Forget Camus

Albert Camus is often remembered as a philosopher of freedom and a pioneering voice against colonialism. Oliver Gloag thinks that picture is far too tidy. Reading Camus's three major novels, The Stranger, The Plague and The First Man, closely, he finds in them a deep attachment to colonialism and to the colonial way of life.

Gloag argues that the contradictions in Camus are not a flaw to be smoothed over. They are the key to understanding both the work itself and the reason it remains so widely loved. Camus is the most widely read Frenchman in the world, and his legacy, Gloag says, has been used to tell a flattering and false story about colonial history.

That story, in his view, gets in the way of France facing its neocolonial present. Forget Camus is both a study of colonial history and an examination of a national literature, and it exposes the ideological contradictions running through French society, past and present.