Albert Camus: Algerian Chronicles. Arthur Goldhammer translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 51, Number 3, May/June 2014.
Americans of a certain age, who cut their literary teeth on the French Existentialists and quasi-Existentialists fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, recall that Albert Camus began his life as a French colon in Algeria, by then France’s largest colony. Unlike almost all others on the French Left in his generation, Cams could not bring himself to despise French imperialism or to turn his back on his countrymen. His reward (it should be needless to say) was condemnation and shunning by the Left, condemnation by the die-hard Algerian French on the Right, and embarrassed silence amidst his foreign admirers, who continued to read The Stranger and The Fall but seldom got round to discussing their literary hero’s political deviationism. A few years later, Edward Said gave him the thumbs-down sign—more than enough to ward off a generation of academics. That’s why Algerian Chronicles, which appeared in 1958, found its American translator and publisher more than half a century later. Yet the book remains a testimony to both the strength and weakness of the French moraliste tradition Camus stood for. His measured defense of the French colonial effort in Algeria, his refusal of fanaticisms secular and religious, ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ set him apart from almost everyone in his day—perhaps most especially from the Existentialists with whom he was too often classed by taxonomists of ideology. His remains a lonely position amidst the self-described ‘postmodern’ Western Left, the regime-changing Right, the neo-isolationist Left and Right, and of course in the North Africa of the past half-century, where military strongmen vie for dominance with Islamic radicals.
In some ways, however, it is most instructive to situate Camus between the two French statesmen who thought most clearly about Algeria: Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles de Gaulle. Tocqueville wanted to bind Algeria to France; de Gaulle dissolved the bands, but on terms that Tocqueville endorsed in advance. Both combined their classical sense of moderation and justice with the toughest sort of practicality, and saw no real contradiction among these three virtues.
After three centuries of rather loose Ottoman rule, under which it developed a well-deserved reputation for monarchy spiced with assassination and Mediterranean piracy, Algeria fell to the French in 1830. More than 50,000 French colonizers arrived between the conquest and the year of European revolutions, 1848. Far from amounting to a scrum of administrators ruling a mass of restless ‘natives,’ the French put down roots in Algeria, taking the mission civilisatrice seriously. This colonial imperialism entailed racial dominance to be sure, but also the characteristic French tone in politics and in moeurs—a certain humanity to go with the imperial fist, a form of rule in many ways much to be preferred to the Ottoman misrule and Algerian despotism that preceded it.
Initially, Tocqueville doubted that “the French genius” was “very conducive to colonization at all.” [1] “To have conquered a nation is not enough to be capable of governing it,” he advised his countrymen; “after having destroyed their government, we [have] not given them another.” He set out to understand Algeria and to improve French governance there, never losing sight of either the human need for rule by force and civility. Given the disparate political regimes represented in French politics—from partisans of the Bourbons to socialists, each of which would either rule or take a stab at ruling during Tocqueville’s career—he also hoped that an imperial mission might serve to unite the French. Far from a race-theory quack, he advocated racial amalgamation as a means of intertwining French and ‘native’ families. On the other hand, he had no illusions about somehow uniting French Catholicism with Islam; after reading the Koran he concluded that it would not educate souls conducive to the give-and-take of republican political life. “Polygamy, the sequestration of women, the absence of any public life, a tyrannical and suspicious government that forces one to conceal one’s life and keep all affections within the family”: the very architecture of Algeria and of Muslim civilization reflected regimes that left no room for the public square and its debates.
Recognizing the difference between the mountain-dwelling Kabyles—descendants of Berber tribes—and the valley-dwelling Arabs—the majority of the population—Tocqueville thought that France might rule Algeria by playing the one set of Muslims against the other. Unlike the Arabs, the Kabyles farmed all year round; they merely wished to be left alone, which was fine with Tocqueville, who suspected that France wouldn’t get very far with its project of bringing either of these peoples to French civilization. For their part, the Arabs were semi-nomadic and ruled by military and religious aristocracies—riding, respectively, horses and donkeys. Whereas the Arabs had allied readily with the Ottoman Turks for protection against the neighboring peoples in the region, the French, “having allowed the aristocracy to be reborn” in Algeria after centuries of Ottoman divide-and-rule, must now ally themselves with the Kabyles, subduing them “not with our arms but with our arts”—that is, with the technology that can provide this people with the “material pleasures” that they enjoy. “If their leaders have nothing to fear from our ambition and see that we have simple, clear laws that protect them, it is certain that they will soon fear war more than we ourselves, and that we shall perceive the almost invincible attraction that draws savages toward civilized man at the moment they no longer fear for their liberty. We shall then see the customs and the ideas of the Kabyles alter without their perceiving it, and the barriers that now shut us out of their country will fall by themselves.”
