Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

by Albert Camus

  Why Spain?

  (Reply to Gabriel Marcel)

  I SHALL reply here to but two passages in your article on my State of Siege in the Nouvelles Littéraires. But I have no intention of replying to the criticisms that you or others made of the play as a dramatic work. When one indulges in publishing a book or staging a play, one has to accept the criticism it evokes. Whatever one may have to say, one must keep silent.

  Yet you went beyond the critic’s prerogatives when you expressed surprise that a play about totalitarian tyranny would be laid in Spain, whereas you would have been more inclined to imagine it in Eastern Europe. And when you state that the setting shows a lack of courage and fairness, you are asking for a reply. To be sure, you are kind enough to think that I am not responsible for the choice (this can be interpreted to mean that everything is the fault of Barrault, already so besmirched with crimes). Unfortunately, the play takes place in Spain because I alone chose, after much thought, that it should take place there. Consequently, I must take upon myself your accusations of opportunism and unfairness. And, under the circumstances, you will not be surprised that I feel obliged to answer you.

  It is likely, moreover, that I should not defend myself against even these accusations (to whom can one justify oneself today?) if you had not touched on a subject as serious as that of Spain. For there is certainly no need for me to say that I did not aim to flatter anyone by writing State of Siege. I wanted to attack a kind of political society that set itself up, or is setting itself up, on a totalitarian model, both on the Right and on the Left. No one in good faith can fail to see that my play defends the individual, the flesh in its noblest aspects—in short, human love—against the abstractions and terrors of the totalitarian state, whether Russian, German, or Spanish. Every day pundits reflect about the decadence of our society and look for its basic causes. Most likely such causes exist. But for the simpler among us the evil of our times can be defined by its effects rather than by its causes. That evil is the State, whether a police state or a bureaucratic state. Its proliferation in all countries under cover of the most varied ideological pretexts, the revolting security granted it by mechanical and psychological means of repression make of the State a mortal danger for everything that is best in each of us. From this point of view, contemporary political society, in any form, is despicable. This is just what I said, and this is why State of Siege represents a break that aims to spare nothing.

  Once this has been stated clearly, why Spain? May I confess that I am somewhat ashamed to ask the question for you? Why Guernica, Gabriel Marcel? Why that event which for the first time, in the face of a world still sunk in its comfort and its wretched morality, gave Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco a chance to show even children the meaning of totalitarian technique? Yes, why that event, which concerned us too? For the first time men of my age came face to face with injustice triumphing in history. At that time the blood of innocence flowed amid a chatter of pharisees, which, alas, is still going on. Why Spain? Because there are some of us who will never wash their hands of that blood. Anti-communism, whatever reasons there may be for embracing it (and I know some good ones), will never gain acceptance among us if it forgets the injustice that is going on with the complicity of our governments. I have stated as vigorously as I could what I thought of the Russian concentration camps. But they will not make me forget Dachau, Buchenwald, and the nameless agony of millions, nor the dreadful repression that decimated the Spanish Republic. Yes, despite the commiseration of our political leaders, all this together must be denounced at one and the same time. And I cannot forgive that hideous plague in the West of Europe because it is also ravaging the East on a vaster scale. You write that, for the well-informed, Spain is not now the source of the news most likely to spread despair among men who respect human dignity. You are not well informed, Gabriel Marcel. Just yesterday five political opponents were condemned to death there. But you did everything you could to be ill informed by developing the art of forgetting. You have forgotten that the first weapons of totalitarian war were bathed in Spanish blood. You have forgotten that in 1936 a rebellious general, in the name of Christ, raised up an army of Moors, hurled them against the legally constituted government of the Spanish Republic, won victory for an unjust cause after massacres that can never be expiated, and initiated a frightful repression that has lasted ten years and is not yet over. Yes, indeed, why Spain? Because you, like so many others, do not remember.

  And also because, together with a small number of fellow Frenchmen, I am still occasionally not proud of my country. I do not know that France ever delivered up to the Russian government any anti-Stalinists who had taken refuge here. This will probably happen, for our leaders are ready for anything. In the case of Spain, however, the deed is already done. By virtue of the most disgraceful clause of the armistice, we handed over to Franco, on Hitler’s orders, many Spanish republicans—among them the great Luis Companys. And Companys was shot while that frightful deal was going on. By Vichy, to be sure, and not by us. We merely put the poet Antonio Machado, back in 1938, into a concentration camp which he left only to die. But at that time when the French State rounded up victims for the totalitarian executioners, who voiced a protest? No one. That was probably, Gabriel Marcel, because those who might have protested shared your feeling that all that was a small matter compared to what they most loathed in the Russian system. So, after all, what did they care about one more man being shot by the firing squad? But the face of a man who has been shot by the firing squad is an ugly wound, and eventually gangrene sets in. The gangrene has spread.

