Albert Camus on telling the truth

We don't need hope

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1957, the French writer Albert Camus grew up very poor in Algeria, beginning to build a name as a writer there, before he went to France during World War II, serving in the Resistance editing the underground newspaper Combat, becoming a leading writer and intellectual in the inner circles of the French intellectual world while keeping his independence. The two quotes and the description are taken from Olivier Todd’s Albert Camus: A Life.

I.

If a man wants to be recognized, one need only tell him who he is. If he shuts up or lies, he will die alone, and everything around him is destined for misery. If, on the contrary, he speaks the truth, he will doubtless die, but after having helped himself and others to live.

II.

Camus believed that when a revolution was not serving its aims, its failure must be pointed out; but at the end of the 1940s, progressive French intellectuals, such as those who wrote for Sartre’s Les Temps Modemes, chose to ignore Communist police-state abuses and gulags in order not to imperil the revolution in general. Realizing that these people were lying to themselves, Camus would say, “I hate my epoch.”

He did not hate realities, but rather the “lies in which they wallow.” Camus saw that the USSR was a land of slaves, and yet its “concentration-camp rule is adored as an instrument of liberation and a school for future happiness.” He vowed to combat this lie until the end of his life, and summed up his feelings in the sentence “We don’t need hope, we only need truth.”

III.

Camus was a fierce opponent of the death penalty.

Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death, “He is going to pay his debt to society,” but: “They are going to cut off his head.” It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference.

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