As for the Arabs, a tougher, more ‘Turkish’ sort of ruling would be needed, but—and here is the crucial claim—”religious beliefs are continually losing their vigor and becoming more and more powerless to battle the interests of this world.” Before that happens, “peace with Christians from time to time, and habitual war, such is the natural taste of the populations that surround us.” this is not to suggest that education of the Arabs could be neglected. “It would be a great imprudence” to assume that Islam will die out on its own: “When religious passions exist among a people, men are always found who take it upon themselves to make use of these and to lead them. Allow the natural and regular interpreters of religion to disappear, and you do not suppress religious passions, you merely cede control to fanatics or impostors. It is already known that there are fanatic mendicants, belonging to secret societies, who have enflamed the spirit of the populations in the last insurrection.” Instead, Tocqueville recommended, let the existing religious authorities, the marabouts, come to see the advantages of rapprochement with the colonists.
Even with such rapprochement, “because of the social organization of this people, their tribal organization and nomadic life, something we can do nothing about for a very long time, perhaps ever,” French “domination of the Arabs will be onerous.” Therefore, the French must colonize the valuable coastline (particularly reinforcing the capital, Algiers) and effectively use the Kabyles as a buffer against the Arabs while playing friendly Arab tribes against the others—all the while fighting the Arabs hard whenever they prove rebellious. By fighting the Arabs hard Tocqueville means burning harvests: “If we do not burn harvests in Europe, it is because in general we wage war on governments and not on peoples.” Not so in Algeria, where the French must punish depredations of hostile tribes undertaken against the friendly ones.
Colonization will therefore be indispensable. Families serve as the foundation for political life. Sending soldiers alone won’t do. Moreover, soldiers who spend any considerable time in imperial service “will soon contract habits, ways of thinking and acting, that are very dangerous everywhere, but especially in a free country.” Ever the enemy of bureaucracy, Tocqueville wanted the colonists to exercise a considerable degree of self-government with well-guarded property rights, thereby attracting more of the French to the country. Tocqueville had seen the English demographic conquest of North America, and while he wanted nothing to do with its attendant use of slavery, he did appreciate the weight of numbers.
Despite the difficulties and dangers, “I do not think France can think seriously of leaving Algeria.” Such a departure would make France seem “to be yielding to her own impotence and succumbing to her own lack of courage” in the “eyes of the world.” Geopolitically, the Mediterranean is “the political sea of our times” and Algeria (along with another French colony, Morocco) dominates the southern border of the entrance to the Mediterranean. If France left, another imperial power would take it for that very reason. “If France ever abandons Algeria, it is clear that she could do it only at a moment when she is seen to be undertaking great things in Europe, and not at a time such as our own, when she appears to be falling to the second rank and seems resigned to let the control of European affairs pass into other hands,” Tocqueville wrote in 1841. This would be de Gaulle’s thinking exactly, 120 years later, but with a very different policy to implement it.
For most of those years, the French pursued something like Tocqueville’s strategy—propping up the Kabyles, playing Arab tribe off Arab tribe, controlling the coast. But the nationalism that social democratization fostered—and which Tocqueville famously saw and described—intensified among Arabs, even as “religious passions” remained. Among the French Algerians, a dangerous officer corps did arise, applauded by civilian colonists as their protectors against Arab nationalists and Islamic militants. By the early 1950s civil war began; a few years later, the conflict threatened the French parliamentary regime itself.
Camus stands as an anguished witness to the erosion and collapse of the Tocquevillian—liberal, commercial-republican—hopes for all Algerians, whether of European, Algerian or Berber origin. The Chronicles consists of writings dating from 1939 to 1958, just before de Gaulle returned to power, most immediately to solve the Algerian crisis. “This book is among other things the history of a failure,” the failure not only of the French to rule Algeria well but Camus’s own failure “to inject sobriety into the discussion,” which extremists of several colorations had dominated.
He begins with an explanation of the moral dilemma faced by any decent person who writes about the crisis at all. Not only is there “a peculiar French nastiness, which I do not wish to compound”—a system of the uncompromising regime-partisan politics dating back at least as far as the 1780s—that makes it hard for one citizen to address another; there is also the way in which the use of torture and terror by extremists among French colonists and Arab rebels alike taints any commentary at all, even the most well-intended. For example, “I am afraid that, by retracing the long history of French errors, I am, with no risk to myself, supplying alibis to the criminal madmen who would toss grenades into crowds of innocent people who happen to be my kin…. When one’s family is in immediate danger of death, one might wish that it were a more generous and just family and even feel obliged to make it so, as this book will attest, and yet (make no mistake!) remain in solidarity against the mortal threat, so that the family might at least survive and therefore preserve its opportunity to become more just.” At the same time, “Can a people survive without being reasonably just toward other peoples? France is dying because it has not been able to resolve this dilemma.” “These errors of both the Right and the Left simply define the nihilism of our times.” The just measure between force and civilization had become deranged, in Europe as well as Algeria.
