It was sixty-six years ago that amidst a raging war, the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus gave his most perilous political speech: outwardly, his speech was a call for a civil truce in Algeria; inwardly, the decline of Arab nationalist aspirations, and in its aspirations, a humanist avowal of shared possibilities on land shared between colonizers and the colonized. Amidst public pleas for decolonial violence, Camus — one of the Pieds-Noirs –– presented himself as a person outside the dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized, a mediator, above all, who despised indiscriminate violence and sought dialogue among the French and the Arabs of Algeria.
As demands for a ceasefire in Gaza gain global political momentum, I think it is worth critically exploring Albert Camus’s thoughts on the French colonial history in Algeria for parallels and breaking points with the present moment. Drawing on those parallels, they suggest that resisting oppression through violence is sometimes the only means available to the oppressed––importantly, for Camus, this is not a justification for violence but a realistic assessment of the effects of oppression on the oppressed.
When Palestine is calling on resistance, we owe it some difficult questions about the legitimacy of self-defence, the limits of violent resistance, and the accountability of the original oppressor. Albert Camus, I think, can help us find some answers.
It goes without saying that the historical context of Algeria cannot be paralleled entirely with the Palestinian situation. Unlike the Algerian case, it is not clear how precisely, if at all, the Palestinians constitute a colonised people. Much more needs to be explored about such parallels and differences. Where the Algerians and the Palestinians share a common fate is in being the recipient of systematic oppression, colonial or otherwise. It is this parallel alone which guides this reflection.
French Colonisation of Algeria: A Brief History
France’s oppression of the Arab Algerians took place in phases: The first was a conquest, which lasted from 1830 until 1870. During military action, France committed mass atrocities on a large scale: French militias obliterated entire villages, violated their inhabitants, and seized their cattle and their crops.
In 1870, during the second phase, civilian settlers from the metropole slowly took over Algerian land. The settlements were ruled by French laws known as the “Indigenous Legal Code,” a racist piece of jurisdiction that deprived Algerians of all protections against the rights afforded to the European settlers.
After 1870, the settlers were faced with erratic insurgencies. In response to violent outbursts, some French called for a reformist approach that would afford limited rights to a limited number of Algerians (those deemed “civilizable”). The real objective behind those reformist attempts was to separate the Algerian masses from the Algerian political leaders, and thus to fracture mass support for Algerian political autonomy.
This brief history of Algerian colonization should sound familiar to anyone aware of key points in Palestinian history: The mass expulsions in ‘48, the ‘67 war, the First Intifada, the reformist Oslo Accords, the outbursts of violence during the Second Intifada, the subsequent scattering of Palestinian political representation, the withdrawal from Gaza, the Unity Uprising…
As a young man, and throughout his life, Albert Camus favoured the reformist approach of the French progressives. In 1936, he embraced the Blum-Viollette bill, named after the leader of the French Popular Front, Léon Blum, and the French governor-general of Algeria, Maurice Viollette. The Blum-Viollette agreement — the Sykes-Picot of French Algeria — would have granted some rights to a tiny minority of Algerians. Note how not a single Algerian was seated at the negotiating table.
At the age of twenty-three, Camus co-authored a manifesto that supported the reform plans:
‘Granting more rights to the Algerian elites would mean enlisting them on [the French] side […] far from harming the interests of France, this project serves them in the most up-to-date way, in that it will make the Arab people see the face of humanity that France must wear.’
The Oslo Accords, a much-scolded concession by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, were welcomed, and justified, in a similar way: The accords would force a face of humanity on the occupation, show to the world the moral righteousness of Israel, and display Palestinians’ ‘reasonableness’ and political ‘goodwill’, Edward Said famously demurred.
By the end of the Second World War, the repression of Algerians was ruthless: it was followed by a decade of massacres. Thousands of Arab civilians were killed by the French army, air force, police, and settler militias. Within less than a decade, France dopped forty-one tons of explosives on insurgent areas. These days, Israel has thoroughly surpassed this sad record. These events in Algeria were, and still are, severely underreported. Even by conservative estimates, reports convey the loss of about 10,000 Algerian lives.
The collective trauma inflicted on Algeria cemented the conviction among Algerian nationalists that national independence from France was the only way forward — self-liberation, by whatever means necessary. This decision was followed by a drawn-out war of independence.
Albert Camus, meanwhile, was accused of double standards. When Camus spoke publicly of ‘massacres,’ he was referring to the occasional death of French civilian settlers. In contrast, when Camus spoke of ‘repression’ he was referring to the systematic killing of more than ten thousand Algerian civilians by the French army, the French police, and settler militias. This should remind us of the narratives surrounding Gaza, pitching terrorism charges on the one side and calls for national self-liberation on the other.
Humanistic Colonialism?
