Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  But within weeks, some all-too-familiar scripts unfolded. Imre Nagy and other officials who had taken refuge in the Yugoslavian embassy since the Russian takeover were duped into leaving and promptly arrested. Budapest workers who tried to organize themselves were blocked from meeting by tank squadrons, and Kádár had about two hundred leading members of the workers’ councils arrested.

  With virtually all means of protest suppressed, several writers who edited the underground newspaper Élünk (We Are Alive)—Gyula Obersovszky, István Eörsi, and József Gáli (the fiancé of Vera Káldor, one of Ullmann’s colleagues at the university)—managed to organize a demonstration for December 4, the one-month anniversary of the second Russian invasion. Figuring that the authorities would be reluctant to use force against women, the writers planned a silent women’s march to mourn those lost in the revolution. They made their appeal in the newspaper: “Hungarian mothers! Hungarian women! It is your turn now. Your strength is enormous! Not even bullets can harm you! Your silent, honorable demonstration compels an armistice and calls for respect for our sacred cause.”

  Several thousand women took the risk and proceeded to Heroes’ Square to place flowers and evergreen twigs on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Ullmann was in the third row. The Russians looked on, fully armed. She and the other marchers were convinced that the soldiers would not shoot at a procession of women, some with children in tow.

  The march ended peacefully, but all three organizers were arrested within a few days. Obersovszky and Gáli were charged with editing an illegal paper containing antigovernment material, for taking part in the preparation of the women’s demonstration, and for distributing leaflets that incited the populace against state order. On December 11, the government banned the Revolutionary Council of Intellectuals and all territorial workers’ councils; on December 12, martial law was declared; and on December 13, courts were empowered to imprison citizens without trial and to impose the death sentence for a variety of offenses, including sabotage or concealing weapons and ammunition. The first execution was carried out December 15.

  A new security force, many of its members formerly of the AVH, took over for the Soviets in the streets. Workers continued to rebel at factories, so in early January, the government authorized the death penalty for strikers or anyone inciting a strike. On January 17, the writers’ union was declared illegal, and on January 20, the journalists’ union was similarly banned. One week later, several leading journalists and writers were arrested.

  Ullmann was very exposed because of her role in the Revolutionary Committee, which included the disbursing of weapons and providing papers to people who fled the country. Both were serious offenses that were being prosecuted by the regime. She burned all of the evidence she could. But her name was on a lot of documents. In the spring of 1957, Györgi Adám, chairman of the committee, was arrested. Other friends also were arrested, but they did not give Ullmann’s name to the authorities.

  The revolution was dead. And each day there was the looming risk of being denounced and arrested. But there was no safe way out of Hungary. The mass exodus of more than 200,000 Hungarians, more than 5,000 per day in the weeks after the invasion, had been checked when the Soviets destroyed several bridges into Austria, and the borders were resealed in December. Attempting to escape the country now incurred the risk of being imprisoned, or shot.

  KÁDÁR’S DAY OF FEAR

  The waves of arrests, the imprisonments without trial, the executions, the suppression of the press, and the crackdowns on workers made the populace bitter, angry, and scornful of the regime. As the March 15 anniversary of the 1848 revolution approached, Kádár was deeply concerned that spontaneous demonstrations would break out and challenge the government. Any public protests would undermine his authority in the eyes of his Soviet bosses. Kádár planned a show of force to deter any gatherings.

  Security forces would be posted on street corners; Hungarian Army units were to march through the streets of Budapest while other forces patrolled in trucks. The monuments that were the symbols of the revolution—Parliament Square, the Bem Statue, and the National Museum where Petöfi read his poem in 1848—were to be cordoned off by police. Russian soldiers in armored personnel carriers would also stand by in case they were needed. And to be sure that no rabble-rousers could cause any trouble, Kádár took additional precautions.

  Around midnight on March 14, the doorbell rang in Ullmann and Erdös’s second-floor apartment on Taragato ut (Taragato Street) in Buda. Three men belonging to Kádár’s security force appeared at the door. They entered the apartment and began to search it room by room. Ullmann followed the men around, even into the bathroom, afraid that they would plant a gun in the toilet, as they were known to do. When the security men began ransacking the bookshelves, Ullmann became furious and asked them to treat the books with more respect. To her surprise, the men complied. But they took papers—even the postcards Erdös had sent Ullmann from Sweden. They found nothing incriminating; all of the important papers had been burned. The men arrested Erdös anyway and would not tell Ullmann where they were taking her husband.

  THE ANNIVERSARY WAS marked in Paris with a meeting at the Salle Wagram. Camus appeared in person to express his solidarity with the Hungarian people and to remind the audience and his readers (his speech “Kádár Had His Day of Fear” was published in its entirety three days later in Franc-Tireur) what the stakes were for all concerned. Camus’s address was also in part a reply to Sartre, who had written at great length in the preceding months about the Hungarian situation and the fate of Communism.