  Where then are the assassins of Companys? In Moscow or in our country? We must answer: in our country. We must admit that we shot Companys, that we are responsible for what followed. We must declare that we are ashamed, and that our only way of making up for this will be to preserve the memory of a Spain that was free and that we betrayed as best we could, in our own petty way. And it is true that no power failed to betray Spain, except Germany and Italy—and they shot Spaniards in open combat. But this can be no consolation, and free Spain continues, by its very silence, to ask amends of us. I did what I could, within the limits of my power, and this is what shocks you. If I had had more talent, the amends would have been greater; that is all I can say. But if I had compromised, that would have been cowardice and deceit. I shall not continue with this subject, however, and I shall stifle my feelings out of regard for you. At most let me add that no man of sensitivity should have been astonished that when I wanted to make a people of flesh and pride speak out against the shame and ghosts of dictatorship, I chose the Spanish people. I couldn’t, after all, choose the international public of Reader’s Digest or the readers of Samedi-Soir and France-Dimanche.

  But you are doubtless eager for me to explain myself as to the role I gave the Church to play. On this point I shall be brief. You consider that role to be odious whereas it was not so in my novel.1 But in my novel I had to do justice to those of my Christian friends whom I met during the Occupation in a combat that was just. In my play, on the other hand, I had to say what was the role of the Spanish Church. And if I made it odious, I did so because in the eyes of the world the role of the Spanish Church was odious. However unpleasant this truth may be for you, you can console yourself with the thought that the scene that bothers you lasts but a minute whereas the one that still offends the conscience of Europe has been going on for ten years. And the entire Church would have been sullied by the unbelievable scandal of Spanish bishops blessing the firing squad’s rifles if during the very first days two great Christians—Bernanos, who is now dead, and José Bergamin, who is now exiled from his country—had not protested. Bernanos would not have written what you have written on this subject. He knew that the line with which my scene ends—“Spanish Christians, you have been abandoned”—does not insult your faith. He knew that if I had said something else or kept silent, I should then have insulted truth.

  If I had to rewrite State of Siege, I s
hould still set it in Spain; that is my conclusion. And, now and in the future, it would be obvious to everyone that the judgment pronounced in it transcends Spain and applies to all totalitarian societies. And no shameful complicity would have been involved. This is the way, and absolutely the only way, we can maintain the right to protest against a reign of terror. This is why I cannot share your opinion that we are in complete agreement in matters of politics. For you are willing to keep silent about one reign of terror in order the better to combat another one. There are some of us who do not want to keep silent about anything. It is our whole political society that nauseates us. Hence there will be no salvation until all those who are still worth while have repudiated it utterly in order to find, somewhere outside insoluble contradictions, the way to a complete renewal. In the meantime we must struggle. But with the knowledge that totalitarian tyranny is not based on the virtues of the totalitarians. It is based on the mistakes of the liberals. Talleyrand’s remark is contemptible, for a mistake is not worse than a crime. But the mistake eventually justifies the crime and provides its alibi. Then the mistake drives its victims to despair, and that is why it must not be condoned. That is just what I cannot forgive contemporary political society: it is a mechanism for driving men to despair.

  It will probably seem to you that I am getting very excited about a small matter. Then let me, for once, speak in my own name. The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it. There are ambitions that are not mine, and I should not feel at ease if I had to make my way by relying on the paltry privileges granted to those who adapt themselves to this world. But it seems to me that there is another ambition that ought to belong to all writers: to bear witness and shout aloud, every time it is possible, insofar as our talent allows, for those who are enslaved as we are. That is the very ambition you questioned in your article, and I shall consistently refuse you the right to question it so long as the murder of a man angers you only when that man shares your ideas.

  COMBAT, December 1948

  1 The Plague.

  Defense of Freedom

  BREAD AND FREEDOM

  (Speech given at the Labor Exchange of Saint-Etienne on 10 May 1953)

  IF WE add up the examples of breach of faith and extortion that have just been pointed out to us, we can foresee a time when, in a Europe of concentration camps, the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another. When only one remains, he will be called the “supreme guard,” and that will be the ideal society in which problems of opposition, the headache of all twentieth-century governments, will be settled once and for all.

  Of course, this is but a prophecy and, although governments and police forces throughout the world are striving, with great good will, to achieve such a happy situation, we have not yet gone that far. Among us, for instance, in Western Europe, freedom is officially approved. But such freedom makes me think of the poor female cousin in certain middle-class families. She has become a widow; she has lost her natural protector. So she has been taken in, given a room on the top floor, and is welcome in the kitchen. She is occasionally paraded publicly on Sunday, to prove that one is virtuous and not a dirty dog. But for everything else, and especially on state occasions, she is requested to keep her mouth shut. And even if some policeman idly takes liberties with her in dark corners, one doesn’t make a fuss about it, for she has seen such things before, especially with the master of the house, and, after all, it’s not worth getting in bad with the legal authorities. In the East, it must be admitted, they are more forthright. They have settled the business of the female cousin once and for all by locking her up in a closet with two solid bolts on the door. It seems that she will be taken out fifty years from now, more or less, when the ideal society is definitively established. Then there will be celebrations in her honor. But, in my opinion, she may then be somewhat moth-eaten, and I am very much afraid that it may be impossible to make use of her. When we stop to think that these two conceptions of freedom, the one in the closet and the other in the kitchen, have decided to force themselves on each other and are obliged in all that hullabaloo to reduce still further the female cousin’s activity, it will be readily seen that our history is rather one of slavery than of freedom and that the world we live in is the one that has just been described, which leaps out at us from the newspaper every morning to make of our days and our weeks a single day of revolt and disgust.

