.
Bakunins ideas were certainly very much in the air at the time of
Camuss lecture, as he remained the single most important influence on
Lottman, Albert Camus, p.49; Todd, Albert Camus, pp.59, 78, 88. Although he
was clearly using the word in the sense of an individualist rather than a member of
a political movement, Camus was probably thinking of himself when he wrote: the
man who wants to be the most solitary and anarchistic is also the man who most
yearns to appear as such in the eyes of the world (Les Voix du quartier pauvre (The
Voices of the Poor Neighbourhood) [1934], I, 85).
53 Lottman, Albert Camus, p.111. Camus had probably been introduced to Stirners
work by Grenier, who had probably been introduced to it in turn by the anarchist
thinker Georges Palante. Palante refers to Stirner some fifty times in La Sensibilit
individualiste (Paris: Alcan, 1909) <http://bibliolib.net/Palante-individu.htm>
accessed 18 May 2010), to which Camus in turn referred twice in his notebooks in
1947 (II, 1094, 1097). Grenier had met Palante as a schoolboy through his friend
Louis Guilloux and later kept up a correspondence with him. See Yannick Pelletiers
preface to Georges Palante. LIndividu en dtresse. Textes choisis (Romill: Folle Avoine,
1987) <http://perso.wanadoo.fr/selene.star/preface_pelletier_palante.htm>.
54 Two French translations of Stirners work had been published at the turn of the century, one by Robert L. Leclaire (Paris: Stock, 1899), and the other by Henri Lasvignes
(Paris: ditions de la Revue Blanche, 1900).
55 At the time of writing, the omission of this and other sections in the British (though
not the US) edition of The Rebel has yet to be rectified.
52
255
Spanish anarchism. According to Gerald Brenan, who describes Bakunin

as the creator of the peasant anarchism of Southern and Eastern Europe,
Spain was the only country where Bakunins ideas were adopted by a mass
movement: It is no exaggeration to say that, slight as the points of contact
may seem to be, everything of importance in Spanish anarchism goes back
to him.56 Grenier was certainly aware of Bakunins influence in this respect,
asking in January 1938: Hasnt Catalonia given real existence to part of the
anarcho-syndicalism that derives from Bakunin?,57 while in 1946, Camus
himself described Spain as the Homeland of rebels, explaining in a footnote
that it was the only country where anarchism has been able to form itself into
a powerful and organised party (Prface LEspagne Libre, II, 668). Partly,
no doubt, due to his mothers Minorcan ancestry, the Spanish Civil War was
an issue about which Camus felt particularly strongly. In 1936, according to
Lottman [h]e decided to read and see everything he could about Spain,58
while in the same year he co-wrote the play Rvolte dans les Asturies, on the
1934 Oviedo miners uprising. This refers explicitly to anarcho-syndicalism
(I, 12), while one character is described as an anarchist (I, 25); a real-life
anarchist, Vincent Solera, played the concertina in rehearsals.59
In his lecture itself, as previously mentioned, Camus alluded twice to
the war, referring to the truth that is being murdered in Spain (I, 569) and
declaring that the struggle for collectivism was being played out, not in
Russia, but in the Mediterranean basin, and in Spain at the present time
(I, 570). His statement that a Mediterranean collectivism would be different from its Russian counterpart is noteworthy in view of the fact that
Bakunin called himself a collectivist to distinguish his brand of libertarianism from what he saw as Marxs authoritarian communism.60 Tensions
Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Cockpit: An Account of the Social and Political Background
to the Spanish Civil War, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967),
p.132.
57 Grenier, propos de LEspoir (Lettre Andr Malraux), Essai, p.198.
59 Ibid., p.102.
60 See Sam Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchism (Montral: Black Rose, 1980), pp.157
58. Bakunin used the term for the first time at the Second Congress of the League
56
256
chapter 9
between anarchists and communists resurfaced in the Spanish Civil War,

and Camus would certainly have been aware of these: as Todd notes, the
Union anarchiste in Algiers put up posters in Camuss native Belcourt
district of Algiers blaming Stalinists for the crisis in the government of
Valencia, for example.61 Given Camuss growing disenchantment with the
Communist partys policy in the Popular Front, what Dunwoodie calls the
anarchist alternative would have seemed increasingly attractive.
Apart from a general commitment to some form of collectivism, however, the question remains as to how else Bakunin might have influenced
Camus at the time of his lecture, and what evidence there is for this. A
possible clue here is provided by Camuss comments about Bakunin in
LHomme rvolt. Although he is critical of what he sees as Bakunins nihilistic tendencies and in particular his involvement with the ruthless young
revolutionary Sergei Nechayev Camus praises Bakunin as the only man
of his time to criticize the idea of government by scientists [savants] with
exceptional insight. Against all abstraction, [Bakunin] pleaded for the
whole man, completely identified with his rebellion (III, 196).
Although Camus does not mention it by name, his comments here are
based on Science et gouvernement de la science (Science and Government
by Science), a section of Bakunins best-known work, Dieu et ltat (God
and the State).62 (By science, it should be emphasized, Bakunin meant
of Peace and Liberty at Bern in 1868. See Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible:
A History of Anarchism (London: Fontana Press, 1993), p.8. According to the Petit
Robert, the word collectiviste entered the French language the following year.
61 Todd, Albert Camus, p.142.
62 Dieu et ltat (Geneva: Imprimerie Jurassienne, 1882) <http://fr.wikisource.org/
wiki/Dieu_et_l%E2%80%99%C3%89tat_(1882)> accessed 18 May 2010; all further
references are to this unpaginated webpage. Bakunins anarchist comrades Carlo
Cafiero and lise Reclus were responsible for both the title and the text of Dieu et
ltat, which they posthumously extracted, edited and translated from the unfinished
manuscript of Bakunins LEmpire Knouto-Germanique et la Rvolution Sociale. The
text of this edition was subsequently reprinted in France (e.g. in 1892 and 1893) and
widely circulated as a pamphlet in anarchist circles. It is unclear which edition(s)
might have been in circulation in the 1930s, hence my reference to the original text,
which has been amended in at least one recent French edition.
257
any theory with scientific pretensions, especially Marxism. For Bakunin,

what made scientists in this sense unfit for government was their tendency
to disregard living individuals in favour of general ideas.) In a draft of
LHomme rvolt, in the middle of the passage I have just quoted, Camus
paraphrased a passage from this section of Bakunins pamphlet, as the following table demonstrates:
Dieu et ltat
Manuscript of LHomme rvolt
every time that men of science,

leaving their abstract world,
meddle with living creation
in the real world, all that they
offer or create is impoverished,
ridiculously abstract, deprived
of blood and life, stillborn, like
the HOMUNCULUS created
by Wagner, [] the pedantic
disciple of Goethes immortal
Doctor Faustus. The result is that
SCIENCE HAS AS ITS SOLE
MISSION TO ILLUMINATE
LIFE, NOT TO GOVERN IT.
(Bakunins italics, my capitals)
Life is a ceaseless transition

from the individual to the
abstract and from the abstract
to the individual. It is this
second movement that science
lacks. Once in the abstract it
can no longer leave it That is
why SCIENCE HAS AS ITS
MISSION TO ILLUMINATE
LIFE, NOT TO GOVERN IT;
what it creates always resembles
the HOMUNCULUS. (E, 1644,
my capitals)
It should be noted, however, that the same passage from Dieu et ltat is quoted
by Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel in the first volume of their Histoire de
lanarchie,63 which Camus cites in the course of his discussion, albeit not in
relation to Bakunin himself (III, 196). Camus may, in other words, have been
relying on secondary sources.64 Indeed, in an extended critique of Camuss
Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel, Histoire de lanarchie I (Paris: Le Portulan, 1949),
p.412.
64 The only work by Bakunin that Camus appears to quote from at first hand is Confession
(III, 196). An 1899 edition of Bakunins pamphlet La Commune de Paris et la notion de
ltat (The Paris Commune and the Notion of the State), however, in which Bakunin
63
258
chapter 9
treatment of Bakunin in LHomme rvolt, Gaston Leval argued that there

were serious deficiences in both Camuss knowledge and understanding of the
Russian thinker, though he concluded that if Camus really knew Bakunins
thought, he would realize that he was, in large part, a Bakuninist without realizing it.65 In his reply to Leval, however, Camus declared that Bakunin was alive
in me as he is in our time (III, 410) and that he had been nurtured (III, 411)
on the philosophies that he had written about in LHomme rvolt, implying
that he had been strongly influenced by Bakunin for some time.
One notable parallel between Camuss and Bakunins attitudes is in their
opposition of doctrine to life. In the draft on communism quoted earlier,
Camus writes that he prefers life to doctrine and that it is always life that
triumphs over doctrine (CAC3, 21). Similarly, in Dieu et lEtat, Bakunin
writes that doctrine kills life, kills the living spontaneity of action. The similarities between Dieu et lEtat and Camuss lecture itself, however, are even
more noteworthy. Just as Camus repeatedly uses abstract and abstraction
in a pejorative sense and in opposition to life, so Bakunin begins the section
Science et gouvernement de la science with the sentence [t]he general idea
is always an abstraction, and, by that very fact, as it were, a negation of real
life, going on on to use the word abstraction thirty-four times in the four
and a half thousand words of this section alone. And just as Camus rejects the
notion of la patrie as the abstraction that precipitates men into massacre, so
Bakunin identifies la patrie as one of a number of abstractions to which, over
the centuries, millions of human beings have been sacrificed. Until now, writes
Bakunin, all of human history has been but a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honour of a merciless abstraction
of one sort or another: gods, patrie, State power, national honour, historical
rights, legal rights, political liberty, public good.
Perhaps the most striking parallels between Dieu et lEtat and Camuss
lecture, however, are evident in the following passages:
65
describes both God and the State as abstractions, is listed in the catalogue of Camuss
library at the Centre de Documentation Albert Camus in Aix-en-Provence.
Gaston Leval, Bakounine et LHomme rvolt dAlbert Camus, Le Libertaire 30811,
28 March12 June 1952, reprinted in Lou Marin, ed., Albert Camus et les libertaires
(Marseille: ditions grgores, 2008), pp.10938 (p.138).
259
Dieu et ltat
Which [of Greek and Roman

civilisations] is the most
abstractly ideal at its startingpoint, sacrificing the material
liberty of man to the ideal liberty
of the citizen, represented by
the abstraction of legal right,
and the natural development of
human society to the abstraction
of the State, and which is the
most brutal in its consequences?
Roman civilisation, without a
doubt.
the abstract and conventional

Mediterranean represented by
Rome and the Romans (I, 568).
And the name of Roman

civilisation? Conquest, with all its
brutal consequences. And its last
word? The omnipotence of the
Caesars.
one may grant to Mussolini

that he is the worthy successor
to the Caesars and Augustuses
of antiquity, if one means by
that that, like them, he sacrifices
truth and greatness to mindless
violence (I, 56869).
The Mediterranean [] is the

very negation of Rome and the
Latin genius. Alive, it has no need
for abstraction (I, 568).
There is only one culture. []

Not the one that [] legitimates
the taste for brutal conquest (I,
571).
(Comparing Italy and Germany):
In Italy, in spite of [its] let us
hope temporary decadence one
can live and breathe humanly,
freely.
(Comparing fascism in Italy

with fascism in Germany): it is
a miracle of the Mediterranean
that it permits men who
think humanly to live without
oppression in a country with
inhuman law (I, 568).
260
chapter 9
It should be emphasized that there is no conclusive evidence that Camus

had read Dieu et ltat before he gave his lecture or even, as we have seen,
by the time that he wrote about Bakunin in LHomme rvolt. At the very
least, however, the demonstrable parallels between the two texts suggest
why Camus should have been increasingly sympathetic towards anarchism
of the Bakuninist variety after his expulsion from the Communist party.
Notwithstanding the lack of conclusive evidence in this particular
case, it is clear that Camuss lecture reflects a wide range of biographical
influences, taking biographical in a broad sense that includes not only
his life and background but also his intellectual development up to that
point. As Abbous account of the lecture suggests, a narrow and conventionally biographical approach that seeks to understand the text as a whole
in terms of what was happening in the authors life at the time runs a high
risk of misinterpretation and reductivism, overlooking potentially important evidence from the authors earlier life and other writings, let alone
other contexts. The same principle that underlies the multi-contextualist
approach that different parts of a text may need to be placed in different contexts also applies within the various types of context, insofar as
multiple factors may need to be taken into account.
chapter 10
The Legacy of The New Mediterranean Culture

in Camuss Later Work
At various points in this study, reference has been made to echoes of The
New Mediterranean Culture in Camuss later work. To give a full account
of the legacy of the lecture in Camuss subsequent writings, however, would
require an extended study in its own right. To take just one example, one
of the most important reasons for considering Camuss lecture as a seminal
text in his intellectual development is that it marks the explicit emergence of
a theme that is widely seen as central to his work as a whole: his rejection
of what he called abstraction in favour of life.1 To trace the development
of this theme through Camuss later writings, however, would call for a
detailed consideration not only of the many non-fictional texts in which
Camus used the term,2 but also his imaginative works, most notably La
Peste, whose narrator describes the struggle between the happiness of each
According to Dunwoodie, for instance, Camuss entire uvre is seen by many critics as a struggle against the deadening abstraction of History and the straitjacket of
unchallenged ideology in the name of life in the present (Writing French Algeria,
p.209).
The theme of abstraction is particularly prominent in Camuss writings in the aftermath of the Second World War, including LHomme rvolt. Why this should be the
case is suggested by a notebook entry he made sometime between December 1944
and July 1945: Demonstration. That abstraction is the evil [mal]. It is responsible
for wars, torture, violence, etc. Problem: how is the abstract view kept up in the face
of evil in the flesh [le mal charnel] ideology in the face of torture inflicted in the
name of that ideology (II, 1022).
262
chapter 10
man and the abstractions of the plague as making up the whole life of his
city during the epidemic (II, 96).3
My examination of the legacy of the lecture in Camuss later work will
therefore focus on two aspects of his conception of the Mediterranean that
have already been discussed in previous chapters: his regional particularism,
or the opposition that he sets up between the Mediterranean and Northern
Europe, and his idealistic view of the Mediterranean and North Africa
in particular as the meeting-point between East and West. After discussing how the Mediterranean particularism of the lecture is reflected in La
pense de midi (Noonday Thought), the final part of LHomme rvolt, I
shall then go on to look at how Camus both retained and modified his early
views on the East/West relationship in his writings and statements during
the Algerian War.4 I will begin, however, by discussing a short text whose
continuity with the lecture is self-evident, namely the editorial Camus wrote
Similarly, Camus described his 1948 play Ltat de sige (State of Siege) as taking the
side of the individual, of flesh in what is noble about it, of earthly love, against the
abstractions and terrors of the totalitarian State (Pourquoi lEspagne, I, 484). On
the theme of abstraction in La Peste, see Maki Ando, La lutte contre labstraction:
la signification de lacte de voir dans La Peste dAlbert Camus, Gallia 40 (2000),
24350; Peter Cryle, La Peste et le monde concret: tude abstraite, in B. T. Fitch,
ed., Albert Camus 8: Camus romancier: La Peste (Paris: Minard, 1976), pp.925;
Eugene Hollahan, The Path of Sympathy: Abstraction and Imagination in Camuss
La Peste, Studies in the Novel 8: 4 (1976), 37793.
4 Davison touches on these issues as part of a broader discussion of Camuss
Mediterraneanism, which he describes as the sustaining myth of [Camuss] work
and life (Mythologizing the Mediterranean, 85). Although he sees this myth as
having had a beneficial influence on Camuss imaginative writing, Davison argues
that it had a negative impact on his philosophical and especially his political thought.
In particular, Davison claims that the idea of Franco-Arab association that Camus
put forward during the Algerian War was a dream emanating from his early conceptualization of the Mediterranean as a convergence point of Oriental and Western
cultures (89).
As discussed below, Camus continued to refer to the Mediterranean in these
terms during the Algerian War. It seems highly unlikely, however, that this conceptualization lay behind his call for the colonial regime to be replaced by one based on
association (III, 1029): there was nothing dream-like, for example, about Camuss
3
The Legacy of The New Mediterranean Culture in Camuss Later Work
263
for the first issue of Rivages (Shores), a short-lived review of Mediterranean

culture which commenced publication in December 1938.5
Rivages: Mediterranean Culture Revisited

As what was in effect a manifesto for a review of Mediterranean culture,
Camuss editorial for the first issue of Rivages inevitably contained echoes of
his inaugural lecture for the Maison de la culture. Reprising a number of key
motifs (a suspicion of doctrines, an affirmation of both unity and diversity)
and oppositions (attachment to vs. separation from the natural world, life
vs. death) from the lecture, Camus even repeated his apocryphal anecdote
from Xenophons Anabasis about the retreating Greek soldiers dancing
when they caught sight of the sea. According to Camus, this emphasized
that beauty and a living poetry were the only truths of a mans life, providing a programme for Rivages and a guarantee for its readers (I, 871).
Life, indeed, was Camuss watchword from the start of his editorial. Rivages, he wrote, was born from a superabundance of life (I, 869):
a movement of youth and passion for man and his works had been born
on our shores, and although various tendencies were being expressed
in various artistic forms, they were united by a common love of life and
the same taste for disinterested intelligence. Rejecting ideology in favour
of immediate physical sensation, Camus once again sought to present a
vision of Mediterranean culture (in the artistic sense) that was rooted in
his conception of Mediterranean culture as a way of life. In what Peter
Dunwoodie describes as the most lucid summary of Camuss Eurocentric
repeated denunciations of colonial injustice, or his fear that there would be no place
for a million European Algerians in an independent Algeria ruled by the FLN.
On Rivages, see Guy Basset, Rivages dAlger, La Revue des revues 23 (1997), 8597.
264
chapter 10
(and, one might add, androcentric) paradigm of the Mediterranean,6 Camus

declared:
At a time when the taste for doctrines would like to separate us from the world, it is
not a bad thing that young men, on a young soil, should proclaim their attachment
to those few perishable and essential goods which give a meaning to our lives: the sea,
sun and women in the light. They are the property of living culture, the rest being
the dead civilization that we repudiate. (I, 86970)7
Although youth was not an exclusively colonialist topos at the time witness the European-influenced reformist movements Jeunes Algriens, Jeunes
Tunisiens, the Young Egyptians and the Young Turks Camuss reference
to Algeria as a young land, like Audisios in Jeunesse de la Mditerrane,8
implicitly denied its pre-colonial past. Similarly, it seems highly unlikely
that the young sunbathers and swimmers Camus seemed to have in mind
included Muslims, albeit not through any deliberate desire to exclude
them.9
As in his lecture, Camuss Mediterranean family centred on the inhabitants of the principal Latin countries and their European-Algerian counterparts: From Florence to Barcelona, from Marseille to Algiers, a whole
swarming and fraternal people gives us the essential lessons of our life (I,
870). The only indication that Camuss notion of Mediterranean culture
might include non-European contributions came when he said that the
review would feature translations of living texts Spanish, Italian and
6
7
8
9
Dunwoodie, From Noces to Ltranger, p.154.

The distinction that Camus draws here between a living culture and a dead civilization clearly reflects his reading of Spenglers Decline of the West the previous year:
see Chapter 7.
See Chapter 5.
Dunwoodie claims that beaches used by European Algerians in the colonial period
had signs which read No beggars, dogs or Arabs (From Noces to Ltranger, p.153).
Although it seems likely that a form of unofficial apartheid would have operated on
beaches frequented by Europeans, the historian Guy Pervill has persuasively argued
that the signs in question related to an isolated case during the Vichy period; A
propos de laffaire de Zeralda (1er aot 1942) (2007) <http://guy.perville.free.fr/
spip/article.php3?id_article=157> accessed 18 May 2010.
265
Arabic. However, just as Camuss lecture needs to be set against the manifesto in favour of the Viollette Bill, so his Eurocentrism here needs to be
set against his campaigning articles on native issues in his contemporary
journalism for Alger rpublicain. Most famously, these include his series of
reports on famine in the Kabylia region, a selection of which Camus later
republished as Misre de la Kabylie in Chroniques algriennes. It should also
be emphasized that, right up until the summer of 1939, Camus was still calling for the franchise to be extended to indigenous Algerians, arguing that
it was unjust to deny the vote to men who were going to be asked to shed
their blood for France.10 This proves, if further evidence were necessary,
that his earlier endorsement of the manifesto in favour of the Viollette Bill
was not simply a matter of following the party line.
Given that Camus was no longer directly involved in politics and that
he was writing for a different purpose, it is hardly surprising that his editorial for Rivages lacked the overtly political edge of the lecture, let alone the
manifesto. At the same time, however, the editorial demonstrated its continuity with the underlying attitudes on which Camuss previous political
commitment had been based, giving the same priority to life over ideology.
Rivages, Camus declared elliptically in a passage that directly echoed the
lecture, would express a culture, thoughts and movements with which all
of us here are in solidarity, to the extent that we all repudiate the powers of
abstraction and death in the name of our forces of life (I, 870). Although
Camus did not identify the powers in question, they were clearly connected
with the doctrines that he had referred to earlier, the taste for which, he
said, threatened to separate us from the world. Once again, Camus associated doctrines with abstraction, abstraction with death, and the sensual
delights of the natural world with life.
10
See Rflexions sur la gnrosit [May 1939] (IV, 132022), translated in the appendix
to this volume, and Lettre dAlger: sur les progrs du nationalisme algrien [ June
1939] (I, 873).
266
chapter 10
North and South: Mediterranean Particularism in

La Pense de midi
As shown in Chapter 3, Camuss lecture shows a distinct bias in favour of
the Mediterranean and against Central and Northern Europe, in particular
Germany. This bias is equally apparent in LHomme rvolt (1951), notably
in its final part, La pense de midi and the penultimate section of the same
name. At the end of what he described as this long survey of rebellion and
nihilism (III, 313),11 Camus proposed Greco-Mediterranean measure, a
philosophy of limits and noonday thought as characteristic of authentic
rebellion, as opposed to the murderous perversions of rebellion epitomized
by German ideologies of excess (dmesure) Marxism and Nazism.
What precisely Camus meant by the inter-related concepts of measure
(one sense of the Ancient Greek virtue of sphrosyn),12 a philosophy of
limits (broadly speaking, the acknowledgement of boundaries, especially
11
12
An interesting point of comparison with LHomme rvolt is provided by Isaiah