  In January, Les Temps Modernes published a 487-page triple issue devoted to the Hungarian revolution and Soviet repression. Sartre wrote a 120-page exposition of his views entitled Le Fantôme de Staline (The Ghost of Stalin) in which he laid most of the blame for the debacle on the reaction of hard-liners in the USSR to the de-Stalinization movement. Sartre also pinned responsibility on the West, whose anti-Communist stance, he alleged, was motivated to preserve the Cold War and the profits of arms manufacturers.

  Sartre deemed the USSR’s actions in Hungary criminal, but in no way did he indict the Communist system. Camus saw the one-party system as fundamentally bankrupt: “None of the evils that totalitarianism (defined by the single party and the suppression of all opposition) claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.”

  Sartre still believed Communism was a path to socialism: “Communism appears to us, in spite of everything that has happened, to be the sole movement which still carries within it the likelihood that it may lead to socialism.” Camus underscored where that path had led:

  Foreign tanks, police, twenty-year old girls hanged, committees of workers decapitated and gagged, scaffolds, writers deported and imprisoned, the lying press, camps, censorship, judges arrested, criminals legislating, and the scaffold again—is this socialism, the great celebration of liberty and justice?

  No, we have known, we still know this kind of thing; these are the bloody and monotonous rites of the totalitarian religion!

  Sartre asserted that “all men of the left” recognized that “the USSR must survive for the cause of communism.” Camus rejected this idea completely:

  There is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society. Terror does not evolve except toward a worse terror, the scaffold does not become any more liberal, the gallows are not more tolerant. Nowhere in the world has there been a party or a man with absolute power who did not use it absolutely.

  The first thing to define totalitarian society, whether of the Right or the Left, is the single party, and the single party has no reason to destroy itself. This is why the only society capable of evolution and liberalization, the only one that deserves both our critical and our active support is the society that involves a plurality of parties as a part of its structure. It alone allows one to denounce, hence to correct, injustice and crime. It alone today allows one to denounce torture, disgraceful torture, as contemptible in Algiers as in Bud
apest.

  Sartre still rejected the West and claimed that “the USSR is not imperialist, the USSR is peaceful, the USSR is socialist.” Camus saw the West as flawed, but also as the only hope: “The defects of the West are innumerable, its crimes and errors very real. But in the end, let’s not forget that we are the only ones to have the possibility of improvement and emancipation that lies in free genius.”

  In closing, Camus paid tribute to the Hungarians and tried to offer some glimmer of hope:

  Our faith is that throughout the world, beside the impulse toward coercion and death that is darkening history, there is a growing impulse toward persuasion and life, a vast emancipatory movement called culture that is made up both of free creation and of free work …

  The Hungarian workers and intellectuals, beside whom we stand today with so much impotent grief, realized that and made us realize it. This is why, if their suffering is ours, their hope belongs to us too. Despite destitution, their exile, their chains, it took them but a single day to transmit to us the royal legacy of liberty. May we be worthy of it.

  Camus and Monod would soon have the personal opportunity to spare Hungarian lives.

  CHAPTER 27

  A VOICE OF REASON

  Whoever saves a life, it is as if he saved an entire world.

  —THE TALMUD, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5

  CAMUS’S STAND ON THE HUNGARIAN TRAGEDY ECHOED THE FEELINGS of much of France, yet still managed to provide fodder for his many critics. His public statements aggravated his numerous detractors on the left who thought that it was hypocritical of Camus to condemn the Soviets for their actions in Hungary and yet remain silent on the actions of the French government, which was pursuing increasingly harsh policies to repress independence movements in French Algeria. For more than a year, Camus had kept a vow of silence concerning the crisis in his homeland. He had concluded, after extensive public involvement, that he should refrain from commentary “in order not to add to its unhappiness or to the foolishness that is being written on the subject.”

  The conflict in Algeria was a continuous source of profound anguish for Camus. “Algeria is the cause of my suffering at present as others might say their chest is the cause of their suffering … I have been on the verge of despair,” he wrote in a letter to a longtime friend that was published in an Algerian newspaper. Since Camus remained closely identified with and attached to Algeria, those pushing for its independence from France expected him to support their cause. However, as a Pied-Noir and Frenchman, he understood that after being part of France for more than 125 years and with a population of 1.2 million Pieds-Noirs, Algeria could not break free without both it and France experiencing a great trauma. He hoped for reforms that would address Arab grievances but preserve Algeria as part of France.

  As the violence in Algeria escalated with atrocities committed by both sides, that stand had put him in “the no man’s land between two armies and preaching amid the bullets that war is a deception.” Unable to support either the militants determined to gain independence or the French government bent on suppressing them, Camus sought to find some principle upon which both sides might find common ground. Horrified at the mounting civilian casualties, and ever mindful that his mother, brother, and many friends still lived in Algeria, in early 1956 Camus conceived of a “civilian truce” in which both sides would agree “for the duration of the fighting the civilian population will on every occasion be respected and protected.”

