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by
Albert Camus
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February 7 - March 3, 2018
In defiance of the divinity, the frontiers of this stronghold have been gradually extended, to the point of making the entire universe into a fortress erected against the fallen and exiled deity. Man, at the culmination of his rebellion, incarcerated himself; from Sade’s lurid castle to the concentration camps, man’s greatest liberty consisted only in building the prison of his crimes. But the state of siege gradually spreads, the demand for freedom wants to embrace all mankind.
Absolute freedom finally becomes a prison of absolute duties, a collective asceticism, a story to be brought to an end.
In principle, the rebel only wanted to conquer his own existence and to maintain it in the face of God. But he forgets his origins and, by the law of spiritual imperialism, he sets out in search of world conquest by way of an infinitely multiplied series of murders. He drove God from His heaven, but now that the spirit of metaphysical rebellion openly joins forces with revolutionary movements, the irrational claim for freedom paradoxically adopts reason as a weapon, and as the only means of conquest which appears entirely human.
formulation of metaphysical rebellion into action
Nihilism, which, in the very midst of rebellion, smothers the force of creation, only adds that one is justified in using every means at one’s disposal. Man, on an earth that he knows is henceforth solitary, is going to add, to irrational crimes, the crimes of reason that are bent on the triumph of man. To the “I rebel, therefore we exist,” he adds, with prodigious plans in mind which even include the death of rebellion: “And we are alone.”
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.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.
Actually, revolution is only the logical consequence of metaphysical rebellion, and we shall discover, in our analysis of the revolutionary movement, the same desperate and bloody effort to affirm the dignity of man in defiance of the things that deny its existence.
In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy. It is a movement that describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another after a complete transition.
Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas.
While even the collective history of a movement of rebellion is always that of a fruitless struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which involves neither methods nor reasons, a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. That is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.
What was devoutly called, in the nineteenth century, the progressive emancipation of the human race appears, from the outside, like an uninterrupted series of rebellions, which overreach themselves and try to find their formulation in ideas, but which have not yet reached the point of definitive revolution where everything in heaven and on earth would be stabilized.
In fact, if there had ever been one real revolution, there would be no more history. Unity would have been achieved, and death would have been satiated. That is why all revolutionaries finally aspire to world unity and act as though they believed that history was concluded.
Rebellion is therefore compelled, on pain of appearing futile or out of date to become revolutionary. It no longer suffices for the rebel to deify himself like Stirner or to look to his own salvation by adopting a certain attitude of mind. The species must be deified, as Nietzsche attempted to do, and his ideal of the superman must be adopted so as to assure salvation for all—as Ivan Karamazov wanted. For the first time, the Possessed appear on the scene and proceed to give the answer to one of the secrets of the times: the identity of reason and of the will to power. Now that God is dead, the
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The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder. All, or almost all, have been homicidal.
Spartacus’ rebellion is a continual illustration of this principle of positive claims. The slave army liberates the slaves and immediately hands over their former masters to them in bondage.
But to kill men leads to nothing but killing more men. For one principle to triumph, another principle must be overthrown.
The six thousand crosses which, after such a just rebellion, staked out the road from Capua to Rome demonstrated to the servile crowd that there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of their own blood.
1789 is the starting-point of modern times, because the men of that period wished, among other things, to overthrow the principle of divine right and to introduce to the historical scene the forces of negation and rebellion which had become the essence of intellectual discussion in the previous centuries.
The king, in one of his aspects, is the divine emissary in charge of human affairs and therefore of the administration of justice. Like God Himself, he is the last recourse of the victims of misery and injustice. In principle, the people can appeal to the king for help against their oppressors.
Even though it is possible to appeal to the king, it is impossible to appeal against him in so far as he is the embodiment of a principle.
In a France entirely governed by new principles, the principle that had been defeated still survived behind prison walls through the mere power of faith and through the existence of one human being. Justice has this in common with grace, and this alone, that it wants to be total and to rule absolutely.
all or nothing
“To determine the principle in virtue of which the accused is perhaps to die, is to determine the principle by which the society that judges him lives,” he demonstrates that it is the philosophers who are going to kill the King: the King must die in the name of the social contract.
amazing. a society is an embodiment of rebellion.
Until Rousseau’s time, God created kings, who, in their turn, created peoples. After The Social Contract, peoples create themselves before creating kings.
Power, therefore, is no longer arbitrary, but derives its existence from general consent. In other words, power is no longer what is, but what should be.
It is evident that, with The Social Contract, we are assisting at the birth of a new mystique—the will of the people being substituted for God Himself. “Each of us,” says Rousseau, “places his person and his entire capabilities under the supreme guidance of the will of the people, and we receive each individual member into the body as an indivisible part of the whole.”
It is totally free, if it is true that absolute freedom is freedom in regard to oneself. Thus Rousseau declares that it is against the nature of the body politic for the sovereign power to impose a law upon itself that it cannot violate.
Rousseau is, in fact, the first man in modern times to institute the profession of civil faith. He is also the first to justify the death penalty in a civil society and the absolute submission of the subject to the authority of the sovereign.
A strange justification, but one which firmly establishes the fact that you must know how to die if the sovereign commands, and must, if necessary, concede that he is right and you are wrong.
“The day of revelation is upon us.… The very bones have risen at the sound of the voice of French freedom; they bear witness against the centuries of oppression and death, and prophesy the regeneration of human nature and of the life of nations.” Then he predicts: “We have reached the heart of time. The tyrants are ready to fall.” It is the moment of astonished and generous faith when a remarkably enlightened mob overthrows the scaffold and the wheel at Versailles.
