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written in the papers.
However, there are indications that today the intellectuals
are coming back to Camus. History has given
them reason to, with the fall of communism. In fact
it was always the Communist problem which was
responsible for the opposition to Camus. It was always
and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding.
Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin’s trials.
Today we can see that he was right. To say that there
were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was
blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today
we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind,
but before it just wasn’t allowed. Nobody was allowed
to think that or say that if you were left-wing. Camus
always insisted that historical criteria and historical
reasoning were not the only things to take into account,
and that they weren’t all powerful, that history could
always be wrong about man. Today, this is how we are
starting to think.
RW: Do you think that Camus’ work is becoming
vindicated then, after this time of intellectual isolation?
RG: It all depends on the period. Just after the war,
the liberation of 1945, Camus was well known, well
loved by Sartre and all the intellectuals of that generation.
There is an interview given by Sartre in the USA
where he is asked what the future of French literature
is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future
is Camus. And so time passes, and a much more politi-
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
cal rather than literary reasoning intervenes, and from
the day that Camus wrote The Rebel, in 1955, there
comes the rupture, and all, nearly all of the left wing
intellectuals become hostile to him. Since he was already
unfavourably viewed by the right-wing, he found
himself entirely alone.
Then, during the 80s, those you would call the young
philosophers of France, such as Bernard and Gluxman,
pointed out that Camus had said things no one wanted
to hear in the political arena. They said it was Camus
who was right, not those who had slid under the influence
of Sartre, that is to say an unconditional devotion
to Communism as seen in the Soviet Union. And ever
since then the evaluation of Camus has continued to
modify up until today. Intellectuals of Camus’ age who
had previously disliked him now appreciate him. And
at that point we come back to literature, and it’s agreed
that he was always a great writer.
RW: Which brings us specifically to the publication of
The First Man. How will this book alter our perception
of Camus’ work?
CC: We must remember that Camus wrote not even
a third of what he had wished to. The First Man is his
posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it
is his first, because in it you find the signs of his commitments,
and of the whole way of writing as well. This
mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for
those not able to speak for themselves.
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