The Trial of Albert Camus

Abstract

The fiftieth anniversary of Camus’ death in 2010 was largely ignored in his native Algeria, reflecting the critical response to Camus’ writings that regards him as a colonialist writer and apologist for the French domination of his native Algeria. This critique also claims that Camus’ colonial attitudes are hidden and reinforced by a European attitude that sees him as dealing first and foremost with universal questions about the human predicament and existential isolation. However, Camus’ journalism shows an Algerian closely identified with the destiny of all the peoples of Algeria, and his novel The Outsider contains sufficient indications that, whatever its existential importance, in the concrete situation of Camus’ Algeria the Arab has the precise status of outsider.

Great was the embarrassment when in early 2010, the fiftieth anniversary of his untimely death in a car accident on 4 January 1960, some people in Algeria planned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Camus’ death! No one wanted to know anything about the occasion. Requests for support sat unanswered on desks in the Ministry of Culture. Cultural services in the large cities went silent. Even the French cultural centres adopted a low profile. A document, ‘For the attention of all anti-colonialists’, was being distributed in universities, to newspapers and to journalists, alerting them to the ‘Camus festival’ that would be, it said, tantamount to the rehabilitation of the old discourse of French Algeria.¹

In Algeria, the country of his birth and the setting for his two most famous works, L’étranger and La peste, as well as of several shorter ones, Camus’ perspective is still perceived as that of the colonialist. It is a fact that should come as no surprise. As long ago as 1970 the American critic Conor Cruise O’Brien offered a detailed and now celebrated critique of Camus in which he shows Camus to be a man committed to the superiority of the European perspective.² O’Brien’s thesis is that whatever agonising Camus experienced over the war in Algeria, from 1954 until his death in 1960, he remained committed to a French Algeria, because of his conviction that only in this way could Algeria be ‘improved’. O’Brien quotes Camus’ famous – or infamous, as most now consider it – 1957 speech at the Salle Wagram in Paris:

The defects of the West are countless, its crimes and its faults real. But in the final analysis, let’s not forget that we are the only people who hold that power of improvement and emancipation which resides in the genius of freedom.³

You will find similar passages in Camus’ writings from the 1950s (the Algerian War of Independence lasted from 1954–1962). He was an opponent of the war, was categorically opposed to any form of negotiations with the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, and grimly held to the belief that the future of Algeria lay in remaining a part of France.

A more recent and equally significant discussion of Camus’ colonial attitudes can be found in Edward Saïd’s celebrated work, Culture and Imperialism. Saïd was a distinguished academic at Columbia University who came from a Palestinian background, and so knew a thing or two about colonialism. Saïd is interesting because, though a critic of Camus, he also acknowledges the greatness of Camus’ literature. There is, he says, something in Camus that transcends the particular context in which it was written; for instance, he is ready to describe L’étranger as a work in which Camus gives a universal dimension to the portrayal of existential isolation.⁴ Nevertheless, he goes on to say, Camus, like every writer, also speaks from a particular concrete historical situation, and in the case of Camus we need to take particular care to describe this historical context properly and accurately because we find it particularly difficult intellectually and affectively to judge him objectively. Saïd commends Conor Cruise O’Brien for pointing out the Francocentrism of Camus and applauds O’Brien for making Camus’ readers in the English-speaking world aware of his political support for French colonial authority and supremacy over Algeria.⁵

Yet despite this positive assessment of O’Brien’s analysis, Saïd ends up excoriating him for not seeing what Camus represents ‘objectively’, to use the old Marxist term. He believes that O’Brien lets Camus off the hook by describing Camus as a writer who belongs to the ‘frontier of Europe’; but, as Saïd says, this is pure euphemism, and he is completely correct on this.⁶ Camus is writing as a colonial Frenchman, and he is writing in and about one of France’s colonies. Thus, rather than describe Camus as ‘representative of the Western consciousness and conscience’, we need, O’Brien says, to see his writing as representing the ongoing Western dominance over the non-European world.⁷ I would make Saïd’s point by saying that Camus’ consciousness is that of Western dominance, and his conscience is its symptom. Saïd aligns Camus’ novels and stories with ‘the traditions, idioms and discursive strategies of France’s appropriation of Algeria’,⁸ and considers that Camus should be seen as the last in a long history of French writers whose writing is an incorporation of Algeria by the civilizing forces of colonial France.

