Albert Camus: Man, Justice and Homicide
By R. Conroy
1966
Meme dans la destruction, il y a un ordre, il y a des limites. (Les Justes 107)
[Even in destruction, there is an order, there are limits.]
By the time a boy reaches eighteen, he is expected to have decided whether or not he can conscientiously kill for a country, a principle or an ideology. Government and public opinion alike demand that if at all uncertain, he should follow tradition and ‘volunteer’ anyway. He can think things through later when he has acquired more wisdom; but the time to kill is now, because his country needs him. The question which remains is this: what happens if the boy does follow tradition, does kill, does live to reconsider his actions, and finds he now has more doubts than ever? What happens to such a man, and equally important what about the man he has killed? In the eyes of tradition, such a man has done honor to himself and his country. Society decorates him with medals and awards him special privileges. He has performed his duty bravely, capably, thoughtlessly – a model soldier. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, this man finds himself unable to be satisfied with the verdict of society. He is plagued by a new judge and jury, those which exist within his own mind. He is tried a second time, and this time is found guilty. He realizes his mistake; he denounces the war machine. But his deeds remain, and they become part of the tradition that demands that others make the same vital decisions that he was forced to make at age eighteen.
In his writings, Albert Camus shows a recognition of the need for a re-examination of man’s reasons for killing man. “I know those stale old arguments,” he proclaims through the character Diego in L’Etat de siege. “To do away with murder we must kill, and to prevent injustice we must do violence. That’s been dinned into our ears until we took it for granted. For centuries fine gentlemen of your kind have been infecting the world’s wounds on the pretense of healing them … because no one had the courage to laugh them out of court.” (State221) Camus, however, is too understanding of human nature and too sympathetic toward man’s ideals to dismiss the topic with an unqualified, “Thou shalt not kill.” He does not flatly exclude the use of homicide. To do so would be avoiding the real issue. Homicide is a reality. Every day men kill other men, and sometimes (although not frequently) these acts have been intensively deliberated and found justifiable by their executors. Camus shows a particular interest in this sort of crime. If a man believes that his act of murder will be in the cause of justice, is he justified in attempting it? Is a man entitled to judge the worth of the life or death of another? In assuming the powers of a judge, has he ceased being a man? Does he give up his own right to live in a community of men?
Of course the majority of homicides are not preceded by hours of careful thought and deep soul-searching. Most cases derive their cause directly from tradition, circumstance or passion. How should we react to this kind of crime? Is it enough not to be guilty of such murders ourselves, or must we also find some means of combating them? What is the most effective way to struggle against “this creation where children are tortured?” (La Peste 93), a world where “one hundred million cadavers dispersed through history are only a cloud in the imagination” (48)?
Camus has dealt extensively with all of these questions in many of his works of fiction and in his essays. For the purposes of this paper, we shall concern ourselves mainly with his plays Les Justes and L’Etat de siege and two of his novels, L’Etranger and La Peste. It is in these works that Camus most successfully blends his philosophical ideas on the topic of homicide with his profound understanding of mankind’s constant struggle in search of justice.
It should be noted that the author has chosen to omit in this study one type of homicide, suicide. This is not because Camus himself was not concerned with this topic; on the contrary, he had very definite convictions about it. The reason for its omission is instead the different nature, the different motivation, and the different effect on society of suicide from other types of homicide. It is felt by the author that because suicide involves what is essentially a personal decision and does not bring about the infringement of another man’s rights to live that it should be dealt with separately; for the fundamental concern in this study is how man relates to other men in society, not how he reacts to the meaning or meaninglessness of his own universe. Let it suffice to say hear that Camus rejected suicide as a legitimate alternative open to mankind because no logic or sentiment can by valid “jusqu’a la mort” (all the way to death) (Les Justes 68). For further information on this subject, the reader is referred to Camus’s essays, especially “L’Absurdite et le suicide.”
Nous tuons pour batir un monde ou jamais personne ne tuera. (Les Justes 94)
[We kill to construct a world where no one will ever kill.]
How does one fight injustice without increasing it? This is a question to which, quite obviously, man has as yet been unable to give a satisfactory answer. The basis of man’s enforcement of laws intended to maintain justice has long been the use or threatened use of physical punishment upon the offender. The most serious breach of justice, murder, is combated with the most severe punishment, execution. It is here that the complexities involved in distinguishing violence in the case of justice from violence as a breach of justice become most apparent. Camus’s play Les Justes deals with essentially this topic.