In an essay published before the Second World War, Camus excoriates France’s failure to follow up logically on its own ‘Kabylist’ strategy. By 1839 Kabyle children were reduced to eating thistles, and although “the Kabyles thirst for learning and taste for study have become legendary,” and although they never neglected to include girls as well as boys in their schools, and although the stated long-term French policy was assimilation of the Kabyle and French populations, France still maintained segregated and inferior schools for the Kabyles,. Camus also recommends public works, job training, and a reorganized emigration policy to restore economic prosperity to Kabylia. Politically, this “friendly people” should have been granted self-governing communes “under the supervision of a French administrator,” thus accustoming them to a political life consistent with republicanism—”to gain experience in public affairs” by “establish[ing] a small federative republic in the heart of Kabyle territory.”
In a postwar visit to Algeria, Camus saw “the political awakening of the Muslim masses,” many of whom in Algeria had “spent the last two years fighting for the liberation of France.” By then the policy of assimilation could no longer work, having been resisted before the war primarily by the colonists. The most prominent Arab politician, Ferhat Abbas, nonetheless aspired not to full independence for Algeria but to self-government in confederation with France, under the more than reasonable terms of 50/50 representation of Muslim and French populations in an Algerian assembly. Camus urged French acceptance of this offer.
But a decade later, after the founding of the Algerian National Liberation Front in 1954, Camus was reduced to writing to the Algerian Socialist Aziz Kessous, observing that “we now find ourselves pitted against one another, with each side determined to inflict as much pain as possible on the other, inexpiably.” While France “continues to get nowhere” in its parliamentary debates over the colony, “Algeria is dying”; “impotent moderation continues to serve the extremes, and our history is still an insane dialogue between paralytics and epileptics.” “The policy of assimilation has failed—first because it was never really tried, and second because the Arab people have retained their own character, which is not identical to ours”; now, the choice for French Algeria is “between a marriage of convenience and a deadly marriage of two xenophobias.” Like Tocqueville, Camus never forgets the geopolitical consequence of a simple divorce: Although the Mediterranean is no longer “the political sea of our time,” it remained an important place where the Soviet empire aimed at extending its sway through the vehicle of Nasserism. (He urges the Arabs to say “yes to an Arab identity in Algeria, no to an Egyptian identity.”) Therefore, “I urge [Arab militants] to distinguish carefully among those [among the French] who support the Algerian cause because they want to see their own country surrender on this as on other fronts and those who demand reparations for the Algerian people because they want France to demonstrate that grandeur is not incompatible with justice.” Camus points not only to “a law of history”—”when the oppressed take up arms in the name of justice, they take a step toward injustice” toward their oppressors—but also “a law of the intellect”—the West once called it the natural law—”which dictates that although one must never cease to demand justice for the oppressed, there are limits beyond which one cannot approve of injustice committed in their name.” “Each side uses the crimes of the other to justify its own. By this logic, the only possible outcome is interminable destruction.”
Camus asks “that both camps commit themselves publicly and simultaneously to a policy of not harming civilian populations, no matter what the circumstances” are (Here, be it noted, he departs from Tocqueville’s harsher policy.) “What is at stake is life itself.” Only on such terms, the protection of civilian lives, can the 1.5 million French colonists, the French in France, and the Muslims (“both Arab and Berber”) find some modus vivendi within political structures that enables each to retain its way of life while resisting the imperialist encroachments of the Soviet-Nasserite alliance. Very much like Tocqueville, Camus rejects the historical determinism which maintains “there is no progress without bloodshed and that the strong advance at the expense of the weak”; “such a fate may yet indeed exist, but men are not required to bow down before it or submit to its laws.” He calls on all parties “to work on behalf of liberty against fatalism”—most immediately, the fatalism of Marxian dialectic.
He acknowledges that “the Arabs claim to belong not to a nation but to a spiritual or temporal Muslim empire.” He rejoins that there is “a no less important Christian empire,” which “no one is proposing to bring…back into temporal history,” whereas “this new Arab imperialism, which Egypt, overestimating its strength, claims to lead and which Russia is using for the moment to challenge the West as part of its global strategy” only serves to aid the attempt “to encircle Europe from the south.” This will do nothing for “the freedom and prosperity of the Arab peoples,” as shown by “the decimation of the Chechens or the Tartars of Crimea, or the destruction of the Arab culture in the formerly Muslim provinces of Daghestan” by the Soviet Union.
