Écoutez la suite du récit consacré à l’écrivain engagé Albert Camus, raconté par l’historienne Virginie Girod. Alors que la Seconde Guerre mondiale fait rage, Albert Camus rédige les manuscrits de ses ouvrages l’Étranger, puis de La peste, dans lequel la maladie est l’allégorie du fascisme. Parce qu’il s’engage pour la liberté, il se rapproche en 1943 de la Résistance et intègre le journal clandestin Combat. Lorsque "les évènements d’Algérie" débutent, Albert Camus s’engage pour appeler à un fédéralisme égalitaire. Il dénonce le terrorisme et la répression, mais ses mots ne font pas taire les armes. En 1957, l’écrivain obtient le prix Nobel de littérature, comme récompense pour l’ensemble de son œuvre. Mais alors qu’Albert Camus mène à nouveau une vie paisible, un évènement terrible survient.
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00:00 Welcome to the heart of history, I am Virginie Giraud.
00:04 In the first part of this story dedicated to Albert Camus,
00:08 the poor kid from the Algerian suburbs,
00:10 was able to do his studies thanks to the support of his teacher, Mr. Germain.
00:14 Young adult, he makes his debut as an author in journalism
00:17 and is committed to equality between French and indigenous people in Algeria.
00:22 His political positions are worth enemies to him.
00:25 He settles in Paris in 1940,
00:27 but he is forced to flee the capital to the German approaches.
00:30 In the trunk of his car, there is the manuscript of his first great novel.
00:35 In August 1940, he settles in Lyon, where he marries Francine, who came to join him.
00:51 On the day of his wedding, he gives his friend Pascal Piat
00:55 the manuscript of his novel "The Stranger", which he has finally finished.
00:59 He adds a essay to it, "The Myth of Sisyphus",
01:02 a reflection on the absurdity of existence and the vanity of finding a meaning in it,
01:06 since there is no God to create eternal values.
01:09 It is Piat who will take the manuscript to Gallimard and will publish it in 1942.
01:14 On this holiday, Camus returns to Oran, where he thinks he has escaped from the occupation.
01:20 This is where he writes "La Peste", where the disease is the allegory of fascism that terrifies him.
01:25 Lucid and intuitive, Camus already senses the worst.
01:29 With a few friends, he gives lessons to Jewish children who are chased from schools in private apartments.
01:35 But the tuberculosis catches up with him suddenly.
01:37 Camus returns to rest in France.
01:39 Well, "rest" is a big word.
01:42 He takes the opportunity to get closer to the resistance.
01:47 The Resistance
01:52 In Paris, in 1943, he joins the "Combat" editorial with Pascal Piat,
01:57 a clandestine newspaper that publishes 250,000 copies.
02:01 This publication is linked to one of the most powerful organizations of the Resistance, which is also called "Combat".
02:07 Camus' incisive pen enters the big story with its striking titles.
02:13 "A total war, total resistance"
02:17 When he does not live in clandestinity, Albert Camus frequents Saint-Germain-des-Prés,
02:21 this enclave of intellectuals and artists, where one forgets the war in jazz clubs with the "azous",
02:27 these young elegant men crazy about jazz, often too big for their hatred of rationing.
02:33 It is also at the Café de Flore that he meets the philosopher who rises in this period of war.
02:38 Jean-Paul Sartre is eight years his elder.
02:41 With his companion, the "Castor" alias Simone de Beauvoir, it is rainy and sunny in the neighborhood.
02:47 At first, the two men like each other, and Beauvoir throws himself into the bed of the "beaubrin" she calls her "puma".
02:54 Camus is now invited to private parties in the beautiful Parisian apartments,
02:59 where he stages a piece by Picasso for the pleasure of the "Bonne Société Germano-Pratine".
03:04 The Revolution
03:08 It was at this time, in June 1944, that he met the love of his life.
03:13 He is almost 31 years old, she is 21.
03:16 She is an actress, brown, charismatic.
03:20 It may be her Spanish origins that give her an intensity, a trace of gravity, which seems to be the oriolet of mystery.