  The simplest, and hence most tempting, thing is to blame governments or some obscure powers for such naughty behavior. Besides, it is indeed true that they are guilty and that their guilt is so solidly established that we have lost sight of its beginnings. But they are not the only ones responsible. After all, if freedom had always had to rely on governments to encourage her growth, she would probably be still in her infancy or else definitively buried with the inscription “another angel in heaven.” The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice. Police states have never been suspected of opening schools of law in the cellars where they interrogate their subjects. So, when they oppress and exploit, they are merely doing their job, and whoever blindly entrusts them with the care of freedom has no right to be surprised when she is immediately dishonored. If freedom is humiliated or in chains today, it is not because her enemies had recourse to treachery. It is simply because she has lost her natural protector. Yes, freedom is widowed, but it must be added because it is true: she is widowed of all of us.

  Freedom is the concern of the oppressed, and her natural protectors have always come from among the oppressed. In feudal Europe the communes maintained the ferments of freedom; those who assured her fleeting triumph in 1789 were the inhabitants of towns and cities; and since the nineteenth century the workers’ movements have assumed responsibility for the double honor of freedom and justice, without ever dreaming of saying that they were irreconcilable. Laborers, both manual and intellectual, are the ones who gave a body to freedom and helped her progress in the world until she has become the very basis of our thought, the air we cannot do without, that we breathe without even noticing it until the time comes when, deprived of it, we feel that we are dying. And if freedom is regressing today throughout such a large part of the world, this is probably because the devices for enslavement have never been so cynically chosen or so effective, but also because her real defenders, through fatigue, through despair, or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from her. Yes, the great event of the twentieth century was the forsaking of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movement, the progressive retreat of socialism based on freedom before the attacks of a Caesarian and military socialism. Since that moment a certain hope has disappeared from the world and a solitude has begun for each and every free man.

  When, after Marx, the rumor began to spread and gain strength that freedom was a bourgeois hoax, a single word was misplaced in that definition, and we are still paying for that mistake through the convulsions of our time. For it should have been said merely that bourgeois freedom was a hoax—and not all freedom. It should have been said simply that bourgeois freedom was not freedom or, in the best of cases, was not yet freedom. But that there were liberties to be won and never to be relinquished again. It is quite true that there is no possible freedom for the man tied to his lathe all day long who, when evening comes, crowds into a single room with his family. But this fact condemns a class, a society and the slavery it assumes, not freedom itself, without which the poorest among us cannot get along. For even if society were suddenly transformed and became decent and comfortable for all, it would still be a barbarous state unless freedom triumphed. And because bourgeois society talks about freedom without practicing it, must the world of workers also give up practicing it and boast merely of not talking about it? Yet the confusion took place and in the revolutionary movement freedom was gradually condemned because bourgeois society used it as a hoax. From a jus
tifiable and healthy distrust of the way that bourgeois society prostituted freedom, people came to distrust freedom itself. At best, it was postponed to the end of time, with the request that meanwhile it be not talked about. The contention was that we needed justice first and that we would come to freedom later on, as if slaves could ever hope to achieve justice. And forceful intellectuals announced to the worker that bread alone interested him rather than freedom, as if the worker didn’t know that his bread depends in part on his freedom. And, to be sure, in the face of the prolonged injustice of bourgeois society, the temptation to go to such extremes was great. After all, there is probably not one of us here who, either in deed or in thought, did not succumb. But history has progressed, and what we have seen must now make us think things over. The revolution brought about by workers succeeded in 1917 and marked the dawn of real freedom and the greatest hope the world has known. But that revolution, surrounded from the outside, threatened within and without, provided itself with a police force. Inheriting a definition and a doctrine that pictured freedom as suspect, the revolution little by little became stronger, and the world’s greatest hope hardened into the world’s most efficient dictatorship. The false freedom of bourgeois society has not suffered meanwhile. What was killed in the Moscow trials and elsewhere, and in the revolutionary camps, what is assassinated when in Hungary a railway worker is shot for some professional mistake, is not bourgeois freedom but rather the freedom of 1917. Bourgeois freedom can meanwhile have recourse to all possible hoaxes. The trials and perversions of revolutionary society furnish it at one and the same time with a good conscience and with arguments against its enemies.