The play concerns a group of Russian revolutionaries of the pre-Soviet 1900s who plot the assassination of a complacent duke as part of their plan to free the Russian people from tyranny. As indicated by the play’s title, these men have designated themselves as judges of society. They have taken it upon themselves to decide the worth of a person in view of what they consider to be justice. Because the Russian peasants are deprived and oppressed while the duke lives in wasteful luxury, mindless to the poverty around him, ‘Les Justes’ believe there is justification for their act of murder. The crux of their argument is that the end justifies the means. But they run into a problem along the way. They find, one by one, that as much as they want to be selfless instruments of the cause of justice, they are still unable to divorce themselves from the race of human beings. Their love for justice is not pure; it is, with the exception of only one character, tainted with another love: a love for mankind.
The discussion that takes place in Act One and Two of the play before the assassination is finally carried out is truly a document of lasting importance in the field of capital punishment. The group at this stage is comparable to a jury that has already reached the verdict, guilty, and has already recommended the sentence, death. But there is one important difference between this jury and one in the usual murder trial; this jury not only has to give the verdict, but must also carry out the sentence. There is no hangman to do the job for them; their work is not over until the duke is dead. And it is one thing for a salaried hangman to carry out a sentence upon which he had no influence whatsoever; it is quite another when a man who has reached a pure, rational verdict in the cause of justice is faced with the task of taking the life of a living being. Purity no longer exists when one must dirty his own hands. This is the situation with which the young revolutionaries are faced. It is at this time when the love of each individual member for the cause of justice can be measured; this is where they separate the judges from the men.
The physical task of tossing the bomb into the carriage of the duke as it passes in front of the terrorists’ hideout has been assigned to the youngest and apparently least experienced member, Ivan Kaliayev. This choice is vigorously challenged by Stepan Federov, an outspoken anti-humanist, who finds Kaliayev to be too soft. “I don’t love life,” claims Stepan, “but justice which lies over life.” (Les Justes 92) Kaliayev in principle shares Stepan’s love for justice, but unlike his associate he loves life as well. Kaliayev cannot see a reason to kill injustice unless a living justice would result. Justice to him is meaningless without life. “The revolution, of course,” he exclaims, “but the revolution for life, to give a chance to life, do you understand?” According to Kaliayev, “We kill to construct a world where never again will people kill.” (94) And when Dora asks what is perhaps the most important question of the entire discussion – “And if that is not to be?” (94) -- Kaliayev ignores its implications: “Be quiet, you know well that that is impossible.” (94) Kaliayev must believe his act to be a crime against crime, a final injustice to usher in a new era of justice. Stripped of this assurance of its righteousness, Kaliayev would not conceive of throwing the bomb. He chose to ignore the possibility of terrorism serving no useful end when he first joined the Organization. But of course this decision was an intellectual one; now he is faced with the act. No longer just a juror, Kaliayev has become the hangman as well.
Kaliayev does his best to resist any inward human tendencies that may divert his purpose. Dora, Kaliayev’s closest friend in the Organization, warns him that it will not be as easy to throw the bomb into the duke’s cart as he might imagine. Dora warns him, “The grand duke may have compassionate eyes. You may see him scratch his ear or smile joyously.” According to Kaliayev, however, this would make no difference. “It is not him who I kill. I kill despotism.” And when pressed further, Yanek (Kaliayev’s nickname) replies with a most ironic comment: “With the help of God, hate will come at the right moment and blind me.”(97) One is struck by the need for blindness instead of insight in carrying out this crime for justice.