Camus wants France to declare “that the era of colonialism is over,” but with stipulations that guard France as well as Algeria. France “refuses to give in to violence, especially in the forms it takes today in Algeria,” because “it refuses in particular to serve the dream of Arab empire at its own expense, at the expense of the European people of Algeria, and, finally, at the expense of world peace.” France instead should offer “a voluntary federal regime” in Algeria, similar to “a Swiss confederation” embracing “several different nationalities.” However, unlike the Swiss cantonal system, in which each group occupies separate regions, Algeria’s ethnic and religious groups are now mingled. Camus endorses a plan proposed by a French-Algerian law professor who recommended dividing the French National Assembly into two sections: the French would elect representatives to rule the French population both in the metropole and overseas under French law; Muslims overseas would govern themselves under Islamic laws “on all matters pertaining to Muslims alone.” A combined assembly would address taxation, budgets, and national defense—i.e., shared concerns. “Contrary to all French custom and to firm biases inherited from the French Revolution, the proposal would create two categories of equal but distinct citizens”—”a sort of revolution against the regime of centralization and abstract individualism created in 1789, which for many reasons should now be seen as the Old Regime.” But “if your goal is to sever Algeria from France, then both will perish.”
This avante-la-lettre multiculturalism did not seem plausible to France’s leading statesman, Charles de Gaulle, who by then readied himself to resume the authority he had quit in 1946. [2] Nor did he suppose that severing the two countries would cause either to perish. Indeed, “Algeria is costing us more than she is worth to us.” De Gaulle preferred “an Algerian Algeria,” as he put it; “the only question that arises is whether this Algeria will be Algerian against France or in association with her.” Such association would entail preferential trade channels, a common currency, free immigration, but no political linkage as advocated by Camus. Under de Gaulle’s plan, French colonists would choose Algerian citizenship, repatriation, or French citizenship in Algeria, with all rights respected; the latter group, along with any Muslims who chose to retain French citizenship, would do so in a self-governing enclave in Algeria, he stipulated. As for republicanism in Algeria as a whole, that regime “will one day exist, but it has never yet existed” there. Meanwhile, each step toward independence must be taken in the French republican way, by popular referendum in both the metropole and the colony. when the Algerian Arabs attempted to win glory by driving out the French by force of arms, de Gaulle brought the weight of the French military against them and was not defeated; when elements of that military rebelled in the name of continued colonialism, de Gaulle rounded them up. The consequent four years of bloodshed agitated all parties concerned, except de Gaulle, who survived assassination attempts by French-Algerian diehards and pursued the kind of ambitious European geopolitical ends that Tocqueville had said would be the only fitting substitute for empire.
Camus died in an automobile accident in 1960, two years before Algeria achieved independence—a fate that spared him from seeing the destruction of the Algeria he knew and loved. The Algerian state expelled the remaining French colonists and their Muslim allies shortly after independence. (To this day, those Muslim loyalists do not enjoy full citizenship in France.) De Gaulle allowed Algerian perfidy to stand, having freed his hands to continue his foreign policy deigned to establish a republican Europe independent of bot the United States and Soviet Russia, a federal Europe des patries that also preserved the sovereignty of the peoples against the bureaucrats of Brussels. He accomplished the indispensable first step—rapprochement with republican Germany—and the Franco-German partnership forms the bedrock of today’s European Union. But the grander aspects of his design remained elusive, as his fellow European republicans continued to perceive the need for the American alliance and Soviet Russia continued to exercise imperial control over Central and Eastern Europe for another generation. As for the bureaucrats in Brussels, they have had their innings, but the Gaullist esteem for popular sovereignty of nations remains alive and well, too.
Algeria has endured a more or less nationalist, collectivist, and despotic—that is to say Nasserite—regime in the decades since independence, punctuated by a brutal seven-year civil war between the military rulers and the Islamists in the 1990s, leaving over 100,000 dead. The current strongman, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, independent Algeria’s first minister of foreign affairs, has ruled in the years following the ceasefire, cautiously and skillfully liberalizing the regime while maintaining order; Algeria remains what de Gaulle called it, a country that may see republicanism, but has never yet seen it, in large measure because too many well-organized Algerians with guns do not want it. The time for a federal and republican solution in Algeria might have ben the years right after the Second World War, but that was precisely when the French returned to the practices of parliamentary republicanism that had ruined them in the Thirties. In any event, it transpires that the removal of empire does not solve the problems of faction that imperial rule both fomented and pressed down. Algerians today face exactly the same problems in ruling themselves that the French faced when they were ruling them.
