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His essays are often contradictory or downright muddy: "Man, at bottom, is not entirely guilty, since he did not begin history; nor entirely innocent, since he continues it." Nor, despite lifelong claims and yearnings, was Camus a true philosopher, with an organized system of thought. But he is frequently something more valuable: a reliable witness. Observes Critic Wilfrid Sheed: "Like Thomas Aquinas, who 'saw' something just before his death that made all his writings seem like straw," men like Albert Camus "seem to have 'seen something' which makes a good deal, anyway, seem like straw . . . What they had seen was terrorism, and it made even literature seem comparatively trivial."
It is this quality that gives Camus a solar power in times of cant and moral squalor. Unlike his fellow anti-colonialists, Camus was never willing to issue a license to kill. Of rebel atrocities he writes, "The truth, alas, is that part of French opinion vaguely holds that the Arabs have in a way earned the right to slaughter and mutilate, while another part is willing to justify in a way all excesses. To justify himself, each relies on the other's crime. But that is a casuistry of blood, and it strikes me that an intellectual cannot become involved in it, unless he takes up arms himself.. ."
On the matter of vicarious violence, he speaks of the 1956 Hungarian uprising in terms that have a chilling contemporary application: "I am not one of those who long for people to take up arms again in an uprising doomed to be crushed under the eyes of an international society that will spare neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their slippers like football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game. There are already too many dead in the stadium."
Camus's literary works have never gone out of print, but his message has often been muted or ignored. Until now. In America he is a part of the curriculum on almost every campus; even in France, where he was almost pathologically rejected by Sartre's followers, he is being rehabilitated. Says Historian Christian Jambet, 29, whose analysis of revolution, L'Ange, has become a modern classic:
"Camus was saying that those who demand liberty and who then kill are no longer worthy of being loved. It is a message that is important to us today." Agrees New Philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, 36:
"You have several Camus. You have the Camus who was a guru for the left in the '50s, and you have the philosopher. As to the Camus who was the leftist, he at least had the lucidity to be aware of the Soviet concentration camps. The Camus who is the most near us now is the Camus who said he will denounce tyranny and fascism not only when it is on the extreme right but also when it is on the extreme left . . .
Camus is coming back into relevance because of his ethical point of view. The current views on human rights are very much in debt to Camus's approach."