PARIS LETTER
711
out to kill and be killed, and were not murderers or candidates for mar–
tyrdom. Least of all were they ready to make violence itself fit into an
ideological system with the consequences left to the leader to draw. What
did they kill and get killed for then? Justice? The Fatherland? Human
Happiness? A United Europe? Today knowing what we know and
living in the kind of world we are living in it seems that the only respect–
ful answer we can give to such a question is that those men and women
died not for any capital letter but as free individuals possessed of a sense
of human dignity that could not be stifled by fear or prudence and hence
they could not but revolt against humiliation.
Camus' Kalyaev is one of those people. More accurately stated, he
stands for the
idea
of the fullblooded individual, capable of love, of joy,
of intense natural impulses, and who is a terrorist in addition, out of
moral necessity. He does not accept the inhumanity of his mission, but
suffers it as an unbearable strain whose unfailing retribution will be death
(Les Justes
has as an epigraph the verse "0 love! 0 life! Not life but
love in death!" from
Romeo and Juliet).
Kalyaev's antagonist is Stepan,
a kind of passionate forerunner of the Stalinist, who stands for the thesis
that the individual should indeed accept the inhuman, and, in the name
of the Idea, consider himself simply a spare part in the machinery of
fate: Bearing, as it does, on the question whether or not Kalyaev should
have thrown his bomb on the children, which is, of course, no sooner
stated than solved, the opposition remains episodic and lateral. It is
pathetic, but not dramatic, simply because the issue is obviously not the
central one.
In his effort to bring the conflict down to what appears to him solid
ground: individual conscience and a painfully specific choice, Camus
necessarily loses sight of the problem which the action itself, and its
heroes, raise at every moment, namely the problem of the ultimate val–
idity of the terrorists' moral universe, of the eschatological hope out of
which their plight is born: the Revolution. Since this, which is the core
of the matter, is left untouched, what we have in the end is simply a
sort of funeral commemoration of
les justes,
the pure of heart, those
ancient characters who (unlike the bureaucratic executioners of our
time) knew the boundaries of the human, and abided by them. A moving
performance, but not a convincing one.
It still remains that those who criticize Camus for the weakness of
his intellectual position overlook the fact that what this remarkable
writer aims at is not cogent demonstration so much as an artful mobil–
ization of the emotional power contained
in
the western concepts of