03:27 This woman is Maria Caceres.
03:31 He falls madly in love with her while staging her at the Théâtre des Maturins, in one of his own pieces, "Le Malentendu".
03:39 He is subjugated by this young woman who gives life to her text with the exact intonation he had imagined.
03:46 Camus and Caceres become the star couple of Paris.
03:51 The new "Chouchou" of the editor Gaston Gallimard has earned its place in the "Intelligentsia" of the left bank,
04:00 among this Marxist and communist bourgeoisie who has never seen a worker up close.
04:05 He who comes from the lowlands of Algiers, he who does not come from the Serail.
04:10 But we will be able to remind him in time.
04:13 For the moment, everything is fine, and even better.
04:17 The next year, in August 1944, Paris is liberated.
04:23 The journalists of Combat take over the editorial offices of the collaborationist newspapers.
04:27 Combat now appears in the spotlight.
04:30 In the evening, the editorial office turns into a coffee shop.
04:34 Sartre, Beauvoir, Mauriac and so many others come to make the world again.
04:39 Camus often leads the debates and defends his points of view with panache.
04:43 He opposes François Mauriac, a great writer and member of the French Academy, now Gaullist.
04:49 Mauriac pleads for forgiveness to Cordéa, Pétain and the Collabos.
04:54 Camus gets angry and demands justice for those who have pactified with the Nazis
04:59 and led the Jews and the resistance to the camps.
05:02 More and more rebelled against all the executions,
05:05 he is of course one of the intellectuals who condemns the use of the new atomic bomb
05:09 used for the first time by the Americans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
05:15 That year, while the war was ending, he was again in Algeria.
05:20 He feels the tensions between the natives and the settlers.
05:24 He wants to prevent the inevitable and continues to write
05:27 to defend a united Algerian renewal against totalitarianism.
05:32 But as decolonization and its water of horror cover Algeria,
05:36 Camus tries to manage the chaos of his love life.
05:39 Francine moves in with him in Paris and gives him two children,
05:48 twins Catherine and Jean.
05:51 Maria Cazares decides to break up to leave Camus to his family happiness,
05:55 a very relative happiness because the writer suffocates.
05:58 It is now in the theater that he lives by staging his own pieces,
06:02 like Caligula, written in 1944.
06:05 He makes young promising talents like Gérard Philippe and Michel Bouquet debut there,
06:09 and he finds Maria.
06:11 This time, they will not leave each other.
06:14 She agrees to be his second companion.
06:16 They will be able to maintain this passion until death separates them,
06:20 even if many other women pass into the hands of the writer.
06:23 Camus is less complacent.
06:25 His letters testify to his jealousy of Gérard Philippe,
06:28 to whom the press lends a relationship with Maria.
06:31 He says that the actress denies in her response to Camus.
06:34 If Maria accommodates Albert's infidelities,
06:37 Francine is at a loss.
06:39 And lost in grief, she tries to commit suicide
06:42 by throwing herself off the balcony of their Algerian house.
06:45 Albert catches her in extremis.
06:48 This episode clearly inspires her one of his best novels,
06:52 "La Chute", where the hero does not intervene,
06:55 while a woman throws herself off a bridge almost in front of her.
06:58 Francine will consider that her husband owes her this book.
07:01 Sad muse for an author who lets his wife's avatar die with indifference between his pages.
07:07 At the beginning of the 1950s, Camus is in full glory
07:14 and success attracts enemies.
07:16 In 1951, he publishes an essay, "The Revolted Man".
07:20 He criticizes Marxism, Gulag and all totalitarians, including the Reds.
07:26 It is not necessary to go further to inflame the Marxist-Leninist St. Germain des Prés
07:31 gathered around Jean-Paul Sartre.
07:33 "Reunion de crise au temps moderne",
07:35 the philosophy magazine of existentialism.
07:37 The companion of the beaver asks his team
07:40 who wants to do the count-down of "The Revolted Man",
07:43 a murderous count-down of course.
07:45 But all the authors of the magazine vote in favor.