After all his careful preparation and rationalization, Kaliayev is destined to fail in his attempted assassination. The reason for his failure is most extraordinary. Yanek is prepared for the duke to have a warm face or a kind regard. Nothing of this sort could stop him. But as it turns out, the duke is not alone in his carriage; he is accompanied by his two small nephews. Now, to Kaliayev (and here it is certain that he is speaking for Camus) children are beyond the boundary of what is expendable in the cause of justice. Children represent innocence, an innocence which he loves and which he himself seeks ultimately to regain. Seeing two little unsuspecting faces in the carriage beside the duke, Yanek cannot get himself to throw his deadly package into their midst. He returns to the Organization and reports his failure. Immediately the old argument between Dora and Stepan flares up again. “Open your eyes and comprehend that the Organization will lose its power and its influence if it tolerates for a single moment that children be burned by our bombs,” Dora argues in Yanek’s behalf. (105) Stepan maintains that “because Yanek has not killed those two (children), millions of Russian children will die of hunger in years to come.” (106) But would the death of two nephews of the grand duke really prevent any children from dying from hunger?
The answer to this last question bears considerable significance in regard to killings of all types. Stepan has sought justification for his convictions in the assumption that through the use of calculated murder in he present, one can present needless deaths in the future. He accuses Dora and Yanek of living only for the present, of trying to cure only the evils of each day, while ignoring the progress of the revolution that would cure all the injustices, both present and future. Stepan’s argument is in fact very similar to the one on which our own judicial system is based. We do not execute a person because we believe that the act of execution will do him or anyone else any good. We execute him primarily in the hope that through his death, potential murderers will be discouraged. The question is, does this procedure really produce the desired effect? It seems doubtful that it could. If the original murderer has been rationally motivated for his crime, his execution would in fact be a duplication of his own act. In both the murder and the execution, man has taken it upon himself to become a judge. The net result is that, because of the use of the death penalty, the rational murderer of the future now has two precedents for his act instead of one. He can point to two examples of where murder was used in the name of justice, one which has been considered legal in the eyes of institutionalized society. The death sentence is in fact recognition of man’s right to commit rational murder.
Kaliayev, of course, has no legal precedent for his act. In the eyes of the law, he is not executing a capital punishment but is committing a first-degree murder. However, just because acts such as his are not considered legal does not reduce his own intellectual conviction that they are justified. Kaliayev has grown up in a society that has long accepted the use of homicide to eradicate that which is deemed unjust. He has been conditioned to think of purposeful, pre-meditated murder as a cure, rather than an infection of society’s wounds. Now that the occasion has arisen for him to play the role of ‘guardian of justice,’ Kaliayev is not in the least disturbed that his act will be in violation of the existing code of laws rather than in support of it. The fault obviously lies not with him, but with the tyrannical regime that currently imposes the laws of the land.
That is not to say, however, that Kaliayev has no scruples whatsoever about his assignment to kill the duke, even without adding the complication of the duke’s nephews. Kaliayev is fundamentally not a rationally governed being. He cannot see sacrificing one generation for the next. Justice for him must be a living, breathing justice. Stepan speaks of choosing to ignore the innocence of some children today so that millions will someday find something much greater than innocence, justice. But Kaliayev cries out in protest: “But I, I love those who live today on the same earth as I do, and it is they whom I salute…. I will not add to living injustice for dead justice.” (108) The conflict between the two associates can be narrowed down to essentially this: Stepan feels an ardent love for the revolution and the justice that supercedes it, but is capable of feeling no emotion toward another human being; Yanek, on the other hand, is torn right through his heart between “l’amour tender” and “l’amour revolutionaire.” (119) Yanek is overpowered by the immediacy and warmth produced by a compassionate, understanding love between two human beings. On the very afternoon of his second (and this one successful) assassination attempt, Yanek is noticeably shaken by his realization of his love for Dora. Moments before his vital assignment, he is unable to think of the injustice being done to the Russian people, but only of his love for a woman. Dora sees this and reprimands him: “I hear that you call me, me, Dora, above this world poisoned with injustice.” She maintains that they are no longer permitted the luxury of such love. “We are not of this world, we are judges. Human warmth is not for us.” (119) It is perhaps here that Dora makes her fatal mistake. In depriving herself of the warmth of human compassion, she has ignored half the jurors deep within her own being, the jurors who, in the cause of humanity, would have chosen to spare the duke and would thus have counter-balanced her rational convictions. As it stands, Dora no longer has to justify her act as a crime against human life, for she has reduced her world to an abstraction, goods and evils, justs and unjusts. The bomb is being hurled not at the duke, but at tyranny. It doesn’t take much stomach to kill tyranny.