Berlins Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (London: Pimlico,
new ed., 2003), drawn from a famous series of radio talks Berlin gave on the BBC
Third Programme in 1952, the year after LHomme rvolt was published. Three of
the six enemies of liberty identified by Berlin Hegel, Rousseau and Joseph de
Maistre are also discussed as such by Camus. (There is also a considerable overlap
between Camuss discussion of the intellectual background to individual terrorism in
nineteenth-century Russia (III, 188212) and some of the essays collected in Berlins
Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).) From an intellectual-historical
viewpoint, the comparison is not to Camuss advantage, though as he emphasized
in the introduction to LHomme rvolt, only a historian could aspire to set out in
detail the doctrines and movements he was going to discuss (III, 70). Nor, as he
freely admitted, was he a philosopher (III, 402, 411).
Cf. the Delphic maxim Nothing in excess. In the unpublished Dfense de LHomme
rvolt, Camus referred to measure in the [] classic sense in which the Greeks
understood it, stressing that it was not to be confused with a bland moderation: For
a mind grappling with reality, the only rule is to stand at the place where opposites
confront each other, in order not to evade anything and to recognize the path that
leads further. Measure is not, therefore, the casual resolution of opposites. It is nothing
less than the affirmation of contradiction []. What I call excess is that movement
267
moral boundaries) and vaguest of all noonday or solar thought need

not concern us here.13 Suffice it to say, however, that Camus saw them as
the philosophical basis for, among other things, a third way between
Western bourgeois democracy and totalitarianism,14 and that there is an
obvious continuity between solar thought and what Camus, in his 1938
editorial for Rivages, described as [a] thought inspired by the play of the
sun and the sea (I, 871).
At a more down-to-earth level, Camus cited revolutionary syndicalism
as a contemporary example of a politics that combined individualism and
solidarity, and which thus exemplified authentic, bottom-up rebellion, as
opposed to Caesarian or top-down revolution. Evoking a long tradition
of solar thought originating with the Greeks, Camus contrasted French,
Spanish and Italian libertarianism with German socialism: the history of
the First International, in which German socialism continually struggles
against the libertarian thought of the French, Spanish and Italians, is the
history of the struggles between German ideology and the Mediterranean
mind (esprit) (III, 317). Apart from this single example, however, Camus
of the mind that blindly passes the border where opposites are in balance to finally
settle in an intoxicated consent [i.e. to one of the opposites] (III, 372).
The kind of antinomies that Camus had in mind were between freedom and
justice, individual rights and social responsibilities, the rational and the non-rational.
For two studies that deal specifically with Camuss concept of measure, see Thomas H.
Warren, On the Mis-translation of la mesure in Camuss Political Thought, Journal
of the History of Philosophy 30: 1 (1992), 12330, and Karl W. Modler, Soleil et mesure
dans luvre dAlbert Camus (Paris: LHarmattan, 2000).
13 See, notably, Jacques Chabot, Albert Camus: la pense de midi (Aix-en-Provence:
disud, 2002); Agns Spiquel, Nmsis, une pense de midi?, Perspectives : revue de
lUniversit hbraique de Jrusalem 5 (1998), 199212; and Raymond Gay-Crosier, Les
enjeux de la pense de midi, ibid., 93108, reprinted in Paradigmes de lironie: rvolte
et affirmation ngative (Toronto: Paratexte, 2000), pp.17992. Invoking la pense
de midi in his 1948 essay LExil dHlne (Helens Exile), Camus himself stressed
its Greek roots and implied that it encompassed both measure and the philosophy
of limits: The recognition of ignorance, the refusal of fanaticism, the boundaries
of the world and man, the beloved face, beauty in short this is the camp in which
we will rejoin the Greeks (III, 601).
14 Cf. Davison, Mythologizing the Mediterranean, p.84.
268
chapter 10
simply asserted rather than demonstrated the existence of the tradition

in question, offering no explanation of how the principles of revolutionary
syndicalism might be said to have originated with the Greeks. Moreover, in
treating the Mediterranean mind whatever that might be and German
ideology as homogeneous entities that had a life of their own, Camus was
guilty of the very abstraction (in the sense of reification) that he had condemned in his lecture and subsequent writings.
Another obvious paradox in Camuss opposition between German and
Mediterranean thought was that the greatest influence on his conception
of the Greeks was himself a German: Nietzsche.15 As for the struggles of
the First International (186476), Camuss description of these as being
between German ideology and the Mediterranean mind is distinctly oversimplified. The first three congresses of the International, held between
1866 and 1868, were dominated by the struggle between the organizations
General Council, steered by Marx, and the French Proudhonist faction.
Following the defeat of the Proudhonists at the fourth general congress of
the International in 1869, however, a new struggle emerged between two
broad groups: a Marx-led group of British, German and Swiss-German
state communists on the one hand, and a group of Belgian, French, Spanish
and Swiss-French collectivists on the other, later joined by the American,
Dutch and Italian federations. Although initially consisting of Romancelanguage (as distinct from Mediterranean) federations, this second group
was led by a Russian Bakunin who had previously sided with Marxs
followers against the Proudhonists in favour of the principle of collective
ownership.16
15
16
Camus cited another German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, with approval in La pense
de midi (III, 309), while he took the epigraph for LHomme rvolt as a whole from
Hlderlins Death of Empedocles (III, 61).
See Marx, Bakunin and the International, Chapter 5 of Paul Thomass Karl Marx
and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp.249340. It is also
worth noting that, apart from being a power struggle between Bakunin and Marx
(who engineered his rivals expulsion from the First International in 1872), the clash
between the two groups was not only over what the Bakuninists saw as the authoritarianism of Marxs group, but also the issue of whether or not to become involved
269
Although LHomme rvolt mentions in passing that Bakunin was an

enemy of Marx (III, 197), it was only in response to the anarchist Gaston
Levals criticism of his treatment of the Russian thinker that Camus later
acknowledged Bakunins importance in this respect.17 Declaring that
Bakunin was one of the two or three men that true rebellion can oppose
to Marx in the nineteenth century (III, 409), Camus claimed that the conclusion of LHomme rvolt referred explicitly to the French, Jura (FrenchSwiss) and Spanish federations of the First International, which, he said,
were partly Bakuninist. In fact, both the Spanish (as shown in Chapter 9)
and Jura federations (of which Bakunin was a member) were predominantly
Bakuninist, the French federation being largely Proudhonist. La pense
de midi, however, makes no mention of either Bakunin or the Jura federation, which led the revolt against the Marx-dominated General Council. If
Camus had referred to the central role of Bakunin and the Jura federation
in leading the opposition to Marx, however assuming that he was aware
of this before Levals lengthy critique18 this would have undermined
the tendentious opposition he set up between German ideology and the
Mediterranean mind.
Whatever the merits of Camuss philosophy of limits and measure,
it is difficult to escape the conclusion that as in the lecture and despite
his protestations to the contrary his thinking in La pense de midi
was distorted by a pro-Mediterranean and anti-Nordic bias. As in the lecture, Camuss Mediterranean was centred on the leading Latin countries
(France, Spain and Italy) and opposed to Germany: the deep conflict of
17
18
in conventional party politics. Ironically, Marx, who was in alliance with German
Social Democrats at the time, was in favour of such involvement, whereas Bakunin
favoured violent revolution.
See Chapter 9 and Rvolte et romantisme (Actuelles II, III, 40811).
In his reply to Francis Jeansons famously scathing review of LHomme rvolt in Les
Temps Modernes, Camus accused the review of ignoring the First International and
the Bakuninist movement, which is still alive in the mass membership of the Spanish
and French C.N.T. [the anarcho-syndicalist Confederacin Nacional de Trabajo and
Confdration Nationale de Travail] (III, 422). Camuss reply, however, was written
after Levals articles: in LHomme rvolt itself, he made no reference to Bakunins
influence in this respect.
270
chapter 10
the twentieth century, he wrote, was between German dreams and the
Mediterranean tradition (III, 318).19 However, just as he had denied in
his lecture that serving the cause of a Mediterranean regionalism meant
exalting the superiority of one culture over another, and, for example, []
setting Latin peoples against Nordic peoples (I, 565), so now he claimed
that it is not a question of despising anything, nor of firing up [exalter]
one civilization against another (III, 319). According to Camus, it was
simply a question of saying that there was a way of thinking [pense] that
the modern world could not do without for much longer:
the youth of the world is still to be found around the same shores. Cast into ignoble
Europe, where, deprived of beauty and friendship, the most arrogant [orgueilleuse]
of races is dying, we Mediterraneans still live off the same light. In the depths of
the European night, solar thought, civilization with a double face, awaits its dawn.
(III, 319)
As is often the case with his more bombastic pronouncements, Camuss

we can be seen as a generalization from personal experience: after his
newspaper articles for Alger rpublicain and Le Soir rpublicain had made
him persona non grata in Algeria, he had been forced to seek work in
France, and was subsequently stranded there when the Germans invaded
the Vichy-controlled Southern zone; thereafter he lived and worked in
19
Needless to say, the viewpoint that Camus expresses here is distinctly Eurocentric,
a charge that has also often been made against his conception of rebellion. Arguing
that the spirit of rebellion is only possible in groups where theoretical equality conceals great de facto inequalities, Camus concludes: The problem of rebellion, then,
only has meaning within our Western society (III, 77). Whether this excluded anticolonial insurrections of the sort that would soon break out in Algeria, however, is
a moot point: it could be argued that, insofar as it was legitimized by the civilizing
mission and the prospect of assimilation, French colonialism involved precisely the
kind of gap between theoretical equality and great de facto inequalities that Camus
describes. As Camus himself asked shortly before the outbreak of the Algerian War,
referring to what he described as the paradox of French colonialism: Is it possible
to lay claim to the name of a teacher of civilization when one presents oneself with
the Declaration of the Rights of Man in ones left hand and, in ones right hand, the
bludgeon of repression? (III, 1107).
271
Paris. In suggesting that Mediterraneans in general had been unwillingly

cast into Europe, however, Camus implied that they were a race apart from
their arrogant European counterparts.20
As the contemporary response to LHomme rvolt showed, the
Mediterranean bias of Camuss conclusion was all too evident to some of
its readers.21 In Entretien sur la rvolte (Interview on Rebellion), for example, published in the Gazette des lettres of 15 February 1952, Pierre Berger
noted that Camus had sometimes been accused of regionalism and even
spoke of sentimental myths in this connection (III, 402). When a reader
of the anarchist periodical La Rvolution proltarienne criticized LHomme
rvolt along what one can infer were similar lines, Camus replied:
Far from placing [Mediterranean thought] above everything, I claim on the contrary
that German ideology and, in general, historicist [? historicienne [sic]] thought, has
deliberately ignored it, and that, losing one of its essential roots, European thought
has become monstrous as a result. But I do not claim that Mediterranean thought
contains the solution. I wrote and these were my exact words that Europe had
only ever existed in this struggle between midday and midnight. That is to say that
the civilizations of the North seem to me as necessary as those of the South [Midi].
Measure is not peculiar to the Mediterranean. (E, 162829)22
Camus had indeed written that Europe was the product of the struggle
between midday and midnight. In so doing, however, he had identified
the latter with authoritarian thought and the former with the libertarian
tradition.23 Taken together and at face value, Camuss arguments implied
20 In his introduction to LHomme rvolt, Camus declared: The prodigious history
that is evoked here is the history of European arrogance [orgueil] (III, 70).
21 In the unpublished Dfense de lHomme rvolt, for instance, Camus felt the
need to declare: I did not it would have been a pointless undertaking set the
Mediterranean against Europe, but stated that Europe had given enough proof that
it could not do without the Mediterranean (III, 373).
22 Quoted by Roger Quilliot in his notes to LHomme rvolt in his and Louis Faucons
edition of Camuss Essais. The letter is not included in the new Pliade edition.
23 Authoritarian thought, thanks to three wars and the physical destruction of an elite
of rebels, has submerged this libertarian tradition [of the Commune and revolutionary syndicalism]. But this pathetic victory is provisional and the fight is still going
272
chapter 10
that authoritarian thought was characteristic of Nordic civilizations and

Germany in particular, while libertarianism was characteristic of those
of the South a sweeping generalization which ignored Italian, Spanish
and French-Algerian fascism, not to mention Vichy. By a perverse logic,
the same arguments could also be taken as implying that Camus believed
authoritarian thought to be as necessary as libertarianism, if only for libertarian thought to have something to measure itself against. Thus the passage
above continues: Measure is born (?),24 of course, from confrontation. It
is not the phenomenon of such and such a civilization, it is the product of
their greatest tension (E, 1629).
However, insofar as Camus associated measure itself with the Greek
Mediterranean, and excess with the Germanic North, he clearly believed
despite claiming to reject cultural supremacism that Mediterranean
civilization was intrinsically superior. Although Camus gave some Nordic
examples of approximations to his ideal the high-minded Russian revolutionaries of 1905 he had depicted in his play Les Justes (Eng. tr. The Just
Assassins),25 the combination of trade-unionism and constitutional monarchy
in Scandinavian societies (III, 317, note) it is difficult not to conclude that
he saw la pense de midi as essentially the thought of the South (la pense
du Midi).26 The point is not that Camus was somehow wrong to celebrate
on. Europe has only ever existed in this struggle between midday and midnight. It
has only become degraded in deserting this struggle, in eclipsing day by night (III,
318). The three wars to which Camus referred were, of course, all waged against
Germany: the two World Wars and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which led to
the Paris Commune whose connection to Greek thought and the Mediterranean
is, needless to say, as problematic as that of revolutionary syndicalism.
24 The bracketed question mark is Quilliots: Camuss handwriting is notoriously
illegible.
25 In Les meurtriers dlicats, indeed, Camus describes Kaliayev, the real-life hero of
Les Justes, as the purest image of rebellion (III, 209). Cf. the references to Kaliayev
(III, 3023, 306, 319) in La pense de midi and the reference to the sacrificed of
1905 (III, 324) in the final paragraph of LHomme rvolt.
26 [H]istorical absolutism, in spite of its triumphs, has never ceased to come up against
an invincible demand of human nature, the secret of which is kept by the Mediterranean,
where intelligence is sister to the harsh light (III, 318; my italics). Cf. Sarocchi: La
273
the Mediterranean. The point is rather that, in opposing the Mediterranean

tradition, the Mediterranean mind and Mediterranean thought to German
dreams and German ideology, and in holding the latter in the shape of
Marxism and Nazism responsible for the greatest evils of the twentieth
century, he inevitably implied that the root of these evils lay in a specifically German mentality. (The danger of this can best be appreciated if one
considers the effect of substituting Jewish for German.)27
East and West: Camuss Orientalism in the Algerian War

If Camus defined one aspect of the identity of the Mediterranean by opposing it to Northern Europe, he defined another aspect of the regions identity
by presenting the Mediterranean and specifically North Africa as the
meeting-point of East and West, of Arabs and Europeans. In a colonial
context, of course, any such meeting that took place could never be on
equal terms. In theory, however, as we have seen, Camus saw the encounter
with Arabs as potentially enriching for Europeans, telling the audience of
his lecture that the East with which they were in direct contact had much
to teach them about the diversity of Mediterranean culture (I, 570). Two
years later, in his conclusion to Misre de la Kabylie, Camus made a similarly
vague observation, writing that the destiny of the (Berber) Kabyle people
was to work and to contemplate, and in this way to give lessons in wisdom
to the restless [inquiets] conquerors that we are (IV, 336). These sentiments
were echoed in turn in Cest la justice qui sauvera lAlgrie de la haine (It
is Justice that Will Save Algeria from Hatred), one of a series of Combat
articles that Camus wrote in the wake of the abortive 1945 Stif uprising
and the brutal repression that followed: The restless conquerors that we
27
pense de midi is a philosophy of the Miditerranean (La Mditerrane est un songe,

monsieur, Variations Camus, p.297).
Cf. Murets view of the corrosive effects of the Jewish mind (see Chapter 7).
274
chapter 10
are have to learn from the wisdom that is offered to us by Arab civilization.
This assumes that we have to understand it and serve it (II, 619).28
How much Camus himself knew about Arab civilization, however,
is open to doubt. He never learned Arabic,29 and as noted in the previous
chapter, the only evidence of his knowing anything about Islam is a 1939
three-paragraph review of a book-length introduction to the topic, in which
he praised the Prophet for his astonishing broad-mindedness and described
generosity, tolerance and respect as the pillars of Koranic wisdom. These,
said Camus, were manly virtues, that is to say virtues which make great
peoples (I, 824). In Cest la justice , however, his vague generalities about
the wisdom of Arab civilization were followed by a dramatic prognosis:
Faced with the acts of repression that we have just carried out in North
Africa, I insist on expressing my conviction that the time of Western imperialisms is over (I, 619).
The acts of repression to which Camus referred left many thousands
of Algerians dead and were a decisive factor in the outbreak of the Algerian
War nine years later. During the war itself, Camus made a number of statements which contained echoes of his 1937 lecture. Between July 1955 and
January 1956, he wrote a series of articles for LExpress, many of which
dealt with Algeria. In the first of these articles, Terrorisme et rpression
(Terrorism and Repression), Camus protested about what he felt was a
general resignation about the course of events, with people in both France
and Algeria seeming to admit that it was impossible for French and Arabs
to live together. In his lecture, Camus had defined la Patrie as a certain
28
With the exception of Cest la justice , Camuss articles were later collected under
the title Crise en Algrie in Chroniques algriennes. For a discussion of these articles
in their historical context, see Paul Siblot and Jean-Louis Planche, Le 8 mai 1945:
lments pour une analyse des positions de Camus face au nationalisme algrien, in
Jeanyves Gurin, ed., Camus et la politique, pp.15371, and Hughes, Le prlude
dune sorte de fin de lhistoire, underpinning assimilation in Camuss Chroniques
algriennes, LEsprit Crateur 47:1 (2007), 718. Unfortunately, Hughess title is
based on a misquotation: Camus referred to the prospect of the French pulling out
of Algeria as the prelude, not to a sort of end of history, but to a sort of historic
death (une sorte de mort historique) for the French nation (III, 390).
275
taste for life that is common to certain beings, through which one can feel
closer to a Genoese or a Majorcan than to a Norman or an Alsatian (I,
567). Now, once again opposing North and South, Camus wrote that for
him and for many French Algerians, the Franco-Arab community already
existed: If I feel closer, for example, to an Arab peasant [or] a Kabyle
shepherd than to a shopkeeper from our towns of the North, it is because
a single sky, an imperious nature, the community of destinies have been
stronger, for many of us, than natural barriers or the artificial gulfs kept
up by colonization (III, 1022).30 Just as, in his lecture, Camus had used the
fact that the Mediterranean sun was the same for all men to argue for the
creation of a common heritage (I, 572), so here Camus saw the climate and
natural environment of Algeria as making many French Algerians feel that
they had more in common with Arabs and Kabyles than with Northern
Frenchmen. Whether an Algerian peasant or a Kabyle shepherd assuming
that they had been able to read Camuss article in the first place would
have agreed that there was a community of destinies, however, is open to
serious doubt.
In his next article, LAvenir algrien (The Algerian Future), Camus
argued that the Algerian drama was only a particular instance of a much
greater historical drama that was leaving its mark on the century even more
than the conflict between capitalism and communism. This, he said, was
the great movement that is driving the Eastern [orientales] masses towards
the conquest of their personality: Millions of men, starving or enslaved
up until now, have become aware of what they were and from now on are
standing at the gates of our history (III, 103031). As his use of the words
starving and enslaved suggested, Camus seemed sympathetic to the cause
of these masses. Referring to Asia, however, where France had recently
suffered a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, he wrote that whole peoples were liberating themselves at the moment from one servitude [i.e.
30 In 1956, in a private conversation with Jean Daniel, Camus apparently went so far
as to say that he was sure that [he] would get on better with a Muslim of the FLN
[whose terrorist tactics Camus condemned] than with a professeur [professor or
teacher] from Paris. Une patrie algrienne, deux peuples Propos recueillis par
Jean Daniel, tudes mditerranennes 7 (Spring 1960), 1924 (p.22).
276
chapter 10
colonialism] by agreeing to go through another, which they hope will be

temporary [i.e. communism] (III, 1033).
Yet as far as North Africa was concerned, as Paul-F. Smets has pointed
out,31 Camus still clung to the vision of East and West that he had expressed
in his lecture, using it to justify his call for a federal solution to the Algerian
problem. Admitting that Frances so-called Arab vocation had often served
as an ideological smokescreen, Camus argued that
it nonetheless contains a truth, namely that French culture and Arab culture have
been complementary contributions to a vaster civilization, in time and in space.
In this common homeland, of which the Mediterranean is the ever-living heart, the
fusion of East and West has been realized several times as a result of creative syntheses.
As there was an Arab vocation, so there is a French vocation, both historic and cultural, to bring East and West together, and thus to federate the overseas territories
with mainland France.32 (III, 1031; my emphasis)
With its reference to a common homeland, the fusion of East and West,
and creative syntheses, the central sentence of this passage recalls not only
Audisio,33 but also Camuss own remarks, in Mtaphysique chrtienne
et noplatonisme, on the role of Greco-Oriental syncretism (I, 1074)
in preparing the ground for the spread of Christianity throughout the
Mediterranean.
31
32
33
See Smetss introduction to CAC6, pp.5354.