07:48 After a few months, Sartre makes an authority decision.
07:51 It is the philosopher Francis Jansson who will dip his pen in the stained glass window
07:56 to write the review of Camus' last book.
07:59 In his "Albert Camus" or "The Revolted Man",
08:04 Jansson drags the writer into the mud on 21 pages.
08:08 Jansson begins by disjointed all the good reviews that Camus received
08:13 because they would come from the right.
08:15 And from the first page, we can read the first stockade.
08:19 "In Camus's place, it seems to me that I would worry.
08:22 The conclusion, meanwhile, is so poisoned
08:25 that we are surprised that Jansson himself did not get sick in writing.
08:29 "The Revolted Man" is first of all a great book to be missed.
08:33 And, from Jansson, to add that it is pseudo-philosophy
08:36 and the pseudo-history of revolutions.
08:39 Dear listeners, if you want to read a masterpiece of jealousy,
08:43 you will find this review on the Internet without difficulty
08:46 and you will see how an insignificant philosopher shoots red bullets
08:50 on a man who does not have a quarter of literary genius.
08:54 But in this story, let's not forget that Jansson was Sartre's gunman,
09:02 a bourgeois who thinks he is close to the people
09:04 but who cannot stand that a kid from the Algerian Baffons
09:07 can compete with him in the small world of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
09:12 In the end, the modern-day team reproaches Camus, I quote,
09:16 "to judge things with his Mediterranean indifference."
09:20 Everything is said, he is not from theirs.
09:23 Beauvoir also spits at the figure of his puma in the novel entitled "Les Mandarins"
09:28 whose characters are inspired by his entourage.
09:31 She speaks of Camus and lends him collaborators during the occupation.
09:35 Camus is ulcerated when reading "Les Mandarins" which won the Goncourt Prize in 1954.
09:41 The couple confronts Camus by claiming that "Les Mandarins" is not a key novel
09:46 and that Camus is delirious.
09:48 Between the writer and the couple, the hate coup is drunk to the bed.
09:53 Camus is put on the bench of the Parisian intelligentsia,
09:56 but it does not stop his success.
09:59 The French Revolution
10:04 That year, Camus is in the north of Europe
10:08 when a wave of insurrection in Algeria breaks out.
10:11 The FLN, the National Liberation Front in favor of Algerian independence,
10:15 perpetuates 70 attacks in about 30 different places and kills 9 people.
10:21 France is shattered.
10:23 Algeria has been experiencing terrorist attacks for 48 hours.
10:27 Yesterday, a military truck crashed into an ambush at the gates of Algiers
10:31 and two soldiers were killed.
10:34 Today, a new attack occurred.
10:36 This morning at 7.45 on Boulevard Brut, a boulevard that dominates the bay of Algiers,
10:40 and almost at the end of the trolleybus that goes down, it is at the city's door.
10:45 Last night, a grenade was launched in a restaurant bar on Rue Joinville,
10:48 that is, not far from Place Dix-Lys, in the city center.
10:52 This grenade caused the death of three people.
10:55 Two of them were killed instantly.
10:57 As of yesterday evening, Mr. Papa Lardo Vincent,
10:59 two others died in the current of hatred.
11:01 Among these two other people, there was a Muslim CRS from Algiers.
11:05 What do you think of the situation in Algeria?
11:07 It is critical right now.
11:09 Why?
11:11 Because there are attacks everywhere, in the butcheries.
11:14 We record at least ten deaths a day in Algiers.
11:18 Who is responsible for all these deaths in your opinion?
11:20 It is hatred that is gradually spreading between the two communities
11:25 because of the government's policy.
11:28 This is the beginning of what is then called the events of Algeria.
11:33 For historians, it is rather the marker of the beginning of the war in Algeria.
11:38 The Minister of the Interior, François Mitterrand,
11:40 stands on the other side of the Mediterranean and promotes repression.
11:44 Camus, always attached to his native Algeria and to equality, is devastated.
11:50 He does not endorse the violence of the FLN,
11:53 which he personally knows some leaders,
11:55 but he opposes too harsh repression.