Unlike Dora, Yanek is never able to totally blot out the human side of his nature. He must find a way to satisfy his irrational self, to quench the neglected flames of his “amour tendre.” The method he chooses for purging his sins to humanity is to die himself. He reasons that, as a self-appointed judge, he no longer has the right to live in a society of men. He has stepped beyond the bounds within which man can operate. In his words, “if I would not die, it is then that I would be a murderer.” A man who transcends his race purposely to kill cannot descend again to mortal life without being a hypocrite. Having given up life, Yanek is counting on a reunion with his rational accomplices in a spiritual world beyond. Through his death, he desires to crown his work in the purity of the idea. When the time comes, he will mount the scaffold joyfully, as one going to be cleansed. …
Up to now, our examination of murder has focused on the rational crime, pre-meditated and committed in full consciousness for the cause of justice. Camus’s novel L’Etranger (The Stranger) exposes us to a different sort of murder. Meursault, the central character, commits the irrational, spontaneous, absurd murder. He murders an Arab whom he meets on the beach because at the same moment that the Arab’s knife catches the brilliant reflection of the late afternoon sun, a bead of sweat rolls into Meursault’s eye and blinds him behind a dazzling curtain of liquid light. As he describes it, “It seemed to me that the sky opened its full expanse to let loose a rain of fire. My entire being was held in a trance, and I squeezed my hand on the revolver. The trigger moved, I touched the polished belly of the butt end, and it was there, in the noise simultaneously dry and deafening, that everything began. I shook off the sweat and the sun.” (L’Etranger 80)
The question raised by L’Etranger concerns not so much the murder itself but the process of ‘justice’ undertaken to punish Meursault for this act. Meursault is tried for pre-meditated, first-degree murder. The prosecution accuses him of firing the revolver “in a poised manner, leaving no chance for error, as if it had all been well thought out beforehand.” (117) The basis for this accusation is that Meursault is known to be a man with no soul, no sensitivity, no moral principles – in short, “rien de humain” [nothing human] (118) – because several months earlier he behaved in a noticeably calm, dispassionate manner at his mother’s funeral. The trial proceeds entirely out of the control of the defendant. So removed are the proceedings from what he knows to be true, Meursault can hardly force himself to believe that it is his case which is under examination. When finally called to the defense stand himself, he is too hot and tired to care, and says only that he killed the Arab “because of the sun.” (120) Then his lawyer takes over once more, this time using the first person in his client’s defense as if he were the accused. This in Meursault’s point of view reduced him to nothing. The jury then retired briefly and returned with the verdict: Meursault would have his head removed “in the name of the French people.” (124)
Meursault’s execution is not carried out immediately, however. He is allowed to exist as the ultimate “lame duck” in the comforting solitude of his cell for many months, never knowing which dawn will be chosen for his beheading. His thoughts during this period raise some disturbing questions concerning the use and value of capital punishment. First he reflects on the events of the trial. “The fact that the sentence was read at eight o’clock rather than at five, the fact that it could have been completely different, that it was carried out on the basis of a notion as imprecise as the French people (or German, or Chinese), it seemed that all this lifted the decision from the realm of the serious.” (126) Then he thinks of the guillotine and remembers a story his mother once told him about his father going to see the execution of an assassin and then vomiting the rest of the day. Meursault is obsessed with the realization that he has absolutely no chance to escape his fate. His condition is positively absurd. There is nothing he can do to change the course of events; he is to die. He concludes, “What is wrong with the head-chopper is that one does not have any chance, absolutely none.” (128) He suggests the use of a potion that would be fatal to nine out of ten accused, or even nine hundred ninety-nine out of a thousand; the percentage is not important as long as there is that one glimmer of hope.
[Near the end, Meursault comes to three stunning realizations: that nothing matters, that the world is gently indifferent, and that he loves life.] He begins to think of that coming dawn when the blade will come tumbling down upon his throat as being the hour of his justification. He realizes that his life has been a happy one. Before the bead of sweat caused his momentary blindness, he lived a happy existence similar to that of Sisyphus in Camus’s adaptation of the Greek myth. He lived contentedly as a man among men. He now realizes that others consider themselves as gods and judges, as having special insight into human affairs and consequently possessing special privileges. But he does not care. “So what if, accused of murder, he is executed for not having cried at his mother’s burial?” (137) Meursault has been happy. And there remains one comforting thought: perhaps there will be someone moved to vomit at his execution.