It should now be clear; Camus was not a staunch anti-colonialist. Camus’s battle was one of common sense, reasonableness, and humanistic commitments. ‘It Is Justice That Will Save Algeria from Hatred,’ he titled one of his post-war essays. But for justice to manifest, he explained, France had to undertake a ‘second conquest’ — a conquest, this time, escorted by diplomatic niceties.
In 1958, Camus finally unravelled. In his infamous speech in Algiers, he eventually made very clear to his Algerian audience that his long-standing political work equalled a rejection of Algerian national independence. He dismissed self-liberation as a “purely emotional expression” in sharp contrast to the cold, dispassionate rigours of real politics. In words that must remind us of the enduring Palestinian condition, Camus spoke:
‘Reason clearly shows that on this point, at least, French and Arab solidarity is inevitable, in death as in life, in destruction as in hope. The frightful aspect of that solidarity is apparent in the infernal dialectic that whatever kills one side kills the other too, each blaming the other and justifying his violence with the opponent’s violence. The eternal question as to who was first responsible loses.’
In this violent climate, Camus travelled to Algiers, anticipating widespread support for his humanitarian appeals. For him, Algerian national independence simply was not one of the available options. Too strong, he thought, were the ties between the colonizers and the colonized.
Camus’s Position
Camus’s solution was a sort of republicanism — equal political rights in both Paris and Algiers. In other words, Algeria was meant to remain a part of France, but France had to bestow it with the systematic and sincere application of the rights, duties, and benefits of citizenship. If France failed to do so, he cautioned, it would ‘reap hatred like all vanquishers who prove themselves incapable of moving beyond victory.’ Keep at national independence, he summoned the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN), and there will be perpetual war and misery befalling the Algerian Arabs.
At the Cercle de Progrès, Camus’s speech expressed how he believed that both sides were right; the problem, tragically, was that each side claimed sole possession of the truth. Soon, stones began to fly, and the audience responded with a great murmur. Once he suggested that ‘an exchange of views is still possible’ he was silenced by the angry audience. The FLN countered with passionately nationalistic speeches.
Camus failed in his noble goal of saving the lives of countless civilians, Arabs and French alike. Likewise, the current calls for a ceasefire will likely have the same sad results. The slaughter of civilians continued for another six years until France “granted” independence to Algeria. Rather than decolonization by “consent,” political commentators and historians now agree that Algeria has been decolonized by the force of the colonised.
To the French in Paris, Camus embodied the philosophical lowbrow and politically naïve mouthpiece of the Arabs; to the Arabs in Algiers, his Parisian aloofness, and his insistence on transcending the morality of both the colonizers and the colonized was easily identifiable as the common pathology of the white man.
After the events in Algiers, Camus felt hopeless about the situation in Algeria. He stopped speaking publicly, withdrew into prose writing, and slowly realized that his humanistic goodwill was thoroughly misplaced. Only later, he carefully contextualized his absence from the cause. He surrendered his lucidity, he said in his philosophical manner, in the realization of the tragic character of the human condition: While violence rages, there is no room for philosophical thought — an observation so beautifully translated into words by the Palestinian intellectual Basel al-Araj.
Albert Camus remained silent because he refused to give up his loyalty to both communities. But in this situation of pure violence, however, he had to recognize the futility of his political goals. He could not, after all, reconcile his humanism with the violent state of war.
After he had received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, an Algerian student questioned Camus about his anti-independence politics. Although he believed in justice, Camus said,
‘I have always condemned terror. But I must also condemn terrorism that strikes blindly, for example in the streets of Algiers, and which might strike my mother and family. I believe in justice, but I’ll defend my mother before justice.’
This implicitly recognized the injustice of the colonial system and the personal effects it had on Camus himself. He was not, after all, the aloof, dispassionate political observer hailing to the colony from the metropole to speak in the service of the “civilized people” of Paris. Both the colonial system and the national liberation movement, he thought, had done him an injustice: he, the French-Algerian, who had strong ties with both the colonizers and the colonized. For that matter, he could not choose between them, and all he could do was condemn the violence on both sides. And more importantly than any nationalistic ideal, he thought, was the safety and well-being of those dearest to him.
I think I understand Camus’s position. And I think it can be applied to Palestine. The fear and force of violence, Camus noticed, is always stronger than reason and morality. He also recognised that competing nationalisms breed violence, never solutions.
Camus’ initial failure was to not recognise that the violence unleashed by systematic oppression is almost inevitably uncontrollable, beyond justification and reason. Palestinians like the militant intellectual Basil Al-Araj were trying to convince me that there is no room for political subtleties, philosophical deep-dives, and bourgeois humanism whenever violence strikes the strongest. Camus’s silence spoke eloquently to this realisation.
Speaking about visions for post-nationalism in his 2009 film, The Time that Remains, Elia Suleiman wants us to raise the Palestinian flag as a sign against oppression and hatred. But, as soon as this oppression is overcome, he says, with the freedom and dignity it would bring, we will have to take the flag down.