Camus and the wars: from the testimony to silence

Abstract

During the time of the Resistance to the enemy and German occupant in 1944 and in the years of the postwar period, until 1947, Albert Camus wrote hundreds of articles in the newspaper Combat. His commitment to the clandestine fight and in the war for liberation is evident. His will to affirm moral principles fits with most of the literary texts that he published. For him it is necessary to associate ideological and ethical fight. the analysis of his journalistic collaborations illustrates it perfectly. Camus will adopt a similar and different attitude during the war of Algeria: he supported first a liberal position, denouncing certain injustices of the French colonial state but then, during the military clash between the French and the Algerian rebels, he sheltered in a dramatic silence immediately after the failure of his Call for a Civil truce. We will see that in both historical circumstances, Camus favored a deeply ethical attitude.