Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Truth, Freedom, and Justice)

“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.” —French novelist, essayist, and playwright—Nobel Literature laureate—Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Three Interviews,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1970)

The loss to the world when Albert Camus died in an automobile accident 65 years ago today is incalculable. At only 46 years old, he was still in the prime of his career.

His death came at a tricky time for the novelist: France’s divisive, debilitating attempt to crush the independence movement of the colony where Camus was born and spent his formative years, Algeria. As a pacifist, he was so anguished by the Algerian War that he said it affected him “as others feel pain in their legs.”

Like his counterpart across the English Channel, George Orwell, Camus issued a clarion call for liberal democracy when it was threatened by totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right. The successors of these two writers are issuing their own warnings about similar perils that confront our age, but so far they are going unheeded.

Maybe it’s time to re-read Camus, to understand, as he demonstrated in his postwar novel The Plague (much discussed at the outbreak of COVID-19), that withstanding pestilences, whether the medical or political kind, requires eternal vigilance lest they return, but ordinary people must maintain their resistance, no matter how great their weariness.

(For a more extended overview of how Camus balanced political activism with engaging with time “on the smallest and most personal scale,” see Maria Popova’s June 2024 post from her blog “The Marginalian.”)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Music, ‘The Expression of an Unknowable Reality’)

"Music is the expression of an unknowable reality. This reality makes do with a single translation, the most beautiful and the noblest of all. The translation, Music, allows us to form, with the feeble elements at our disposition and by the route of our imperfect minds, an ideal world, which is particular to each one of us, which differs from one person to another.”—French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Essay on Music,” in Cahiers II: Youthful Writings, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1976)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on the Need to ‘Favor Freedom’ Over Resignation)

“People are too readily resigned to fatality. They are too ready to believe that, after all, nothing but bloodshed makes history progress and that the stronger always progresses at the expense of the weaker. Such fatality exists perhaps. But man's task is not to accept it or to bow to its laws. If he had accepted it in the earliest ages, we should still be living in prehistoric times. The task of men of culture and faith, in any case, is not to desert historical struggles nor to serve the cruel and inhuman elements in those struggles. It is rather to remain what they are, to help man against what is oppressing him, to favor freedom against the fatalities that close in upon it.” —French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria” (February 1956), in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien (1961)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Ignorance)

“One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.” — French novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Stranger (1942)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on ‘Refusing to Bow Down to Pestilence’)

“He knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record or what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilence, strive their utmost to be healers.”— French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Plague (1947)

Camus wrote his novel The Plague as an allegory of the authoritarianism that had enveloped so much of the world in the era between the world wars. In 2020 and 2021, what he saw as metaphor became reality, as COVID-19 often seemed to encourage the fear and ignorance underlying reactionary movements.

With restrictions against the disease increasingly crumbling this week, it is important to absorb Camus’ lessons: that we forget what happened in this mortal struggle at our peril, and that the only way to check both disease and authoritarianism is through eternal vigilance born of the need for unillusioned, unblinkered truth.

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on the ‘Smug Justification of Oppression’)

“Today freedom has not many allies. I have been known to say that the real passion of the twentieth century was slavery….I…wanted to express that anguish I feel every day when faced with the decrease of liberal energies, the prostituting of words, the slandered victims, the smug justification of oppression, the insane admiration of force. We see a multiplication of those minds of whom it has been said that they seemed to count an inclination towards slavery as an ingredient of virtue. We see the intelligence seeking justifications for its fear, and finding them readily, for every cowardice has its own philosophy. Indignation is measured, silences take counsel from one another, and history has ceased to be anything but Noah's cloak that is spread over the victims' obscenity. In short, all flee real responsibility, the effort of being consistent or having an opinion of one's own, in order to take refuge in the parties or groups that will think for them, express their anger for them, and make their plans for them.”—French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), "Homage to an Exile," originally a speech delivered Dec. 7, 1955 at a banquet in honor of President Eduardo Santos, editor of El Tiempo, driven out of Colombia by the dictatorship, republished in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien (1961)

This Day in WWII History (French Celebrate Liberation of Paris in ‘Night of Truth’)

Aug. 25, 1944—After four years of a humiliating occupation by Nazis who traduced their national ideals, killed 150,000 and deported or made prisoners of war another 1.9 million, and turned more people than anyone wanted to admit into collaborators with the enemy, Frenchmen deliriously celebrated the liberation of Paris. 