11:58 All this violence is generated by the refusal of equality
12:01 between the settlers and the indigenous people.
12:03 He has known for a long time.
12:05 We are always too blond.
12:06 It is both an advice, a reproach and a threat
12:10 that the streets and the faces of Algiers say.
12:13 Too blond, the taxi driver of Algerois,
12:15 who still has the black hair of the Mediterranean,
12:18 but whose skin is still too dark
12:22 to accept to drive you in the Muslim fiefdoms of Climat de France
12:26 or the ravine of the wild woman.
12:28 Too blond, the metropolitan,
12:30 even if he was born very south of the Loire,
12:32 he will be a stranger, or even an enemy,
12:35 on the side of Babel Oued, where anyone who is not from the neighborhood
12:38 is considered by the black feet of the neighborhood at least as an intruder.
12:42 This is Algiers, a place where everything is pretext,
12:46 everything is food, everything is argument
12:48 for the propaganda that is spreading.
12:50 You see, for years, everyone here has been saying
12:52 that the big day of the Franco-FLN agreement
12:54 will be a St. Barthélemy between the two communities.
12:57 But we are right in the middle of the St. Barthélemy.
12:59 100 deaths a week, what is it?
13:01 And no one can do anything about it.
13:02 Unless you put a gendarme behind each European
13:04 and a CRS behind each Muslim,
13:06 there is no reason for it to change.
13:08 Camus no longer manages to devote himself to literature
13:11 while the events of Algeria are painful for him.
13:14 In January 1956, he returns to Algiers,
13:20 where he preaches for the civil truce during a conference.
13:23 He wants neither terrorism nor repression,
13:26 and he calls for an egalitarian federalism.
13:29 But no one hears him.
13:31 Evil is done.
13:33 The FLN gets involved in terrorism,
13:35 the metropolis responds with the army,
13:37 and the OAS, an extreme right organization
13:39 in favour of French Algeria,
13:41 adds fuel to the fire.
13:43 The OAS has gone into the offensive,
13:45 the test of strength is engaged.
13:46 We still doubted it,
13:47 as the information is long to come and difficult to control.
13:51 But tonight, looking at the statistics
13:53 of the last 48 hours, it is clear.
13:55 More than 50 dead, 150 injured,
13:57 Muslims or members of the armed forces.
13:59 Attack on bazookas and rockets,
14:01 mortars, government places, climate of France,
14:03 Dar El Khef in Algiers,
14:04 18 shells in one night.
14:06 Commando attack in Oran, Algiers,
14:08 on the 6th district police station.
14:10 Attacks against Muslims, grenades,
14:12 machine guns, one dead in one hour,
14:14 nothing but in Algiers.
14:15 In 1957, the battle of Algiers
14:17 killed more than 3,000 French and FLN soldiers.
14:21 Camus, powerless, isolates himself.
14:24 But a new event this year
14:26 pushes him to the front of the scene.
14:28 While having lunch in a Parisian restaurant,
14:33 he is disturbed by a Galimar courier
14:35 who announces great news to him.
14:37 He has just received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
14:40 I would like to thank the Swedish Academy
14:44 for wanting to distinguish my country first
14:49 and then a French writer from Algiers.
14:52 This announcement is a bomb for him.
14:55 He first thinks that André Malraux
14:57 deserves it more than him,
14:59 and then he fears the critics' jealousy.
15:01 Mr. Camus, what does the Nobel Prize represent
15:04 for a man of your generation,
15:06 and I dare say, a man of your age?
15:09 Well, a surprise to begin with.
15:12 I always thought that the Nobel Prize
15:14 was given to a writer whose work was finished.
15:17 And in particular, if I had personally to vote,
15:20 I would have done it for André Malraux,
15:22 who was one of the masters of my youth
15:24 and who continues to remain a writer I admire
15:27 and a man for whom I have friendship.
15:29 It is therefore a little lost that he goes to Stockholm
15:32 to receive his prize in the arms of his wife Francine.
15:35 In his sublime speech, he exhorts his generation
15:39 to prevent the world from falling apart
15:41 rather than to rebuild the world.
