Camus, the new philosopher

Fifty years after his death, the author of "The Stranger" is everywhere. We read in the world, and of Michel Onfray to Nicolas Sarkozy, is invoked as a moral conscience for the twenty-first century. Survey

AFP
Born in 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, Albert Camus published "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Stranger" in 1942. Follow including "The Plague" (1947), "The Rebel" (1951), and "The Fall" (1956). He received the Nobel Prize in 1957 and died in a car accident January 4, 1960.

Duke University, North Carolina, 2007. A young teacher left the Sorbonne ask a silly question to his students: what is the great French writer of the twentieth century? It looks Proust and Celine. Claudel, Sartre or rigor. The answer is unanimous: "It Camus, sir!" Camus? The philosopher final classes with style Third Republic and its morality of Red Cross? The professor did not return. The only thing that reassures those ignorant Americans are.

But back in France, he learns that Nicolas Sarkozy held a luncheon in honor of Camus and praised "his non-conformism with respect to the elites." "With him, I have nostalgia whenever I go to Algeria, not to be born in North Africa, "he said in a fit of bizarre lyricism.

The popularity of Camus was never in doubt. In 1999, "The Stranger" comes out ahead of a top 50 set by 6000 readers. But mostly, this short novel first published in 1942 required, with 6.7 million copies sold in Folio, as the paperback best-selling in France. Better than "The Little Prince", or any Marc Levy. "The Plague" (4 million) followed almost immediately. And further, "the Fall" (1.7 million). "He has always maintained a loyal readership among secondary school teachers in particular," says the University jeanyves Guerin, who has run a remarkable "Albert Dictionary Camus (Mouthpieces, Robert Laffont). And then a writer is acceptable to the classical and modern. "The writer, without doubt, that was admired even Barthes or Robbe-Grillet, but the thinker?

It is indeed a global glory. "His wealth is global," says Guerin. It's always abroad he found his best allies. " And not only because the Cure said to have inspired "The Stranger" to select their first hit, "Killing an Arab" (1978), nor even because it is a Palestinian, Edward Said , one of the most challenging critics of Camus: the killing of any Arab presence in his novels he appeared as the expression of a "colonial unconscious".

From Spain to Japan, he is one of most French authors studied. His theater has been mounted by the larger, Strehler, Wajda, Bergman, while the French sulking - the creation of "Righteous" by Stanislas Nordey in 2010 to Hill, then announcing himself as an event. It translates everywhere. Three years after its release in 1994, "First Man" was available in thirty-six languages. "All the writings of Camus's Algerian were then replayed and accepted," said Guerin. It became a cult author in Algeria. And too bad if it were not for independence. At least, this was not a supporter of the FLN, as Sartre. "