Honoré of the Nobel Prize, Albert Camus, moved, suffers from his native Algeria.

Albert Camus (1913.1960)

Signed autograph letter.

An in-8 ° page on NRF header paper.

 [Paris]. November 19, 1957.

"It is true that no honor can compensate for the humiliating sadness that an Algeria I cannot forget me. »»

Important and moving letter from Albert Camus who has just been awarded unanimously, a month earlier, on October 16, the Nobel Prize for literature "for his important literary work which highlights, with a serious penetrating, the problems which are posing today to the conscience of men ". The French writer does not forget his native Algeria and thank with emotion his correspondent for an article published in the Journal of Algiers .

That same day, November 19, Camus wrote to his teacher Louis Germain a letter-which has become mythical-full of recognition and gratitude for the teaching of the latter.

Camus will go to Stockholm on December 10, receive its prize.

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Dear Sir, Claude Gallimard gives me your article from the Algiers Journal . I could thank you, in the sincerity of the heart, for the generous words of which you have honored my work. But especially I want to tell you my gratitude and my emotion when reading your last paragraph. It is true that no honor can compensate for the humiliating sadness given to me by an Algeria that I cannot forget. Let you feel it, and choose to tell the very people who needed to hear it, gives you a particular title to feelings of recognition that I want to express you with all my heart. The few meetings in which I told you were enough to give birth in me a lot of vintage and unattaining sympathy. Something more personal will be added now, be sure. Believe, please, dear sir, to my faithful thoughts. Albert Camus "

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A man of justice, Camus was deeply marked by the Algerian war. Evidenced by his numerous speeches on the conflict such as that of the call for a civil break , speech delivered in January 1956 in Algiers, as well as Stockholm in 1957: " I am for a just Algeria where the two populations must live in peace and equality. I said and repeated that the Algerian people had to do justice and grant them a fully democratic regime, until hatred on both sides has become as it no longer belonged to an intellectual to intervene, its declarations risking aggravating terror […] I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which one day can strike my mother or family. »»

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The letter to his teacher Louis Germain, written that same day, November 19, 1957:

"Dear Monsieur Germain, I let out the noise that surrounded me every day before coming to tell you about all my heart. I have just been made too much honor, which I have neither sought nor solicited. But when I learned the news, my first thought, after my mother, was for you. Without you, without this affectionate hand that you have stretched to the poor poor child I was, without your teaching, and your example, none of this would have happened. I do not make a world of this kind of honor. But this one is at least an opportunity to tell you what you have been, and are always for me, and to make sure that your efforts, your work and the generous heart you put there are always alive in one of your little schoolchildren who, despite the age, has not ceased to be your grateful student. I kiss you with all my might. Albert Camus. »»

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Speech by Albert Camus, pronounced in Oslo on December 10, 1957:

Sire, madam, royal altesses, ladies, gentlemen,

By receiving the distinction of which your free academy was kind enough to honor me, my gratitude was all the deeper as I measured how this reward exceeded my personal merits. Any man and, all the more reason, any artist, wishes to be recognized. I want it too. But it was not possible for me to learn your decision without comparing your impact on what I really am. How does an almost young man, rich in his only doubts and a work still under construction, used to living in the solitude of work or in the pensions of friendship, would he not have learned with a sort of panic which brought him suddenly, alone and reduced to himself, at the center of a raw light? What heart could he also receive this honor at a time when, in Europe, other writers, among the greatest, are silenced, and in the very time when his native land is incessant?

I have known this disarray and this inner disorder. To find peace, I had to put myself in good standing with an overly generous spell. And, since I could not get lost to him by relying on my merit alone, I found nothing else to help me that what supported me throughout my life, and in the most contrary circumstances: the idea that I have of my art and the role of the writer. Just allow that, in a feeling of recognition and friendship, I tell you, as simply as I can, what is this idea.

I cannot live personally without my art. But I have never placed this art above everything. If it is necessary to me, on the contrary, it is because it does not separate from anyone and allows me to live, as I am, at the level of all. Art is not in my eyes a lonely rejoicing. It is a way to move the greatest number of men by offering them a privileged image of suffering and common joys. He therefore forces the artist not to separate; He submits it to the most humble and universal truth. And whoever, often chose his artist's destiny because he felt different quickly learns that he will not feed his art, and his difference, that by admitting his likeness to all. The artist forges in this perpetual return of him to others, halfway the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear out. This is why real artists do not despise anything; They oblige themselves to understand instead of judging. And if they have a party to take in this world it can only be that of a society where, according to the big word of Nietzsche, will no longer reign the judge, but the creator, whether worker or intellectual.

