ALBERT CAMUS

Unlike Malraux, Albert Camus had been active in the French Resistance as an ardent communist and editor of the clandestine periodical Combat. When the enemy is superidealist, or fascist, then the most credible opposition must come from submaterialism, or communism. Submen against supermen, with the humanistic middle-ground either helplessly looking on or, as in Malraux's case, fighting in a more official capacity as part of the French army of liberation.

Later, when France was victorious or, at any rate, liberated, these two approaches and identities were bound to clash, and clash they did, with, inevitably, unfortunate consequences for the Communists, who were to be denied power by de Gaulle, even though he was shortly obliged to resign the Provisional Presidency on constitutional grounds. With little prospect of a post-war communist France, many former Resistance fighters, both physical and intellectual, grew disillusioned with communism, and Camus was among them, his disillusionment sharpened by Soviet Russia's attitude towards and actions against its satellites.

No less surely than Malraux abandoned communism, so did Camus, who perhaps was too religious and moral, deep down, to be able to take communist nihilism and amoral opportunism for granted - apparently unlike his one-time friend and 'fellow traveller' Jean-Paul Sartre, who sought to harmonize Existentialism with Marxism in an attempt to justify and exculpate communist and, in particular, Soviet amoral behaviour (man never so free as when he acts ... no matter how or against whom).

By contrast, Camus seems to have taken a moral stance, supporting the liberty within an ethical context of individual conscience against the tyranny, as he saw it, of collective expedience, as though to say, à la Burke, no revolutionary change is worth the pain and blood-sacrifice it entails. Needless to say, he was severely castigated for bourgeois revisionism and reactionary humanism by the Communists, not to mention Jean-Paul Sartre, who attacked The Rebel, Camus' long indictment of ideological tyranny, on these and similar grounds.

Undaunted, Camus continued to cling to a precarious liberal realism until his premature death, in a road accident, a few years later. What is surprising is not that he abandoned communism but ... that he ever took up with it in the first place. Youthful works like his brilliant essay Nietzsche and Schopenhauer suggest an innate predilection towards idealism. But he was, after all, an Algerian of mixed French and Spanish extraction for whom the Ideal was more likely to be seen through the objective ambience of sun, sea, and sand than through any subjective criterion. At least, this was the case for the early Camus, who gave the world a contentment with ‘the Given’ in the guise of Patrice Mersault, the protagonist of both The Outsider and A Happy Death, two of his most memorable novels.

Yet Albert Camus was essentially an evolutionary type in his work as in his life, and if he abandoned hedonistic idealism in Algeria, he later came closer to embracing a Christian idealism in metropolitan France, communism being for him, as for Koestler, a 'God that failed'.