Albert Camus was an exceptional man who lived in interest- ing times. His parents were pieds-noirs — French settlers in Algeria. His father died at the battle of the Marne and he was raised by his mother, an illiterate cleaning lady. Encouraged by inspired teachers, he won scholarships to a lycée and then university in Algiers. He published his first book at the age of 24, and worked as a journalist, first in Algiers and later in Paris. At the outbreak of the second world war, ill-health exempted him from military service. He worked as a reader for Gallimard, and wrote a classic novel of existentialism, L’Etranger, and a philosophical essay, Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Both were published in 1942.
In the autumn of 1943, now aged 30, Camus joined the Resistance and wrote for the underground newsletter, Combat. After the liberation of Paris, Combat became a newspaper with Camus its editor. Between August 1944 and the paper’s demise on 3 June 1947, he wrote 138 editorials and 27 articles which are now published with scholarly annotations by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi. Journalists, Camus wrote, are ‘historians of the moment’ and here we have an invaluable source for anyone interested in the moral complexities of political life in post-war France.
The war continued after the liberation of Paris, but it was the hitherto quiescent armed forces of Vichy France that chased the Germans out of France while the ‘heroic’ Resistance remained behind to jockey for power and pursue a ruthless settling of scores. At first Camus supported this purge (épuration) in the name of justice: those who had collaborated with the Nazis and committed atrocities against fellow Frenchmen — in particular the infamous milice — must be called to account and, when found guilty, sentenced to death. Camus’ adversary on this issue, the Catholic novelist Fran