L’Homme révolté

Camus’s major philosophical essay extols the virtues of a creative revolt and raised numerous controversies, the most famous of which took six months to erupt, in the form of an article signed by Francis Jeanson but orchestrated by Sartre. Seven pages of singular virulence, published in the May 1952 issue of Les Temps modernes under the title “Albert Camus ou l’âme révoltée,” caused a public and definitive ideological break between Sartre and Camus, and stirred considerable hostility elsewhere in French intellectual circles, notably from Pierre Bourdieu and the Surrealists, led by André Breton.

“It is a book that caused a great stir, but which earned me more enemies than friends. […] Of all my books, it is the one I hold dearest,” Camus later wrote. In it, he examines the spirit of revolt and tragedy through portraits of rebellious figures — Sade, Lautréamont, Bakunin, the Russian anarchists, Dostoevsky — revealing the emergence of a new cogito, which Camus defended vigorously. He was accused of thinking little but writing well. “If it is true,” he retorted, “that my thoughts are inconsistent, I might as well write them well, to limit the damage. Imagine having to read confused thoughts in a dismal style — now that would be exile! […] And if the truth were finally on the right, I would be there,” denouncing elsewhere the partisan spirit underlying Jeanson’s reproaches, and implicating, without naming him, Sartre himself. Sartre would respond with nineteen pages beginning: “My dear Camus, our friendship was not an easy one, but I shall miss it.”