15:43 Better than anyone else, he understood
15:45 the ineluctable crime of society.
15:48 After the ceremony, the laureate writes to his old master,
15:51 Mr. Germain, the man who put him on the path to glory
15:54 when he was 11 years old.
15:56 You started in journalism,
16:00 and what did journalism bring you in your work?
16:05 Journalism seems to me to be the most beautiful profession,
16:09 in the sense that it is a profession where you judge yourself,
16:12 which is already a good point for the profession.
16:16 And on the other hand, I find it an excellent school of literature,
16:19 insofar as, naturally, one does not give up easily,
16:22 in the sense that it teaches you to say "quick and straight",
16:25 and that for me it is one of the definitions of style.
16:28 Mr. Albert Camus, I thank you.
16:31 Following the reception of the Nobel Prize,
16:33 Camus panics several times.
16:35 He even has suicidal ideas.
16:38 A trip on a bike with his best friend Michel Gallimard
16:41 and Maria Cassares gives him back some of the beast's hair.
16:44 In Paris, he even gets excited about a new relationship
16:48 with the young painter Mette Ivers,
16:50 his 20-year-old cadet.
16:52 In the summer of 1958, Camus has found his balance
16:56 in his new house in Lourdes-Marins, in Vaucluse.
16:59 He then begins to write a new novel, "The First Man".
17:03 It is a kind of autobiography that evokes his youth
17:06 in the poor neighborhoods of Algiers,
17:08 the school that allowed him to get by and his rage to live.
17:12 After spending the holidays in this house of the south,
17:15 Camus is forced to leave his home town,
17:18 because the region reminds him of Algeria,
17:20 and puts his wife and children on a train to Paris.
17:23 He still has some time in Lourdes-Marins.
17:26 He writes a letter to Maria Cassares
17:28 to invite her to dinner on his return to Paris,
17:31 and another to Mette Ivers on his trip abroad.
17:34 He can't wait to see her again.
17:36 He is a happy, noble writer,
17:38 in love with three women,
17:40 who sits behind the wheel of his car on January 4, 1968.
17:44 He travels with his friends, Michel Gallimard, his wife and their children.
17:49 In the trunk, there is the manuscript of "The First Man".
17:53 That day, Camus' car leaves Route 5
18:00 and hits a tree at full speed.
18:03 A tire would have exploded when the vehicle was driving at 145 km/h.
18:08 The writer dies on the spot, stuck between his seat and the dashboard,
18:12 chained to the cold atoll.
18:14 He was 46 years old.
18:16 He is buried in the cemetery of Lourdes-Marins,
18:19 under the sun of the south,
18:21 far from the capital that dried his soul.
18:24 It is one of the greatest losses
18:30 that could reach the French letters.
18:33 It is one of the greatest losses
18:36 that could reach the French letters at the moment.
18:39 François Moryac, writer and academician.
18:42 The French letters,
18:44 but we should say France.
18:47 A whole generation has become aware of itself
18:51 and its problems through Albert Camus.
18:55 The Nobel Prize had been given
18:59 to the young master of the young European elite.
19:04 And it is all the youth that is crying at the moment.
19:08 Albert Camus was like me, an African from the North.
19:12 He was born a few tens of kilometers from my hometown.
19:15 Pierre Blanchard, actor and director.
19:18 And he kept in his heart, like me,
19:21 a tenderness for his country.
19:24 His current book "Troyes" is the shining proof.
19:28 It is this tenderness
19:31 that was the basis of our friendship.
19:34 Tonight I am crying for a friend
19:37 and an exceptional man.
19:40 Don't ask me for more.
19:43 The first novel was published in 1974.
19:49 This novel, although unfinished,
19:52 is considered to be his most brilliant book,
19:55 with its lyric and sensual style.
19:58 Albert Camus is still a major figure
20:01 in French and world literature.
20:04 The writers never die,
20:07 and neither does the humanist.
20:10 This is the end of this story about Albert Camus.
20:22 Thank you for listening.
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