Saïd thus rejects the reading of L’étranger that sees in it the ‘universality of a liberated existential humanity facing cosmic indifference and human cruelty with impudent stoicism’.⁹ Camus’ work is more accurately read as the final representative of this colonial movement, which gives his narratives ‘a negative vitality, in which the tragic human seriousness of the colonial effort achieves its last great clarification before ruin overtakes it. They express a waste and sadness we have still not completely understood or recovered from’.¹⁰

Most Western readings of Camus have been blind, perhaps wilfully blind, to this reality, Saïd argues, and we find it ‘easier to interpret [Camus’] work as being about “the human condition’” than to regard Camus as the inheritor of a long tradition of French colonial writing on Algeria that is forgotten today or just simply ignored.¹¹ Camus, he says, comes to make claims (‘There has never been an Algerian nation’) that are as preposterous as the declaration by a French Minister in 1938 that Arabic was a ‘foreign language’ in Algeria.¹² This obduracy of Camus’ on the matter of colonialism would not be so bad and conceivably could even be ignored, were it not for the fact that it bleeds into his literary works. It is Camus’ obduracy ‘that accounts for the blankness and absence of background in the Arab killed by Meursault’, for instance.¹³ There is just the one solitary Arab with his generic name, no family, no life, and he dies, killed by the French Algerian Meursault, on a beach near Algiers. This example points to perhaps the biggest issue and the single most symptomatic feature of Camus’ eurocentrism – the anonymity of the depersonalised Arabs in his novels.

Indeed, in L’étranger, Meursault’s victim is only ever referred to as ‘the Arab’. Actually, and this is an interesting point, Camus writes the word with a capital, which you’d only do in French if it were a proper name, not a common noun. That is, Camus doesn’t call him ‘an Arab’, but it’s rather as if he is giving him the name, ‘Arab’ (as if it were a name like ‘Mohammed’). His victim carries the generic name, ‘Arab’, as if it were a proper name; and it is this decision that effectively names him, but in naming him, an act that individualises, it also renders him anonymous and makes of him a token, indistinguishable from his Algerian brothers. The Arab is ‘not quite a man’, as Conor Cruise O’Brien observes, adding, ‘The reader does not quite feel that Meursault has killed a man. He has killed an Arab’.¹⁴ Compare this with the French Algerians, on the other hand, with whom we are on first-name terms: the killer, Meursault, and his group of friends, Raymond, Marie, Masson – how reassuring these names would have been to your French reader! How familiar they are to us Europeans! . . . And then there’s the Arab, whose name is ‘Arab’.

These considerations lead to one inescapable conclusion: it is pitifully inadequate to say that while the great novels are indeed set in Algeria, they might have been set anywhere, the entire Algerian experience receding into the background. On the contrary, they come out of and are a reflection of colonial relations, and it is we, the European readers, who manage to make them into major texts that reflect upon the great themes of Western thought by a complicit silence over and wilful ignorance of the colonial, Algerian setting. Yacine’s comparison of Camus with Faulkner is telling. In Faulkner’s literature Blacks are everywhere, and the theme of racism and Black-White relations dominates; there is no escaping the issue. In Camus, on the other hand, there is silence.

The colonial relations are even more prominent in the circumstances of the trial. The inexplicable insignificance attached to the murder reflects the settlers’ indifference to the life of a Muslim—and what is disturbing is that this indifference is so matter of fact. What does one dead Arab matter to them, the French colonials? There were many French pied noirs who, if they had had their way, would have done away with all the Muslims in Algeria. They would have done it because it would be easier than doing what colonisers have always done, which is to steal the land from the people who own it, and they would not have to leave the indigenous people to starvation and misery.

