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PARTISAN REVIEW
king's mercy and generosity depended on his will alone. His ability and free–
dom to act with compassion were known as Grace, the fundamental and es–
sentially arbitrary principle of monarchical rule: "He dispenses his protection
and his assistance if and when he wants
to.
One of the attributes of grace is
that it is discretionary. Monarchy in its theocratic form is a type of govern–
ment which wants to put grace before justice by always letting it have the
last word." Camus hastened to add that such a system could hardly be
equated with justice ("even though it is possible to appeal
to
the king, it is im–
possible to appeal against him"). But given the choice between absolute justice
and absolute grace, arb itrary grace seemed less threatening than the
Revolution's desacralized principle of rational and merciless justice. Despairing
of the modern age, Camus lamented the obliteration of the
ancien regime
and
looked upon Louis XVI as the lost king and savior.
These positive remarks about Louis XVI and monarchy are not signs
of an improbable reactionary embracing of right-wing politics. Camus was
never a monarchist and always felt a greater affinity for the political left than
for the right. He was attracted by the myth more than by the reality of
monarchy. Monarchy was an issue only inasmuch as it represented a chari–
table, divinely-inspired government theoretically founded on concepts of
grace and mercy.
In the post-war and Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s, fi·ightened by
the growth of terrifYing state power and saddened by the divorce of politics
and ethics, Camus expressed nostalgia for a regime in which political power
was finite and the moral authority of God and king infinite. Monarchical
sovereignty emanated solely from God, and monarchy was, in theory if not
in practice, an inherently moral, nonideological rule. In
The
Rebel,
a condem–
nation of modern political power, Camus sought a sublime syntllesis of ethical
and political principles. It is only in tI1e idealistic context of a search which ul–
timately transcended political reality that he resuscitated the memory of the
French monarchy. The death of Louis XVI was a "repugnant scandal" be–
cause the Jacobins decapitated the reign of pardon and grace, because the
French republic was born in a pitiless act of ideological murder.
In his last novel,
The Fall,
Camus described life in the grim and bleak
twentieth century. In a god less and kingless world, the absence of pity for
suffering humanity and the absence of pardon for guilt-ridden souls is at the
source of the angu ish of the protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Witllout the
capacity for true compassion, witl10ut the ideological and spiritual foundations
for forgiveness, modern man issues only pronouncements of guilt: "They
condemn without absolving anyone. [The Lord] left forever, leaving them to
judge and condemn, witl1 pardon on tI1eir lips and tile sentence in tI1eir hearts.
For it cannot be said there is no more pity; no, good Lord, we never stop
I
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