Paris-Presse told the news in one stark word so closely identified with Albert Camus in life: ABSURD. In Paris small crowds of his admirers gathered around newsstands, not quite knowing what they were waiting for. One by one the celebrated names of French literature poured out their stunned tributes. Author Camus, 46, France's (1957) Nobel prizewinner, had been killed in a speeding sports car. "A stupid death," cried one Academician bitterly, but somehow nothing could have seemed more in keeping with the vision Camus had had of his time.
He had come out of sun-baked Algeria —a strange and extreme land, he wrote later, that "gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and his misery." The son of a Spanish mother and a French farm laborer who was killed in the first battle of the Marne, Camus worked at everything from selling auto accessories to clerking at a prefecture de police to get his education. By the time he wrote his thesis at the University of Algiers, he had already had tuberculosis, had married and separated, joined the Communist Party and then quit in disgust. Before his death last week, more had been written about him than he had written himself. Above all his contemporaries, he was the authentic voice of France's war generation.
The Despair. It was in 1942, when all humanity "stood at the open door of Hell," that France first heard of him, in his bleak first novel, The Stranger, set in a death cell, and then in a collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus explained his doctrine of the absurd. Its first words are: "There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide," and its conclusion is that in a world with no God, man's only hope is to keep the absurd alive, and thus suicide is unthinkable. Because Camus articulated despair so eloquently, a generation bred in depression, surrender and occupation chose him its leader in its quest for something to believe in.
The Promise. When France fell to the Nazis, Camus joined the Resistance in North Africa, eventually made his way to Paris. There, while working for his publisher, Gaston Gallimard, he secretly edited the Resistance newspaper Combat. On the day of liberation, Combat appeared with a Page One editorial. "Out of this dread childbirth," Camus had written, "a revolution is being born. The Paris that fights tonight intends to command tomorrow, not for power but for justice, not for politics but morality." For millions, that was the promise of the peace.
But the promise quickly tarnished. Camus' friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, preached his dreary mixture of Marxism and Existentialism; Camus continued to describe the absurd. It was for him a time of "solitary struggle," when all the forces of the old Resistance were falling apart. When Combat seemed in danger of being compromised, Camus quit his job. "He wanted politics with clean hands," explains a former colleague, and many took Camus as symbol of the "betrayed" liberation.