In the autumn of 1943, barely 30 and recently recovered from tuberculosis, French novelist Albert Camus joined with the Resistance in France and began writing for the clandestine newspaper Combat, which he later came to edit. He was not a hands-off editor. Between Aug. 21, 1944, and June 3, 1947, Camus pounded out some 165 pieces.
The fall of 1944 was his busiest period, when over the course of three months he contributed 70 editorials and seven articles. In the wake of the collaborationist Vichy government’s collapse, Camus explained this explosion of writing with a typically philosophical version of patriotic intensity. “If it is true that newspapers are the voice of the nation,” he wrote, then Combat was “determined to do our own small part to raise the country’s stature by ennobling its language.”
Some of the pieces written during this period wound up in Camus’ “Actuelles I” (1950), a selection of his journalism, but in “Camus at Combat” the scholar Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi presents all his writings from the periodical, organizing them chronologically and labeling with various degrees of doubt the pieces that cannot be attributed to Camus with complete certainty. (Much of Combat’s content was unsigned.)
The result is a stirring, if occasionally arcane, book that puts Camus back into his historical context. Here is Camus frothing at the mouth about collaborators and beating the drum loudly for his countrymen to get involved in creating a new democracy. “From this moment on there are only two parties in France,” he writes in an unsigned editorial in July 1944, “the France that has always been and those who shall soon be annihilated for having attempted to annihilate it.”
His remarks on April 14, 1945, upon the news of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, are worth quoting at length: “For so many who knew him without ever coming near him, all that remains is the smile that for all those years he displayed on the front pages of newspapers, on movie screens, and amid cheering crowds of his countrymen. This is no doubt the reason for the emotion that was felt throughout the free world at the news of his death, even though it was but one of the many deaths that America has contributed to our common cause. History’s powerful men are not generally men of such good humor. … Until now it was possible to talk about his accomplishments but not about his destiny. Today we know his destiny. He was the great leader of the free people that he led to the threshold of victory.”
It is worth remembering that Jean-Paul Sartre, the figure with whom Albert Camus is paired in the history of French letters, lived a different sort of war. For much of it he was comfortably ensconced in Paris, teaching and writing plays. He first appeared in Combat only as the occupation was ending, in late August 1944. (Simone de Beauvoir later claimed to have written his first series of articles, because Sartre himself was “too busy.”)
In his postwar life, Sartre famously became a militant fellow traveler, defending repressive communist regimes and, along the way, alienating Camus, his fellow “existentialist.” By the early 1950s, the two men had broken off their friendship. Camus, for all his leftist sympathies, was too much the “stubborn humanist” for Sartre.
True to form, Camus in his Combat essays called for a return of morality to public life, a refocus on personal responsibility – especially in the line of journalism. Although many of the pieces in Combat deal with now forgotten wartime figures, his thoughts on journalism are scorching and relevant: the sort of thing that newspaper reporters today ought to have tacked above their computers.
“A journalist who rereads his published article and does not ask whether he was right or wrong, who experiences no pangs of doubt or scruples, and who on some nights does not despair of being equal to the absurd but necessary work that he does week in and week out – in short, a journalist who does not judge himself daily – is not worthy of this profession and bears the heaviest of responsibilities in his own eyes and in the eyes of his country.”
John Freeman lives in New York.
Camus at Combat
Edited by Jacqueline Levi-Valensi; with a Foreword by David Carroll
Princeton University Press, 378 pages, $29.95
