Abstract :
[en] Until recently, in France, Albert Camus was regularly dismissed as a consensual writer and a minor philosopher -- for the dubious reason that his work figured too heavily in syllabuses for secondary schools.
A year before the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death, issues about the memory of Camus in France started gaining new momentum in the face of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to have the author’s remains transferred to the Pantheon. Although Sarkozy’s ploy was successfully opposed by Camus’ son, who claimed (unlike Camus’ daughter) that moving his father’s remains would be contrary to the deceased’s wishes, the struggle over the writer’s legacy dramatically resurfaced a few years later. In Fall 2012, the project of a major Camus exhibition in Aix-en-Provence for Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture 2013 was stalled, following on, first, the brutal eviction of its curator, French Algeria historian Benjamin Stora, and second, the consequent underhanded appointment of middlebrow philosopher Michel Onfray, before the latter’s final decision to back off from what he called “la pétaudière” (the madhouse).
Given that the forced replacement of Stora by Onfray was pronounced by arch-conservative Aix-en-Provence mayor Maryse Joissains-Masini, the French and Algerian presses have been unanimous in interpreting Stora’s eviction as a result of his resolve to lay stress on one of the most silenced aspects of Camus’ work -- namely, his problematic status as a ‘French’ writer born on North African soil, and his impossible French/Algerian identity as a Pied-Noir who opposed both the OAS and the FLN. “What they did not like in him was the Algerian,” reads the Annex to Camus’ unfinished novel, The First Man. This paper sets out to examine how, beyond its escapist character, Camus’ ‘Mediterranean utopia’ still has a potential for raising unsettling questions about post-colonial Algeria and post-imperial France alike, in a contemporary context where a French apology for more than a century of colonization in Algeria remains overdue.