We will refrain form making any conclusions at this point about Camus’s formula for the use or non-use of murder and capital punishment in society. These will be in order in the final section, before which we will have also looked at Camus’s ideas on war and ideological genocide.
Il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’annes dans les meubles et le linge, it attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et peut-etre, le jour viendrait ou, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des homes, la peste reveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourrir dans une cite heureuse.
[It is able to stay for decades, sleeping in the furniture and linens, it waits patiently in rooms, in caves, in trunks, in handkerchiefs and old papers, and then possibly the day comes when, for the misfortune and instruction of men, the plague reawakens her rats and sends them to die in a happy city.]
Albert Camus is known to have been at least in sympathy with the pacifist movement. Several of his essays are pointedly anti-war, and almost all express a good degree of discontent toward society’s lack of moral conviction about the sanctity of human life. None of his major fictional works deals explicitly with the subject of war. But two of them, his novel-chronicle La Peste (The Plague) and his ultra-modern morality play L’Etat de Siege (State of Siege), are allegories of war-time situations. In both cases Camus found his inspiration in the French resistance movement during the period of Nazi occupation in World War II. The equivalence of army and plague in these works is very important to keep in mind when trying to fully grasp Camus’s message. We shall make detailed examinations of the views expressed in both of these works, paying special attention to how Camus’s ideas on murder and capital punishment relate to his approach toward what is perhaps the most important question of our day: the use of ideological genocide. … [The section on State of Siege has been omitted.]
Camus’s Nobel-prize winning novel-chronicle La Peste has the same theme as L’Etat de Siege but is much more subtle in its didacticism and more sensitively humanistic in its approach. Again the allegory is between the French resistance movement and the struggle of a town’s people against the plague. This time, however, the plague is not a mysterious omnipotent murderer but a genuine epidemic. And the resistance leaders are no longer mere puppets manipulated to present the author’s views on moralities of war. They have become fully developed and remarkably sensitive human beings, each reacting in his own way to combat the horrors of le fleau (the germ) that surrounds him.
The first reality the inhabitants of the plague-infested town of Oran (on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria) had to face was that they could not look at this calamity as they had come to look at countless others in the pages of history – as an abstraction. They had found that “one hundred million cadavers dispersed through history are only a cloud in the imagination….” (La Peste 48) “But when an abstraction begins to kill you, it is well to concern yourself with the abstraction.” (56) The three most fully examined responses to the challenge presented by le fleau were those of le pere Paneloux, le docteur Rieux, and his friend Tarrou. Paneloux’s reaction to the wretched suffering surrounding him was somewhat simpler than that of the other two. First, to struggle against le fleau in their own way, Paneloux and the other ecclesiastical authorities organized a week of prayers. Then on the following Sunday he delivered a dynamic sermon whose message was essentially that the plague had always been used by the Lord as a weapon to humble a people who had become too proud and defiant in their ways. Thus the only way they could rid themselves of the plague was to repent, to bow down in complete submission to the will of the Lord; and this done, “divine mercy would see to the rest.” (59) After witnessing the torturous death of a young boy stricken with the dread disease, Paneloux comments to le docteur Rieux, “maybe we ought to love that which we cannot understand.” (95) This remark brings out into the open one of the central conflicts of the novel. To quote Rieux, “If a preacher consults a doctor, there are contradictions.” (104) This is a bit of an understatement. Some of Rieux’s views on the place and function of God and religion relative to man will explain why.
