The question of Albert Camus’ relation to violence means examining a source of tension – the feeling of being torn between the necessity of sometimes resorting to force and the will never to justify doing so. It is this feeling of being torn that accompanies Albert Camus throughout his intellectual itinerary and that I have chosen to study. Was Camus an existentialist? a philosopher? a writer or playwright? These are questions that come back again and again, be it in scholarly research or works destined for the general public. I wanted to study another facet of the writer, one as yet little explored, that of the artist who takes hold of a contemporary issue, one of burning importance during the particular historical context. Was violence then a burning issue? Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Algeria; his father died a few months later on the battlefield of World War I. After studying philosophy in Algeria in the 1930s, Camus branched into literature and journalism, but always with history in mind, the period between the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism. Then came the Second World War and Camus found himself forced to take the side of freedom and entered the Resistance. Later on, decolonization brought its lot of violence and combat, particularly in Algeria, where Camus was born and the country to which he remained deeply attached. The intellectual itinerary of the 1957 Nobel Literary prizewinner is marked by a number of violent episodes: in what way did he take on this subject in his works, as well as his life? Only a precise genealogy of his thoughts and commitments on the theme of violence can enable us to answer that question. An overall study of the artist’s work is necessary – as is a detailed analysis of his choices of commitments and the positions he took in public. He had of course already started out on that path in the 1930s, studying philosophy and sensitive to these early influences. This period of first writings and commitment would become a resource he would return to throughout his life.

Then came the shock of the Second World War. Already implicit in his work, violence then took on a central role, particularly in his thoughts a propos of entering the Resistance. After the war, revisiting the experience, reconsidering his relation to violence through that experience and his vision of revolution, a matter of fighting nihilism, which he thought was taking on a new form – historicism, making history an insurmountable absolute. The few perspectives he was able to elicit at that time were soon shaken by the upheaval caused by the decolonization of the 1950s. The feeling of being torn apart would continue with the problem of his country, Algeria.