Chapter author : Jeanyves Guérin

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Journalism occupied an important place in the career and work of Camus. In l’Alger Républicain where he started his career, Camus took a polemical stand, criticized the political system and society in the context of the rise of fascism before the war and sometimes in the Dreyfusian tradition. At the newspaper Combat, born of the Resistance, he tried to realize the noble aims of vigilance and objectivity, derived from the spirit of the struggle against the occupier and his collaborators. He elaborated the notion of critical journalism, making an effort to always distinguish between opinion and information. But the lyrical times of the Liberation soon gave way to disillusionment in the post war years. It was in the L’Express that Camus, notably on the subject of the Algerian war which is his obsession, gives full expression to his talent as a chronicler and journalist. Here he offers suggestions and also analysis of the situation at hand. His own prestige acts as the newspapers moral guarantee. From the professional journalist at the beginning of his career, Camus moves on to become a militant resistant, then the committed writer in his editorials. Camus the writer is aware that journalistic writing is transitory, is to contemporaries and only to them while the writer writes for his contemporaries and posterity.

Updated on 01/01/2007