  Camus even traveled to Algiers in January 1956 in an attempt to secure support for the idea. It was a dangerous mission. He received death threats and feared that he might be kidnapped. Camus met with French liberals who supported reform, and with members of the militant, pro-independence National Liberation Front (the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN). Under heavy security, he spoke to an invitation-only audience comprised of both groups at the Cercle de Progrès. As protestors outside chanted “Death to Camus” and pelted the windows with stones, Camus explained that he thought it was his “duty, to come and echo among you a purely humanitarian appeal that might, at least on one point, silence the fury and unite most Algerians.” Camus admitted, “My only qualifications for taking a stand are that I have lived through the Algerian calamity as a personal tragedy and that I am incapable of rejoicing over any death whatsoever. For twenty years, with paltry means, I have done all that I could to contribute to the understanding of our two peoples.”

  Camus said that he could not let “two Algerian populations, each accusing the other of having begun the quarrel … to hurl themselves against each other in a sort of xenophobic madness … without launching a final appeal to reason.” The crux of that appeal was for both sides to recognize that if they could not break the cycle of accusation and violence, they were “condemned to die together, with rage in their hearts.” Camus hoped that by agreeing to protect the innocent, one narrow point of recognition might lead to a broader accord. But for the time being, he merely begged that “on a single spot of the globe a handful of innocent victims be spared.”

  The audience was moved, and there were positive accounts of the speech in the Algiers press. But the proposal languished. It was very soon after the Algiers trip that Camus stopped writing about Algeria. Understanding that he was walking a tightrope—seen as a traitor by the right wing because he did not support the French government’s policies in Algeria, but also condemned by the left wing for not supporting the revolutionary violence of the FLN—Camus elected silence.

  The shift was tactical, not spiritual. Camus had not abandoned Algeria; he remained committed to acting personally whenever he thought he could make a difference. He found himself intervening often on behalf of Algerians. For example, when he learned that Jean de Maisonseul—a friend from his youth in Algiers and a member of the committee that organized his appearance on behalf of the civilian truce—had been arrested by the French security police, Camus sprang into action. Certain that the liberal architect and painter was not involved in any conspiracy against the state, he wrote letters to Premier Guy Mollet, to the governor general in Algeria, and to Le Monde urging de Maisonseul’s release.

  The newspaper published Camus’s appeal, in which he defended de Maisonseul’s character and reputation, and explained that he could not remain silent in the face of “such stupid and brutal initiatives.” Camus suggested that if de Maisonseul deserved to be arrested, so did Camus, Red Cross workers, and all of those involved in the truce effort. After several days during which no actions were taken, Camus raised his tone and the pressure on the government, demanding that de Maisonseul be released and that reparations be paid, and threatening to appeal for public action. De Maisonseul was freed and the case was later dropped.

  But Camus’s general silence was not understood, and he found himself explaining, if not defending, his position again and again. That meant being honest and risking the severing of old ties. He replied to a pro-FLN Algerian poet he had known for many years:

  I owe you … the truth about what I think … I was painfully shocked by what you wrote on several occasions, about French Algerians in general … You have the right to choose the positions of the FLN. For my part, I think of them as murderous in the present, blind and dangerous in the future … I have given up hope on trying to make a voice of reason heard publicly … But, in private, I must tell you my reaction, and you should not ignore the shooting, nor justify that they shoot at the French-Algerians in general, and thus entangled, shoot at my family, who have always been poor and without hatred and who should not be mixed up in an unjust rebellion. No cause … will ever tear me from my mother, who is the greatest cause that I know in the world.

  As requests for his intervention continued to arrive at his office at his publisher, Gallimard, Camus was forced to weigh each case on its merits, which was often difficult given biased accounts of the circumstances, or to try to forge some general rationale to guide his involvement. As French reactions to terror attacks intensified, and as the executions of
rebels in Algeria increased, Camus found the rationale for many interventions in his fierce opposition to the death penalty.

  OUTLAWING DEATH

  In the fall of 1956, Camus had been invited to contribute an essay to a book on capital punishment that would also include contributions by Arthur Koestler and Jean Bloch-Michel. Camus researched and composed “Réflexions sur la guillotine” (Reflections on the guillotine) throughout the winter, just as executions were also mounting in Hungary. The lengthy essay was first published in the June and July 1957 issues of the Nouvelle Revue Française and in book form the following year.

  Camus focused once more on the issue of legitimizing murder that he had raised in his Combat editorials “Neither Victims nor Executioners” and in The Rebel. Now Camus argued at length that the death penalty must be abolished because it was inhumane, irreversible, ineffective, and in fact “not only useless but definitely harmful.” As France remained “one of the last countries this side of the iron curtain to keep capital punishment in its arsenal of repression,” Camus hoped to appeal to his readers’ reason and sense of French progressivism.

  He opened his essay with the story of his father’s reactions to attending the public execution of a notorious murderer in Algiers—a story that had been told to him by his mother. Lucien Camus had gotten up early in the morning in order to go to the other end of town to watch the spectacle, the first he had ever attended. He returned home vomiting over what he had witnessed, and never spoke of the experience again. Camus’s gory research told him enough to explain his father’s reaction to the guillotine.