In referring to a former Arab vocation to bring East and West together, Camus was
presumably thinking of Moorish Spain.
See Le sel de Carthage, where Audisio writes that despite the conflicts between East
and West over the centuries, the role of the Mediterranean was always not to oppose,
but to join: Thanks to its ships [], unity was forged more than once, under the sign
of trade, of conquest or the spirit. Christian preaching remains the best example, and
was for a short while the most dazzling success of the conciliation of the Semitic East
with the Greco-Latin West, of Jewish mysticism with Hellenic rationalism. There
was nothing, said Audisio, to prevent the synthesis of the Mediterranean genius
from being recreated, leading to a kind of International of the Mediterranean which
would be a harmonious part of a vaster gathering (Le sel de Carthage, pp.16, 17;
cf. Sel de la mer, pp.51, 57). Compare the similar ideas of Michel Chevalier in the
1830s, discussed in Chapter 4.
277
In Les Raisons de ladversaire (The Opponents Reasons), on the

other hand, Camus showed that his thinking was still conditioned by
notions of East and West that went back to Saint-Simonians such as mile
Barrault:34 Whatever one thinks of technical civilization, it alone, in spite
of its weaknesses, can give a decent life to underdeveloped countries. And it
is not through the East that the East will physically save itself, but through
the West, which will then itself find nourishment in the civilization of
the East (IV, 364).35 It should be emphasized, however, that Camus was
not alone in expressing such idealistic sentiments at the time. The FrenchAlgerian writer Jean Snac, who had regarded Camus as a father-figure,
but who criticized him bitterly for opposing Algerian independence,
was a case in point. In Lettre un jeune Franais dAlgrie (Letter to a
Young Frenchman of Algeria), for instance, published in Esprit in March
1956, Snac looked forward to a mutually beneficial partnership between
Europeans and Algerians once independence had been achieved:
I continue to believe, and I hope against all appearances, that East and West, united
in a new project [uvre], will have a healthy face to offer the world in the years to
come. I believe that East and West need to rejuvenate each other and to embody
together a new idea of man. Algeria should be the crucible of this culture and this
peaceful message.36
Looking back on the Algerian War in 1980, meanwhile, the exiled Algerian
political leader Ferhat Abbas expressed his disappointment that the dream
of reconciling East and West in Algeria had not been realized: If Algeria,
34 See Chapter 4.
35 Camuss use of the word nourishment in this context recalls the use of similar alimentary metaphors by Audisio, Ballard, Grenier and Valry in the interwar EastWest
debate: see Chapter 7.
36 Jean Snac, Lettre un jeune Franais dAlgrie (extrait), in Guy Dugas, ed., Algrie:
un rve de fraternit (Paris: Omnibus, 1997), pp.84952, p.851, originally published
in Esprit 3 (March 1956), 33539. Ironically, Snac, who stayed in Algeria after independence, was murdered in Algiers in 1973. On the relationship between Camus and
Snac, see Hamid Nacer-Khodja, Albert Camus Jean Snac, ou le fils rebelle (Paris:
Paris-Mditerrane, 2004), which includes the two mens correspondence.
278
chapter 10
and in a more general way, North Africa, was not capable of realizing a
synthesis between the Muslim East and a renewed Christian West, then
no other part of the world could hope to succeed.37
However, there had also been a significant change in Camuss outlook
since the lecture, most notably in his perception that the conjunction of
Arab nationalism and Soviet communism posed a grave threat to the West.
In January 1956, Camus flew into Algiers to give a speech appealing for both
sides in the Algerian War to agree to a civil truce (a proposal which the
French government would reject). With a mob of diehard Algrie Franaise
supporters outside baying for his blood, Camus declared:
Just as I have felt Arab suspicion here of everything that is being proposed to them,
one can feel in France [] the rise of doubt and a parallel suspicion, which risk taking
hold if the French, already struck by the continuation of the Rif War after the return
of the Sultan, and by the awakening of fellaheenism in Tunisia, see themselves forced,
through the development of an inexpiable struggle, to think that the goals of this
struggle are not only justice for a people, but the realization, at Frances expense, and
for its definitive ruin, of foreign ambitions. (IV, 378)38
In describing what would become known to Moroccans as the Revolution

of the King and the People as a continuation of the Rif War, the rebellion
led by the Berber leader Abd el-Krim between 1920 and 1926, Camus unwittingly echoed views expressed by his old ideological opponent Henri Massis
some thirty years earlier. For in his introduction to Dfense de lOccident,
Massis had claimed that the war in Morocco had finally brought home to
37
38
Ferhat Abbas, Autopsie dune guerre (Paris: Garnier, 1980), p.159, quoted by David
Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007), p.152.
In 1953, France had exiled Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco to Madagascar, provoking
widespread opposition to the French protectorate and violence against Europeans.
In Cairo, meanwhile, the Comit de Libration du Maghreb Arabe (Arab Maghreb
Liberation Committee) formed an armed resistance movement whose goal was the
return of the Sultan and the liberation of Morocco, Tunisia (also a French protectorate at the time) and Algeria. France gave Tunisia independence in 1955 and Morocco
in 1956, leaving only Algeria under French control.
279
the French that anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia were being
directed by Soviet Russia in an attack on Western civilization:
As for public opinion, in France, it took the rebellion of a Berber Rogui [i.e. Abd-elKrim] for it to begin to glimpse the profound significance of an event that matters
less for what it is than for what it foreshadows. Up until now the formidable problems
posed by the awakening of the peoples of Asia and Africa, united by Bolshevism
against the civilisation of the West, remained more or less misunderstood.39
Unlike Massis, of course, Camus was a consistent critic of colonial injustice and an equally persistent advocate of democratization. As far as the
twin threat posed by the combination of communism and Third World
nationalism is concerned, however, the convergence between and Camuss
and Massiss views here is striking.
In 1958, Camus published Chroniques algriennes, which combined
articles he had written on Algeria over the previous twenty years with his
current thoughts on the subject. In his foreword, Camus made clear his
opposition to both a policy of preserving the status quo and a policy of
repression in Algeria. Referring to the prospect of a French withdrawal and a
European-Algerian exodus, however, he said that he also rejected a policy of
abdication that would abandon the Arab population to a greater wretchedness, tear the French population of Algeria up from their century-old roots
and only encourage, without advantage to anyone, the new imperialism
that threatens the freedom of France and the West (IV, 297). The nature
of this new imperialism was revealed when Camus went on to refer to
an empire of Islam [] that would tear the French population of Algeria
away from their natural homeland (IV, 305). This was not, however, the
only imperialism that Camus feared. In an earlier draft of the foreword,
he warned that the danger of the French killing innocent people and using
torture was that it would inevitably lead to the abandonment of Algeria,
39
Dfense de lOccident, p.4. Massiss use of the phrase the awakening of the peoples
of Asia and Africa was probably influenced by the title of the Orientalist Ren
Groussets Le Rveil de lAsie: limprialisme britannique et la rvolte des peuples (The
Awakening of Asia: British Imperialism and Popular Rebellion) (Paris: Plon, 1924),
to which he refers twice in Dfense de lOccident (pp.149, 155).
280
chapter 10
and, in the longer term, the enslavement of the West by the East [lEst, i.e.
the Soviet bloc] (IV, 1424).
The double nature of the threat perceived by Camus was confirmed by
comments he made in the final section of Chroniques algriennes, Algrie
1958. According to Camus, the demand for Algerian independence had
to be considered in part as a manifestation of a new Arab imperialism of
which Egypt saw itself as the leader, and which Russia was using for antiWestern ends. The Russian strategy, he claimed, consisted in calling for the
status quo to be maintained in Europe, and thus for the recognition of its
own colonial system, and to stir up the Middle East and Africa in order to
encircle Europe from the South (IV, 389).
From a twenty-first century perspective, it is tempting to see these
remarks as simply the product of Cold War and post-Suez paranoia. They
should be seen, however, in the context of the stream of anti-colonial and
pan-Arab propaganda being broadcast from Cairo (where the FLN delegation to the exterior was based) and the fact that the FLN was being financed
by the nations of the Arab League and armed by Eastern Bloc countries.40
As evidence, meanwhile, that the Soviet Union which had intervened to
crush the Hungarian uprising in 195641 was not concerned with the happiness and freedom of Arab peoples, Camus referred to what he described
as the decimation of Chechens and Crimean Tartars, and the destruction
of Arab culture in the former Muslim provinces of Dagestan (IV, 389).
A further aspect of Camuss thinking on the EastWest question in this
period is revealed by a letter he wrote to Jean Grenier after returning from
a holiday in the Aegean in the summer of 1958: I saw [] a bit of Turkey
opposite Greece and this opposition struck me a lot. The wretchedness
40 Horne, A Savage War of Peace, pp.85, 261. With the French navy patrolling the coast,
most of the arms supplied to the FLN came via the newly independent Morocco
and (especially) Tunisia.
41 Camuss support for the Hungarian uprising and opposition to the FLN inevitably
led to accusations of double standards. See Camuss response to one such criticism
in a letter to Encounter (IV, 57475), where he argued that the situation in Algeria
was not comparable to that in Hungary because the lives and rights and not just
the privileges of over a million French Algerians were threatened.
281
[misre] is the same, but they are two universes as different as day and
night The night being Turkish, obviously.42 Whatever positive remarks
Camus may have made in his lecture and elsewhere about the relationship
between East and West, he seemed here to return to the view, following
Malraux and Grenier, that there was an unbridgeable gulf between them.43
Referring to this passage in his memoir on Camus, Grenier made an observation that recalled the contrast he himself had drawn in the early 1930s
between India and Greece:
What, then, is lacking on one side that is over-abundant on the other? The answer
is in [Camuss] work. It consists in a certain idea of man, in an eternal value given
to human nature; and Asia represents an ancient [millnaire] opposition to that
supremacy which Greece and then the entire West give to man.44
For Grenier, in other words and presumably Camus Eastern civilization

saw man as an insignificant part of the universe, whereas Greco-Western
civilization placed man at its centre.
Camuss view of the relationship between East and West, however, went
beyond seeing an unbridgeable gulf between them. In 1955, as we have seen,
Camus had spoken, apparently sympathetically, of the great movement that
is driving the Eastern masses towards the conquest of their personality and
of the fact that millions of starving men were standing at the gates of our
history (III, 1031). Now, in the same letter to Grenier, Camus seemed to
see this movement the justice of whose cause, it should be emphasized,
he did not appear to question as posing a threat to Europe: The way of
the world is overwhelming me at the moment. In the long term, all the
continents (yellow, black and brown [bistre]) will topple over old Europe.
There are hundreds and hundreds of millions of them. They are hungry
and they are not afraid of dying (Corr. JG, 210). This passage is echoed
42 Corr. JG, 210. Cf. the comments on Greece and Turkey quoted from Gides Incidences
in Les Appels de lOrient (see Chapter 7).
43 See Chapter 7.
44 Grenier, Albert Camus, souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p.94. As noted in Chapter
7, Grenier had described India as an inhuman country, where nothing is to our
measure as it is in Greece (Les les, p.53).
282
chapter 10
in Camuss notes for his unfinished and partly autobiographical novel Le

Premier homme, where one of the characters, identifiable as Camuss alter
ego Jacques Cormery, has a dream during a siesta:
Tomorrow, six hundred million yellow men [Jaunes], billions of yellow men, of
Blacks, of dark-skinned men [basans], would wash over the cape of Europe and
at best would convert it. So everything that he and those like him had been taught,
all that he had learnt too, from that day on the men of his race, all the values for
which he had lived, would die of pointlessness. What would still be worth something then The silence of his mother. He laid down his arms before her. (IV, 939;
italics in the original)
The beginning of this passage seems to conjure up a white supremacist

nightmare of being swamped by coloureds Jaunes and basans could be
translated as Chinks and darkies while Camuss reference to the cape
of Europe recalls the fear that Valry that expressed forty years earlier in
La crise de lesprit: that Europe would become a small cape of the Asiatic
continent.45 The reference to arms, on the other hand, suggests that, in
his dream, Camuss alter ego was preparing to fight in defence of his race.
In laying them down, however, he seems to decide to defer to his mother
and to accept whatever the future may bring.46
From a postcolonial viewpoint, it might be tempting to see Cormerys
dream as evidence that Camus was a closet racist all along,47 confirming
that Meursaults killing of the Arab in Ltranger reflected the uncon45 See Chapter 7.
46 The reference to the mothers silence is illuminated if not fully explained by the
preface that Camus wrote in 1954 for a new edition of LEnvers et lendroit. Revealing
his dream of rewriting the book one day, Camus said that he imagined placing once
again at the centre of the work the admirable silence of a mother and the effort of
a man to rediscover a justice or a love to balance this silence (I, 38).
47 For a discussion of this issue with specific reference to Le Premier homme, see Guy
Pervill, Albert Camus tait-il raciste? Le tmoignage du Premier homme, in Jacques
Cantier, Laurent Jalabert and Jean Franois Soulet, eds, Histoire et littrature au
XXme sicle: hommage Jean Rives (Toulouse: Groupe de Recherche de Histoire
Immdiate, 2003), pp.43145<http://guy.perville.free.fr/spip/article.php3?id_article=33> accessed 18 May 2010.
283
scious desire of Camus and his fellow European Algerians to eliminate

the indigenous population. (This, of course, makes the highly questionable assumption that Camus can be directly identified with Meursault.)
Another fragmentary note Camus made for Le Premier homme, however,
presents what seems to be the same general scenario in a rather different
light: In the last part, Jacques explains to his mother the Arab question,
creole civilization, the destiny of the West. Yes, she says, yes. Then complete confession and end (III, 937).
Camuss use of the phrase destiny of the West here inevitably recalls
Massis and the EastWest debate of the interwar years. In 1929, indeed, the
Action Franaise supporter (and future speech-writer for Marshal Ptain)
Ren Gillouin had published a collection of essays with that very title,48
while in 1956, Massis republished Dfense de lOccident as part of a collection entitled LOccident et son destin: la crise de la civilisation: dfense de
lOccident, lempire sovitique la conqute du monde, comment lAmrique a
perdu la paix: histoire de dix ans (19451955)49 (The West and Its Destiny:
The Crisis of Civilization: Defence of the West, the Soviet Empire Out
to Conquer the World, How America Has Lost the Peace: History of Ten
Years (19451955)). Whether or not the vision of the destiny of the West
that Camus sketches here is comparable to Massiss, however, depends on
whether one interprets Camuss view of creole civilization at this point as
positive, negative or simply descriptive, and whether the Yes of Jacquess
mother signifies approval, acceptance or simply her understanding of what
he is saying. A later marginal note in the manuscript of Le Premier homme
under the heading Creole civilization, however, could be taken as implying
that Camuss own attitude is ultimately one of acceptance, like Jacquess
at the end of the dream passage quoted above: What does it matter she
[presumably Camuss mother] will be there (IV, 953).
48 Ren Gillouin, Le Destin de lOccident (Paris: Promthe, 1929); Jtais lami du
marchal Ptain (Paris: Plon, 1966). In fact, the title-essay of Le Destin de lOccident
(pp.1356) was critical of the neo-medievalism and anti-Protestantism of Massiss
Dfense de lOccident, holding the spirit of the Renaissance and Rousseau responsible
for the Wests ills.
49 Paris: Grasset, 1956.
284
chapter 10
Although this interpretation is necessarily tentative, a third fragment

of Le Premier homme also intended for the conclusion of the novel
strongly suggests that, whatever fears he may have harboured for the future
of Europe and the West, Camus never abandoned the commitment to
justice that was rooted in the poverty of his upbringing, a justice in which
indigenous and European Algerians would finally be reconciled.50 In a passage preceded by the word End, he wrote (the he in the text is presumably
Camuss alter ego Jacques):
Give back the land, the land that belongs to nobody. []
And he cried out, looking at his mother, and then the others:
Give back the land. Give all the land to the poor, to the immense band of the
wretched, Arabs for the most part, and some French [], and then [] I will die
content, knowing that the land I have loved and those and the woman that I have
revered are finally joined together in the sunshine of my birth.51 (IV, 94445)
50 On the theme of justice in Camuss work, see Mark Orme, The Development of Albert
Camuss Concern for Social and Political Justice (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2007).
51 This passage is also quoted by David Carroll at the conclusion of his discussion
(pp.17677) of Le Premier homme in Albert Camus the Algerian, a powerful defence
of Camus against his postcolonial critics. In omitting any mention of the remarkable dream passage quoted above, however, Carroll seems as partial at this point
at least as the postcolonial critics he takes issue with.
Peter Dunwoodie, on the other hand, has pointed out that the land in question
could hardly be given back to any European immigrants, since it was not theirs in
the first place (Negotiation or Confrontation? Camus, Memory and the Colonial
Chronotope, in Christine Margerrison, Mark Orme and Lissa Lincoln, eds, Albert
Camus in the 21st Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp.4560 (p.57)). As shown
in Chapter 4, however, it was the French who first introduced the legal concept of
land ownership into Algeria.
Conclusion
This study has shown that a modified, multi-contextualist version of

Quentin Skinners intellectual-historical methodology, which has hitherto been applied exclusively to early modern texts, can be fruitfully
applied to a modern text. In demonstrating that different parts of The
New Mediterranean Culture need to be placed in different contexts if
their meaning is to be properly understood, it has not only shown the
need to refine Skinners approach, but also confirmed the inadequacies of
textualist and mono-contextualist approaches, whether biographical or
socio-historical (in this case postcolonial).
In Chapter 1, I presented a critical account of Skinners method as laid
out in his theoretical writings and modified it to bring it into line with
his practice, supplementing it where necessary with the complementary
approaches of Pocock and Koselleck. In particular, I argued that closer
attention needs to be paid to the text itself than Skinner appears to think
is required, and in particular to the use of normative terms to manipulate
the pivotal concepts on which the argument turns; that the reconstruction
of the argumentative context should be extended to contextualizing the
immediate argumentative intertexts of the target text in turn, in order to
reconstruct the discourses and debates of which it forms a part; and that,
despite Skinners polemical emphasis on the argumentative context, it is
also vital to take account of the biographical and socio-historical contexts
in order to gain an adequate understanding of the text.
After providing an improved and extensively annotated translation
of Camuss lecture in Chapter 2, in Chapter 3 I presented a critique of
humanist and postcolonial approaches to the lecture at the textual level,
developing their insights while exposing their limitations. I also gave a
critique of the postcolonial discursive contextualization of the lecture in
terms of French colonial literary discourses on Algeria, showing that the
286
Conclusion
view that it is a manifesto for the so-called cole dAlger and that it offers
a myth of Greek origin for Algeria is unfounded.
Chapter 4 drew on fresh evidence to provide a critical exposition of
the humanist discursive contextualization of Camuss lecture in terms of
French discourses on the Mediterranean, showing that the progressive
tradition within which the lecture can be located remains firmly anchored
in a colonial framework. In Chapter 5, I gave a detailed analysis of the most
important intertexts for the lecture, Audisios mid-1930s writings on the
Mediterranean. This drew on previously undiscussed articles that highlight
the lectures polemical context, and revealed significant differences as well
as similarities between Camuss and Audisios views.
In Chapters 6 and 7, I placed the lecture in the context of two overlapping interwar debates on culture and the East/West relationship respectively. I identified the previously unidentified manifesto of intellectuals of
the West attacked by Camus as Henri Massiss Manifeste pour la dfense de
lOccident, and established that, in the last part of the lecture in particular,
Camus is responding to the manifestos attempt to appropriate concepts
such as culture, intelligence and mind for the Right. I also argued, however, that both Massiss manifesto and Camuss lecture need to be seen in
the broader context of a debate on culture which can be traced back to the
First World War, and in which Massis was a leading participant, as he was
in a related debate on the EastWest relationship. Drawing on previously
overlooked or neglected texts by writers close to Camus (Audisio, Ballard,
Grenier), I showed that, beyond its immediate polemical context, Camuss
lecture was also an intervention in this latter debate.
Chapter 8 went beyond the reductive postcolonial contextualization
of the lecture in terms of French colonialism in Algeria by providing a
detailed account of the immediate political context of the lecture and the
political position of both Camus and the Maison de la culture which he was
inaugurating. I showed that, in failing to take account of Camuss consistent support for democratization and the civil rights of native Algerians,
postcolonial interpretations of the lecture give a seriously distorted picture
of his position.
In Chapter 9, I gave a comprehensive critique of a biographical contextualization of the lecture that focuses on Camuss subsequent expulsion
Conclusion
287
from the Communist party, showing that the passages it discusses echo
other writings by Camus. I also placed the attitudes Camus expresses in
the lecture in the context of a new interpretation of his early intellectual development, showing the influence of his family background on
the one hand, and Nietzsche, Jean Grenier and possibly Bakunin on the
other. Finally, in Chapter 10, I showed how Camuss identification of the
Mediterranean in the lecture in terms of the relationship between North
and South and between East and West carries over into the notion of la
pense de midi in LHomme rvolt and attitudes he expressed during the
Algerian War respectively.
In more general terms, this study can be regarded as contributing
to knowledge in a number of areas: primarily Camus studies and the
theory and practice of intellectual history, but also (post)colonial and
Mediterranean studies, in particular the history of French representations of
the Mediterranean. As far as Camus studies are concerned, I have criticized
the widespread tendency to see Camus as an exemplary representative of
either liberal humanism or the Western colonial mindset, and thus opened
up the possibility of a more balanced and nuanced approach to his work.
Underlining the need for further research into Camuss early and formative
writings, some of which have only recently become available, this study
has also laid the foundation for a more detailed examination of some of
the lectures central themes most notably the notion of abstraction in
his later writings.
As regards Mediterranean studies, further research is required in the
field opened up by Fabres study of French and other national discourses
on the Mediterranean.1 These discourses and their relationship with other
discourses need to be studied in greater detail, especially in the light of the
Union for the Mediterranean initiated by President Sarkozy in July 2008.2
1
La Mditerrane franaise is part of a multi-volume study of different countries

representations of the Mediterranean: Thierry Fabre and Robert Ilbert, eds, Les
Reprsentations de la Mditerrane 10 vols (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2000). The
countries in question include Germany, but not, notably, Algeria.
See Daguzan, Frances Mediterranean policy and Gourvitch, Le Rve mdi
terranen.
288
Conclusion
This brings together EU members and most non-European Mediterranean

countries, including Turkey whose accession to the EU, however, Sarkozy
has consistently opposed, arguing that it is not a European country.3 The
relationship between the European West and the Arab/Muslim East in
the so-called Mediterranean of the two shores is thus very much on the
political agenda, as is, of course, the question of the East/West relationship on a global scale, whether the East in question is defined as Asian or
Muslim.4 The similarities and differences between the current and interwar
debates on this issue need to be explored.
Regarding (post)colonial studies, one of the main conclusions to be
drawn from this study is that to interpret a text solely in terms of the colonial context in which it was written can be not only limiting and reductive, but also potentially distorting. Postcolonial critics are inevitably (and
legitimately) involved in the rewriting of colonial history from a postindependence viewpoint, but in so doing, they have an obligation to avoid
anachronism, to resist the temptation of doing history backward5 and
3
Turkey does not have its place in the European Union because it is not a European
country. But Turkey is a great Mediterranean country, with which Mediterranean
Europe can move Mediterranean unity forward. Sarkozy, Speech in Toulon, 7
February 2007.
The current East/West debate was largely initiated by Samuel P. Huntingtons
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996), which developed the arguments of an earlier lecture and article.
French responses include Georges Corm, OrientOccident, La fracture imaginaire
(Paris: La Dcouverte, 2004); Philippe Barb, LAnti-choc des civilisations. Mditations
mditerranennes (Paris: ditions de lAube, 2006); Tzvetan Todorov, La Peur des
barbares. Au-del du choc des civilisations (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008).
This is one of the common methodological shortcomings of colonial studies identified by Frederick Cooper in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Other shortcomings Cooper identifies are story plucking, leapfrogging legacies and the epochal fallacy (pp.1722).
Coopers criticisms of doing history backward in particular are reminiscent of
Skinner. According to Cooper, for example, what tends to gets lost in genealogical
approaches to ideas is the historical context in which concepts emerged, the debates
out of which they came, the ways in which they were deflected and appropriated
(p.19).
Conclusion
289
to pay due regard to the full range of evidence available. Similarly, I have
shown that intellectual history must take account of a variety of contexts
argumentative, biographical and socio-historical if it is to do justice to
the texts and thinkers that it studies. While it is of course equally legitimate
and necessary to study concepts and discourses, these can only be studied
through texts, hence the need to give priority to a sound approach to textual
interpretation. As I argued in Chapter 1, however, the same principle applies
at each level: concepts must be studied in relation to other concepts, in the
context of texts which need to be seen in relation to other texts, in the context of discourses that exist in relation to other discourses. And concepts,
texts and discourses all of which have their own histories have to be
seen in turn in relation to individuals and groups with their own histories,
acting in particular personal and socio-historical circumstances.
Similar considerations, of course, apply to interpretations. As confirmed by the controversy that broke out in 2009 over President Sarkozys
proposal that Camuss remains should be transferred to the Panthon in
Paris,6 Camus has become a political football,7 a contested concept
whose meaning, in a particular context, depends on how it is deployed in
relation to other contested concepts colonialism, humanism or justice,
for example or the contested identities, pasts,8 presents and futures of
6
7
The main point at dispute was not whether Camus deserved such recognition, but
what was seen by many as Sarkozys attempt to appropriate Camus for his own political purposes.
Using another metaphor (or rather range of metaphors), James D. Le Sueur writes
that, after Camuss death, his ghost became part of an intellectual tug-of-war between
those who sought to resurrect him in order to claim him for French humanism and
those who desired to see him forgotten in a shallow grave of chauvinistic hypocrisy. The Unbearable Solitude of Being: the Question of Albert Camus, in Uncivil
War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria, 2nd edn
(Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), pp.98143 (p.101). See
pp.13643 on what Le Sueur calls Camuss posthumous life in this respect.
See Katharine Hodgkin and Suzannah Radstone, eds, Contested Pasts: The Politics
of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003), republished as Memory, History, Nation:
Contested Pasts (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006). For the war of memories
290
Conclusion
Algeria, France, the Mediterranean, Europe9 and the West. Such interpretations take the form of texts which appropriate Camus and in effect
selectively rewrite his life and works in response to and in competition
with other interpretations, reinscribing them in narratives and discourses
that compete with other narratives and discourses not only those of
humanism and postcolonial studies, but also those of French and Algerian
nationalism,10 Berber and pied-noir particularism,11 feminism12 and so on
9
10
11
12
over Frances colonial past, see Benjamin Stora, La Guerre des mmoires. La France
face son pass colonial (Paris: ditions de LAube, 2007).
See John Oswald, Re-appropriating Europe: Albert Camuss Wartime Europeanism,
Modern & Contemporary France 9: 4 (2001), 48393.
See Mohamed Lakhdar Maougal, ed., Albert Camus. Assassinat post-mortem (Algiers:
Apic, 2005). Maougal presents Camuss entire career as a writer as being determined
by a utopian cultural syncretism first expressed in Mtaphysique chrtienne et noplatonisme and his consequent opposition to Algerian nationalism. On the politics
of Camuss reception in Algeria, see the revealing contribution by Acha Kassoul,
Albert Camus et la critique universitaire algrienne (ibid., pp.3764), and Christiane
Chaulet-Achour, Albert Camus et lAlgrie (Algiers: Barzakh, 2004), pp.14261.
For a pied-noir perspective on Camus, see Manuel Gomez, Camus lAlgrois (La
Motte dAigues: C.L.C., 2004). For sympathetic studies by Berbers living in exile,
see Nabil Boudraa, Was Edward Said Right in Depicting Albert Camus as an
Imperialist Writer?, in Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, ed., Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward
Said (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006), pp.187200, and Alek Baylee Toumi, Albert
Camus, lalgrian(iste): gense dEntre la mre et linjustice, in (coll.) Albert Camus
et les critures algriennes. Quelles traces? (Aix-en-Provence: disud, 2004), pp.8191.
In 2005, the Association de Culture Berbre in Paris held a colloquium on Lautre
Camus, which included a paper on Camuss Mediterranean humanism by Denise
Brahimi. Views on Camuss legacy, however, were sharply divided. See <http://
webcamus.free.fr/conferences/menilmontant05.html>.
For critical feminist studies that link the treatment of women and the treatment of
native Algerians in Camuss fictional work, see, for example, Louise Horowitz, Of
Women and Arabs: Sexual and Racial Polarization in Camus, Modern Language
Studies 17:3 (Summer 1987), 5461, and Margerrison, Ces forces obscures de lme.
For feminist studies sympathetic to Camus, see Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, Rebellious
Feminism: Camuss Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004); Geraldine F. Montgomery, Noces pour femme seule. Le fminin
et le sacr dans luvre dAlbert Camus (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004); and
Conclusion
291
for legitimacy and authority. Particular interpretations of Camus can

