Les Justes

Les Justes premiered on December 15, 1949, at the Théâtre Hébertot, directed by Paul Oettly, with Maria Casarès, Serge Reggiani and Michel Bouquet. The play was fairly well received, although Camus wrote to a friend: “warmly welcomed by some… coldly executed by others. A draw, then.” He was stung by a review in the journal Caliban, edited by his friend Jean Daniel, to whom he wrote a reply later partly reprinted in Actuelles II.

For Camus, Les Justes was above all an opportunity to debate terrorism and the death of innocents, and to question justice and the legitimacy of the means employed in the service of an idea.

Conceived as a tragedy in the strict Aristotelian tradition, it sets against one another “characters equal in strength and reason”: the “delicate murderers,” for whom tyrannicide is necessary yet inexcusable because it violates a human life, and the avenging assassins who despise life and justify the means by the end. “I wanted,” Camus explains in his publisher’s insert, “to show that action itself has limits. There is no good and just action except one that recognizes these limits and, if it must cross them, at least accepts death. Our world shows us a repugnant face today precisely because it is made by men who grant themselves the right to cross these limits, and above all to kill others without ever paying with their own person. Thus does today’s justice serve as an alibi for the assassins of all justice.”

Excellent condition, uncut.
The deluxe issue preceding these pur fil vellum copies consists of only 13 copies on vergé de Hollande.