There is a third dimension, partially hidden by the obscurity of the motivation of Meursault’s act of murder. This is the question of fear, always something that marked the settlers’ relations with the indigenous Muslim community. Muslims outnumbered the French ten to one in French Algeria. The massacres at Sétif in Algeria in 1945, which precipitated the Algerian uprising and the start of the war of independence, demonstrated how brutal French repression could be when the French felt themselves threatened.¹⁵ At Sétif the French military, police and settlers went on a murderous campaign in which, it is reported, at least 6,000 Muslims were killed, quite possibly many more, in acts of reprisals against the indigenous population; these were acts motivated both by revenge and by a deep fear that the Muslims might rise up against them and throw them out of Algeria. Sétif was counterproductive, as it turned out, as this incident became a symbol of French colonial repression and a rallying point for the insurrection that became the beginning of the end for the French in Algeria.

Camus was sensitive to this state of fear experienced by the French settlers. He has written about it on more than one occasion, and we should note that the fear was already there when he was a child in the 1920s. He recalls that his aunt would go around the bedrooms of their farmhouse at bedtime ‘to make sure the huge bolts on the thick, solid wooden shutters had been properly closed’.¹⁶ He even wrote, towards the end of his life, that he felt ‘as if he were the first inhabitant, or the first conqueror, landing where the law of the jungle still prevailed, where justice was intended to punish without mercy’.¹⁷ Camus felt the menace of the Algerian people; in this he was no different from any of the other French colons. As he also writes, ‘They [the Algerians] were so numerous in the neighbourhoods where they were concentrated, so many of them that by their sheer numbers, even though exhausted and submissive, they caused an invisible menace that you could feel in the air some evenings on the streets when a fight would break out between a Frenchman and an Arab’.¹⁸ As he says, a fight might just as easily break out between two Frenchmen or between two Arabs, but, he tells us, ‘it was not viewed the same way’ as a fight between a Frenchman and an Arab.¹⁹ So, what was the difference? As he explains it,

The Arabs of the neighbourhood, wearing their faded blue overalls or their wretched coats, would slowly approach, coming from all directions in a continuous movement, until this steadily agglutinating mass, by the mere action of its coalescing, would without violence eject the few Frenchmen attracted by witnesses to the fight, and the Frenchman who was fighting would in backing up find himself suddenly confronting both his antagonist and a crowd of sombre impenetrable faces, which would have deprived him of what courage he possessed had he not been raised in this country and therefore knew that only with courage could you live there; and so he would face up to the threatening crowd that nonetheless was making no threat except by its presence and by the movement it could not help making.²⁰

Camus here evokes the famous spirit of the settlers and their courage before these ‘impenetrable faces’; but these are the faces of Algeria, Berbers and Arabs, who are the ever-present threat behind the single ‘Arab’ with whom one gets into a fight. In the days of French colonialism an Arab would be taking a great risk in allowing a conflict with a Frenchman to escalate, knowing that when a Muslim fought with a Frenchman the police would always take the Frenchman’s side. As Camus notes, ‘Most often it was [the Arabs] who took hold of the Arab fighting in a transport of rage to make him leave before the arrival of the police’²¹.

Camus’ The First Man has an interesting history. Very closely based on Camus’ own life, the novel describes the dreadful poverty in which ‘Jacques Cormery’ was raised by a mother for whom he is everything in her otherwise wretched life. It is the life of an impoverished pied noir family, whose ancestors had come from Spain and France to seek their fortune in French Algeria. The family, already poor, was devastated by the death of Camus’ father, killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, and Camus was raised by his widowed, illiterate mother. This unfinished work, the manuscript of which was found in the car in which Camus was killed in 1960, was not published till 1995 when Camus’ family and literary executors released it for publication by Camus’ publisher, Gallimard. I was taken aback when I read, on the front cover of my Penguin edition of the book in English, ‘The most brilliant account of an Algerian childhood’, since I have no idea how one would even start to compare Camus’ account with those of Assia Djeba or Kateb Yacine, Leïla Sebbar or even Hélène Cixous.

