Novelist, playwright, essay writer, resistant journalist and, Albert Camus are perhaps par excellence the figure of the writer and the French intellectual of post-war period. Deeply engaged in the fights and the debates of its time, it continues, in spite of the misunderstandings which its fame even was worth with its lucid and sincere work, to play an important role in the literature of the XX ^E century.

The memory of a miserable youth seems definitively to have directed a sensitivity that the honors did not divert: in 1957, in Stockholm, vis-a-vis the crowned heads, the new Nobel Prize of literature will pay, with the platform, homage to its teacher.

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi in 1913, in a family more than modest. The First World War occurs; his/her father, farm laborer, are killed with the face; his/her mother settles in Algiers, in a modest housing, and saw households and small work. Pug will say later as this experiment of poverty was its true school. His/her uncle, a butcher amateur of books, gives him the taste of the reading. But the young man still prefers to devote his time to the friendship, the bathes and football. Encouraged by its teacher, it profits from a purse which enables him to continue its studies with the college then at the university of Algiers, where it obtains its diploma of philosophy. But of fragile health and fearing the routine, it gives up teaching.

The entry in literature

To 1934 go back its first marriage, which will last only two years, and its adhesion with the Communist party, which it will leave three years later. If he seeks himself in the life, he is in the literature. Back and the Place (1937), its first test, contains already the major topics of its work: sun, loneliness, the absurd destiny of the men. In 1939, Noces confirms its gifts of writer and the nature of a sensitivity to which it meditation cannot be enough. The young author manages to reconcile his taste for the writing, the reflection and the action while being journalist in Algiers republican and stimulating of a theater company.

The war then comes to modify the course of the things. The censure involves the disappearance of the newspaper to which he worked, and Pug army for health reason is isolated.

Development of a philosophy

It remarries and leaves Algeria for the metropolis. In Paris, it joined Resistance in the network “Fights”, for missions of information and clandestine journalism. Especially, he works already so that one can name the “cycle of the absurdity”.

From 1940 to 1945, in three major works, a philosophy is worked out. Meursault, in the Foreigner, keep silent an Arab almost by chance and tests in its cell the indifference of the world. With the theater, it is Caligula, incarnated by Gérard Philipe, who intends to push the nonsense of the things until causing the revolt. The Myth of Sisyphus tackles the same questions in a theoretical way: for lack of a direction to the life, the man can exceed of it the nonsense by the “tough revolt” against its condition.

These works are at the origin of its first successes but also of the first criticisms and the first misunderstandings. Presented by the press like a despaired philosopher, it is associated to Jean-Paul Sartre and with the existentialist current, that of which it is defended, vainly. At all events, it now forms part of what is called “French intelligentsia”. The Gallimard editions accommodate it in their reading committee.

Editor-in-chief of the newspaper Fights with the Release, Camus discusses from now on the great debates which shake the world: the atomic bomb, revolts colonial, the capital punishment. He travels to Algeria, America and is moved everywhere by the misery of the men.

Since 1947, he undertook a new cycle on the revolt with a novel, the Plague, where the men are confronted with the symbol of an insurmountable evil. The Russian terrorists put in scene in the Right ones also wonder them about the direction of their at the same time fatal and retributive acts.

Polemics and moral crisis

Its test the revolted Man causes long and forces controversy: journalists attack it, of the political parties, the writers also, like Jean-Paul Sartre or André Breton, which reproach him “middle-class” tendencies. Pug defends oneself, is explained, answered. The polemic lasts one year and ends up discouraging it, while its health is degraded. It is diverted for a time of the romantic kind and devotes to dramatic adaptations foreign authors: Dostoïevski, Calderón, Buzzati, Faulkner. It in addition continues to intervene in favor of the victims, to protest against the torturers. This return on oneself is neither a withdrawal nor a renouncement. Moreover, the crisis which it cross-piece finds soon its expression literary and, in 1956, it publishes the Fall, an account which marks a renewal in its manner: in Amsterdam, far from the Mediterranean sky, a former lawyer confesses his bad conscience and his culpability in a monolog full with irony and sarcastic remarks. A collection of news appears the following year, the Exile and the Kingdom, where more doubts are expressed than of certainty.

