The Breakup

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus became friends in Paris during World War II. Shortly after the war, they became world famous.

Sartre and Camus were committed to the cause of French workers after the war. The French Communist Party, PCF, was the most powerful Leftist party in France. However, the Party took its orders directly from Moscow and the Stalinist regime, was dogmatic and rigid in their ideology, and attacked Sartre and Camus, neither of whom were communists, because they did not rigidly follow the Party line. The revelations after the war of Stalinist betrayal and brutality in the Soviet Union created dilemmas for those on the Left. Leftists were faced with the difficult decision of whether to repudiate communism because of Stalin, or choose it because when compared to western capitalism it was the lesser of two evils.

Sartre chose to become a fellow traveler. Camus grew to hate communism and marxism, even though it is possible he had not read Marx, and only received his information about Marx second hand from folks such as Arthur Koestler. The friendship began to break apart.

The final break came in 1952 when Camus published The Rebel, better translated as Man in Revolt. Camus came out against revolutionary violence. Sartre interpreted this as a direct repudiation of the peace he had made with communism and the Soviet Union. In a famous letter published in his journal Les temps modernes, Sartre attacked the book, Camus’s politics, and Camus personally. They never spoke or met again.

Their writing grew fallow in the following years. Camus had been publicly humiliated by Sartre, and it silenced him. Beauvoir published her novel The Mandarins about the Sartre and Camus friendship and its breakup. The characters representing Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus reconcile in the novel. Camus read the novel as a further attack on his reputation.

Camus eventually published The Fall. The novel is Camus’s settling of accounts with himself and Sartre. Clamence, the reprehensible protagonist of the novel, is a compendium of the faults of both Camus and Sartre. Sartre called The Fall Camus’s best book. Sartre also returned to writing productively.

Camus died in 1960 in a car accident. Death ended the slim chances for reconciliation and any further accounting by both parties. The issues over which they fought, violence, revolution, revolt, justice, freedom, loyalty, and good faith, remain unresolved.

For an in depth investigation of the Camus and Sartre friendship and its milieu, read Ronald Aronson’s excellent Camus & Sartre: the story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it.