In summary, Saïd’s argument is that it is futile to distinguish Camus the activist and the politically engaged thinker with his confused and outmoded views about colonialism from the author of the novels, and pretend that the latter express another story, another sentiment. This is where Saïd is so important; as a stateless Palestinian Arab who found refuge in the United States and knows what it is like to be colonised, he concludes that the ideological significance of Camus’ literature is to justify French rule. This argument, the lesson of which is that we must see even the most universal of Camus’ novels, The Outsider, as the cultural expression of European imperialist domination, has proven very influential. Forcefully made and argued in detail first by O’Brien and then, with even greater force, by Saïd, it has dominated so-called postcolonial views about Camus.

Let me start to introduce into the discussion a different Camus, or, since he was nothing if not a complex man, another side of the same Camus, by quoting the French philosopher and sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. When Bourdieu was assigned to Algiers on military service in 1955, he was transformed by the experience. He was part of a generation of French intellectuals in postwar France who saw their state betray its defining values of liberation and civilization, revealing, as one writer puts it, ‘the sheer power that lay behind colonialism, despite its legitimation in terms of progress’.²² During the war of independence he observed that in Algeria ‘the European gradually created an environment that reflected his own image . . . , a world in which he no longer felt himself to be an outsider, un étranger, and in which, by a natural reversal, the Algerian was finally considered to be the outsider’.²³

Bourdieu’s description accurately describes L’étranger in many respects; Meursault is the outsider, to be sure, but an internal outsider to the French community in Algeria, which has itself created an Algeria after its own image, one inhabited by French citizens leading ordinary lives with their ordinary concerns.

I wonder however whether it is it possible to argue for a contrary view, one in which this picture is inverted and, in particular, one in which, in becoming the outsider, Meursault becomes Algerian. According to this reading, Camus is indeed an Algerian writer. A French Algerian, to be sure, a pied noir, but one writing about an Algerian reality that is not. To be sure, this Camus remains a writer with a universal existentialist message, but this is because he is a great writer, and not because he is a European writer. This Camus is also an essayist, and a chronicler of the misery of the famines in the Kabyle in 1939 and of the post-war disaster of Algeria.²⁴ He is a writer who is unable to reconcile the raw experience of the savage exploitation of Arabs and Berbers at the hands of French colonialism with the fine sentiments he articulates when he says, in that fateful speech at the Salle Wagram in 1957 quoted above, ‘Let’s not forget that we are the only people who hold that power of improvement and emancipation which resides in the genius of freedom’, and who thinks, wrongly, that the structural problem of French colonialism in Algeria can be rectified if only the French make just one more effort.

While pointing to the absence of the indigenous Arab and Berber in Camus’ work, Saïd runs the risk of missing the complexities of the French-Algerian relationship, with its unique characteristics. Saïd ridicules the French Minister who declared that Arabic was a foreign language in Algeria. Whatever the political point this remark was being used to make, it is an accurate observation. Arabic is no more indigenous than French in Algeria, since while it penetrated Algeria very early on, it only became established with the arrival of the Ottoman Empire in 1516. This may be a quibble; the debate is also beside the point. Consider Kateb Yacine, one of Algeria’s finest writers, who refers to French – the French language in which this Algerian born writer frequently wrote – as ‘the spoils of war’.²⁵ Or again, I refer you to the Algerian woman writer, Assia Djebar, who declares that Algeria is a nation of three languages: Berber, ‘a language of rock and soil, a language of origin’, she says; Arabic, ‘a second language, from the prestigious exterior with its Mediterranean heritage’; and French, ‘the third partner of this three-fold couple, which presents itself as the most exposed of the languages, the dominant, public language, the language of power’.²⁶ Incidentally Assia Djebar, who is the daughter of an Algerian schoolteacher, has said she finds in Le premier homme a detailed reflection, in counterpoint as it were, of her own childhood experiences.