In a post 10 years ago, I recounted Ernest Hemingway’s war dispatch about witnessing the return to freedom of “the city I love best in all the world.” (In short order, he did his part for the war effort by “liberating” the bar at the Ritz Hotel.)

Far more can be said—and has been said—about this emotional high point in the Allies’ destruction of Fascism. But I thought I’d focus on two Frenchmen who would play a major role in the postwar world.

The first is Charles de Gaulle. Long a burr in the side of the Allies whose support he needed to free his country, the general had helped shove the liberation decisively ahead of schedule. 

Only four days before the liberation, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had told him that, instead of immediately supporting the Resistance fighters and striking government workers now pouring into the streets, the Allies would come back to the city later so that they wouldn’t use up resources needed to clear out the Nazis in the rest of the country.

De Gaulle urged him to reconsider. Retaking Paris wouldn’t be a problem, he said. If Eisenhower insisted on withholding forces, de Gaulle would order General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division anyway. Oh, yes—and if the Allies didn’t act, they ran the risk of Communists taking over the city.

In the early stages of the war, in an attempt to preserve French autonomy, de Gaulle had used Communists as part of the Free French movement. Now, though, he demonstrated why a college professor of mine termed him “perhaps the first Cold War” with this hint of a Marxist takeover of the City of Lights.

The play worked. The Nazi forces in the city were crushed between Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division and the Allies’ 4^th Infantry Division. In his victory speech, de Gaulle hailed the former but offered not a word about the latter. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had long since come to consider such slights as typical of the man. 

The two leaders had to deal with him, however, because by this point in the war, he was the one leader with both credibility and widespread support from the public. He was the focal point the next day in leading a victory march down the Champs d’Elysees. As can be seen in the accompanying photo, at six feet and a half, he made for an easy assassination target.

Indeed, for a short bewildering but terrifyingsecond, shots from a rooftop sniper rang out, disrupting the parade and raising fears that de Gaulle had been hit. But the general’s scoffing at death (“Mosquitoes do not bite General de Gaulle,” he had joked to aides who urged him to take precautions against malaria) seemed borne out once again, as he survived the attack.

The other figure who played a notable part in the day—not by participating in it, but by witnessing to it—was Albert Camus. A young journalist, novelist and playwright with a strong interest in philosophy, Camus had attempted to join the Resistance as a soldier but could not serve because of recurring bouts with tuberculosis. Instead, he became editor of the clandestine newspaper Combat.

While Hemingway couldn’t help writing about himself in chronicling the liberation of Paris, Camus submerged his own personality in conveying the impact of “The Night of Truth” for Combat.  His eloquent editorial celebrating the event represented a touchstone in the 20^th century’s struggle against totalitarianism, and established his own striking voice in witnessing to that clash:

“While the bullets of freedom are still whistling throughout the city, the cannons of the liberation are entering the gates of Paris amid shouts and flowers. In the most beautiful and hottest of August nights, the eternal stars over Paris mingle with the tracer bullets, the smoke of fires, and the colored rockets of a mass celebration. This unparalleled night marks the end of four years of monstrous history and of an unspeakable struggle in which France came to grips with her shame and her wrath.”

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Beauty)

“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.”—French novelist-playwright-essayist and Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, translated by Justin O'Brien (1942)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Walking and the ‘Need to Be’)

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”—French novelist, playwright, essayist, and Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), Notebooks 1951-1959 (1962)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on ‘Mistaken Ideas,’ Their Motives and Costs)

“Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.”— French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), Actuelles I, 1950