Forget Camus

Olivier Gloag recalls Camus's visceral attachment to colonialism and the colonial way of life, which runs through his three major novels, The Stranger, The Plague and The First Man. It examines his political commitments in the light of his falling out with Sartre: the tension between revolt and revolution, his recourse to the absurd as a refusal of History, his anti-communism and his denial of the struggle of colonized peoples. Finally, it looks at the way Camus has been co-opted: the most popular author in France and the most widely read Frenchman in the world has become a political and ideological battleground. The invocation of a mythologized Camus projects a flattering but falsified reflection of colonial history. It is this Camus that we need to forget in order to recognize theupheavals of a writer who was as passionately attached to the social gains of the Popular Front as he was to the French presence in Algeria.Forget Camus is a book about French colonial history and literature; it proposes reinterpretations of Camus's major works: these allow to lay bare the ideological contradictions of French society past and present.