The role of the writer, at the same time, does not separate from difficult duties. By definition, he cannot put himself today at the service of those who make history: he is at the service of those who undergo it. Or if not, here he is alone and deprived of his art. All the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will not remove it from loneliness, even and especially if it agrees to take their step. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to remove the writer from exile each time, at least, that he manages, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, not to forget this silence, and to relay it to make it resound by the means of art.

None of us are big enough for such a vocation. But in all the circumstances of his life, obscure or temporarily famous, thrown into the irons of tyranny or free for a time to express themselves, the writer can find the feeling of a living community which will justify him, on the only condition that he accepts, as much as he can, the two charges which make the greatness of his profession: the service of truth and that of freedom. Since its vocation is to bring together the greatest number of men as possible, it cannot accommodate the lie and the servitude which, where they reign, make the solitudes proliferate. Whatever our personal infirmities, the nobility of our profession will always be rooted in two commitments that are difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression.

For more than twenty years of an insane story, lost without help, like all men my age, in the convulsions of time, I was supported as follows: by the obscure feeling that writing was today an honor, because this act obliged, and forced not to write only. He particularly forced me to wear, as I was and according to my strengths, with all those who lived the same story, the misfortune and the hope that we shared. These men, born at the beginning of the First World War, who had twenty years when the Hitlerian power and the first revolutionary trials settled both, which were then confronted, to perfect their education, with the Spanish War, with the Second World War, with the concentrationnaire universe, to the Europe of torture and prisons, must today raise their sons and their works in a world threatened with nuclear destruction. No one, I suppose, can ask them to be optimistic. And I even think that we must understand, without ceasing to fight against them, the error of those who, by an overbidding of despair, claimed the right to dishonor, and rushed in the nihilisms of the time. But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, refused this nihilism and got into the search for legitimacy. They had to be forged an art of living in disaster, to be born a second time, and then fight, with an discovered face, against the instinct of death at work in our history.

Each generation, no doubt, believes is doomed to redo the world. Mine however knows that it will not do it again. But his task may be larger. It consists in preventing the world from off. Heir to a corrupt history where the fallen revolutions mix, the techniques that have become crazy, the dead gods and the exhausted ideologies, where mediocre powers can today destroy everything but can no longer convince, where intelligence has lowered to the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation had, in itself and around it, from its alone A little of what makes the dignity to live and die. Faced with a world threatened with disintegration, where our great inquisitors are likely to establish the kingdoms of death forever, she knows that she should, in a sort of crazy race against the clock, restore between nations a peace which is not that of servitude, reconcile work and culture again, and redo with all men an ark of alliance. It is not certain that she can ever accomplish this immense task, but it is sure that all over the world, she already holds her double bet of truth and freedom, and, on occasion, knows how to die without hatred for him. It is she who deserves to be greeted and encouraged wherever she is, and especially where she sacrifices herself. It is on her, in any case, that, certain of your deep agreement, I would like to postpone the honor that you have just made me.

At the same time, after having said the nobility of the profession of writing, I would have given the writer to his true place, having no other titles than those he shares with his companions of struggle, vulnerable but stubborn, unjust and passionate about justice, building his work without shame or pride to the sight of all, constantly shared between pain and beauty, and finally dedicated to his duplicate. destructive of history. Who, after that, could expect ready -made solutions and beautiful morals? The truth is mysterious, fleeting, always to conquer. Freedom is dangerous, hard to live as much as it is exhilarating. We have to walk to these two goals, painfully, but resolutely, some in advance of our failures on such a long path. What writer, would therefore dare, in good conscience, to be preachable of virtue? As for me, I must say once again that I am none of this. I have never been able to give up the light, the happiness of being, the free life where I grew up. But although this nostalgia explains a lot of my mistakes and my faults, she undoubtedly helped me to better understand my job, she still helps me to stand, blindly, with all these silent men who do not support, in the world, the life that is made to them only by the memory or the return of brief and free happiness. Brought back to what I really am, to my limits, to my debts, as in my difficult faith, I feel more free to show you to finish, the extent and generosity of the distinction that you have just gave me, more free to tell you also that I would like to receive it as a tribute to all those who, sharing the same fight, have received no privilege, but have known misfortune and persecution. I will then have to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, and to make you publicly, as a personal testimony of gratitude, the same and old promise of fidelity as each true artist, every day, takes place in silence.