Let’s return to L’étranger. I would now like to argue that Saïd’s imperialist reading of the novel is wrong on just about every point. I think that the reason for this is that he is far too quick and far too facile in his reference to the ‘wider context’ of colonial literature. Let’s ask, what does the wider context show? Are we to conclude, blindly, that Camus is merely continuing a long line of colonial literature, as Saïd accuses? Or should we go the other way and consider that he is drawing on that literature just so as to subvert it? How are you going to decide which is the more accurate view if we are to base ourselves merely on a comparison of superficially similar themes? To do so would be to follow the crudest and most simplistic of readings.

I’d also make a second preliminary point. Saïd refers to the inconsistency between Camus’ novels and his journalism, an old criticism that goes back to Conor Cruise O’Brien. Here is what O’Brien says: ‘Camus never did come to terms with the situation in question [colonialism in Algeria], and his journalistic writings are the record of his painful and protracted failure to do so . . .[though] imaginatively he comes closer to it’.²⁷ Thus, O’Brien explains this schism in Camus by saying that Camus could reconcile himself to colonialism in his literature (‘imaginatively’), but was never able to bring himself to this reconciliation in what he had to deal with as a journalist.

I find this view of Camus to be far too schizophrenic to be correct. I can’t see how a man as concerned for the suffering of his fellow Algerians as Camus was would somehow foreclose all mention of this in his own ‘imaginative’ literature. So let’s now return to L’étranger and focus on the narrative structure of the novel, and I’ll make some suggestions as to how it can be read as consistent with and sympathetic to the people of Algeria, and in a way that breaks with the standard, let’s call it ‘Parisian’, existentialist interpretation of the work.

If there is one single, overriding fact about L’étranger – it is also the most obvious but also the most frequently overlooked fact – it is that Meursault is arrested for a crime, a murder, which is then steadfastly ignored during the totality of his trial. This overriding fact is also an essential fact because nothing in the novel works without it. It is the novel’s sine qua non; L’étranger could not be the novel it is without the repression, almost total, of the crime for which Meursault has been charged.

Let’s look at the facts. The murder is the reason for his arrest; he would not have found himself arrested and in danger of losing his life unless he had killed the Arab. However, to develop the sense of injustice in the novel it is imperative that the murder be immediately forgotten. Otherwise, the trial would not revolve around an issue completely irrelevant to the accusation. Thus, he has committed murder; of this we are in no doubt. But then this crime is treated as if it were irrelevant. This is a point observed by David Carroll, who writes, ‘Even though the shooting [of the Arab] is the reason for Meursault’s arrest, the victim of the crime and the crime itself are largely ignored or forgotten during the legal proceedings’.²⁸

Think about the logic of it:

• 1 Meursault has to commit the crime in order to be arrested. He’s an otherwise ordinary fellow; he works, has a girlfriend and goes to the beach—it could almost be a portrayal of some bloke in Sydney. If he hadn’t shot someone then he would have remained under the radar of the police, just another of our ‘braves gens’, ‘un gars’, a ‘good bloke’.

• 2 The murder is the reason why he gets caught up in the legal, penal, policing state, caught up in what the French philosopher Louis Althusser calls the repressive state apparatus. He becomes a person of interest as a result of the murder. It is the initial reason for his being arrested, interrogated, charged, tried, convicted and, finally, executed.

