Gina Breen 2021 Address to The Albert Camus Society

Gina Breen: ‘French-Algerian Exile’

Albert Camus’s L’Exil et le Royaume was Camus’s last official literary publication before his death in 1960. It is a collection of six short stories, published in 1957, seven months before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his acceptance speech, which was misreported, Camus specifically addressed justice and the Algerian situation, by discussing the role of the writer and the importance of truth, communicating his belief that the writer has a social duty as they bear witness to history.

In this paper, I will discuss three of the six short stories, namely “La Femme Adultère,” “Les Muets” and “L’Hôte” which are all set in Algeria. Written at the beginning of the armed struggle, the stories were published three years into the Algerian War. I argue that these stories demonstrate the moral dilemmas of the colonial situation, and they are vital to our understanding of Camus’s mythopoetics and the evolution of the pied-noir myth Camus first presents in L’étranger fifteen years earlier. Like Meursault, the characters in these stories suffer from estrangement. As the title suggests, Camus’s identity crisis still exists as he depicts the poverty, self-exile, exclusion, and solitude inherent in these dystopic Algerian spaces. None of the stories end with resolutions and the characters’ neutrality makes them victims of French colonialism. The stories and protagonists also mirror many of Camus’s personal confrontations because they hesitate about the future. They imply a certain degree of hopefulness, but their true feelings remain hidden