By 1958, the political dispute between de Gaulle and Camus may be stated as follows: Camus wanted to preserve the French Algerian and Kabyle communities within the Algeria that was their home, and to which they had as much right as the Arabs. To this end he endorsed a federation with metropolitan France, one that would avoid Nasserism and Soviet imperial encroachment. De Gaulle wanted to accomplish these things, but without federation, which he judged politically impossible, given the strength of both Arab-Algerian nationalism and Islamic fervor. He had other fish to fry: founding a stable republican regime in France, which included a strong executive who would prevent parliamentary paralysis and the construction of a new alliance system, not only within Europe but in competition with both American-capitalist and Russian-communist efforts to penetrate the nations then known as the ‘Third World.’ For the latter, and the grandest of all Gaullist projects, de Gaulle could not be seen to continue an imperial policy for France, although associational ties (mostly economic) with the former colonies in Africa were to be encouraged. De Gaulle was French, Camus French-Algerian.
Each man understood the difference, which indicates a more profound difference between them. In one of the most delightful pieces in this collection, a speech Camus delivered in 1937 titled “The New Mediterranean Culture,” the future Nobel Laureate celebrated “Mediterranean regionalism.” At the time, Mussolini’s Fascist regime pretended to a “Latin” empire in northern Africa. Camus remarked “a confusion between Mediterranean and Latin” owing to the habit of “ascribing to Rome what began in Athens.” Athens embodied “the Western world’s true meaning and vocation”—Athens, with its humanism of the polis, in modernity “the nationalism of sunshine” and not of imperial dominance, a universalism that welcomes a unity of neither force, as under ancient Rome, or of faith, as under the Holy Roman Empire, but of “hope” and of “joy,” which are the very opposite of Roman, German, Austrian “anxiety” and “buttoned up” restraint. The Mediterranean transformed Christian hermeticism and harshness to Catholicism in the original sense of the term, the religion of Francis of Assisi and not of Martin Luther. (“Protestantism, strictly speaking, is Catholicism wrenched from the Mediterranean.”) Islam too has moderated itself as it has moved west, across the convivial, sun-drenched sea. Even the fascism of Rome, noxious though it may be, isn’t the fascism of Berlin. “What Rome took from Greece was not the life but rather the puerile abstraction and reasoning.” He fails to see that it isn’t abstraction that leads to death but life itself; conversely, political life may require killing.”
“The triumphant zest for life, the sense of oppression and boredom, the deserted squares of Spain at noontime, the siesta—that is the true Mediterranean, and it is closer to the East than to the Latin West. North Africa is one of the only regions in which East and West cohabit.” And of course “Mediterranean men need a Mediterranean politics.” That was the ambition of Camus for France, for Algeria, for the world he loved. To mix cultural metaphors, the envisioned politics of Camus had a touch of the Bohemian—that is to say, of the apolitical. And it is the Catholicism of Francis, not of Thomas Aquinas, that Catholic with an Aristotelian sense of the political.
Not so, de Gaulle, that admirer of the Latinity of Rome, albeit a republican Rome far removed politically from the monarchist crankiness of his older contemporary, Charles Maurras. Against the anti-Dreyfusards of his youth, the Pétainists of his middle age, the partisans of Algérie française he defeated in his old age, de Gaulle defended Latin mesure and order,the stern, Stoic virtues of the “man of character,” against what he regarded as German extremism, Russian despotism, American commercialism, and the “heavy dough of the English” temperament. On one memorable occasion, he reminded the Romanians—then in the grim tyrant Ceaucescu’s grip—of the Latin civilization they shared with France, as attested by the very name of their country. For this enterprise, for this re-founding of France and this envisioned reconfiguration of the alliance structures of the world, Mediterranean joie de vivre would not suffice, although it might have its place, somewhere in the far south of France. To his friend and ally André Malraux, he contrasted Roman self-government with “Mediterranean restlessness,” and he thought the French habitually exhibited too little of the former, too much of the latter.
With her characteristic touch of irony, Susan Sontag once called Camus a husband-figure, not a dangerous lover-type. De Gaulle, however, was not only a husband but a father who (like Tocqueville, like all fathers) knew the harsher requirements of ruling. The French regime he founded thus continues to do better than the bankrupt but still talkative Greeks, or the self-lacerating Algerians whom he left in Mediterrania.
Notes
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery. Jennifer Pitts editor and translator. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
- See Charles de Gaulle: Memoirs of Hope, chapter 3 (“Algeria”).Terence Kilmartin translation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.
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