• 3 But if it is indeed the cause of this sequence, this is true only on condition that the murder then be immediately ignored. It is only because the murder is ‘forgotten’ that he can be accused and judged on quite different and basically irrelevant grounds, such as the fact that he fails to show proper respect to his mother and mourn her passing.²⁹

Thus, we need the crime, the repression of the crime and the irrelevant grounds for him to become, as he does, a blatant victim of the judicial system. It has – incidentally – the exact structure of a Freudian symptom, and, as with a symptom, all sorts of secondary rationalisations overlie it. How often does one hear it said that the murder of an Arab would generally not result in the conviction of a French Algerian? This may be true, but it is hardly the point; the logic of the novel requires that Meursault not be interrogated over his crime but instead over irrelevant issues.

The narrative sometimes goes to almost surreal lengths to maintain this structure – such as when his defence lawyer actually reminds the court: excuse me, he’s here because he has been accused of murder! Let’s not forget that!³⁰ Moreover, Meursault is the chief witness for the prosecution of his own case, since it is his forthright admission that constitutes the principle evidence. It’s actually quite weird, if you think about it! It is as if he would have a better chance of getting off the charge of killing another man than of failing to show appropriate grief at his mother’s funeral. As Carroll points out, it is ‘as if Meursault could only be condemned to die if the crime he actually committed was largely ignored’.³¹ But if this is true, then we have to accept the converse proposition, which is that he could only have escaped punishment if he was actually tried for the murder.

This is perverse logic, but nevertheless it is thanks to this perverse logic that Meursault effectively loses his status as a French citizen – and in the context of colonial Algeria, this can mean only one thing; he is reduced to the status of an Arab. This is not just a formal point; it is exactly what happens in the second part of the novel. The first part of the novel closes powerfully, with the Arab’s murder: ‘I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness’.³² Then the second part of the book, which is entirely devoted to the trial, gives a sympathetic portrayal of someone who is the victim of perverse French colonial ‘justice’. This is why the murder has to be ignored – so that the accused can be judged and condemned for what he is rather than what he has done. And this, as Camus knew, was the justice that Muslims, Camus’ ‘Arabs’, experienced at the hands of the French. When Meursault is imprisoned, his fellow prisoners are nearly all Arabs. When Marie comes to visit him she finds herself in the company of the ‘Moorish women’ of his fellow inmates. When he is asked what he was in prison for and replies that he has killed an Arab, he is shown how to make his bed.³³ He loses his status as someone who can speak in his own name. His lawyer speaks for him, even to the point of using the first person pronoun, ‘I’, in his place. He is laughed at when he says it was because of the rays of the sun that he shot the Arab – how much better for him it would have been had he argued that it was an act of self-defence! And so on and so on.

Above all he is considered to be no longer safe, and this is what condemns him in the end. He is suspect, and thus to be feared, because he does not have the sentiments of a Frenchman and is not a good, pious Christian. The ‘instructing judge’ would like him to declare himself a Christian. Being Christian was virtually a prerequisite to becoming a French citizen in Algeria for a Muslim, for Algerian Muslims could only become French citizens by foreswearing allegiance to Koranic law, which was such an egregious decision in a Muslim society (such an act would have effectively meant becoming accepted by neither French nor Muslim communities) that by 1936 only 2,500 Arabs or Berbers had taken this step.³⁴ Being reduced to the status of an Arab, Meursault is then judged on his ‘soul’, his ‘nature’, and he is found wanting – the judge calls him a ‘monster’, and not for his crime for which, if he had played the game, he would never have been executed, but on the basis of who he is. In the end, Meursault is indeed executed for being ‘other’, an outsider; but what is usually missed, even though it is exceedingly obvious in the novel, is that Meursault’s transformation into an outsider and thus his gradually exclusion him from the society of the pieds noirs not only brings him to dwell amongst Arabs but also renders him similar in nature to them – with fateful consequences for him.

Of course, Meursault is executed for being ‘Other’, an Outsider – but I hope that I have shown you that whatever universalism Camus’ outsider expresses, his narrative is also rooted historically in the context of the French colonial presence in Algeria, and this means that the outsider is, concretely, Arab.