When asked by Tarrou if he believes in God, Rieux answers that “if he believed in an all-powerful God, he would cease curing men, leaving this care to him.” (71) He further contends that “since the order of the world is regulated by death, maybe it better for God that one not believe in him and that one struggle with all one’s forces against death, without raising one’s eyes toward heaven, where he remains silent.” Tarrou gives his approval to Rieux’s philosophy: “Yes, I am able to understand. But your victories will be always temporary, that is all…. Always, I know it. That isn’t a reason to stop struggling, though.” (72) On the subject of Paneloux’s sermon, Rieux comments, “I have lived too long in hospitals to like the idea of collective punishment.” And after the death of a young boy: “I will refuse up to my death to love this creation where children are tortured.” (69)
Tarrou’s views on how one should react to a calamity such as plague or war are quite similar to those of the doctor. During his childhood, Tarrou had an experience that was destined to greatly influence his later philosophy. His father was a district attorney, and on one occasion he invited his son to attend a murder trial. Tarrou proudly watched as his father delivered a most eloquent case for conviction, but then happened to look for the first time at the defendant. He suddenly realized that it was this man about whom his father was talking, this living man, and his father wanted to have him killed. “This head must fall,” his father had said. (108) In Tarrou’s words, “ I heard practically nothing, I sensed that they wanted to kill this living man and a formidable instinct like a wave carried me to his side with a sort of blind stubbornness. I did not want to be a carrier of the germ. I say only that there are on this earth calamities and victims, and it is necessary to avoid as much as possible siding with the calamity.” (109) Tarrou concedes that the natural state of society breeds the microbe. “The rest, health, integrity, purity, what you will, these are effects of will and of will that must never let up.” (112) Tarrou maintains that there are three roads open to a man to choose in seeking a response to le fleau: one could accept plague as the inevitable, and become a part of it, become un pestifere; one could refuse to let oneself become a contributor to le fleau, but in order to do this “it is necessary to watch yourself ceaselessly to not be led, in a moment of distraction, to breathe in the face of another and spread the infection to him.” (112) Finally, one could dedicate oneself to the only occupation that actively fights le fleau, “that of the real doctors.” (113) Tarrou recognizes that he can only hope to be representative of the second category, those who themselves do not add to the suffering. Rieux has achieved the third level. Most of us rest contentedly on the first.
At various points throughout this study, reference has been made to contradictions that exist between what Camus has eloquently argued to be essential in man’s evaluation of homicide and what modern society has said on the same topic. In several of his essays, Camus has attempted to pinpoint where this area of conflict lies. For example, in an essay entitled “Les Pharisiens de la justice,” Camus summarizes what he considered to be his major points in the play Les Justes. He first makes it clear that the response he seeks is not simply “it is necessary to stay home.” It is:
The response of our era (implicit response) is, to the contrary:
These accusations toward our society seem harsh indeed. One might be tempted to dismiss them as Camus’s emotional response to the bitter experience of Nazi occupation. But when it comes down to the bare, un-propagandized facts, it seems to be an unavoidable conclusion that the behavior of nations in the mid-nineteen sixties has demonstrated no greater concern with limits of what can be done in the name of justice than have the most belligerent empire builders of history. The United States, for example, has firmly pronounced its determination to obtain a “just” peace in Vietnam. Typical of her line of thinking is that in order to fight terrorism she must herself terrorize. It is her firm belief that the best way to put a stop to violence is to be violent herself. In assuming this position, the United States has fallen into the same trap that the townsmen of Cadiz fell into when they stole The Plague’s notebook and began exterminating each other. As long as the townspeople fought only The Plague, they were involved in a justifiable struggle against pure evil. But as soon as they tried to fight evil with evil by striking out the names of people they found undesirable, then the townspeople were no longer engaged in an honorable struggle in the cause of justice, but were instead playing right into the hands of the great perpetrator of injustice, The Plague. Compared to the people of the world today, however, the fictional characters in State of Siege are really more virtuous; for they at least did not turn against each other until the Plague had spread the seeds of fear and dissension among them. Society today has shown no need of The Plague. We are quite capable of sowing our own seeds. …
[Camus] summed up what he felt to be his most important message in La Peste in an article entitled “The Century of Fear”:
Yes, that which is necessary to combat today is fear and silence, and with them the separation of minds and souls that they cause. That which we must preserve is dialogue and the universal communion of men among themselves. Slavery, injustice, and lying are the evils that break this communication and forbid the dialogue. That is why we must refuse them. But these evils today are the same as those that have existed all through history, and everywhere many men consider them as necessary evils. It is true that we shouldn’t try to escape history, since we are plunged up to our necks in it. But we can aspire to struggle within history to preserve that part of man that hasn’t joined the forces of evil. (La Peste, 29)
This passage also brings up [another] conclusion that we can draw about Camus’s message to mankind, that of the nobility of the role of le medecin in society. Camus makes it very clear that it is the doctor and not the saint who shows us the way to a more meaningful life in the case of le fleau. In summarizing the chronicle that ends La Peste, Camus, at this point speaking as the doctor Rieux, makes this statement: “This chronicle can only serve as witness to what it was necessary to accomplish, and without doubt will be necessary to accomplish again, against the inescapable arm of terror; the chronicle of all men who, in spite of their personal problems, and unable to be saints yet refusing to submit to evils, strive to be doctors.” (136-7) To Camus, the source of man’s inhumanity to man is his inability to satisfy himself with being a man and not a god, judge, or saint. Rieux accepted his role as a man. Answering Paneloux, he confesses, “The salvation of man is too great a word for me. I do not go that far. It is his health that interests me, his health first.” (96) The doctor has recognized his limits and is now content to work within them in his struggle against the plague. By extension, one can conclude that Camus felt that man in general should involve himself in the constructive process of doing the good that is humanly possible, rather than the idealistic mission of purging the world of all evil.
