The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (Vintage International)

by Albert Camus

Rimbaud’s greatness does not lie in the first poems from Charleville nor in his trading at Harrar. It shines forth at the moment when, in giving the most peculiarly appropriate expression to rebellion that it has ever received, he simultaneously proclaims his triumph and his agony, his conception of a life beyond the confines of this world and the inescapability of the world, the yearning for the unattainable and reality brutally determined on restraint, the rejection of morality and the irresistible compulsion to duty. At the moment when he carries in his breast both illumination and the darkness of hell, when he hails and insults beauty, and creates, from an insoluble conflict, the intricate counterpoint of an exquisite song, he is the poet of rebellion—the greatest of all.

The young Rimbaud comes to life again on the brink of the abyss and with him revives the rebellion of the times when his imprecations against life were only expressions of despair at the thought of death. It is at this point that the bourgeois trader once more rejoins the tortured adolescent whom we so much admired. He recaptures his youth in the terror and bitter pain finally experienced by those who do not know how to attain happiness. Only at this point does his passion, and with it his truth, begin.

The surrealists, while simultaneously exalting human innocence, believed that they could exalt murder and suicide. They spoke of suicide as a solution and Crevel, who considered this solution “the most probable, just, and definitive,” killed himself, as did Rigaut and Vaché.

surrealism is involved in an incessant effort to reconcile, with Marxism, the inevitable conclusions that led it to revolution. We can say, without being paradoxical, that the surrealists arrived at Marxism on account of what, today, they most detest in Marx.

André Breton wanted revolution and love together—

One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation.

The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity.

It is not rebellion itself that is noble, but its aims, even though its achievements are at times ignoble.

Freedom, “that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm,”1 is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel’s mind.

a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame.

Saint-Just introduced Rousseau’s ideas into the pages of history. At the King’s trial, the essential part of his arguments consisted in saying that the King is not inviolable and should be judged by the Assembly and not by a special tribunal. His arguments he owed to Rousseau.

Saint-Just, therefore, postulates that every king is a rebel or a usurper. He is a rebel against the people whose absolute sovereignty he usurps. Monarchy is not a king, “it is crime.” Not a crime, but crime itself, says Saint-Just; in other words, absolute profanation.

“No one can rule innocently.” Every king is guilty, because any man who wants to be king is automatically on the side of death.

Then Saint-Just averts his mysterious and handsome face: “It would be leaving very little to leave a life in which one must be either the accomplice or the silent witness of evil.”

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die—and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist. We are far from the gentle savage of the eighteenth century and from the Social Contract. In the sound and fury of the passing centuries, each separate consciousness, to ensure its own existence, must henceforth desire the death of others.

“The mystery of God is only the mystery of the love of man for himself.” The accents of a strange new prophecy ring out: “Individuality has replaced faith, reason the Bible, politics religion and the Church, the earth heaven, work prayer, poverty hell, and man Christ.” Thus there is only one hell and it is on this earth: and it is against this that the struggle must be waged.

Ludwig Feuerbach

If one cannot accept the suffering of others, then something in the world cannot be justified, and history, at one point at least, no longer coincides with reason.

This man’s solitary protest, quieted for a moment by the idea that everything can be justified, bursts forth again in vehement terms. Bielinsky addresses Hegel himself: “With all the esteem due to your philistine philosophy, I have the honor to inform you that even if I had the opportunity of climbing to the very top of the ladder of evolution, I should still ask you to account for all the victims of life and history. I do not want happiness, even gratuitous happiness, if my mind is not at rest concerning all my blood brothers.”

Bielinsky understood that what he wanted was not the absolute of reason bu...

We know that the very term nihilism was invented by Turgeniev in his novel Fathers and Sons, whose hero, Bazarov, was an exact portrayal of this type of man.

This is the point at which the terrorists were born, disillusioned with love, united against the crimes of their masters, but alone in their despair, and face to face with their contradictions, which they could resolve only in the double sacrifice of their innocence and their life.

The joint legacy of Nechaiev and Marx will give birth to the totalitarian revolution of the twentieth century.

modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler.