Algerian chronicles

176 Pages·2013·0.8 MB·English

by  Albert Camus

Algerian Chronicles
Albert Camus
Algerian Chronicles
TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER
WITH AN
INTRODUCTION BY ALICE KAPLAN
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2013
This book was originally published as Chroniques algériennes, 1939–1958, by Editions
Gallimard, copyright © 1958 and 2002 by Editions Gallimard, Paris Chapter 8 (“Crisis in
Algeria”) was originally published, in slightly different form, in Albert Camus, Camus at
Combat, copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of
Princeton University Press.
Introduction and translation copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College All rights reserved
Design: Graciela Galup
Jacket art: Rue des Archives / The Granger Collection, NYC. All rights reserved.
Camus, Albert, 1913–1960.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
[Chroniques algériennes, 1939–1958. English]
Algerian chronicles / Albert Camus ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer ; with an
introduction by Alice Kaplan.
p. cm.
Originally published in French: Paris : Gallimard, 1958.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-07258-9 (alk. paper) 1. Algeria—Politics and government—20th
century. 2. Algeria—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Algeria—History—
Revolution, 1954–1962. I. Title.
DT295.C293 2013
965.04—dc23 2012036100
Contents
Translator’s Note
New Perspectives on Camus’s Algerian Chronicles, by Alice Kaplan
Algerian Chronicles
Preface
THE MISERY OF KABYLIA
1 Destitution
2 Destitution (continued)
3 Wages
4 Education
5 The Political Future
6 The Economic and Social Future
7 Conclusion
CRISIS IN ALGERIA
8 Crisis in Algeria
9 Famine in Algeria
10 Ships and Justice
11 The Political Malaise
12 The Party of the Manifesto
13 Conclusion
14 Letter to an Algerian Militant
ALGERIA TORN
15 The Missing
16 The Roundtable
17 A Clear Conscience
18 The True Surrender
19 The Adversary’s Reasons
20 November 1
21 A Truce for Civilians
22 The Party of Truce
23 Call for a Civilian Truce in Algeria
THE MAISONSEUL AFFAIR
24 Letter to Le Monde
25 Govern!
ALGERIA 1958
26 Algeria 1958
27 The New Algeria
APPENDIX
Indigenous Culture: The New Mediterranean Culture
Men Stricken from the Rolls of Humanity
Letter from Camus to Le Monde
Draft of a Letter to Encounter
Two Letters to René Coty
The Nobel Prize Press Conference Incident
INDEX
Translator’s Note
Algerian Chronicles is a moving record of Albert Camus’s distress at his
inability to alleviate the series of tragedies that befell his homeland, Algeria,
over a period of 20 years, from 1939 to 1958. Camus collected these reactions to
current events in a volume originally entitled Actuelles III. It would no doubt
have saddened him to learn that the sources of his heartache—the difficulty of
reconciling European and non-European cultures, the senseless recourse to
violence, the fatal spiral of repression and terror—are once again matters “of
actuality,” lending prescience to his original title.
After listening to Camus lecture, the writer Julien Green described him in
terms that one might apply to a secular saint: “There is in this man a probity so
obvious that it inspires almost immediate respect in me. To put it plainly, he is
not like the others.” This quality of authenticity is unmistakable throughout the
pieces collected here. Camus wrote as a moralist, in the noblest sense of the
term. In fact, he was a moralist in two different senses. In the French sense, he
was a worthy heir to La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, moralistes who exposed
the hidden selfishness in ostensibly selfless action, the hypocrisy in what society,
for reasons of its own, hypocritically honors as virtue. But he was also a moralist
in the American sense, a writer of “jeremiads,” which, as Sacvan Bercovitch
revealed, are best understood as appeals to the fatherland to return to the high
ideals that it has set for itself and from which it has strayed. Here, it is primarily
this second type of moralism that is on display. Camus addresses France, his
second home, which he believed had not, in its policies toward Algeria,
remained true to the founding ideals of its republican tradition—liberty, equality,
and fraternity—which for Camus were the political virtues par excellence.
In this respect, Camus was quintessentially French, but he saw himself not
only as a Frenchman but also as a man of the Mediterranean, a spiritual heir of
Saint Francis who, as Camus put it in an early manifesto on “Mediterranean
culture” (included in the supplementary material to this volume), “turned
Christianity from a religion of inner torment into a hymn to nature and naïve
joy.” But “nature and naïve joy” could not survive in the climate of “soulless
violence” that descended on Algeria, the land of Camus’s birth and the very root
of his being. The pieces in this volume trace the increasing effect of this
violence, not only on Camus’s allegiances but on the language in which he
expressed his and his homeland’s suffering.
Abstraction was not Camus’s natural element. In his early reportage, he
indulges in a minimum of economic theorizing to set the stage for his narratives,
but the force of his writing lies in his ability to make the reader feel what it is
like to eat thistle, to depend on capricious handouts, or to die of exhaustion in
the snow on the way home from a food distribution center. Although he may on
occasion use an abstract and value-laden term like “justice,” what moves him is
plain fellow-feeling for other suffering human beings. With almost Franciscan
faith he hopes that the example of his own compassion will suffice to elicit the
compassion of others.
Attentive to Camus’s text, the translator senses not only his despair of the
situation in Algeria but also his exasperation. The political dilemmas of the time
were cruel, and no intellectuel engagé escaped from them unscathed. History
chose a course different from the one Camus envisioned, but history’s choice has
not been so incontrovertibly satisfactory as to rob Camus’s counterfactual
alternative of its retrospective grandeur. What we have here is a precious
document of a soul’s torment lived in real rather than eternal time. I can only
hope that my translation has done it justice.
And it is not easy to do justice to Camus’s style in English. He is a writer who
has fully mastered all the resources of concision, subtlety, and grace that French
provides. He can maintain perfect equipoise through a series of long sentences
and then punctuate his point with a short phrase intensified by a slightly unusual
syntax or surprising word choice. To mimic the French structure slavishly is to
betray the spirit of the text, which has to be rethought with the different stylistic
resources of English in mind. When I think of Camus’s prose, I think of
adjectives such as “pure,” “restrained,” and “disciplined.” He never strains for
effect, never descends into bathos, and always modulates his passion with
classical precision.
When this book originally went to press, Camus was feeling desperate about
Algeria’s future, yet he concluded that it was still worth publishing the record of
his own engagement, because of the facts it contained. “The facts have not
changed,” he wrote, “and someday these will have to be recognized if we are to
achieve the only acceptable future: a future in which France, wholeheartedly
embracing its tradition of liberty, does justice to all the communities of Algeria
without discrimination in favor of one or another. Today as in the past, my only
ambition in publishing this independent account is to contribute as best I can to
defining that future.” For us, half a century later, the facts still have not changed,
and the future to which Camus hoped to contribute has expanded to include not
just France but the entire world. Like Camus, we cannot change the obdurate
facts of the past, but we can hope to learn from his unflinchingly honest account
how better to deal with them in charting our own course.
—Arthur Goldhammer