Albert Camus ( kam-OO; French: [albɛʁ kamy] ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, writer, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history, and the first laureate in literature born in Africa. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall and The Rebel.
Camus was born in French Algeria to pied-noir parents. He spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. He was in Paris when the Germans invaded France during World War II in 1940. Camus tried to flee but finally joined the French Resistance where he served as editor-in-chief at Combat, an outlawed newspaper. After the war, he was a celebrity figure and gave many lectures around the world. He married twice but had many extramarital affairs. Camus was politically active; he was part of the left that opposed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union because of their totalitarianism. Camus was a moralist and leaned towards anarcho-syndicalism. He was part of many organisations seeking European integration. During the Algerian War (1954–1962), he kept a neutral stance, advocating a multicultural and pluralistic Algeria, a position that was rejected by most parties.
Philosophically, Camus's views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. Some consider Camus's work to show him to be an existentialist, even though he himself firmly rejected the term throughout his lifetime.
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in a working-class neighbourhood in Mondovi (present-day Dréan), in French Algeria. His mother, Catherine Hélène Camus (née Sintès), was French with Balearic Spanish ancestry. She was deaf and illiterate. He never knew his father, Lucien Camus, a poor French agricultural worker killed in action while serving with a Zouave regiment in October 1914 during World War I. Camus, his mother, and other relatives lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. Camus was a second-generation French inhabitant of Algeria, which was a French territory from 1830 until 1962. His paternal grandfather, along with many others of his generation, had moved to Algeria for a better life during the first decades of the 19th century. Hence, he was called a pied-noir – a slang term for people of French and other European descent born in Algeria. His identity and poor background had a substantial effect on his later life and beliefs. Nevertheless, Camus was a French citizen and enjoyed more rights than Arab and Berber Algerians under indigénat. During his childhood, he developed a love for football and swimming.
Under the influence of his teacher Louis Germain, Camus gained a scholarship in 1924 to continue his studies at a prestigious lyceum (secondary school) near Algiers. Germain immediately noticed his lively intelligence and his desire to learn. In middle school, he gave Camus free lessons to prepare him for the 1924 scholarship competition – despite the fact that his grandmother had a plan for him to be a manual worker so that he could immediately contribute to the maintenance of the family. Camus maintained great gratitude and affection towards Germain throughout his life and dedicated his speech for accepting the Nobel Prize to him. Having received the news of the awarding of the prize, he wrote:
But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.
In a letter dated 30 April 1959, Germain lovingly reciprocated the warm feelings towards his former pupil, calling him "my little Camus".
Camus played as goalkeeper for the Racing Universitaire d'Alger junior team from 1928 to 1930. The sense of team spirit, fraternity, and common purpose appealed to him enormously. In match reports, he was often praised for playing with passion and courage. Any football ambitions, however, disappeared when he contracted tuberculosis. Camus later drew parallels between football, human existence, morality, and personal identity. For him, the simplistic morality of football contradicted the complicated morality imposed by authorities such as the state and church.
In 1930, at the age of 17, Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Because it is a transmitted disease, he moved out of his home and stayed with his uncle Gustave Acault, a butcher, who influenced the young Camus. It was at that time he turned to philosophy, with the mentoring of his philosophy teacher Jean Grenier. He was impressed by ancient Greek philosophers and Friedrich Nietzsche. During that time, he was only able to study part time. To earn money, he took odd jobs, including as a private tutor, car parts clerk, and assistant at the Meteorological Institute.
In 1933, Camus enrolled at the University of Algiers and completed his licence de philosophie (BA) in 1936 after presenting his thesis on Plotinus. Camus developed an interest in early Christian philosophers, but Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer had paved the way towards pessimism and atheism. Camus also studied novelist-philosophers such as Stendhal, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Franz Kafka. That same year he met Simone Hié, then a partner of Camus's friend, who later became his first wife.
Camus joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in early 1935. He saw it as a way to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria", even though he was not a Marxist. He explained: "We might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities." Camus left the PCF a year later. In 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party (PCA) was founded, and Camus joined it after his mentor Grenier advised him to do so. Camus's main role within the PCA was to organise the Théâtre du Travail ('Workers' Theatre'). Camus was also close to the Parti du Peuple Algérien (Algerian People's Party [PPA]), which was a moderate anti-colonialist/nationalist party. As tensions in the interwar period escalated, the Stalinist PCA and PPA broke ties. Camus was expelled from the PCA for refusing to toe the party line. This series of events sharpened his belief in human dignity. Camus's mistrust of bureaucracies that aimed for efficiency instead of justice grew. He continued his involvement with theatre and renamed his group Théâtre de l'Equipe ('Theatre of the Team'). Some of his scripts were the basis for his later novels.
In 1938, Camus began working for the leftist newspaper Alger républicain (founded by Pascal Pia), as he had strong anti-fascist feelings, and the rise of fascist regimes in Europe was worrying him. By then, Camus had also developed strong feelings against authoritarian colonialism as he witnessed the harsh treatment of the Arabs and Berbers by French authorities. Alger républicain was banned in 1940 and Camus flew to Paris to take a new job at Paris-Soir as layout editor. In Paris, he almost completed his "first cycle" of works dealing with the absurd and the meaningless: the novel L'Étranger (The Outsider [UK] or The Stranger [US]), the philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), and the play Caligula. Each cycle consisted of a novel, an essay, and a theatrical play.
World War II, Resistance and Combat
Soon after Camus moved to Paris, the outbreak of World War II began to affect France. Camus volunteered to join the army but was not accepted because he had once had tuberculosis. As the Germans were marching towards Paris, Camus fled. He was laid off from Paris-Soir and ended up in Lyon. Camus and Faure moved back to Algeria (Oran), where he taught in primary schools. Because of his tuberculosis, he moved to the French Alps on medical advice. There he began writing his second cycle of works, this time dealing with revolt – a novel, La Peste (The Plague), and a play, Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding). By 1943 he was known because of his earlier work. He returned to Paris, where he met and became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre. He also became part of a circle of intellectuals, which included Simone de Beauvoir and André Breton. Among them was the actress María Casares, who later had an affair with Camus.