A tribunal cannot be the judge between the king and the sovereign people. The general will cannot be cited before ordinary judges. It is above everything. The inviolability and the transcendence of the general will are thus proclaimed. We know that the predominant theme of the trial was the inviolability of the royal person.
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. That is the precise, and at the same time ultimate, meaning of Saint-Just’s remark, the import of which has been stretched too far:8 “No one can rule innocently.” Every king is guilty, because any man who wants to be king is automatically on the side of death.
We are not dealing with law, we are dealing with theology. The crime of the king is, at the same time, a sin against the ultimate nature of things. A crime is committed; then it is pardoned, punished, or forgotten. But the crime of royalty is permanent; it is inextricably bound to the person of the king, to his very existence. Christ Himself, though He can forgive sinners, cannot absolve false gods. They must disappear or conquer. If the people forgive today, they will find the crime intact tomorrow, even though the criminal sleeps peacefully in prison. Therefore there is only one solution:
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The art of ruling, according to him, has produced only monsters because, before his time, no one wished to govern according to nature.
What is nature??
Man only has to be given law “in accord with nature and with his heart,” and he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt. Universal suffrage, the foundation of the new laws, must inevitably lead to a universal morality. “Our aim is to create an order of things which establishes a universal tendency toward good.”
What, in fact, is virtue? For the bourgeois philosopher of the period it is conformity with nature11 and, in politics, conformity with the law, which expresses the general will. “Morality,” says Saint-Just, “is stronger than tyrants.” It has, in fact, just killed Louis XVI. Every form of disobedience to law therefore comes, not from an imperfection in the law, which is presumed to be impossible, but from a lack of virtue in the refractory citizen.
If Sade’s formula were “Open the prisons or prove your virtue,” then Saint-Just’s would be: “Prove your virtue or go to prison.” Both, however, justify terrorism—the libertine justifies individual terrorism, the high priest of virtue State terrorism.
Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.
When neither reason nor the free expression of individual opinion succeeds in systematically establishing unity, it must be decided to suppress all alien elements. Thus the guillotine becomes a logician whose function is refutation. “A rogue who has been condemned to death by the tribunal says he wants to resist oppression simply because he wants to resist the scaffold!”
But at the heart of this logical delirium, at the logical conclusion of this morality of virtue, the scaffold represents freedom. It assures rational unity, and harmony in the ideal city. It purifies (the word is apt) the Republic and eliminates malpractices that arise to contradict the general will and universal reason.
He did not like power which he called “cruel and wicked” and which, he said, “advanced toward repression, without any guiding principle.” But the guiding principle was virtue and was derived from the people. When the people failed, the guiding principle became obscured and oppression increased. Therefore it was the people who were guilty and not power, which must remain, in principle, innocent. Such an extreme and outrageous contradiction could only be resolved by an even more extreme logic and by the final acceptance of principles in silence and in death.
But neither is it possible to govern innocently. Thus, evil must be either suffered or served, principles must be declared wrong or the people and mankind must be recognized as guilty.
When principles fail, men have only one way to save them and to preserve their faith, which is to die for them.
Law can reign, in fact, in so far as it is the law of universal reason.13 But it never is, and it loses its justification if man is not naturally good. A day comes when ideology conflicts with psychology. Then there is no more legitimate power. Thus the law evolves to the point of becoming confused with the legislator and with a new form of arbitrariness. Where turn then? The law has gone completely off its course; and, losing its precision, it becomes more and more inaccurate, to the point of making everything a crime. The law still reigns supreme, but it no longer has any fixed limits.
The regicides of the nineteenth century are succeeded by the deicides of the twentieth century, who draw the ultimate conclusions from the logic of rebellion and want to make the earth a kingdom where man is God.
Truth, reason, and justice were abruptly incarnated in the progress of the world. But by committing them to perpetual acceleration, German ideology confused their existence with their impulse and fixed the conclusion of this existence at the final stage of the historical future—if there was to be one. These values have ceased to be guides in order to become goals.
They radicalized beliefs and put their ideals at the top.
On the contrary, a large part of Hegelian demonstration is devoted to proving that moral conscience, by being so banal as to obey justice and truth, as though these values existed independently of the world, jeopardizes, precisely for this reason, the advent of these values. The rule of action has thus become action itself—which must be performed in darkness while awaiting the final illumination.
By banality, german thought roots itself in action, firmly believing that action will illuminate.
Before Napoleon, men had discovered space and the universe; with Napoleon, they discovered time and the future in terms of this world; and by this discovery the spirit of rebellion is going to be profoundly transformed.
Philosophers, however, are rarely read with the head alone, but often with the heart and all its passions, which can accept no kind of reconciliation.
The hatred of formal virtue—degraded witness to divinity and false witness in the service of injustice—has remained one of the principal themes of history today. Nothing is pure: that is the cry which convulses our period. Impurity, the equivalent of history, is going to become the rule, and the abandoned earth will be delivered to naked force, which will decide whether or not man is divine. Thus lies and violence are adopted in the same spirit in which a religion is adopted and on the same heartrending impulse.
The movement which starts with Hegel, and which is triumphant today, presumes, on the contrary, that no one is virtuous, but that everyone will be. At the beginning, everything, according to Saint-Just, is an idyl; according to Hegel, everything is a tragedy.
