A new Mediterranean culture

Camus's attitude to Algerian independence remains highly controversial, but his position can be stated simply: although he believed that Algeria was culturally and historically inextricable from France, he loathed the injustice of its system of government, which served the interests of the tiny minority of wealthy European colons. Any attempt at understanding Camus's paradoxical attitude to Algeria must begin by avoiding the easy assumption that the conflict that broke out in Algeria in 1954 was simply between the demands of French imperialism and those of Algerian independence. Although the conflict can be reduced to this, it is not always helpful to do so, because it obscures some factors that are necessary to a reasonably clear understanding of the conflict itself, as well as Camus's response to it. Perhaps the most important of these factors are the circumstances of Camus's Algerian background. Camus was not in Algeria, as Conor Cruise O'Brien puts it, by right of conquest (the same right, Cruise O'Brien notes, by which the Nazis were in France).