Appendix A - Whose exodus, which interpretation?

Summary

The Said–Walzer dispute recalls an earlier dispute between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. These giants of twentieth-century French letters disagreed about much – the Cold War, Algeria, and the nature of political obligation. Their friendship eventually collapsed under the weight of their disagreements. Sartre and Camus first met in the French Resistance. Sartre, we might say, was a “fellow traveler,” Camus a deeply engaged participant. In her widely influential and thoroughly pro-Camus account, Germaine Brie describes them as:

anti-fascist, against the Franco forces in the Spanish civil war; and after Camus's short adherence to the Communist Party, non-communist left-wing men. They were on the side of the Resistance against the policies of Vichy and both, in the decolonialization period, were opposed to the repressive policies of the French government with regard to the national liberation forces in its former territories.

How, then, to account for their famous “break” in 1952? The short answer is that philosophical differences latent in their relationship surfaced frequently and intensely, especially as regards Algeria. While recent history has been kinder to Camus, I think that Sartre was right on the question of national liberation. And I think that Conor Cruise O'Brien provides the best account of their estrangement. On this account, Sartre became increasingly critical of Cold War-inspired anti-communism (only a month earlier, he had explicitly embraced the Communist party in “The Communist and the Peace”), while Camus' retreat from his early embrace of the Communist party accelerated.