also be seen as reflecting the personal situation of the individual interpreter. Although one cannot assume an automatic correlation between
an individuals background and the views that they hold, it is perhaps no
coincidence, for example, that the criticisms of Camus by Conor Cruise
OBrien, an Irish Catholic, and Edward Said, a Palestinian, should focus
on the colonial dimension of Camuss work; or that the interpretations of
the liberal Israeli academic David Ohana13 and Thierry Fabre, the founder
and former editor-in-chief of a review of Arab and Mediterranean culture,
should correspondingly stress Camuss Mediterranean humanism.14
Finally, of course, all interpretations are historically situated. It is surely
no accident, for instance, that the interest in Camuss Mediterraneanism
over the last decade or so should have coincided with the Euro-Mediterranean
project; or that Camuss views on terrorism should have become the object
of renewed attention after 9/11;15 or that his position in the Algerian
War should have been favourably reassessed by some writers at least,
Algerian and otherwise in the light of what has happened in Algeria
since independence.16 As Edward J. Hughes, the editor of the Cambridge
13
14
15
16
Danielle Marx-Scouras, Portraits of Women, Visions of Algeria, in Edward J. Hughes,

ed., The Cambridge Companion to Camus, pp.13144.
See Ohanas seminar paper, Israel and the Mediterranean Option <http://www.
passia.org/seminars/2000/israel/part11.html>.
Fabre is currently the editor-in-chief of another review of Mediterranean culture,
with the Camus-inspired title La Pense de midi. In its first issue, Fabre (mis)quoted
the second paragraph of Camuss lecture (up to nationalism of the sun) and stated
that the review shared the position that the passage expressed, praising it for its relevance in grasping contemporary debates on questions of identity (Ouverture, La
Pense de midi 1 (Spring 2000), 89. In 2007, Fabre published loge de la pense de
midi (In Praise of Noonday Thought) (Arles: Actes Sud, 2007), which proposes
the Mediterranean way of life as an alternative to its American counterpart.
Cf. Rflexions sur le terrorisme (Reflections on Terrorism), ed. Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi
and Denis Salas (Paris: Nicolas Philippe, 2002), an anthology of Camuss writings
on the subject.
Revisionist views of Camus revisionist, that is, in relation to Algerian nationalist
or postcolonial views of his position are discussed in a number of contributions
to The Cambridge Companion to Camus. Briefly, Algerias history since 1962 has
292
Conclusion
Companion to Camus, puts it in his afterword, new contexts prompt and

legitimise new readings17 or rather, I would suggest, are used to legitimize
new readings.
At this point the reader would be entitled to speculate how and to
what extent the interpretation of Camus that has been offered in the
present study reflects the personal situation and history of its author and
the particular socio-historical context in which he was writing. Although
such considerations, as I have shown, would need to be taken into account
if this were a primary historical text that was being studied, they are irrelevant to the assessment of this study. The same, however, cannot be said
of its argumentative context, since its contribution to knowledge will be
judged in relation to previous writings on the same subject(s). This in itself
can be regarded as a substantial vindication of Skinners approach.
17
included the institution of a one-party state that suppressed minorities notably

Berbers in the name of Arabo-Islamic identity politics; the subsequent suspension of
democracy by the Algerian army after the 1991 election success of the fundamentalist
Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front), which was itself committed to
replacing democracy with a theocratic form of government; and a decade of vicious
civil war that inevitably invited comparison with the war of independence itself.
Hughes, Postface, The Cambridge Companion to Camus, p.207.
Appendix: Reflections on Generosity (1939)1
Introduction
In Chroniques algriennes, under the title Crise en Algrie, Camus collected a series of articles that he had published in Combat following the
abortive nationalist uprising in Stif in May 1945.2 In a postscript to the
first of these articles, he criticized another newspaper which had hastened
to accuse Ferhat Abbas, president of the Amis du Manifeste,3 of having
directly organized what Camus who had not witnessed the events in
question called the disturbances (troubles; IV, 339). In a later article on
the Manifesto party, Camus recalled that before the war, Abbas had been
one of the most resolute supporters of the policy of assimilation, and that
at that time, he had run a newspaper, LEntente (Understanding), which
defended the Blum-Viollette Bill and demanded that a democratic politics
in which the Arab might find rights equivalent to his duties should finally
be established in Algeria (IV, 347).4 What Camus did not mention is that
2
3
4
The following is a translation, with some revisions, of my article Rflexions sur la

gnrosit: un article peu connu dAlbert Camus, Bulletin de la Socit des tudes
Camusiennes 81 (May 2007), 914. I am grateful to Catherine Camus for giving me
permission to publish my translation of Rflexions sur la gnrosit and to Agns
Spiquel for having transcribed the text of the original from a copy of LEntente in
the Bibliothque Nationale de France.
See Vtillard, Stif, mai 1945.
Les Amis du Manifeste et de la Libert, founded in March 1944, brought together
the various currents of Algerian nationalism. It was based on the Manifeste du peuple
algrien written by Abbas in May 1943.
Les Arabes demandent pour lAlgrie une constitution et un parlement (Arabs
Demand a Constitution and a Parliament for Algeria), Combat, 2021 May 1945,
reprinted in Chroniques algriennes under the title Le parti du Manifeste (The
294
in 1939, he had himself published an article in LEntente Rflexions sur

la gnrosit (Reflections on Generosity) which expressed the same
viewpoint that he attributed to Abbas.5
LEntente formerly LEntente franco-musulmane was an Algerian
French-language newspaper with a circulation of 3,000, based in Stif and
bearing the subtitle Organe hebdomadaire de la Fdration des lus des
Musulmans et de lUnion Populaire Algrienne pour la Conqute des Droits
de lHomme et du Citoyen (Weekly Organ of the Federation of Muslim
Representatives and the Algerian Popular Union for the Conquest of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen). The newspapers political director, Dr
Mohamed Bendjelloul, was the president of the Federation; Abbas, who
had founded the Union Populaire Algrienne in 1938, had been the editor
in chief since 1937.6 He would later become president of the National
Assembly after independence, before resigning in protest against the decision of the FLN to make Algeria a one-party state.
From a political viewpoint, there were obvious affinities between
Camus and Abbas. In the 1920s, Abbas himself had written articles for
various newspapers, including Ikdam (Courage), directed by Emir Khaled,
the grandson of the nationalist hero Abd El Kader.7 Similarly, Herbert
Manifesto Party; IV, 34750). As previously noted, the term Arabs was used by
Europeans at the time to refer to Algerian Muslims.
LEntente 121 (4 May 1939), pp.1 and 3. The final words of the passage already quoted
echo those of the penultimate paragraph of Reflections on Generosity, in which
Camus speaks of this people [] which wishes to keep a balance between its rights
and its duties.
Abbas replaced Mohamed Aziz Kessous, a future member of the Parti du Manifeste,
to whom Camus wrote a Lettre un militant algrien in October 1955 (IV, 35255).
See Lela Benammar Benmansour, Ferhat Abbas, journaliste LEntente (19351942):
une plume combative exceptionnelle, El Watan, 19 February 2006 <http://www.
elwatan.com/spip.php?page=article&id_article=36553> accessed 18 May 2010. On
Abbas in general, see Benjamin Stora and Zakya Daoud, Ferhat Abbas: une utopie
algrienne (Paris: Denol, 1995).
A selection of these articles was reprinted by Abbas in his book Le Jeune Algrien.
De la colonie vers la province (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1931; Paris: Garnier, 1981).
See Lela Benammar Benmansour, travers Le Jeune Algrien: Ferhat Abbas et la
295
Lottman notes that Camus, while he was still a schoolboy in the early
1930s, was a member of the group that published Ikdam, which called for
equality between Muslims and Europeans and an end to discriminatory
legislation.8 Although Camus may have met Abbas during this period, it
seems more likely that he got to know him through his friend Claude de
Frminville while they were both members of the Communist party. Abbas
was among the contacts of de Frminville, who published pamphlets and
periodicals not only for the communists, but also for nationalist organizations.9 According to de Frminvilles wife Jeanne, the Party accused him of
having bought his printing equipment with funds obtained from Abbas,
and when de Frminville left the Party at the end of 1937, he called himself
a Ferhatist.10
Camuss contemporary activities in his role as general secretary of the
Maison de la Culture of Algiers are also relevant here.11 One of the organizations associated with the Maison was the Union Franco-Musulmane,
led by de Frminville, but founded, according to Marguerite Dobrenn,
by Camus himself.12 The Union published pamphlets calling for Muslim
representation in parliament, and on 26 April 1937, Camus and the secretary of the Union (de Frminville, no doubt) gave speeches at a meeting
on intellectuals and the Viollette Bill.13 The next month, a Manifeste des
intellectuels dAlgrie en faveur du projet Viollette (I, 57273) without
the names of its fifty signatories, but presented as an initiative of the Maison
de la Culture was published in the second issue of Jeune Mditerrane,
the Maisons monthly newsletter.
8
9
10
11
12
13
question de lAlgrianit, El Watan, 5 November 2006 <http://www.elwatan.com/

spip.php?page=article&id_article=53213> accessed 18 May 2010.
Lottman, Albert Camus, p. 56; Benammar Benmansour, travers Le Jeune
Algrien.
Lottman, p.100.
Lottman, p. 159, quoting Jeanne Delais (a pseudonym for Jeanne de Poix de
Frminville), LAmi de chaque matin (Paris: Grasset, 1969).
See Chapter 8.
Quoted by Roger Quilliot (E, 1316).
Lottman, p.132.
296
The Viollette Bill had been tabled by Maurice Viollette, the former
governor general of Algeria, first in 1931 and then again in 1936 after the
election of a Popular Front government under the leadership of Lon
Blum (hence its other name, the Blum-Viollette Bill). Viollette envisaged
the progressive incorporation of all the natives of Algeria into the French
electoral body as their development brought them to think French, and
without there being any grounds for concern about personal status14
in other words, customs, religious or otherwise, which were incompatible
with the French Civil Code. Although the bill would only have begun by
allowing an elite of some 24,000 Muslims to acquire French citizenship
and thus the right to vote the manifesto of the Maison de la Culture
had described it as a stage in the complete parliamentary emancipation of
Muslims (I, 573; my emphasis). As Camus explained in 1945 in his series of
articles on the crisis in Algeria, however, the reaction of the grands colons
and the mayors of Algeria was such that the bill was abandoned.15
What Camus calls the stifling of the Blum-Viollette Bill and the
crisis in Europe created by the growing aggressiveness of the fascist powers
provide the two explicit political contexts for Reflections on Generosity.
From this viewpoint, the importance of the article is that, a few months
before the outbreak of war, Camus showed himself to be an unwavering
supporter of democratization in Algeria. But another context to which the
article does not refer must also be taken into account: the rise of Algerian
nationalism as a result, precisely, of the abandonment of the Blum-Viollette
Bill and interference by the colonial administration in the elections for
native representatives. In the departmental elections of 23 and 30 April
1939, for example a few days before the publication of Reflections on
Generosity the prefecture of Algiers had ended up invalidating the election of the candidate of the Parti du Peuple Algrien (PPA), the radical
nationalist party led by Messali Hadj.16
14
15
16
Quoted by Ageron, Histoire de lAlgrie contemporaine, vol. II, p.430.

La malaise politique (IV, 345). See the detailed analysis by Planche, Le projet BlumViollette, pp.13550.
See the Note de la rdaction to Lettre dAlger: les progrs du nationalisme algrien (I, 87374) and the chronicle of Ralits historiques et politiques drawn up by
297
On the 24 April, in an article for Alger rpublicain where Camus was

working as a reporter a certain Antar had given an overview of the three
main political organizations which had put up candidates for the elections:
the PPA, the Communist party and the Jeunesse du Congrs musulman
algrien, of which Abbass supporters were a part. Antars description of
the latter left little doubt about where his sympathies lay: The Jeunesse du
Congrs keeps a happy medium. Its militants, who are not devoid of political maturity and intelligence, have been able to guard against any dangerous extremism and likewise any self-interested demagogy.17 This clearly
implied that the militants of the Communist party were self-interested
demagogues and that the militants of the PPA were dangerous extremists.
Antar then alluded to the failure of the Blum-Viollette Bill, reminding his
readers of [the] profound discouragement [] of the native masses, from
the day when they realized that the Algerian fascist mayors had been able
to impose their will on the government of the Republic by preventing the
grievances that were closest to their hearts from being taken into consideration. According to Antar, Muslim voters had demonstrated their profound
disillusionment and their dissatisfaction by voting as they had done that
is, by giving a majority of their votes to the candidate of the PPA, which he
described as a party which is regarded as having subversive tendencies.
Antars article on the departmental elections was followed, not only
by Reflections on Generosity, but also by four signed articles by Camus
on the question of Franco-Muslim politics. (As Andr Abbou notes, the
third of these, a Lettre dAlger (Letter from Algiers) on the progress of
Algerian nationalism, echoes Antars article in its structure, its assessments
and its expressions.)18 Taken together, these articles which appeared in
three different publications with different readerships constitute a kind
of one-man journalistic campaign against the repression of Algerian dissidence and in favour of a democratic, just and prudent colonial policy.
17
18
Andr Abbou and Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi in their edition of Fragments dun combat
193840, pp.13839.
Antar, Autour du scrutin des lections indignes dpartementales de la 1re circonscription dAlger, Fragments dun Combat, p.589.
Fragments, p.559 (cf. I, 1385). See also Abbous pilogue (pp.55865).
298
In the first of these articles, published on 10 May in Alger rpublicain,

Camus lent his support to efforts to resuscitate the Blum-Viollette Bill,
and demanded the freeing of Algerian political detainees, including Messali
Hadj.19 In the second, La justice et lempire (Justice and the Empire)
of 16 May, Camus used biting irony to condemn the outcome of a case in
which a police inspector and constable, shooting into a crowd attending a
public meeting held by the candidate of the Fdration des lus, had killed
two Algerian war veterans. Not only had the case against the killers been
dismissed, but LEntente, which had been sued for defamation by one of the
accused, had been ordered to pay 1,000 francs in damages. Suggesting that
the victims families could also be fined, Camus concluded that in this way,
the constant concern [sollicitude] that we feel for the Arab people of this
country would once more be given a convincing illustration (I, 649).
Camuss third article, the aforementioned Lettre dAlger, appeared in
the Revue Mditerrane-Afrique du Nord of 1 June 1939. Between 5 and 15
June, meanwhile, Camus published the articles collected later in Misre de la
Kabylie, and between 21 June and 28 July his reports on the trial for murder
of Sheik El Okbi, the moderate former vice-president of the Association des
oulmas (Association of Ulama, or Islamic theologians) and a member of the
Congrs musulman algrien. In the fourth of his series of articles on FrancoMuslim politics, De malencontreuses poursuites (Unwise Proceedings),
which appeared in Alger rpublicain on 18 August, Camus reiterated the
argument of his Lettre dAlger: that what he called the persecutions of
Algerian nationalism were only serving to strengthen it. The demands of
the PPA, he argued, needed to be examined in a spirit of generosity and
justice. The only way to eradicate Algerian nationalism, he concluded, was
to suppress the injustice from which it was born (I, 752).
As Reflections on Generosity shows, Camus saw no contradiction
between, on the one hand, democracy and justice as ends in themselves,
and on the other, the interests of France, of French Algerians and the indigenous Muslim population. Unwilling and unable to accept the reality
of colonialism in practice, he sincerely believed as did Abbas before
19
Il faut librer les dtenus politiques indignes (I, 64648).
299
he became disillusioned20 in the ideal of Frances civilizing mission in

Algeria. Even today, however, one cannot help being struck by the force
of his argument. Reflections on Generosity was rediscovered thanks to
a mention in Charles-Robert Agerons Histoire de lAlgrie contemporaine.
It is therefore fitting to leave the last word to Ageron, who described the
author of Reflections on Generosity as a voice in which generosity was
combined with political intelligence.21
*
Reflections on Generosity
Those who had the sad courage to read the newspapers in the
week preceding the Munich agreement22 did not fail to notice
the extensive coverage given in the Algiers press to the demonstrations of loyalism by the Muslims of Algeria. Newspapers, of
whom the least it can be said is that they only paid attention to
the Arab23 people in order to refuse what it sometimes asked for,
drew up a daily roll of honour of declarations of fidelity to France
that were addressed to them by a certain number of important
Muslim figures.
Nobody, to tell the truth, saw any disadvantages in this.
Few Frenchmen, however, noticed that these demonstrations
(I remember a photo in the cho dAlger in which four hundred
natives from Mascara marched to affirm their solidarity with
20 See Abbass remarks on what he calls the age of illusions in La Nuit coloniale (Paris:
Julliard, 1962), pp.11014.
21 Ageron, op. cit., p.465.
22 The Munich agreement was signed on 29 September 1938 by Britain, France,
Germany and Italy to resolve the international crisis caused by Hitlers threats to
invade Czechoslovakia unless he was allowed to take over the former German region
of Sudetenland. The crisis was resolved by giving in to Hitlers demands.
23 The terms Arabs and natives were commonly used to refer to non-European
Algerians at the time.
300
France) came a few months after the stifling of the Viollette Bill.24
Still fewer Frenchmen thought of being surprised by this. There
are some things, no doubt, that appear natural. But one must be
generous oneself to find generosity natural. And one would have
liked certain people who made such a great commotion about the
loyalism of our populations to show more modesty in the display
of their satisfaction. Because, after all, they had just refused this
people which was offering them their blood the right to express
themselves.
One might expect, at least, that once the alert had passed,
the same newspapers would remember this gesture. But the press
in question only abandoned its silence in order to denounce the
Viollette Bill or to disown the innocuous Duroux Bill.25 Once
again, the Muslims may just as well not have bothered with their
generosity. I can hear from here the loud voices of French colonizers replying that this is no time for emancipation bills. And that
in these times of external danger, all their attention is focused on
national defence. But this national defence finds one of its surest
supports in its Muslim conscripts. After generosity, it is therefore
logic that will be spurned.
Of course, one would appear naive to show too much surprise. We are familiar with this policy. It goes hand in hand with
the policy that consists in telling Muslim natives You want
to vote. Ask to be naturalized and in refusing nine out of ten
24 The Blum-Viollette Bill was shelved in the spring of 1938 after a mass revolt by the
mayors of Algeria. See Planche, Le projet Blum-Viollette au temps du Front Populaire
et du Congrs Musulman, p.138.
25 The Duroux Bill was a counter-proposal to the Viollette Bill tabled by the Radical
senator of Algiers in April 1936. Although it would have given 135,000 Algerians the
right to vote the European electorate numbered 200,000 the Duroux Bill was
not as innocuous as Camus seemed to think: by asserting the principle of a separate
electoral college, it would have maintained racial exclusion. See Planche, op. cit.,
pp.13637.
301
naturalizations;26 with the policy that consists in saying You want

to be represented. Give up your personal status, when, through
the jurisdiction of Muslim marriage and compulsory military
service, one has not been afraid to profoundly undermine this
personal status; with the policy that only wants to offer educated
Muslims the right to make themselves heard, at the same time
that it leaves 900,000 children outside the schools where qualifications are acquired. It goes hand in hand, finally, with all the
petty intrigues that tarnish the face of a France that would like
to think it was generous and is taught lessons in greatness by the
very people that it has a mission to educate.27
It isnt a question here of sentimentalizing about politics. But
there are nevertheless a certain number of us who have a different
idea of Frances mission in this country. And who think that the
conquest of a country has no excuses as long as it is not devoted
to conquering hearts.28 It is odd that this people, which is asking
today to become French, and which wishes to keep a balance
between its rights and its duties, should be so doggedly refused
what we should be surprised and proud to see it ask for. And it
is not the least shame of some Frenchmen of Algeria to see the
generous instincts of a disinterested people alternately used and
spurned for political ends.
In this newspaper, at least, we can affirm our solidarity and
ask again for France to be able to recognise where its true greatness lies. Generosity is a difficult virtue to practise. It requires
being able to forget. But it also demands memory. The Muslims
26 Between 1865 and 1962, only 7,000 Algerian Muslims succeeded in being
naturalized.
27 As his phrasing here suggests, Camus was imbued with the twin republican ideals of
education and the mission civilisatrice, both particularly associated with the name of
Jules Ferry (18321893).
28 Cf. the final words of Camuss conclusion to Crise en Algrie, originally published
in Combat in 1945: It is the infinite force of justice, and this alone, which must help
us to reconquer Algeria and its inhabitants (IV, 351).
302
have shown that they were capable of forgetting. It would be

unfortunate if the Government of the Republic were unable to
remember.
Albert CAMUS
Bibliography
Bibliographies
Gay-Crosier, Raymond, Selective and Cumulative Bibliography of Recent Studies on
Albert Camus. Books (1990 ), Articles (1991 ) <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/
gaycros/Bibliog.htm> accessed 18 May 2010.
Roeming, Robert F., Camus: A Bibliography Microform, 15th edn (Milwaukee:
Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin, 2000).
Primary Works by Camus