Another possible guide to man in regard to the type of act one can commit for justice is brought up in both La Peste and Les Justes but not fully developed in either. This guide seems of particular merit because of its direct applicability to numerous situations in all our lives. In Les Justes, after Kaliayev has failed in his first assassination attempt because of his inability to murder children, Stepan demands this of him: “Do you live only for the moment? All right, choose charity and care only about the evil of each day, not the revolution to cure all evils, present and future.” (Les Justes106) Kaliayev responds by saying he is more concerned with a justice that exists here and now, a living justice, not one that may exist three generations later. A possible conclusion one can draw from this is that an act must be in the cause of justice at the time it is committed. One should never rely on what has happened in the past or what may happen in the future to justify a significant act. If stripped of its relation to past and future the act is still a just one, or at least not an unjust one, then it should by all means be carried out. A murder, of course, is almost never justified in the present. The only case where it could be so is when used for the direct preservation of other lives. Otherwise, one should be contented to play the role of le docteur Rieux in La Peste: “Without memory and without hope, he installed himself in the present.” (La Peste86)
In closing, one other passage from the Nobel Prize-winning pages of La Peste seems appropriate. Camus frequently reminds us that the struggle of existence is only worth it if we take some time out to enjoy the beautiful aspects of the world we live in. He emphasizes that we should always take care to realize une chaleur d’ame, the warmth of the human soul. His message is most sensitively expressed in a moving passage in La Peste. As we join the scene, Rieux and his friend Tarrou have used their special passes to escape the plague-ridden city of Oran for a nocturnal swim in the Mediterranean.
The waters swelled and subsided slowly. This calm breathing of the sea caused the birth and disappearance of sparkling reflections at the water’s surface. Before them, the night stretched endlessly. Rieux, who felt under his fingers the rough face of rocks, was full of a strange joy. Turned toward Tarrou, he guessed, on the somber and calm face of his friend, the same joy that forgot nothing, not even death. … For several minutes they advanced in cadence and with the same vigor, alone, far from the world, free at last from the city and the plague. Rieux stopped first, and they came back slowly, except for a moment when they entered into an icy current. With no word spoken, they both quickened their movements, stimulated by this surprise of the sea.
Dressed again, they left without saying a word. But they had the same heart, and the memory of this night was sweet. When they noticed in the distance the guard of the quarantined city, Rieux knew that Tarrou was thinking as he was, that the plague had just forgotten them, that this was well, and that it was now necessary to recommence.
Bibliography
Note: All of the Camus quotations were translated by the 17-year-old author, R. Conroy, except in the case of “State of Siege,” which was only available in English. In the original paper, French quotations were used in the body, with the English translations provided in an appendix. The French was replaced by the English in the present edition for the convenience of the reader.
1. Bree, Germaine (ed.), Albert Camus, Dell Publishing Company, New York, 1963.
2. Camus, Albert, “State of Siege,” in Caligula and Three Other Plays, Stuart Gilbert, (tr.), Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1958.
3. – L’Etranger, Germaine Bree and Carlos Lynes, Jr. (eds.), Appleton Century Crofts, Inc., New York, 1955.
4. – “Les Justes,” in Bree, Germaine (see above).
5. – Le Malentendu, Galliard, Paris.
6. – La Peste, Librarie Larousse, Paris, 1948.