Dedication

Like Jonas, the painter of one of his texts, locked up in a cage to escape the visitors, Camus feels captive of his public, whether this one admires it or disputes it. If the celebrity weighs to him, it however will reach its top.

In 1957, the Nobel Prize of literature is decreed to him. At forty-three years, he is the youngest writer ever distinguished in Stockholm. This international dedication can increase its tiredness, it does not start its energy: there puts soon in building site a new novel, the First Man, remained unfinished (and published, well after its death, in 1994), which one could say that he would have inaugurated a “cycle of the love”.

On January 4th, 1960, Camus returns to Paris with its editor. Close to Villeblevin, in Yonne, the car strikes a tree. Died absurd, which however gives to work its unit. The Notebooks which it left testify to the constant effort of a life towards clearness and the authenticity.

Can one suppose place which occupies, that Camus in the literary history will occupy? The literature with thesis arousing today less interest, Camus could initially seem the heir to Montaigne and the traditional moralists thanks to literary tests which retain less by the solidity of a system than by the force of a style to the service of a free spirit and sincere.

As many writers of its generation, Camus wanted to practice all the literary kinds which could contribute to the expression of its ideas or its doubts. As is it righter to articulate its works around the topics as they approach rather than according to the kind which they concern: the novel, the theater and the test. It indicated itself two major cycle of its maturity: absurdity and the revolt. But one can neglect neither the tests of youth nor the last accounts, which undoubtedly announced a new manner, prematurely stopped.

Heat of living and absurd

Alive the Pug one, the polemics could make accept successive reversals. With the distance from time, it is especially the coherence of a course and a work which is essential. The topics of the first tests cross all work: heat of living, the Mediterranean passion of the sun and the sea. It is on a sunny beach that Meursault commits its crime, and the survivors of the plague find the taste of living at the time of a bathe at sea. The “thought of midday” per which is completed the revolted Man is also that of the Weddings and the Summer: lucid, solar, burning. But “all that excites the life increases at the same time its nonsense”.

To tell the truth, it is not the world which is absurd, but the direction which the man seeks there, without finding it. On this mechanics plugs and private significance is based a divorce. Like Meursault, like Sisyphus, we are condemned to push without end a rock in front of us. Is the life then worth to be lived? Yes, because the man, in his useless effort, is taller than his destiny since it can revolt against him. Such is its freedom. “It is necessary to imagine happy Sisyphus.”

Revolt and humanism

The man thus exists only by his revolt, which can take thousand forms: philosophical, historical, political, poetic. But, between authorized slavery and revolutionary violence, creation is the true humblest freedom, and the proudest human effort. It is what the characters of the Plague put into practice. However, in the middle of the XX ^E century, the world remains convulsive, the anxious individual. Pug has the feeling not to have been able to build a true wisdom, and to have led only to one bad conscience. The last accounts, disillusioned, testify to a failure, a tough pessimism. What remains of this questioning, it is the truth, the nobility of the man, “the merry and torn life” celebrated in the Speech of Sweden.

This is why the “existentialist” word defines less Camus than that of “humanistic”. What imports if the questions do not find answers? Humanism can be achieved in concern, fix on it its conscience, its measurement and its limits. Do generosity and the virtue need hope? Of holiness, heroism and wisdom, it is appropriate above all to be a Juste. There is no doubt that Camus was it.

A style with the service of the idea

The ideas are nothing without their expression. And work the Pug one is that of a writer, not of a philosopher. He said it itself without dissipating this other misunderstanding. Just as he did not want to confine himself with a kind, he took care not to limit his style to only one register. “I adapted the form to the subject, here all.” Indeed, according to the subject or the character, the writing changes: neutral for Meursault in the Foreigner; rigorous, objective and yet impassioned for the chronicle of the Plague; ironic for Clamence in the Fall. If the articles use of an impeccable and vibrating prose, where the word goes right to the idea, without effects nor dryness, it is perhaps in the literary tests that especially the control of a personal language continues. Better than of the arguments, the images, the rhythms compose a luminous meditation, an anthem with the beauty and the heat. In parallel, whereas it returns in the Summer to the magic lyricism of the Weddings, Camus, in the last accounts, becomes moralist and poet. The ton of the confidence replaces that of the speeches. “Styles, he said, are for me only one means.”