Albert Camus ditorialiste LExpress (mai 1955fvrier 1956) (CAC6), ed. Paul-F.
Smets (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
Albert Camus. Fragments dun combat (19381940). Alger rpublicain, Le Soir rpublicain (CAC3), ed. Andr Abbou and Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi (Paris: Gallimard,
1978).
Camus Combat (194447) (CAC8), ed. Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi (Paris: Gallimard,
2002).
Essais, ed. Roger Quilliot and Louis Faucon (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque de la
Pliade, 1965 [1981]).
uvres compltes I, ed. Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi and others (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliothque de la Pliade, 2006]).
uvres compltes II, ed. Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi and others (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliothque de la Pliade, 2006).
uvres compltes III, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier and others (Paris: Gallimard,
uvres compltes IV, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier and others (Paris: Gallimard,
Rflexions sur le terrorisme, ed. Jacqueline Lvi-Valensi and Denis Salas (Paris: Nicolas
Philippe, 2002).
Une patrie algrienne, deux peuples Propos recueillis par Jean Daniel, tudes
mditerranennes 7 (Spring 1960), 1924.
304
Bibliography
Translations of La nouvelle culture mditerranenne

Native Culture. The New Culture of the Mediterranean, in Albert Camus: Lyrical
and Critical, tr. Philip Thody (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967).
The New Mediterranean Culture, in Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed.
Philip Thody, tr. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970).
Correspondence
Camus, Albert and Jean Grenier, Correspondance 19321960, ed. Marguerite Dobrenn
(Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
Camus, Albert and Pascal Pia, Correspondance 19391947, ed. Yves-Marc Ajchenbaum
(Paris: Fayard/Gallimard, 2000).
Camus, Albert and Ren Char, Correspondance 19461959, ed. Franck Planeille (Paris:
Gallimard, 2007).
Biographies
Lottman, Herbert R., Albert Camus: A Biography (London: Picador, 1981).
Todd, Olivier, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
Srie Albert Camus of the Revue des Lettres Modernes (selective)

Albert Camus 4: Sources et influences, ed. B.T. Fitch (Paris: Lettres Modernes/Minard,
1971).
Albert Camus 5: Journalisme et politique: lentre dans lhistoire (19381940), ed. B.T.
Fitch (Paris, Lettres Modernes/Minard, 1972).
Albert Camus 8: Camus romancier: La Peste, ed. B.T. Fitch (Paris: Lettres Modernes/
Minard, 1976).
Albert Camus 9: La Pense de Camus, ed. B. T. Fitch (Paris: Lettres Modernes/Minard,
1979).
Albert Camus 11: Camus et la religion, ed. B. T. Fitch (Paris: Lettres Modernes/Minard,
1982).
Bibliography
305
Albert Camus 12: La Rvolte en question, ed. B. T. Fitch (Paris: Lettres Modernes/
Minard, 1985).
Albert Camus 14: Le texte et ses langages, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier (Paris: Lettres
ModernesMinard, 1991).
Albert Camus 19: LHomme rvolt cinquante ans aprs, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier
(Paris: Lettres Modernes/Minard, 2001).
Albert Camus 20: Le Premier homme en perspective, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier (Paris:
Lettres Modernes/Minard, 2004).
Albert Camus 21 (avec un grand carnet critique), ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier (Caen:
Lettres Modernes/Minard, 2007).
Secondary and Tertiary Literature

Abbas, Ferhat, Le Jeune Algrien. De la colonie vers la province (Paris: La Jeune Parque,
1931; rpt Paris: Garnier, 1981).
La Nuit coloniale (Paris: Julliard, 1962).
Adamson, Kay, Understanding Post-Independence Visions of Economic Prosperity in
Algeria through the Mirror of the Second Napoleonic Empire, Topics in Middle
Eastern and North African Economies 7 (Sep. 2005) <http://www.luc.edu/orgs/
meea/volume7/adamson.pdf> accessed 18 May 2010.
Ageron, Charles-Robert, Histoire de lAlgrie contemporaine, vol. 2, De lInsurrection
de 1871 au Dclenchement de la Guerre de Libration (1954) (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1979).
Alhau, Max, Un crivain mditerranen: Gabriel Audisio, unpublished thesis,
Universit de Paris 3, 1982.
Gabriel Audisio et la Mditerrane, NRF 513 (1995), 8791.
Ando, Maki, La lutte contre labstraction: la signification de lacte de voir dans La
Peste dAlbert Camus, Gallia 40 (2000), 24350.
Apter, Emily S., Out of Character: Camuss French Algerian Subjects MLN 112:4
(Sep. 1997), 499516.
Aragon, [Louis], Luvre potique VII: 19361937 (Paris: Livre Club Diderot,
1977).
Archambault, Paul, Albert Camus et la mtaphysique chrtienne, in Raymond GayCrosier, ed., Albert Camus 1980 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1980),
pp.21017.
Arjakovky, Antoine, La Gnration des penseurs religieux russes (Kiev/Paris: LEsprit
et la Lettre, 2002).
306
Bibliography
Arnold, A.J., Camus lecteur de Nietzsche, AC9, pp.9599.

Audisio, Camus, Robls, frres de soleil (Aix-en-Provence: disud, 2003).
Audisio, Gabriel, Humanisme et Latinit, Europe: revue littraire mensuelle (November
1935), 41114.
Jeunesse de la Mditerrane (Paris: Gallimard, 1935, rpt 2002).
Jeunesse de la Mditerrane II: Sel de la Mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1936, rpt 2002).
Le sel de Carthage, Europe: revue littraire mensuelle 165 (September 1936),
1424.
Rome, lunique objet , Vendredi (21 February 1936), p.5.
Vers une synthse mditerranenne. Culture mditerranenne, Cahiers du Sud
196 (August 1937), 45760.
Vers une synthse mditerranenne. Documents sur lesprit mditerranen,
Cahiers du Sud 181 (March 1936), n.p.
Vers une synthse mditerranenne. Document sur lesprit Mditerranen,
Cahiers du Sud 183 (May 1936), 42729.
Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbis (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980 [1962]).
Baishanski, Jacqueline, LOrient dans la pense du jeune Camus (Paris: Lettres
Modernes/Minard, 2002).
Bakounine [Bakunin], Mikhail, Dieu et ltat (Geneva: Imprimerie Jurassienne, 1882)
<http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Dieu_et_l%E2%80%99%C3%89tat_(1882)>
Ballard, Jean, Dfense de lOccident (two parts), Fortunio 58 ( July 1924), 67993
and 59 (August 1924), 76286.
Barb, Philippe, LAnti-choc des civilisations. Mditations mditerranennes (Paris:
ditions de lAube, 2006).
Barrault, mile, Occident et Orient: tudes politiques, morales, religieuses pendant 1833
1834 de lre chrtienne, 12491250 de lhgire (Paris: Dessart, 1835) <http://gallica.
bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k855900> accessed 18 May 2010.
Bartfeld, Fernande, Albert Camus voyageur et confrencier: le voyage en Amrique du
sud (Paris: Lettres Modernes/Minard, 1995).
Anti-Mditerrane et lyrisme de lexil, Perspectives: revue de lUniversit Hbraque
de Jrusalem 5 (1998), 21325.
Barthes, Roland, The Death of the Author, ImageMusicText, ed. and tr. Stephen
Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp.14248.
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann, Rebellious Feminism: Camuss Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist
Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Basset, Guy, In memoriam: en compagnie dEdmond (19152004), Bulletin
dInformation de la Socit des tudes Camusiennes 71 ( July 2004), 6164.
Bibliography
307
Rivages dAlger, La Revue des revues 23 (1997), 8597.

Baudouin, Axel, Reclus colonialiste?, Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography /
Revue europenne de gographie 239 (26 May 2003) <http://cybergeo.revues.
org/pdf/4004>; Reclus a Colonialist?, tr. Hilary Green <http://cybergeo.
revues.org/index4004.html> accessed 18 May 2010.
Belamri, Rabah, Luvre de Louis Bertrand. Miroir de lidologie colonialiste (Algiers:
Office des Publications Universitaires, 1980).
Benmansour, Leila Benammar, Lalgrianit, ses expressions dans ldition franaise
(19191939): Et le livre devint mdia, doctoral dissertation, Universit
Panthon-Assas (Paris II), 2000.
travers Le Jeune Algrien: Ferhat Abbas et la question de lAlgrianit, El Watan,
5 November 2006 <http://www.elwatan.com/spip.php?page=article&id_article=53213> accessed 18 May 2010.
Ferhat Abbas, journaliste LEntente (19351942): une plume combative
exceptionnelle, El Watan, 19 February 2006 <http://www.elwatan.com/spip.
php?page=article&id_article=36553> accessed 18 May 2010.
Berdiaev, Nicolai, LOrient et lOccident, in LOrient et lOccident. Textes suivis de
dbats, Cahiers de la quinzaine 20:9 (1930), 5560.
Berdyaev, Nikolai, Orient and Occident, tr. Fr. S. Janos <http://www.berdyaev.com/
berdiaev/berd_lib/1930_353.html> accessed 18 May 2010.
Berlin, Isaiah, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. Henry
Hardy, new edn (London: Pimlico, 2003).
Russian Thinkers, ed. Aileen Kelly and Henry Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1979).
Bernard, Augustin LAlgrie. Histoire des colonies franaises et de lexpansion de la
France dans le monde II (Paris: Plon, 1931) <http://aj.garcia.free.fr/index4.
htm> accessed 18 May 2010.
Bertrand, Louis, la recherche de lesprit mditerranen: lAlgrie notre autre grande
France, Conferencia 25:16 (1931), 15767.
Hitler: A View of the 1935 Reichsparteitag by a Member of the Acadmie Franaise,
tr. Dan Desjardins (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2005).
Le Sang des races (Paris: Ollendorf, 1925).
Les Villes dor: Afrique et Sicile antiques (Paris: Fayard, 1921).
Bieber, Konrad, Traduttore, traditore. La rception problmatique de LHomme rvolt
aux tats-Unis, AC19, pp.14348.
Birchall, Ian, The Labourism of Sisyphus : Albert Camus and Revolutionary
Syndicalism, Journal of European Studies 20 (1990), 13565.
Bonnet, Marguerite, LOrient dans le Surralisme: mythe et rel, Revue de littrature
compare 54:4 (October/December 1980), 41124.
308
Bibliography
Boudraa, Nabil, Was Edward Said Right in Depicting Albert Camus as an Imperialist
Writer?, in Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, ed., Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006), pp.187200.
Brahimi, Denise, LAlgrie coloniale, histoire dune impossible fusion, in Levallois
and Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens, pp.22336.
Linspiration saint-simonienne dans la Description de lgypte, in Magali Morsy,
ed., Les Saint-Simoniens et lOrient: vers la modernit (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud,
1990), pp.1927.
Bre, Germaine, Climates of the Mind: Albert Camus 19361940, in Bettina L.
Knapp, ed., Critical Essays on Albert Camus (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1988),
pp.8899.
Brenan, Gerald The Spanish Cockpit: An Account of the Social and Political Background
to the Spanish Civil War, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1967).
Brett, Michael, Legislating for Inequality in Algeria: the Senatus-Consulte of 14 July
1865, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
51:3 (1988), 44061.
Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds, Geschichtliche Grund
begriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 9 vols
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 19721990).
Burke, Sean, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in
Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1998).
Cadwallader, Barrie, Crisis of the European Mind: A Study of Andr Malraux and
Drieu La Rochelle (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1981).
Carrre dEncausse, Hlne, Le franais dans tous ses tats, Dfense de la langue
franaise 218 (October/November/December 2005), 37 <http://www.languefrancaise.org/dlf218.pdf> accessed 18 May 2010.
Carroll, David, Camuss Algeria: Birthrights, Colonial Injustice, and the Fiction of
a French-Algerian People MLN 112:4 (1997), 51749.
Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia
Caves, Jean: pseudonym for Grenier, Jean (q.v.).
Chabot, Jacques, Albert Camus: la pense de midi (Aix-en-Provence: disud, 2002).
Charbit, Denis, Camus et lpreuve algrienne, Perspectives: revue de lUniversit
Hbraque de Jrusalem 5 (1998), 15781.
Charles, Daniel, Camus et lOrient (Notes sur le Mythe de Sisyphe), in Anne-Marie
Amiot and Jean-Franois Matti, eds, Albert Camus et la philosophie (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp.24156.
Bibliography
309
Chaulet-Achour, Christine, Albert Camus, Alger. Ltranger et autres rcits (Biarritz:

Atlantica, 1998).
Albert Camus et lAlgerie (Algiers: Barzakh, 2004).
Chevalier, Michel, Politique industrielle. Systme de la Mditerrane (Paris: n.p., 1832)
<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k85502w> accessed 18 May 2010.
Conklin, Alice, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and
West Africa, 18951930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
Cooper, Nicola, Colonial Humanism in the 1930s: the Case of Andr Viollis, French
Cultural Studies 17:2 ( June 2006), 189205.
Corm, Georges, OrientOccident, La fracture imaginaire (Paris: La Dcouverte,
2004).
Cornick, Martyn, In Search of the Absolute: the Nouvelle Revue franaise, and Uses
and Meanings of the Orient (19201930), Modern and Contemporary France
14:1 (February 2006), 1532.
Coulet, Michle, la recherche de lhumanisme mditerranen de Jean Ballard, in
Jean Ballard et les Cahiers du Sud [exhibition catalogue] (Marseille: Ville de
Marseille, 1993), pp.23147.
Crisis in Algeria, The March of Time, 29 October 1937 [video] <http://xroads.virginia.
edu/~MA04/wood/mot/html/mediterranean.htm> accessed 18 May 2010.
Cryle, Peter, La Peste et le monde concret: tude abstraite, AC8, 925.
Curtis, Michael, Three against the Republic: Sorel, Barrs and Maurras (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1959).
Curtius, Ernst-Robert, Les influences asiatiques dans la vie intellectuelle de lAllemagne
daujourdhui, Revue de Genve (December 1920), 89095.
Daguzan, Jean-Franois, Frances Mediterranean Policy: Between Myths and Strategy,
Journal of Contemporary European Studies 17:3 (2009), 387400.
Davison, Ray, Camus: The Challenge of Dostoevsky (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
1997).
Mythologizing the Mediterranean: The Case of Albert Camus, Journal of
Mediterranean Studies 10:1/2 (2000), 7792.
Decremps, Marcel, Mistral et lide latine, in Georges and Ilianca Barthouil-Ionesco,
eds, La Latinit: hier, aujourdhui, demain (Bucharest: Eminescu, 1981),
pp.189202.
Djeux, Jean, De lternel mditerranen lternel Jugurtha, Revue algrienne des
sciences juridiques, conomiques et politiques 14:4 (1977), 658728.
Dolgoff, Sam, ed., Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose, 1980).
310
Bibliography
Dondin-Payre, Monique, La Commission dexploration scientifique dAlgrie: une

hritire mconnue de la Commission dgypte (Paris: De Boccard, Mmoires de
lAcadmie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1994).
Dorgels, Roland, Les Croix de bois (Paris: Albin Michel, 1931).
Drake, David, The PCF, the Surrealists, Clart and the Rif War, French Cultural
Studies 17 (2006), 17388.
Dugas, Guy, ed., Algrie: un rve de fraternit (Paris: Omnibus, 1997).
Dunn, John. The Identity of the History of Ideas, Philosophy 43 (1968), 85104,
reprinted in Political Obligation in its Historical Context: Essays in Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp.1328.
The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1969).
Dunwoodie, Peter, Albert Camus and the Anarchist Alternative, Australian Journal
of French Studies 30:1 (1993).
Chestov et le Mythe de Sisyphe, AC8, pp.4953.
From Noces to Ltranger, in Hughes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Camus,
pp.14764.
Negotiation or Confrontation? Camus, Memory and the Colonial Chronotope,
in Christine Margerrison, Mark Orme and Lissa Lincoln, eds, Albert Camus in
the 21st Century, pp.4560.
Une histoire ambivalente: le dialogue CamusDostoevski (Paris: Nizet, 1996).
Writing French Algeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Eksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
(London: Bantam, 1989).
Emerit, Marcel, Les Saint-Simoniens en Algrie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1941).
Enfantin, [Barthlemy-Antonin], Colonisation de lAlgrie (Paris: Bertrand, 1843)
<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k284770> accessed 18 May 2010.
Fabre, Thierry, loge de la pense de midi (Arles: Actes Sud, 2007).
La Mditerrane franaise: gnalogies et reprsentations, in Jean-Claude Izzo and
Thierry Fabre, La Mditerrane franaise, Les Reprsentations de la Mditerrane
vol. 9 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000), pp.13152.
Ouverture, La Pense de midi 1 (Spring 2000), 89.
Fabre, Thierry and Robert Ilbert, eds, Les Reprsentations de la Mditerrane, 10 vols
(Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2000).
Favre, Frantz, Quand Camus lisait Nietzsche, AC20, pp.197206.
Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1949).
Fisher, David James, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Bibliography
311
Foley, John, Albert Camus. From the Absurd to Revolt (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008).
Foucault, Michel, LArchologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock,
1972).
What Is an Author?, in Josu V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-Structuralist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1980), pp.14160.
Foxlee, Neil, Arabes, Algriens et autres appellations dans le discours camusien,
Bulletin de la Socit des tudes Camusiennes 88 (2009), 3538.
Un manifeste dgradant comme objet de la polmique camusienne dans La
nouvelle culture mditerranenne, Bulletin de la Socit des tudes Camusiennes
77 (May 2006), 2830.
Mediterranean Humanism or Colonialism with a Human Face? Contextualizing
Albert Camus The New Mediterranean Culture, Mediterranean Historical
Review 21:1 ( June 2006), 7797.
Rflexions sur la gnrosit: un article peu connu dAlbert Camus, Bulletin de
la Socit des tudes Camusiennes 81 (May 2007), 914.
Gallie, W.B., Essentially Contested Concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
n.s., 56 (1956), 16798.
Garfitt, J.S.T., The Work and Thought of Jean Grenier (18981971) (London: Modern
Humanities Research Association, 1983).
Gaspard, Franoise, ed., De Dreux Alger: Maurice Viollette 18701960 (Paris:
LHarmattan, 1991).
Gay-Crosier, Raymond, ed., Albert Camus 1980 (Gainesville: University Presses of
Florida, c. 1980).
Les enjeux de la pense de midi, Perspectives: revue de lUniversit Hbraque
de Jrusalem 5 (1998), 93108, rpt in Gay-Crosier, Paradigmes de lironie,
pp.17992.
Paradigmes de lironie: rvolte et affirmation ngative (Toronto: Paratexte,
2000).
Ghon, Henri, Rflexions sur le rle actuel de lintelligence franaise, NRF 13
(November 1919), 95364.
Gillouin, Ren, Le Destin de lOccident (Paris: Promthe, 1929).
Girardet, Raoul, LIde coloniale en France 18711962 (Paris: ditions de la Table
Ronde, 1972).
Gomez, Manuel, Camus lAlgrois (La Motte dAigues: C.L.C, 2004).
Gonzales, Jean-Jacques, Une utopie mditerranenne: Albert Camus et lAlgrie en
guerre, in Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, eds, La Guerre dAlgrie:
19542004, la fin de lamnsie (Paris: Laffont, 2004), pp.597620.
312
Bibliography
Gourdon, Hubert, Jean-Robert Henry and Franoise Henry-Lorcerie, Roman colonial

et idologie en Algrie, Revue Algrienne des Sciences Juridiques, conomiques et
Politiques 11:1 (1974), 3252.
Gourvitch, Jean-Paul, Le Rve mditerranen, dUlysse Sarkozy (Paris: ditions
Luvre, 2009).
Grenier, Jean, Albert Camus, souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
(as Jean Caves) La crise de lesprit europen, Vie des lettres 17 (1924), 3336.
Cum apparuerit , NRF 34 (1930), 64147.
Essai sur lesprit dorthodoxie (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).
Les les (Paris: Gallimard, 1977 [1933]).
LInde imaginaire, in Les les, pp.11142.
Inspirations mditerranennes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961 [1940]).
(as Jean Caves) Le nihilisme europen et les appels de lOrient (two parts),
Philosophies 1 (March 1924), 5165; 2 (May 1924), 18596.
Rflexions sur la mentalit indienne dans ses rapports avec la ntre, in Message
actuel de lInde, special issue of Cahiers du Sud 236 ( JuneJuly 1941), 32955.
Remarques sur lide de progrs, Esprit 4748 (1936), 71218, rpt in Essai sur
lesprit dorthodoxie, pp.16680.
Sagesse de Lourmarin, Cahiers du Sud 183 (May 1936), 39097.
Schopenhauer et lInde, Annales de lUniversit de Grenoble (Section lettresdroit)
(nouvelle srie), 2 (1925), 14153.
Sur lInde (three parts), Nouvelle Revue Franaise 35: 2024 ( JulySep. 1930),
5569, 17085, 33855.
Grenier, Roger, Albert Camus, soleil et ombre: une biographie intellectuelle (Paris:
Gallimard, 1987).
Groethuysen, Bernard, Lettre dAllemagne, NRF 86 (Nov. 1920), 792805, and NRF
91 (April 1921), 497508, rpt as Spengler, Autres portraits, ed. Philippe Delpuech
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp.17199.
Gunon, Ren, Orient et Occident (Paris: Vga, 1924).
Gurin, Jeanyves, Albert Camus: portrait de lartiste en citoyen (Paris: Bourin, 1993).
ed., Camus et la politique: actes du colloque de Nanterre 57 juin 1985 (Paris:
LHarmattan, 1986).
Haddour, Azzedine, Camus: The Other as an Outsider in a Univocal Discourse,
unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 1989.
Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000).
Halvorsen, Kjell H., Colonial Transformation of Agrarian Society in Algeria, Journal
of Peace Research 15 (1978), 32343.
Bibliography
313
Hamouda, Ouahiba, Albert Camus lpreuve dAlger Rpublicain (Algiers: Office

