During the war Camus joined the
French Resistance cell
Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name. This group worked against the Nazis, and in it Camus assumed the
nom de guerre "Beauchard". Camus became the paper's editor in 1943, and when the Allies liberated Paris, Camus reported on the last of the fighting. He was, however, one of the few French editors to publicly express opposition to the
use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima soon after the event on
August 8, 1945. He eventually resigned from
Combat in 1947, when it became a commercial paper. It was there that Camus became acquainted with
Jean-Paul Sartre.
After the war, Camus began frequenting the
Café de Flore on the
Boulevard Saint-Germain in
Paris with Sartre. Camus also toured the
United States to lecture about French thinking. Although he leaned
left politically, his strong criticisms of
Communist doctrine did not win him any friends in the
Communist parties and eventually also alienated Sartre.
In 1949 his tuberculosis returned and he lived in seclusion for two years. In 1951 he published
The Rebel, a philosophical analysis of rebellion and revolution which made clear his rejection of communism. The book upset many of his colleagues and contemporaries in France and led to the final split with Sartre. The dour reception depressed him and he began instead to translate plays.
Camus's first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd, the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he explained in
The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works, such as
The Stranger and
The Plague. Despite the split from his “study partner,” Sartre, some still argue that Camus falls into the
existentialist camp. However, he rejected that label himself in his essay
Enigma and elsewhere (see:
The Lyrical and Critical Essays of Albert Camus). The current confusion may still arise as many recent applications of existentialism have much in common with many of Camus's
practical ideas (see:
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death). However, the personal understanding he had of the world (e.g. "a benign indifference," in
The Stranger), and every vision he had for its progress (i.e. vanquishing the "adolescent furies" of history and society, in
The Rebel) undoubtedly sets him apart.
In the 1950s Camus devoted his efforts to
human rights. In 1952 he resigned from his work for
UNESCO when the
UN accepted
Spain as a member under the leadership of
General Franco. In 1953 he criticized
Soviet methods to crush a workers' strike in
East Berlin. In 1956 he protested against similar methods in
Poland (protests in
Poznań) and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution in October.
He maintained his pacifism and resistance to
capital punishment anywhere in the world. One of his most significant contributions to the movement against capital punishment was an essay collaboration with
Arthur Koestler, the writer, intellectual and founder of the League Against Capital Punishment.
When the
Algerian War of Independence began in 1954 it presented a moral dilemma for Camus. He identified with
pied-noirs, and defended the French government on the grounds that revolt of its North African colony was really an integral part of the 'new Arab imperialism' led by Egypt and an 'anti-Western' offensive orchestrated by Russia to 'encircle Europe' and 'isolate the United States'. Although favouring greater Algerian
autonomy or even
federation, though not full-scale independence, he believed that the pied-noirs and Arabs could co-exist. During the war he advocated civil truce that would spare the civilians, which was rejected by both sides who regarded it as foolish. Behind the scenes, he began to work clandestinely for imprisoned Algerians who faced the death penalty.
From 1955 to 1956 Camus wrote for
L'Express. In 1957 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in literature, officially not for his novel
The Fall, published the previous year, but for his writings against capital punishment in the essay
Réflexions sur la Guillotine. When he spoke to students at the
University of Stockholm, he defended his apparent inactivity in the Algerian question and stated that he was worried what could happen to his mother who still lived in Algeria. This led to further ostracism by French left-wing intellectuals.
Camus died on
January 4, 1960 in a car crash near
Sens, in a place named "Le Grand Fossard" in the small town of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. It is possible that he had planned to travel by train, but decided to go by car instead.
The driver of the
Facel Vega car,
Michel Gallimard — his publisher and close friend — also perished in the accident. Camus was interred in the Lourmarin Cemetery,
Lourmarin, Vaucluse, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France.
He was survived by his twin children, Catherine and Jean, who hold the copyrights to his work.
After his death, two of Camus's works were published posthumously. The first, entitled
A Happy Death published in 1970, featured a character named Meursault, as in
The Stranger, but there is some debate as to the relationship between the two stories. The second posthumous publication was an unfinished novel,
The First Man, that Camus was writing before he died. The novel was an
autobiographical work about his childhood in
Algeria and was published in 1995.