des Publications Universitaires, 1991).
Hampsher-Monk, Iain, Karen Tilmans and Frank van Vree, eds, History of Concepts:
Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998).
Harrison, Nicholas, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
Hodgkin, Katharine and Suzannah Radstone, eds, Contested Pasts: The Politics of
Memory (London: Routledge, 2003), republished as Memory, History, Nation:
Contested Pasts (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006).
Hollahan, Eugene, The Path of Sympathy: Abstraction and Imagination in Camuss
La Peste. Studies in the Novel 8:4 (1976), 37793.
Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 19541962, rev. edn (London: Papermac,
1996).
Horowitz, Louise, Of Women and Arabs: Sexual and Racial Polarization in Camus,
Modern Language Studies 17:3 (Summer 1987), 5461.
Hughes, Edward J., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge
Le prlude dune sorte de fin de lhistoire: underpinning assimilation in Camuss
Chroniques algriennes, LEsprit Crateur 47:1 (2007), 718.
Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Ifversen, Jan, The Crisis of European Civilisation after 1918, in Menno Spiering and
Michael Wintle, eds, Ideas of Europe since 1914: The Legacy of the First World
War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp.1431.
The Crisis of European Civilization: An Inter-War Diagnosis, in Mehdi Mozaffari,
ed., Globalization and Civilizations (London: Routledge, 2002), pp.15177.
Inwood, Michael, The Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
Islam et lOccident, Cahiers du Sud 175 (AugustSeptember 1935).
Jean-Darrouy, Lucienne, Une culture mditerranenne est-elle ralisable?, Lcho
dAlger, 10 February 1937, p.4.
Jean-Desthieux, Franois, LHumanisme et la Mditerrane: rapport gnral prsent
au congrs de 1935 (Monaco: Acadmie Mditerranenne, Cahier IV, 1936).
Kaddache, Mahfoud, La Vie Politique Alger de 1919 1939 (Algiers: Socit Nationale
dEdition et de Diffusion, 1970).
Kaergi, Pascal, LOrient des Saint-Simoniens dans les Enseignements dEnfantin et
Le Globe (. Barrault, M. Chevalier), entre fin novembre 1831 et mi-fvrier 1832,
in Levallois and Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens, pp.11329.
Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
314
Bibliography
Kedward, Roderick, La Vie en Bleu: France and the French Since 1900 (London: Allen
Lane, 2005).
Kennedy, Sean, The Croix de Feu, the Parti Social Franais, and the Politics of Aviation,
19311939, French Historical Studies 23 (2000), 37399.
Klein, Wolfgang, tr. D. Bonnaud-Lamotte and M.-A. Coadou, Commune: revue
pour la dfense de la culture, 19331939 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 1988).
Knapp, Bettina L., ed. Critical Essays on Albert Camus (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall,
1988).
Koselleck, Reinhart, Crisis, tr. Michaela W. Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas
67 (2006), 357400.
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004).
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, tr. Todd
Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, tr. Melvin Richter
and Sally E. Robertson, in Lehmann and Richter, eds, The Meaning of Historical
Terms and Concepts, pp.5970.
LaCapra, Dominick, Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts, History
and Theory 19 (1980), 24576.
Lardinois, Roland, Orientalistes et orientalisme dans lentre-deux-guerres, in Johan
Heilbron, Remi Lenoir, Gisle Sapiro, with Pascale Pargamin, eds, Pour une
histoire des sciences sociales. Hommage Pierre Bourdieu (Paris: Fayard, 2004),
pp.34965.
Laurens, Henry, Lexpdition dgypte (Paris: Seuil, 1998 [1989]).
Orientales I: autour de lexpdition dgypte (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 2004).
Laurenti, Huguette, ed., Paul Valry 6: Mare nostrum: Valry et le monde mditerranen.
(Paris: Minard, Revue des lettres modernes, 1989).
Le Sueur, James D., The Unbearable Solitude of Being: the Question of Albert Camus,
in Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization
of Algeria, 2nd edn (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005),
pp.98143.
LeBlanc, John Randolph, Camus, Said, and the Dilemma of Home: Space, Identity,
and the Limits of Postcolonial Political Theory, Strategies: Journal of Theory,
Culture & Politics 15:2 (2002), 23958.
Lefvre, Frdric, Une heure avec , premire srie (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Franaise,
1924).
Bibliography
315
Lehmann, Hartmut and Melvin Richter, eds, The Meaning of Historical Terms and
Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (Washington, DC: German Historical
Institute, 1996).
Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, 2nd edn (Paris:
Guillaumin, 1882 [1874]) <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k245012>
Les Appels de lOrient, special double issue of Les Cahiers du Mois 9/10 (February/
March 1925).
Levallois, Anne, Les crits autobiographiques dIsmal Urbain. Homme de couleur,
saint-simonien et musulman 18121884 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005).
Levallois, Michel, Colonisation et association, postrit dUrbain dans la politique
coloniale en France, in Levallois and Moussa, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens,
pp.25362.
Essai de typologie des orientalistes saint-simoniens, ibid., pp.93112.
Ismayl Urbain: lments pour une biographie, in Morsy, Les Saint-Simoniens
et lOrient, pp.5382.
Ismal Urbain (18121884): une autre conqute de lAlgrie (Paris: Maisonneuve
& Larose, 2001).
and Sarga Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens (Paris: Maisonneuve
& Larose, 2006).
Lvi-Valensi, Jacqueline, Albert Camus, ou la naissance dun romancier, 19301942, ed.
Agns Spiquel (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).
Lengagement culturel, AC5, pp.83106.
Lentre dAlbert Camus en politique, in Jeanyves Gurin, ed., Camus et la politique (Paris: LHarmattan, 1986), pp.13751.
LHumanisme et la Mditerrane: congrs de 1935, 31 octobre, 1 et 2 novembre (Monaco:
Acadmie Mditerranenne, Cahier II, 1936).
Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge
Lorcin, Patricia M. E., Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algerias
Latin Past, French Historical Studies 25:2 (2002), 295329.
Lucas, Philippe and Jean-Claude Vatin, LAlgrie des anthropologues (Paris: Maspro,
1975).
Lunel, Armand, Paul Valry, la Mditerrane et lhumanisme, Cahiers du Sud 183
(May 1936), 4017.
Malraux, Andr, Andr Malraux et lOrient [Les Nouvelles littraires, 31 juillet 1926],
in uvres compltes Tome 1, ed. Pierre Brunel (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque
de la Pliade, 1989), pp.11314.
316
Bibliography
Dfense de lOccident, par Henri Massis (Plon), NRF, XXVIII: 165 ( June 1927),
81319.
La Tentation de lOccident (Paris: Grasset, 1926).
Maougal, Mohamed Lakhdar, ed., Albert Camus. Assassinat post-mortem (Algiers:
Apic, 2005).
Margerrison, Christine, Ces forces obscures de lme: Women, Race and Origins in the
Writings of Albert Camus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
Two Recent Studies of Camus, French Studies Bulletin 83 (2002), 1617.
Margerrison, Christine, Mark Orme and Lissa Lincoln, eds, Albert Camus in the 21st
Century. A Reassessment of his Thinking at the Dawn of the New Millennium
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
Marin, Lou, ed., Albert Camus et les libertaires (Marseille: ditions grgores,
2008).
Ursprung der Revolte: Albert Camus und der Anarchismus (Heidelberg:
Graswurzelrevolution, 1998).
Marshall, Peter, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Fontana
Press, 1993 [1992]).
Marx-Scouras, Danielle, Portraits of Women, Visions of Algeria, in Edward J. Hughes,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Camus, pp.13144.
Massis, Henri La crise de lesprit (1920), in LHonneur de servir: textes runis pour contribuer lhistoire dune gnration, 19121937 (Paris: Plon, 1937), pp.18793.
Dfense de lOccident (Paris: Plon, 1925).
LOccident et son destin (Paris: Grasset, 1956).
Loffensive germano-asiatique contre la culture occidentale, Journal littraire, 19
July 1924, reprinted in Almanach de lAction Franaise pour lanne 1925 (Paris:
Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925), pp.16773 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k2052626> accessed 18 May 2010.
Pour la dfense de lOccident (1935), in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions franaises,
pp.9294.
Masson-Oursel, Paul, OrientOccident, NRF 150 (1926), 26779.
Mathieu, Anne, Intellectuels contre la guerre dthiopie, Aden: Paul Nizan et les
annes trente 1 (2002), 199226.
Maurras, Charles, Barbarie et posie: vers un art intellectuel 1 (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie
Nationale, 1925).
Civilisation latine, esprit latin, LAction Franaise, 22 October 1916, reprinted
in Gaulois, Germains, Latins (Extraits), Les Cahiers de lOccident 1 (1926),
pp.7779.
La Dentelle du rempart, choix de pages civiques en prose et en vers (18861936)
(Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1937).
Bibliography
317
LAvenir de lintelligence, 2nd edn (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1937

[1906]).
Ltang de Berre (Paris: Flammarion, 1928).
McCarthy, Patrick, Camus: A Critical Study of his Life and Work (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1982).
Memmi, Albert, Camus ou le colonisateur de bonne volont, La Nef, 12 December
1957, 9596.
Portrait du colonis, prcd du Portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
Mino, Hiroshi, Le dbat sur Ltranger au Japon, AC14, pp.15562.
Mistral, Frdric, A la race latine, in Anthologie de la posie occitane, ed. Andr Berry
(Paris: Stock, 1961), pp.23839.
Modler, Karl W., Soleil et mesure dans luvre dAlbert Camus (Paris: LHarmattan,
2000).
Montgomery, Geraldine F., Noces pour femme seule. Le fminin et le sacr dans luvre
dAlbert Camus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
Morsy, Magali, ed., Les Saint-Simoniens et lOrient: vers la modernit (Aix-en-Provence:
disud, 1990).
Mouralis, Bernard, Edward W. Said et Albert Camus: un malentendu?, in Sylvie
Brodziak et al. Albert Camus et les critures du XXe sicle (Arras: Artois Presses
Universit, 2003), pp.23954.
Mulligan, Lotte, Judith Richards and John Graham, Intentions and Conventions:
A Critique of Quentin Skinners Method for the Study of the History of Ideas,
Political Studies 27:1 (1979), 8498.
Mumma, Howard, Albert Camus and the Minister (Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete,
2000).
Muret, Maurice, La pense allemande et lOrient, La Revue universelle, 15 August
1921, pp.41528.
Nacer-Khodja, Hamid, Albert Camus Jean Snac, ou le fils rebelle (Paris: ParisMditerrane, 2004).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann
and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).
The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, 1967).
Novello, Samantha, Du nihilisme aux thocraties totalitaires: Les Sources et le sens du
communisme russe de Berdiaev dans les Carnets de Camus, AC20, pp.17594.
OBrien, Conor Cruise, Camus (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, Modern Masters,
1970).
318
Bibliography
Ohana, David, Humanist Ba-Shemesh: Kami Veha-Hashraah Ha-Yam-Tikhonit

(Humanist in the Sun: Albert Camus and the Mediterranean Inspiration)
( Jerusalem: Carmel, 2000).
Mediterranean Humanism, Mediterranean Historical Review 18:1 (2003),
5975.
Orme, Mark, The Development of Albert Camuss Concern for Social and Political Justice
(Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007).
Orwell, George, 1984 (London: Penguin, 1989).
Oswald, John, Re-appropriating Europe: Albert Camuss Wartime Europeanism,
Modern & Contemporary France 9:4 (2001), 48393.
Pagden, Anthony, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe
Paire, Alain, Chronique des Cahiers du Sud (Paris: Institut Mmoires de ldition
contemporaine, 1993).
Pakenham, Thomas, The Scramble for Africa 18761912 (London: Abacus, 1992).
Palante, Georges, La Sensibilit individualiste (Paris: Alcan, 1909).
Palonen, Kari, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric. (Cambridge: Polity,
2003).
Paxton, Robert O., Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 19401944 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982 [1972]).
Pelletier, Yannick, ed., Georges Palante. LIndividu en dtresse. Textes choisis. (Romill:
Folle Avoine, 1987).
Pervill, Guy, Albert Camus tait-il raciste? Le tmoignage du Premier homme, in
Jacques Cantier, Laurent Jalabert and Jean Franois Soulet, eds, Histoire et littrature au XXme sicle: hommage Jean Rives (Toulouse: Groupe de Recherche
de Histoire Immdiate, 2003), pp.43145 <http://guy.perville.free.fr/spip/
article.php3?id_article=33> accessed 18 May 2010.
A propos de laffaire de Zeralda (1er aot 1942) (2007) <http://guy.perville.
free.fr/spip/article.php3?id_article=157> accessed 18 May 2010.
Pierre, Jos ed., Tracts surralistes et dclarations collectives, 19221969, Tome 1: 19221939
(Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1980).
Pirenne, Henri, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de
France, 1992 [1935]).
Planche, Jean-Louis, Une jeunesse algroise: Albert Camus 19141940. Europe 846
(1999): 1739.
Le projet Blum-Viollette au temps du Front Populaire et du Congrs Musulman,
in Gaspard, De Dreux Alger: Maurice Viollette 18701960, pp.13550.
Bibliography
319
Pocock, J.G.A., Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture? Comment on

a Paper by Melvin Richter, in Lehmann and Richter, The Meaning of Historical
Terms and Concepts, pp.4758.
Introduction: The State of the Art, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on
Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.134.
Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History,
Common Knowledge 10:3 (2004), 53250, rpt in Political Thought and History,
pp.12342.
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1957).
The Concept of a Language and the Mtier dHistorien: Some Considerations on
Practice, in Pagden, The Languages of Political Theory, pp.1938, rpt in Political
Thought and History, pp.87105.
The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
The Reconstruction of Discourse: Towards the Historiography of Political
Thought, MLN 96:5 (1981), Comparative Literature, 95980, rpt in Political
Thought and History, pp.6786.
Pouthier, Jean-Luc Rome et la latinit, La Pense de midi 1 (2000), 4043.
Prochasson, Christophe and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie: les intellectuels et
la premire guerre mondiale (19101919) (Paris: La Dcouverte, 1996).
Racine, Nicole, LAssociation des Artistes et crivains Rvolutionnaires (AEAR),
Mouvement social 54 ( JanuaryMarch 1966), 2947.
Racine-Furlaud, Nicole, Bataille autour dintellectuel(s) dans les manifestes et contre-manifestes de 1918 1939, in D. Bonnaud-Lamotte and J.-L. Rispail, eds,
Intellectuel(s) des annes trente: entre le rve et laction (Paris: ditions du Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1989), pp.22336.
Raymond, Marcel, De Baudelaire au Surralisme, new edn (Paris: Jos Corti, 1963).
Reclus, Elise, Hgmonie de lEurope, La Socit nouvelle (April 1894), 43343
<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k66024n> accessed 18 May 2010.
Reclus, Onsime, France, Algrie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1880), <http://gallica.
bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k75061t> accessed 18 May 2010.
Rgnier, Philippe, Le colonialisme est-il un orientalisme? propos dEnfantin
et de son essai Colonisation de lAlgrie (1843), in Levallois and Moussa, eds,
LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens, pp.13155.
320
Bibliography
ed., Le Livre nouveau des saint-simoniens: manuscrits dmile Barrault, Michel

Chevalier, Charles Duveyrier, Prosper Enfantin, Charles Lambert, Lon Simon
et Thomas-Ismayl Urbain (Tussot, Charente: Du Lrot, 1991).
Les Saint-Simoniens en gypte 18331851 (Giza/Cairo: Abdelnour, 1989).
Reichardt, Rolf, Historical Semantics and Political Iconography: The Case of the
Game of the French Revolution, in Hampsher-Monk and others, History of
Concepts, pp.191226.
Rmond, Ren, Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982).
Richter, Melvin and Michaela W. Richter, Introduction: Translation of Reinhart
Kosellecks Krise, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Journal of the History of
Ideas 67 (2006), 34356.
Rivire, Jacques, Le parti de lintelligence, NRF, XIII (Sep. 1919), 61218.
Rosebury, Brian, Irrecoverable Intentions and Literary Interpretation, British Journal
of Aesthetics 37 (1997), 1527.
Rufat, Hlne, Entretien avec Edmond Charlot, Bulletin dInformation de la Socit
des tudes Camusiennes 71 ( July 2004), 6567.
Said, Edward W., Camus and the French Imperial Experience, in Culture and
Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp.16985.
Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1985
[1978]).
Sapiro, Gisle, La Guerre des crivains 19401953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
LIntroduction du relativisme culturel en France: Malraux et le dbat Orient
Occident dans lentre-deux-guerres, Revue Andr Malraux Review, 29:1/2 (2001),
7088.
Sarkozy, Nicolas, Speech in Toulon, 27 February 2007 <http://sites.univ-provence.
fr/veronis/Discours2007/transcript.php?n=Sarkozy&p=2007-02-07> accessed
18 May 2010.
Sarocchi, Jean, Variations Camus (Biarritz: Atlantica-Sguier, 2005).
Savelli, Denis [Dany] and Rgis Poulet, Asiatisme/Asiaticism, Dictionnaire
International des Termes Littraires <http://www.flsh.unilim.fr/ditl/Fahey/
ASIATISMEAsiaticism_n.html> accessed 18 May 2010.
Sebastin, J.F., Intellectual History, Liberty and Republicanism: An Interview with
Quentin Skinner, Contributions to the History of Concepts 3 (2007), 10323.
Section de Toulon de la Ligue des Droits de lHomme, La LDH et le problme colonial en 19301931 <http://www.ldh-toulon.net/article.php3?id_article=193>
Sedgwick, Mark, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual
History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Bibliography
321
Seillan, Jean-Marie, Nord contre Sud. Visages de lantimridionalisme dans la littrature franaise de la fin du XIXe sicle, Loxias 1: Idiomes, fleurs obscures <http://
revel.unice.fr/loxias/document.html?id=6> accessed 18 May 2010.
Sellam, Sadek, Algrie: des colons aux colonels: camps, extermination, radication,
in Catherine Coquio, ed., Parler des camps, penser les gnocides (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1999), pp.32248.
Snac, Jean, Lettre un jeune Franais dAlgrie, Esprit 3 (March 1956), 33539.
Sergent, Alain and Claude Harmel, Histoire de lanarchie. Tome I (n.p.: Le Portulan,
1949).
Shackleton, Robert, The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number: the History
of Benthams Phrase, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 90 (1972),
146182.
Siblot, Paul, Lalgrianisme au lieu de lautre, in Paul Siblot, ed., Vie culturelle Alger,
19001950 (Aix-en-Provence: Praxiling, Universit Paul Valry Montpellier III,
n.d. [1996]), pp.1418.
Les palimpsestes du texte ou les fantmes de linterdiscours, Cahiers de
Praxmatique 33 (1999), 11343.
Siblot, Paul and Jean-Louis Planche, Le 8 mai 1945: lments pour une analyse des
positions de Camus face au nationalisme algrien, in Jeanyves Gurin, ed., Camus
et la politique (Paris: LHarmattan, 1986), pp.15371.
Signorile, Patricia, ed., Valry et la Mditerrane (Aix-en-Provence: disud, 2006).
Sirinelli, Jean-Franois, Intellectuels et passions franaises: manifestes et ptitions au XXe
sicle (Paris: Fayard, 1990).
Skinner, Quentin, Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts, Philosophical
Quarterly, 20 (1970), 11838.
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge
Hermeneutics and the Role of History, New Literary History 7:1 (Autumn
1975), 20932.
Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory, 8:1
(1969), 353, rpt in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, pp.2957.
The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon, Essays in Criticism 29 (1979), 20524.
The Limits of Historical Explanations, Philosophy 41 (1966), 199215.
A Reply to My Critics, in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, pp.23188.
Visions of Politics, vol. I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
322
Bibliography
Slama, Alain-Grard, La guerre dAlgrie: histoire dune dchirure (Paris: Gallimard

Dcouvertes, 1996).
Smets, Paul-F., Albert Camus. Sa vraie Mditerrane: la vrit avant la fable, la vie avant
le rve, LEurope et la Mditerrane. Actes de la Vime Chaire Glaverbel dtudes
europennes, 20002001 (Brussels: PIEPeter Lang, 2001), pp.24967.
Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1932).
Spiquel, Agns, Nmsis, une pense de midi?, Perspectives: revue de lUniversit
Hbraque de Jrusalem 5 (1998), 199212.
Stirner, Max, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge
LUnique et sa proprit, tr. Henri Lasvignes (Paris: ditions de la Revue Blanche,
1900).
LUnique et sa proprit, tr. Robert L. Leclaire (Paris: Stock, 1899).
Stock, Phyllis H., Students versus the University in Pre-World War Paris, French
Historical Studies 7:1 (1971), 93110.
Stora, Benjamin, Des nationalistes algriens face au projet Blum-Viollette, in Gaspard,
ed., De Dreux Alger: Maurice Viollette 18701960, pp.15160.
La Guerre des mmoires. La France face son pass colonial (Paris: LAube, 2007).
and Zakya Daoud, Ferhat Abbas: une utopie algrienne (Paris: Denol, 1995).
Talbayev, Edwige Tamalet, Between Nostalgia and Desire: lcole dAlgers Transnational
Identifications and the Case for a Mediterranean Relation, International Journal
of Francophone Studies, 10:3 (2007), 35976.
Tarcov, Nathan, Quentin Skinners Method and Machiavellis Prince, Ethics 92:4
(1982), 692709.
Tarrow, Susan, Exile from the Kingdom: A Political Re-Reading of Albert Camus
(Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985).
Tmime, Emile, Un rve mditerranen: des saint-simoniens aux intellectuels des annes
trente (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002).
Rves mditerranens et prsence franaise en Orient au milieu du XIXe sicle,
in Michel Levallois and Sarga Moussa, eds, LOrientalisme des Saint-Simoniens
(Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006), pp.1931.
Teroni, Sandra, ed., Per la difesa della cultura: Scrittori a Parigi nel 1935 (Rome: Carocci,
2002).
Teroni, Sandra and Klein, Wolfgang, eds, Pour la dfense de la culture: les textes du
congrs international des crivains, Paris, juin 1935 (Dijon: ditions universitaires
de Dijon, 2005).
Thomas, Paul, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980).
Bibliography
323
Thompson, Martyn P., Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical

Meaning, History and Theory, 32:3 (1993), 24872.
Thornberry, Robert S., Lorientalisme chez Malraux et Massis, in Christine Moatti
and David Bevan, eds, Andr Malraux: unit de luvre, unit de lhomme (Paris:
La Documentation Franaise, 1989), pp.14752.
Toda, Michel, Henri Massis: un tmoin de la droite intellectuelle (Paris: La Table
Ronde, 1987).
Todorov, Tzvetan, Nous et les autres: la rflexion franaise sur la diversit humaine
(Paris: Seuil, 1992).
La Peur des barbares. Au-del du choc des civilisations (Paris: Robert Laffont,
2008).
Toumi, Alek Baylee, Albert Camus, lalgrian(iste): gense dEntre la mre et
linjustice, in (coll.) Albert Camus et les critures algriennes. Quelles traces?
(Aix-en-Provence: disud, 2004), pp.8191.
ed., Albert Camus, prcurseur: Mditerrane dhier et daujourdhui (New York:
Peter Lang, 2009).
Trbitsch, Michel, Limage de lOrient chez les intellectuels franais et allemands
au lendemain de la premire guerre mondiale, in E. Franois, M.-C. HoockDemarle, R. Myer-Kalkus and M. Werner, eds, MarianneGermania: DeutschFranzsischer Kulturtransfer im Europischen Kontext, Vol. 2 (Leipzig: Leipziger
Universittsverlag, 1998), pp.53153.
Internationalisme, universalisme et cosmopolitisme: les reprsentations du monde
dans les milieux intellectuels franais, dune guerre lautre, in Robert Frank ed.,
Images et imaginaires dans les relations internationals depuis 1938 (Paris: Cahiers
de l Institut dhistoire du temps prsent 28 (1994), 1327.
Tuck, Richard, A New Date for Filmers Patriarcha, The Historical Journal, 29:1
(1986), 18386.
Tully, James ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge:
Polity Press/Blackwell, 1988).
The Pen Is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinners Analysis of Politics, ibid.,
pp.725.
Urbain, Ismal, LAlgrie franaise: indignes et immigrants, ed. Michel Levallois (Paris:
Atlantica-Sguier, 2002).
LAlgrie pour les Algriens, ed. Michel Levallois (Paris: Atlantica-Sguier, 2000)
<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k732162> accessed 18 May 2010.
Valry, Paul, La crise de lesprit (1919), in uvres I, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard,
La Pliade, 1957), pp.9881000.
Le Centre universitaire mditerranen, in Regards sur le monde actuel et autres
essais, 3rd edn (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Ides, 1945), pp.33459.
324
Bibliography
Note (ou lEuropen) in uvres I, edn Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, La Pliade,
1957), pp.100014.
van der Poel, Ieme, Albert Camus, ou la critique postcoloniale face au rve mditerranen, Francophone Postcolonial Studies 2:1 (2004), 7078.
Vtillard, Roger, Stif, mai 1945. Massacres en Algrie (Paris: ditions de Paris, 2008).
Victoroff, Tatiana, Lmigration, lieu de rencontres culturelles: le Studio franco-russe,
tribune libre des annes 1930, colloque Les Premires rencontres de lInstitut
europen Est-Ouest, Lyon, Ecole Normale Suprieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines,
24 December 2004 < http://russie-europe.ens-lsh.fr/article.php3?id_article=58> accessed 18 May 2010.
Vircondolet, Alain, Albert Camus: vrits et lgendes (Paris: ditions du Chne/
Hachette, 1998).
Vulor, Ena C., Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria:
An Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and
Mohammed Dib (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000).
Warren, Thomas H., On the Mistranslation of la Mesure in Camuss Political Thought,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 30:1 (1992), 12330.
Weber, Eugen, Action Franaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).
Weil, Simone, Lagonie dune civilisation vue travers un pome pique, ibid.,
pp.99107.
En quoi consiste linspiration occitanienne, in Le Gnie dOc et lhomme mditerranen, special issue of Cahiers du Sud (Marseille: Rivages, facsimile edition,
1981 [1943]), pp.15058.
Weyembergh, Maurice, Camus et Saint Augustin: la justice et la grce, Perspectives :
revue de lUniversit hbraique de Jrusalem 5 (1998), 13146.
Wilson, Stephen, Action Franaise in French Intellectual Life, Historical Journal
12:2 (1969), 32850.
Wimsatt, W.K. and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy (1946) in David
Newton-De Molina ed., On Literary Intention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1976), pp.113.
Wingeate-Pike, David, Les Franais et la guerre dEspagne (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1975).
Wohl, Robert, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1979).
Xuereb, Jean-Claude, Lcole dAlger, mythe ou ralit?, in (coll.), Audisio, Camus,
Robls, frres de soleil, pp.916.
Ydes, Ali, Camus lAlgrien (Paris: LHarmattan, 2003).
Index
Abbas, Ferhat 137, 219, 27778, 29395,

299
Abbou, Andr 212, 213, 22433 passim,
260, 297
Acadmie franaise 90, 94, 122, 162
Acadmie mditerranenne: see
LHumanisme et la
Mditerrane
Acault, Gustave (Camuss uncle) 13940,
253
Action Franaise (movement) 38, 139, 158,
208
Action Franaise (L) (newspaper) 140,
141, 142
Adamson, Kay 82
Aeschylus 44
Ageron, Charles-Robert, Histoire de
lAlgrie contemporaine 88, 206,
299
Aguedal 71
Alger Rpublicain see Camus and Alger
Rpublicain
Algeria, colonial 58, 59, 66, 20522 passim
see also Arabs; Audisio, colonial
attitudes of; Camus, postcolonial interpretations of;
Saint-Simonians and colonization of Algeria
Algerian War see Camus and Algerian
War
Algerianism 52, 6566, 67, 69, 70, 11920,
133
see also Randau
Alhau, Max 11011
Amiel, Henri-Frdric 192

Amis du Manifeste (Les) 293
Amitis mditerranennes 97
Amrouche, Jean 70
Amsterdam-Pleyel movement 158
anarchism see Bakunin; Camus and;
Stirner
Ando, Maki 262
Antar (possible pseudonym for Camus)
297
anti-Semitism 12122
Algeria 2067, 208, 209
Camus and 229
see also Bertrand and anti-Semitism;
Dreyfus Affair; Maurras and antiSemitism
Appels de lOrient (Les) 5, 177, 18793
Apter, Emily 6162
Arabs (Algerian/North African
Muslims)
Audisio on 133
Bertrand on 95, 120
Camus on 45, 55, 5961, 213, 273,
27475, 293
Aragon, Louis, manifestos signed by 145,
147, 159
Archambault, Paul 22728
Arjakovky, Antoine 197
Arnold, A.J. 244
Asiaticism/asiatisme 154, 170, 174, 182,
191, 195
Association des crivains et artistes
rvolutionnaires (AEAR) 146,
157
326
Association internationale des crivains
pour la dfense de la culture 146,
157, 159
Audisio, Gabriel 11038
Algerianism, and 11920
anti-Semitism, on 122, 209
Bertrand, on 114
Camus, comparison/contrast with
12530
Camuss lecture, and 45, 64
Charlot, and 71
colonial attitudes of 13038
Dfense de lOccident (Pour la), on
11719, 120, 122, 123
East and West 116, 12829
Islam 119, 19293
Latinity 11416
manifesto on Spanish Civil War
signed by 159
Mediterranean humanism of 52,
64
race, and 11415, 120, 12425, 128, 133,
193, 227
Saint-Simonians, compared to 75
utopianism of 67, 131
see also cole dAlger
Audisio, writings of
Amour dAlger 113, 132, 133
Appels de lOrient (Les), contribution
to 19293
Feux vivants 13132
Humanisme et latinit 11617
Jeunesse de la Mditerrane 45, 7273,
74, 97, 98, 12530 passim, 13038
passim
polemical context of 11416, 11925
Sel de Carthage (Le) 119, 276
Sel de la mer (Jeunesse de la
Mditerrane II) 64, 73, 105,
12530 passim, 13038 passim
Rome lunique objet 117, 13435
Index
Synthse mditerranenne (Vers
une) 64, 98, 11719
Augustine, St 229
Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words
22
Baishanski, Jacqueline 61, 164, 202
Bakunin, Mikhail 6, 25460, 26869
Ballard, Jean 64, 72, 9798
Dfense de lOccident 18387
see also Cahiers du Sud; Islam, Ballard
on
barbarism 95 (Bertrand), 134 (Audisio),
13435 (Morand), 195 (Curtius),
197 (Parti Social Franais), 226
(Camus)
invoked in manifestos 123, 147, 160,
161
Massis 170, 175, 191, 196
Maurras 91, 96, 142
see also civilization
Barb, Philippe 288
Barbusse, Henri 149, 157
Clart, and 151, 154
manifestos signed by 147, 151, 155, 156
Barcelona Process see Mediterranean
Union
Bardche, Maurice 162
Barrault, mile, Occident et Orient 8182
Barrs, Maurice 150
Barthes, Roland 14
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann 290
Basset, Guy 69, 72
Baudouin, Axel 89
Beccaria, Cesaria 14
Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts) see
Koselleck
Belamri, Rabah 60
Benda, Julien 157
Benmansour, Leila Benammar 66
Benot, Fernand 97
327
Index
Bentham, Jeremy 15
Brard, Victor 121
Berdyaev, Nikolai 19697
Camus and 198
Bergson, Henri 24041
Berlin, Isaiah 266
Bernard, Augustin 80, 85
Bertrand, Louis
Algerianism, and 65, 69
anti-Semitism and Islamophobia of
9596
Audisio and Camus, contrasted with
6364, 73, 74, 105, 121, 12425
Audisios criticisms of 114, 11920,
12223
civilizing mission, on 9596
Gsell, influence of 121
Hitler, admiration of 94
Latin Africa, and 66, 7273, 9396,
120, 138
Latinity, and 52, 9396
manifestos signed by 145, 152, 160
Maurras, influence of 9394
Mediterranean humanism, on
103104
racism of 124
writings of 94
Bieber, Konrad 15
Birchall, Ian 253
Blum-Viollette Bill see Viollette Bill
Bolshevism 15253, 154
Bonaparte, Napoleon 7678, 108
Bonnet, Marguerite 166
Bosco, Henri 71
Boudraa, Nabil 290
Bourgeois, Yves 217, 25354
Brahimi, Denise 78, 85
Brasillach, Robert 145, 159, 162
Braudel, Fernand 30
Brauquier, Louis 115
Brazza, Pierre Savorgnan de 135, 136
Bre, Germaine 59, 214

Brenan, Gerald 255
Brett, Michael 86
Brunner, Otto et al., Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe 25
Burke, Sean 14
Cadwallader, Barrie 164, 175, 182
Cahiers de Barbarie 71
Cahiers du Mois (Les), see Appels de
lOrient (Les)
Cahiers du Sud 64, 72, 9799, 117, 118,
232
see also Fortunio
Cambridge School 7
origins of 913
see also Pocock; Skinner
Camus, Albert
abstraction, on 43, 125, 24347
passim, 25659, 26162, 265
Algerian independence, opposition
to 56
Algerian War, and 27384 passim
Alger Rpublicain, and 216, 253, 265,
270, 297, 298
Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, and
158, 235
anarchism, and 25260
anti-intellectualism of, early 23847
passim
appropriations of 28990
Audisio, comparison/contrast with
12630
Christianity, and 22729
communism, attitude to 180, 24749
Communist party, expulsion from
21617, 224
Dostoevsky, and 177
Eastern thought, and 16465, 22931
Eurocentrism of 5862, 164, 26365,
270
328
fascism, and 7, 39, 42, 2056, 22526,
235
humanist interpretations of see
humanism, Mediterranean
influences on see Audisio, Bakunin,
Grenier, Malraux, Nietzsche,
Spengler
intellectuals, on 4647
Islam, and 59, 229, 231, 274, 279
Latinity, and 39, 43, 14041, 206, 209
measure, concept of 26667, 272
Mediterranean in thought of 2,
5859, 67, 262, 26673, 291
mother, relationship with 23739
mother and justice, on 250
patrie, on 23336
pense de midi (noonday thought)
26673
postcolonial interpretations of 5152,
5762, 7273, 21920, 28586
race, and 59, 12830, 22627, 28283
rebellion and revolution, on 3031
religion, attitude to 242
sensibility of 237, 248
Spengler, and 17273
terrorism, and 250, 291
well-meaning colonizer, as 5762, 220
see also Antar; Maison de la culture
(Algiers)
Camus, writings of
Andr Malraux ( propos d) 201
Avenir de la tragdie (Sur l) 244
Briha 23940
Cest la justice qui sauvera lAlgrie
de la haine 27374
Chute (La) 242
Chroniques algriennes 210; 27980,
293
Crise en Algrie 274, 293, 301
Dfense de lHomme rvolt 26667,
271
Index
Dernier jour dun mort-n (Le) 241
Deux rponses Emmanuel dAstier
de la Vigerie 47, 248
Entre oui et non 234
Entretien sur la rvolte 271
Envers et lendroit (L) 40, 41, 71, 246,
282
tat de sige (L) 262
tranger (L) 66, 28283
Exil dHlne (L) 267
Express (L), articles on Algeria for
27376
Homme rvolt (L) 4647, 51, 156,
225, 23132, 25658, 26673
Il faut librer les dtenus politiques
indignes 298
Intuitions 240
Justes (Les) 272
Justice et lempire (La) 298
Lettre dAlger 297
Louis Raingeard 23639
Malencontreuses poursuites (De)
298
Mtaphysique chrtienne et noplatonisme 42, 44, 22728, 276
Misre de la Kabylie 214, 265, 273
Mort heureuse (La) 2023
Musique (Sur la) 24246
Noces 48, 227
Noces Tipasa106, 121
Peste (La) 52, 26162
Petit guide pour des villes sans pass
226
Pome 241
poem on Mediterranean 99, 123, 140
Prface LEspagne Libre 255
Premier homme (Le) 234, 28184
Rebel (The) (tr. of LHomme rvolt)
15
Rflexions sur la gnrosit 293302
Rvolte dans les Asturies 70, 207, 255
Index
Rivages, preface to 6, 26365, 267
Voix du quartier pauvre (Les) 254
see also Manifeste des intellectuels
dAlgrie en faveur du projet
Viollette
Camus, Catherine (senior) 236
Camus, Lucien 23334
Carrre dEncausse, Hlne 90
Carroll, David 5758, 63, 284
Carthage 73, 118, 121, 128
Catharism 232
Catholicism 42, 54, 56, 58, 22829, 232
Caves, Jean see Grenier, Jean
Centre universitaire mditerranen
99100
Chabot, Jacques 267
Chant des Girondins (Le) (Dumas) 234
Charbit, Denis 222
Charles, Daniel 16465
Charlot, Edmond 65, 6972, 105
Chaulet-Achour, Christine 290
Chevalier, Michel, Systme de la
Mditerrane 7980, 100
Christianity 4142, 5859
see also Catholicism; Protestantism
civilization 14748, 15253, 154, 156
culture, and 17273
see also barbarism
civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice)
Abbas and 299
Audisio and 134, 135, 13637
Bertrand and 9596
Bonaparte and 77
Camus and 58, 299
Intellectuels aux cts de la patrie
(Les) and 156
Manifeste des intellectuels dAlgrie
and 213
Saint-Simonians and 81, 82, 84
Sarkozy and 108, 109
Clart 151, 154, 155
329
Claudel, Paul, Connaissance de lEst 188
pro-Franco manifesto signed by 160
Clt, Ren-Jean 71
collectivism 54, 62, 205, 25253, 254, 255
Comit de Vigilance des Intellectuels
Antifascistes 207, 220
Commune 14547, 157, 159
Communist party 205, 236
see also Camus and Communist party,
Parti Communiste Algrien
concepts
asymmetric counter-concepts 34
contested 25, 14561 passim
relationship with texts and discourses
2627, 29, 289
semantic fields, and 26
Congrs pour la dfense de la culture 157,
160
Conklin, Alice 77
Coomaraswamy, Ananda 18182
Cooper, Frederick 288
Cornick, Martyn 200
Coulet, Michle 184, 185
Crisis in Algeria (March of Time newsreel) 209
Croix de Feu 150, 158, 206, 207
see also Parti Social Franais
Crusades 45, 61, 109, 115
Cryle, Peter 262
culture 14748, 156, 16061
civilization, and 17273
see also defence of culture
Culture en danger (La) 15960
Curtis, Michael 139
Curtius, Ernst-Robert 174
Daguzan, Jean-Franois 106, 109
Davison, Peter (on Orwells 1984) 15
Davison, Ray 2, 6768, 177, 262
Dclaration dindpendance de lesprit
151
330
Decremps, Marcel 91
defence of culture 15657, 159
Dfense de lOccident (see Massis)
Dfense de lOccident (Pour la) (manifesto) 45, 14449, 150
broader argumentative context of
14958
Camuss reference to 43
notion of man 160
signatories of 145
see also Audisio
Djeux, Jean 6667, 112, 131, 133
Dermenghem, mile 97, 98
Description de lgypte 78
Dobrenn, Marguerite 211
Dondin-Payre, Monique 81
Dorgels, Roland, Les Croix de bois
23435
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 177, 17879
douars 8485
Drake, David 155
Dreyfus affair 139, 140, 149, 150, 155
Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre 145, 160
Dugas, Guy 277
Dunn, John 10, 30
Dunwoodie, Peter 2, 72, 74, 177, 261
Audisio, on 132
Camuss Eurocentrism, on 62, 26364
cole dAlger, on 69
Premier homme (Le), on 284
Duroux Bill 300
East, German interest in 17475, 18283
East and West
Abbas 27778
Audisio 115, 121, 122, 138
Audisio and Camus, contrasting
views of 110, 12830
Camus 4445, 5960, 105, 14849,
2004, 27677, 28081
Fabre 63, 76
Index
Ghon 154
Maurras 91
Reclus 8788
Saint-Simonians 7882
Sarkozy 107, 109
Snac 277
Valry 1012
EastWest debate
current 288
1920s 154, 163204 passim
studies of 16566
cole dAlger 4, 45, 52, 6566, 6874,
112
see also Charlot
cole romane 141
crivains et artistes contre la guerre
dthiopie 146
Egypt, Bonapartes expedition to 7678
Saint-Simonians expedition to 7879
Eksteins, Modris 167
El Okbi, Sheikh 216, 298
Emerit, Marcel 82
Enfantin, Barthlemy-Antonin 7879,
8081
Colonisation de lAlgrie 81, 85
Entente (L) 29394
Ethiopian War
Audisio on 135
Camuss references to 43, 44, 48
see also Dfense de lOccident (Pour
la)
toile Nord-Africaine (ENA) 214, 21617
Euripides 44, 24344, 245
Europe 116, 119, 14546, 154
Fabre, Thierry 291
France et la Mditerrane (La) 52,
67, 72, 75105 passim
fascism 53, 54, 55, 105, 140, 144, 158
in Algeria 2059
see also Camus and fascism
331
Index
Faure, Jean-Pierre 125
Flibrige movement 9091, 9394
Feraoun, Mouloud 52
Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha 910
First International 26869
First World War 41, 167
see also Camus, Lucien
Fisher, David James 151
FLN (Front de Libration Nationale) 218,
219, 250, 263, 275, 280, 294
Foley, John 220
Fortunio 183
Foucault, Michel 11, 14
Fouchet, Max-Pol 70, 23940
Foxlee, Neil 2, 221, 293
Francis of Assisi, St 42, 55, 231, 232
Franco, Francisco 155, 207
see also Spanish Civil War
Frminville, Claude de 70, 146, 201, 211,
216, 253, 295
Gallie, W.B. 25
Gandhi, Mahatma 175, 179
Garfitt, J.S.T. 99
Gay-Crosier, Raymond 2, 172
Ghon, Henri 154
Gide, Andr 157, 176, 188
to 190
manifestos signed by 145, 159
Retour de lU.R.S.S. 224
Gillouin, Ren, Le Destin de lOccident
283
Girard, Maurice 217
Girardet, Raoul 220
Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur de, Essai sur
lingalit des races 124, 187
Gomez, Manuel 290
Gonzales, Jean-Jacques 68
Gourdon, Hubert et al. 6566
Gourvitch, Jean-Paul 106
Grandeffe, Arthur de 83
Greece, Ancient 43, 7273, 82, 92
Grenier, Jean 5, 6, 70, 231
communism, and25052
EastWest debate, and 163, 17781
Gunon, on 18081
Mediterranean humanism, on 104
Russian nihilism, on 17879
Grenier, writings of
Albert Camus, souvenirs 281
to 192
Crise de lesprit europen (La)
18081
Cum apparuerit 45
Essai sur lesprit dorthodoxie 49,
25052
les (Les) 40, 71, 199201, 23031
Inspirations mditerranennes 99
Nihilisme europen et les appels de
lOrient (Le) 17780
Sagesse de Lourmarin 4546, 97
Santa Cruz et autres paysages africains
70
Schopenhauer et lInde 242
Sur lInde 199200
Groethuysen, Bernard 17172
Gsell, Stphane 121
Guaino, Henry 107, 109
Gunon, Ren 18081, 18486
and Les Appels de lOrient 189
Gurin, Jeanyves 67, 274
Guibert, Armand 71
Haddour, Azzedine 65, 67, 205, 213
Hadj, Messali 214, 21819
see also Parti du Peuple Algrien
Halvorsen, Kjell H. 84
Hamouda, Ouahiba 98
harkis 108
Hegel, G.W.F. 48, 244, 248, 251
332
hermeneutic circle 23
Hitler, Adolf 53
Hodgkin, Katharine 289
Hollahan, Eugene 262
Holy Roman Empire 39, 40, 108, 203
Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace
59
Horowitz, Louise 290
Hughes, Edward J. 2, 274, 29192
humanism, Mediterranean
Audisio 11617, 123
Ballard and Cahiers du Sud 97
Bertrand and Jean-Desthieux 1034
Camus 51, 5356, 291
Grenier 104
Sarkozy 1089
Valry 99102
see also Ohana
Humanisme et la Mditerrane (L)
(conference) 97, 1024, 116, 117,
118, 12223
Huntington, Samuel P. 288
Ifversen, Jan 165
Ikdam 21516, 29495
India 40, 58, 199201 (Grenier)
indigne, connotations of 21011
intellectuals 146, 148, 155
Intellectuels aux cts de la Patrie (Les)
15556
intelligence 145, 148, 15253, 16061
see also Camus, anti-intellectualism of
intention, authorial 1315
intentional fallacy, see Wimsatt and
Beardsley
Internationale de lesprit (Pour l) 151
Inwood, Michael 244
Islam
Audisio on 119, 19293
Ballard on 97, 98, 186
Sarkozy and 107, 109
Index
see also Bertrand, anti-Semitism and
Islamophobia of; Camus and
Islam
Jean-Darrouy, Lucienne 164, 2056
Jean-Desthieux, Franois 97, 1034
Jeune Mditerrane (Maison de la culture
newsletter) 3738, 98, 110,
21011
Jeunes Algriens 218
Jomard, Edm-Franois 78
Judaism 5859
Kaddache, Mahfoud 209
Kaergi, Pascal 77, 79
Kassoul, Acha 290
Kaufmann, Walter 231
Kedward, Roderick 150, 155
Kennedy, Ellen Conroy 37, 39
Kennedy, Sean 207
Keyserling, Hermann 17475
Klein, Wolfgang 157
Koselleck, Reinhart 3
asymmetric counter-concepts 34
Begriffsgeschichte 2528
concepts and discourses 27
Pocock as reception historians, and
2829
Skinner, and 28, 29
LaCapra, Dominick, critique of Skinner
3233
Lambert, Abb Gabriel 206, 208
Lardinois, Roland 166
Laslett, Peter 9
Pocock, influence on 1011
Skinner, influence on 1213
Latin Africa 93; see also Bertrand
Latinity 52
Audisio on 114, 116, 11924, 209
Audisio and Camus on 12627
Index
Algeria, in 2059 (see also Unions
Latines)
Ballard and 98, 18487
Bertrand 52, 9396
Camus on 39, 43, 14041, 206, 209
Curtius on Germanism and 195
Jean-Desthieux on 1034
Massis 183
Maurras 91, 13944 passim
Mistral 9091
Mussolini 144
nineteenth-century France, in 83
Spanish Civil War, in 16061
see also Latin Africa
Laurens, Henry 77
Lauriol, Marc 56
Lefvre, Frdric 175
Lenin, Vladimir 178
Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul 88
Le Sueur, James D. 289
Leval, Gaston 258
Levallois, Anne 86
Levallois, Michel 7576, 77, 8388 passim
Lvi, Sylvain 200
Lvi-Valensi, Jacqueline 67, 110, 21314,
23738, 24041
Ligue des Droits de lHomme 220
Locke, John 9, 10
Lorcin, Patricia 62, 64, 93, 121
Lottman, Herbert 21516 and passim
Lucas, Philippe 93
Lunel, Armand 97, 102
Luther, Martin 42, 5556, 23132
Lutte sociale (La) 161, 208, 215
Lyautey, Hubert 108, 156
Maison de la culture
(Algiers) 3738, 161, 21014, 224,
29596
(Paris) 145, 146, 157
see also Jeune Mditerrane
333
Malraux, Andr 5, 157
Condition humaine (La) 2012
review of Dfense de lOccident
19899
speech in Algeria 207
Tentation de lOccident (La) and
EastWest debate 19495
Manifeste aux intellectuels espagnols 161
Manifeste des intellectuels dAlgrie en
faveur du projet Viollette 21114,
215, 29596
Manifestos
Ethiopian War 145
Rif War 15456
Spanish Civil War15961
see also Culture en danger (La);
Dclaration dindpendance de
lesprit; Dfense de lOccident
(Pour la); crivains et artistes
contre la guerre dthiopie;
Intellectuels aux cts de la
Patrie (Les); Internationale
de lesprit (Pour l); Manifeste
aux intellectuels espagnols;
Manifeste des intellectuels
dAlgrie en faveur du projet
Viollette; Rvolution dabord et
toujours! (La); Travailleurs intellectuels aux cts du proltariat
contre la guerre du Maroc (Les)
Maougal, Mohamed Lakhdar 290
Margerrison, Christine 65, 72
Marin, Lou 253
Marshall, Peter 256
Marx, Karl 26, 26869
Marx-Scouras, Danielle 291
Massis, Henri 100, 149, 17576
Appels de lOrient (Les), and 188,
19091
Camus, mirror-image of 166, 17677
334
chauvinism of 170
later career of 162
Revue universelle (La) 154
Rif War 27879
Rolland, attacks on 151, 170, 18182,
196
Spanish Civil War 159
Massis, writings of
Cit de lesprit (La), 16971
Dfense de lOccident 150, 162, 165,
19599, 283
Occident et son destin (L) 283
Offensive germano-asiatique contre
la culture occidentale (L) 18183
Parti de lintelligence (Pour un)
15253
see also Dfense de lOccident (Pour
la)
Masson-Oursel, Paul 189
Mathieu, Anne 157
Mauclair, Camille 11819
Mauriac, Franois 156
Maurras, Charles 3839, 43, 52, 55, 63,
149, 150
Audisios references to 115, 12223
anti-Semitism of 9192
Bertrand influenced by 9394
Camus, compared/contrasted with
14244
civilization and barbarism, on 19596
integral nationalism, and 54
Latinity, and 13944
manifestos signed by 145, 152, 160
racism of 120
Spanish Civil War, and 159
McCarthy, Patrick 217
Mediterranean humanism see humanism,
Mediterranean
Mediterranean Union / Union for the
Mediterranean 106, 109, 28788
Index
Memmi, Albert 54, 57, 220
messianism 181
Min, Kou Houng 179
Mino, Hiroshi 165
Mistral, Frdric 9091, 124
Mithouard, Adrien 154
Modler, Karl W. 267
Montgomery, Geraldine F. 290
Morand, Paul 118, 13435
Moras, Jean 141
Moroccan War see Rif War
Mulligan, Lotte et al., critique of Skinner
3132
multi-contextualist approach 3, 3435,
289
Mumma, Howard 242
Muret, Maurice 174
Muslim Congress 214
Mussolini, Benito 43, 144, 14647
Audisio references to 117, 135
Camus references to 43
see also Ethiopian War
myth(s), 6668, 24546
Nacer-Khodja, Hamid 52
Namia, Robert 218
Napoleon III 83, 86, 108
nationalism, integral see Maurras
Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 231
Birth of Tragedy (The) 24346
Ecce Homo 244
Grenier, quoted by 178
Nizan, Paul 146
North Africa, as meeting-point of East
and West 44, 55, 60, 276
Novello, Samantha 198
OBrien, Conor Cruise 45, 52, 57, 6162,
164, 291
Ohana, David 5356, 291
Orme, Mark 284
335
Index
Orwell, George 15
Oswald, John 290
Oulmas (Ulama) 216
Ouzegane, Amar 21920
Padula, mile 217
Paire, Alain 97
Pakenham, Thomas 136
Palante, Georges 254
Palonen, Kari 6, 18
Parti Communiste Algrien (PCA)
21617, 224
Parti de lintelligence (Pour un) 15253
Parti du Peuple Algrien (PPA) 29697
Parti Populaire Franais (PPF) 208
Parti Social Franais (PSF) 208
Paxton, Robert 61
Pelletier, Yannick 254
Pelloutier, Fernand 253
Pervill, Guy 264, 282
Ptain, Philippe 155, 162
Phalange (La) 118, 119
Pia, Pascal 253
Pirenne, Henri 109
Planche, Jean-Louis 206, 207, 212, 274
Pocock, J.G.A. 3
Begriffsgeschichte, criticisms of 2627
complex texts 22
discourses or languages of political
thought 1012, 14, 16, 20
Koselleck as reception historians, and
2829
Laslett, influenced by 1012
Skinner, on 8
synchronic and diachronic analysis,
need for 30
Poirier, Ren 164
Popular Front 149, 161, formation of 158
Postcolonialism 288
see also Camus, postcolonial interpretations of
Pour la dfense de lOccident see

Dfense de lOccident (Pour la)
Protestantism 42, 56, 142
Pouthier, Jean-Luc 144
Prochasson, Christophe 170
Quilliot, Roger 51, 158
Racine(-Furlaud), Nicole 146, 151, 157
Radical party 158
Randau, Robert 65
Bertrand, distinguished from 66
Raymond, Marcel 141
reception, reception history 11, 13, 14, 16,
2829, 34
Reclus, lise 64, 8790, 100
Reclus, Onsime 8990
Reconquista 208
Rgnier, Philippe 78, 79,
Reichardt, Rolf 26
Renan, Ernest 73
Rvolution dabord et toujours! (La)
156
Rvolution surraliste 156
Revue universelle (La) 100, 154
Ricoeur, Paul 131
Rif War 15456, 278
Rivire, Jacques 153
Robls, Emmanuel 55, 70
Rocque, Colonel de la 207
Roeming, Robert F. 2
Rolland, Romain 149
anti-fascist conferences organized
by 157
First World War 151
manifestos written or signed by
15152, 155, 159
see also Massis: Rolland, attacks on
Rome, Ancient see Latinity
Rosebury, Brian 16
Roy, Jules 70
336
Rozis, Augustin 2067
Rufat, Hlne 69, 70
Russia 46
Said, Edward 291
Camus and the French Imperial
Experience 5758, 63, 218
Orientalism 18, 63, 77, 88, 188
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy,
comte de 80
Saint-Simonians 4, 52, 64, 75, 7677,
7885
colonization of Algeria, and 8086
see also Barrault, Chevalier, Enfantin,
Saint-Simon, Urbain
Salazar, Antonio 162
Sapiro, Gisle 161
Sarkozy, Nicolas 1069, 288, 289
see also Islam, Sarkozy and
Sarrochi, Jean 51, 59, 173, 27273
Savelli, Denis [Dany] 170
Schoelcher, Victor 88
Schopenhauer, Arthur 24243
Sebastin, J.F. 28
Section de Toulon de la Ligue des Droits
de lHomme 220
Sedgwick, Mark 180
Seillan, Jean-Marie 141
Sellam, Sadek 135
Snac, Jean 277
snatus-consultes 8486
Sergent, Alain 257
Stif uprising 221, 27374, 293
Shackleton, Robert 15
Shestov, Lev 175, 17677
Shuzo, Kuki 16465
Siblot, Paul 211, 274
Sirinelli, Jean-Franois 14561 passim
Skinner, Quentin 78
approach of 1922
critiques of 23, 3133
Index
evaluative-descriptive terms 24
influences and counter-influences on
1213, 2930
intellectual, ideological and argumentative contexts 21
Koselleck, and 28, 29
need for properly historical approach
1618
need to refine approach of 2330, 285
texts and contexts 3
Smets, Paul-F. 2, 276
Socit Franaise pour la Protection des
Indignes des Colonies 88
Socrates 24344, 245
Sol, Robert 77
Sorel, Georges 251
Spanish Civil War 44, 53, 55, 128, 15961,
25556
reaction in Algeria to 208
Spengler, Oswald 17174
Spiquel, Agns 267
Stirner, Max 254
Stock, Phyllis H. 150
Stora, Benjamin 212, 214, 215
Sud 240
Surrealists 156
Tagore, Rabindranath 179
Talbayev, Edwige Tamalet 67
Tarcov, Nathan, on Skinner 23
Tarrow, Susan 59
Tmime, mile 63, 76, 87
Mediterranean intellectuals of 1930s
71
Mediterranean utopia as ideal 67
Saint-Simonians 79, and Audisio,
Camus 75, 76
Urbain 84
Teroni, Sandra 157
textualism 3, 19
Thody, Philip 37, 39
337
Index
Thomas, Paul 268
Thompson, Martyn P. 14
Thorez, Maurice 208, 215
Thornberry, Robert S. 194
Toda, Michel 166, 196
Todd, Olivier 217 and passim
Todorov, Tzvetan 80
Tolstoy, Leo 17879
Toumi, Alek Baylee 3
Travailleurs intellectuels aux cts du
proltariat contre la guerre du
Maroc (Les) 155
Trbitsch, Michel 165
Tuck, Richard 9
Ulama see Oulmas
Union for the Mediterranean see
Mediterranean Union
Union franco-musulmane 295
Unions latines 206, 207, 208, 209
Urbain, Ismal 8386
compared to Camus 7576, 86
Valry, Paul
Appels de lOrient (Les), and 18990
Centre universitaire mditerranen
(Le) 99100, 115
Cimetire marin (Le) 99
Crise de lesprit (La) 100, 16769,
175, 282
East/West relationship 88, 101,
16769
Europe 100102, 168
manifesto on Rif War signed by 156

Mediterranean humanism 64, 97,
99102
Note (ou lEuropen) 1002
racism of 102, 169
Varenne, Charles de La 83
Vtillard, Roger 221
Vichy regime 150
Victoroff, Tatiana 197
Viggiani, Carl 164
Viollette, Maurice 212, 220
Viollette Bill (Projet Viollette) 5, 212, 215,
296, 300
Virgil 123
Vulor, Ena C. 6465, 72, 218
Wagner, Richard 24546
Warnier, loi 85
Warren, Thomas H. 267
Weber, Eugen 12021, 139
Weil, Simone 232
Weyembergh, Maurice 51, 142
Wilson, Stephen 94, 139
Wimsatt and Beardsley (intentional
fallacy) 17
Wingeate-Pike, David 160
Wohl, Robert 150
Xenophon 4748
Xuereb, Jean-Claude 69
Zabloudovsky, Rgina 182
Zananiri, Gaston 104

Edited by Peter Collier
This series aims to publish monographs, editions or collections of

papers based on recent research into modern French Literature. It
welcomes contributions from academics, researchers and writers in
British and Irish universities in particular.
Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone
writing of the twentieth century, whose formal experiments and
revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of
literary forms, from the thematic autobiographies of Michel Leiris and
Bernard Nol to the magic realism of French Caribbean writers.
The idea that identities are constructed rather than found, and
that the self is an area to explore rather than a given pretext, runs
through much of modern French literature, from Proust, Gide and
Apollinaire to Kristeva, Barthes, Duras, Germain and Roubaud.
This series reflects a concern to explore the turn-of-thecentury turmoil in ideas and values that is expressed in the works of
theorists like Lacan, Irigaray and Bourdieu and to follow through the
impact of current ideologies such as feminism and postmodernism on
the literary and cultural interpretation and presentation of the self,
whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, gender, autobiography,
cinema, fiction and poetry, or in newer forms like performance art.
The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists,
comparative studies, and interdisciplinary projects, including those
where art and cinema intersect with literature.
Volume 1

Victoria Best & Peter Collier (eds): Powerful Bodies.

Performance in French Cultural Studies.
220 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-56-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4239-9
Volume 2

Julia Waters: Intersexual Rivalry.

A Reading in Pairs of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Volume 3

Sarah Cooper: Relating to Queer Theory.

Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig
and Cixous.
231 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-46-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-4636-X
Volume 4

Julia Prest & Hannah Thompson (eds): Corporeal Practices.

(Re)figuring the Body in French Studies.
Volume 5

Victoria Best: Critical Subjectivities.

Identity and Narrative in the Work
of Colette and Marguerite Duras.
Volume 6

David Houston Jones: The Body Abject: Self and Text in

Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.
Volume 7

Robin MacKenzie: The Unconscious in Prousts A la recherche

du temps perdu.
Volume 8

Rosemary Chapman: Siting the Quebec Novel.

The Representation of Space in Francophone Writing in Quebec.
Volume 9

Gill Rye: Reading for Change.

Interactions between Text Identity in Contemporary French
Womens Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant).
Volume 10 Jonathan Paul Murphy: Prousts Art.

Painting, Sculpture and Writing in A la recherche du temps perdu.

Volume 11 Julia Dobson: Hlne Cixous and the Theatre.

The Scene of Writing.

Volume 12

Emily Butterworth & Kathryn Robson (eds): Shifting Borders.

Theory and Identity in French Literature.
VIII + 208 pages. 2001.
ISBN 3-906766-86-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5602-0
Volume 13 Victoria Korzeniowska: The Heroine as Social Redeemer in

the Plays of Jean Giraudoux.

144 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-92-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5608-X
Volume 14 Kay Chadwick: Alphonse de Chteaubriant:

Catholic Collaborator.

Volume 15 Nina Bastin: Queneaus Fictional Worlds.

Volume 16 Sarah Fishwick: The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir.

Volume 17 Simon Kemp & Libby Saxton (eds): Seeing Things.

Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies.

Volume 18 Kamal Salhi (ed.): French in and out of France.

Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue.

Volume 19 Genevieve Shepherd: Simone de Beauvoirs Fiction.

A Psychoanalytic Rereading.

Volume 20 Lucille Cairns (ed.): Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France.

Volume 21 Wendy Goolcharan-Kumeta: My Mother, My Country.

Reconstructing the Female Self in Guadeloupean Womens Writing.

Volume 22 Patricia OFlaherty: Henry de Montherlant (18951972).

A Philosophy of Failure.

Volume 23 Katherine Ashley (ed.): Prix Goncourt, 19032003: essais critiques.

Volume 24 Julia Horn & Lynsey Russell-Watts (eds): Possessions.

Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory.

223 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-005-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5924-0
Volume 25 Steve Wharton: Screening Reality.

French Documentary Film during the German Occupation.

Volume 26 Frdric Royall (ed.): Contemporary French Cultures and Societies.

Volume 27 Tom Genrich: Authentic Fictions.

Cosmopolitan Writing of the Troisime Rpublique, 19081940.

Volume 28 Maeve Conrick & Vera Regan: French in Canada.

Language Issues.

186 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03-910142-9
Volume 29 Kathryn Banks & Joseph Harris (eds): Exposure.

Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations.

Volume 30 Emma Gilby & Katja Haustein (eds): Space.

New Dimensions in French Studies.

Volume 31

Rachel Killick (ed.): Uncertain Relations.

Some Configurations of the Third Space in Francophone Writings
of the Americas and of Europe.
Volume 32 Sarah F. Donachie & Kim Harrison (eds): Love and Sexuality.

New Approaches in French Studies.

Volume 33 Michal Abecassis: The Representation of Parisian Speech in

the Cinema of the 1930s.

Volume 34 Benedict ODonohoe: Sartres Theatre: Acts for Life.

Volume 35 Moya Longstaffe: The Fiction of Albert Camus. A Complex Simplicity.

Volume 36 Arnaud Beaujeu: Matire et lumire dans le thtre de Samuel Beckett:

Autour des notions de trivialit, de spiritualit et dautre-l.

377 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0206-8
Volume 37 Shirley Ann Jordan: Contemporary French Womens Writing:

Womens Visions, Womens Voices, Womens Lives.

Volume 38 Neil Foxlee: Albert Camuss The New Mediterranean Culture:

A Text and its Contexts.

349 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0207-4
Volume 39 Michael ODwyer & Michle Raclot: Le Journal de Julien Green:

Miroir dune me, miroir dun sicle.

289 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-319-9
Volume 40 Thomas Baldwin: The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust.

Volume 41 Charles Forsdick & Andrew Stafford (eds): The Modern Essay

in French: Genre, Sociology, Performance.

Volume 42 Peter Dunwoodie: Francophone Writing in Transition.

Algeria 19001945.

Volume 43 Emma Webb (ed.): Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives.

Volume 44 Jrme Game (ed.): Porous Boundaries : Texts and Images in

Twentieth-Century French Culture.

164 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-568-7
Volume 45 David Gascoigne: The Games of Fiction: Georges Perec and Modern

French Ludic Narrative.

Volume 46 Derek ORegan: Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations:

The Intertextual Appeal of Maryse Cond.

329 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-578-7
Volume 47 Jennifer Hatte: La langue secrte de Jean Cocteau: la mythologie

personnelle du pote et lhistoire cache des Enfants terribles.

332 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-707-0
Volume 48 Loraine Day: Writing Shame and Desire: The Work of Annie Ernaux.

315 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-275-4
Volume 49-50 Forthcoming.
Volume 51 Isabelle McNeill & Bradley Stephens (eds): Transmissions:

Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema.

221 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-734-6
Volume 52 Marie-Christine Lala: Georges Bataille, Pote du rel.

178 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-738-4
Volume 53 Patrick Crowley: Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names.

242 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-744-5
Volume 54 Nicole Thatcher & Ethel Tolansky (eds): Six Authors in Captivity.

Literary Responses to the Occupation of France during World War II.

Volume 55 Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze & Floriane Place-Verghnes (eds):

Potiques de la parodie et du pastiche de 1850 nos jours.

361 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-743-7
Volume 56 Forthcoming.
Volume 57 Helen Vassallo : Jeanne Hyvrard, Wounded Witness:

The Body Politic and the Illness Narrative.

243 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-017-9
Volume 58 Marie-Claire Barnet, Eric Robertson & Nigel Saint (eds):

Robert Desnos. Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century.

390 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03911-019-5
Volume 59 Michael ODwyer (ed.): Julien Green, Diariste et Essayiste.

259 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-016-2
Volume 60 Kate Marsh: Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian

Decolonization 19191962.

238 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-033-9
Volume 61 Lucy Bolton, Gerri Kimber, Ann Lewis and Michael Seabrook (eds):

Framed! : Essays in French Studies.

235 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-043-8
Volume 64 Sam Coombes: The Early Sartre and Marxism.

330 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-115-2
Volume 67 Alison S. Fell (ed.): French and francophone women facing war /

Les femmes face la guerre.

301 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-332-3
Volume 68 Elizabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (eds):

Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture.

238 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-349-1
Volume 69 Georgina Evans and Adam Kay (eds): Threat: Essays in French

Literature, Thought and Visual Culture.

248 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-357-6
Volume 70 John McCann: Michel Houellebecq: Author of our Times.

229 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-373-6
Volume 71 Jenny Murray: Remembering the (Post)Colonial Self:

Memory and Identity in the Novels of Assia Djebar.

258 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-367-5
Volume 72 Susan Bainbrigge: Culture and Identity in Belgian Francophone

Writing: Dialogue, Diversity and Displacement.

230 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-382-8
Volume 75 Elodie Lagt: LOrient du signe: Rves et drives chez Victor Segalen,

Henri Michaux et Emile Cioran.

242 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-402-3
Volume 76 Suzanne Dow: Madness in Twentieth-Century French Womens

Writing: Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard.

217 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-540-2
Volume 77 Myriem El Mazi: Marguerite Duras ou lcriture du devenir.

228 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-561-7
Volume 79 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins (eds): Guilt and Shame:

Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture.

231 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-563-1
Volume 80

Vera Regan and Caitrona N Chasaide (eds): Language Practices

and Identity Construction by Multilingual Speakers of French L2:
The Acquisition of Sociostylistic Variation.
189 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-569-3
Volume 81 Margaret-Anne Hutton (ed.): Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in

Contemporary French and Francophone Womens Writing.

294 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-567-9
Volume 82 Elise Hugueny-Lger: Annie Ernaux, une potique de la

transgression.

269 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-833-5
Volume 83 Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith (eds):

Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture.

359 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-846-5
Volume 84 Adam Watt (ed./d.): Le Temps retrouv Eighty Years After/80 ans

aprs: Critical Essays/Essais critiques.

349 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-843-4
Volume 85 Louise Hardwick (ed.): New Approaches to Crime in French

Literature, Culture and Film.

237 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-850-2
Volume 87 Amaleena Daml and Aurlie LHostis (eds): The Beautiful and the

Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture.

237 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-900-4
Volume 88 Alistair Rolls (ed.): Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction.

212 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-957-8
Volume 89 Brnice Bonhomme: Claude Simon : une criture en cinma.

359 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-983-7
Volume 90 Barbara Lebrun and Jill Lovecy (eds): Une et divisible? Plural Identities

in Modern France.

258 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0123-7
Volume 91

Pierre-Alexis Mvel & Helen Tattam (eds): Language and its Contexts/
Le Langage et ses contextes: Transposition and Transformation of
Meaning?/Transposition et transformation du sens ?
Forthcoming. ISBN 978-3-0343-0128-2
Volume 93 Michal Abecassis et Gudrun Ledegen (ds): Les Voix des Franais

Volume 1: travers lhistoire, lcole et la presse.

372 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0170-1
Volume 94 Michal Abecassis et Gudrun Ledegen (ds): Les Voix des Franais

Volume 2: en parlant, en crivant.

481 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0171-8

Foxlee, Neil - Albert Camus's The New Mediterranean Culture. A Text and Its Contexts

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Foxlee, Neil - Albert Camus's The New Mediterranean Culture. A Text and Its Contexts

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Modern French Identities

Modern French Identities

Neil Foxlee is a Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University and

These various interpretations are based on reading the text of The

Neil Foxlee Albert Camuss The New Mediterranean Culture

On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural

Modern French Identities

Modern French Identities

Neil Foxlee is a Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University and

These various interpretations are based on reading the text of The

Neil Foxlee Albert Camuss The New Mediterranean Culture

On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural

M odern F rench I dentities

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

This book is dedicated to my mother

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

The New Mediterranean Culture: An Annotated Translation

Humanist and Postcolonial Approaches

The Context of French Discourses on the Mediterranean

Gabriel Audisios Mid-1930s Writings on the Mediterranean

The Interwar French Intellectual Debate on Culture

The Interwar EastWest Debate

The Algerian Political Context

The Legacy of The New Mediterranean Culture in

Appendix: Reflections on Generosity (1939)

I would like to thank the following for their invaluable assistance in my

Full publication details will be found in the bibliography.

Albert Camus 1, etc. (numbers of the Albert Camus series of the

This book applies a multi-contextualist approach to La nouvelle culture

Given the vast amount of secondary literature on Camus,2 it should be

See Robert F. Roeming, Camus: A Bibliography Microform, 15th edn (Milwaukee:

Chapter 2 consists of an annotated translation of La nouvelle culture

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

The Choice of a Methodology

As noted in my introduction to Chapter 2, Camuss lecture was printed under the

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge:

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

with the complementary approaches of Pocock and the German school of

The Origins of the Cambridge School

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

complex structure comprising a vocabulary; a grammar; a rhetoric; and a

J.G.A. Pocock, Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture? Comment on a

historical contexts [].14 This second emphasis was exemplified in Pococks

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

is indebted to Lasletts introduction to the Two Treatises in two ways:

The Choice of Skinners Approach and the

M&C, 327, note 12.

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

interpretations on what they believe to be reliable editions and in the case

Seeing Things Their Way:

From a viewpoint that can be regarded as either radically sceptical or simply

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

to require precisely this. Equally, however, we can never be certain that we

The importance of this point may best be brought out by substituting

Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin,

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

Pocock, The Reconstruction of Discourse, p.84.

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

As in Meaning and Understanding, however, Skinner rejected crude

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach

Refining Skinners Approach

Seen in this light, the task of the historically minded interpreter

Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach