Camus against the rioters, eternal rebellion and the origins of the ‘French mal’

“Every generation believes it is destined to remake the world. Mine knows it will not remake it. Its task is perhaps even greater: it consists of preventing the world from destroying itself.”

Albert Camus, 10 December 1957, speech on receiving the Nobel Prize.

Jacqueries, sans-culottes, Vendeans, Poujadists, leftists (the revolt of the imagination against power that lasted throughout the mythologised May ’68), rioters, gilets jaunes, and now the rebels in search of a cause. So many names for different phenomena and protagonists across different eras, yet the cauldron has been bubbling for centuries and, at varying intervals, unleashes all its disruptive force. Are the young people wreaking havoc in Paris and spreading their virus from Madrid to Milan the new sans-culottes? Many maintain so. On the one hand, the impoverished petty bourgeoisie; on the other, the children and grandchildren of immigrants – isolated, ghettoised, ignored. The former gave rise to the ‘yellow vests’ who emerged in 2018, submerged by the pandemic but never truly sunk, so much so that today they are back on the streets. The latter are the younger brothers of the gangs that, in successive waves from the banlieues, stormed the centre of the capital, smashing everything up, looting shops and attacking buses to steal the ticket takings, just as happened in the 1990s.

It is now said that it all began in France and that it may all end there. What began? Undoubtedly the modern nation-state, a century before it took hold – albeit in a more moderate form – in Elizabethan England. The bourgeois revolution began, to be followed, according to the Marxist narrative, by that of the proletariat. The politicisation of the masses began; they were now active participants rather than mere rabble, whom the feudal lords and the powerful incited to serve their own economic, political and religious interests, which were often intertwined (one need only think of the peasant revolts and Martin Luther). With Charles de Gaulle, a form of republican presidentialism began, distinct from the American model due to the lesser power of the other branches (parliamentary and judicial). And whilst Paris is burning once again, due to yet another of its endless displays of rebellion, there are those who say that even the liberal-democratic ‘order’ – which, since the end of the Second World War, has withstood blows from without (the Cold War, jihad) and from within (class struggle, terrorism, white or black coups such as that of the colonels in Greece) – may come to an end in France. Perhaps.

It is difficult to analyse, let alone judge, what is happening; even two centuries have not been enough to understand the ‘Glorious Revolution’. And yet the question of why in France, and why mass violence has found such a fertile ground there – a base capable of projecting its rebellious flashes far and wide, starting with the neighbouring countries – is a legitimate one, even if it itself lacks a clear and definitive answer. One might turn to history, to a debatable ‘spirit of the people’, to politics, or to the nature of that vertical power structure which seems tailor-made to provoke horizontal outbursts. Then there is a philosophical explanation, which in reality links France to all the violent phenomena that accompany both the rich world and the world that is still poor: Isaiah Berlin had written of ‘a confused revolt against the calculemus’, that is, against the rational form of politics as interpreted by the parties that are the heirs of the Age of Enlightenment – to use his own terms, whether liberal or socialist. One can only speculate on what Albert Camus, for whom rebellion is part of human nature, would have said, whilst revolution becomes inhuman when it seeks to transform and reshape that nature in the name of fallacious illusions.

Unable to make sense of it all, all we can do is cast our eyes back to the past to trace the thread of a rebellious spirit that has certainly characterised events north of the Alps for centuries. But as we are drawn to the political aspect of the story, we would venture to suggest that the ‘French mal’ also, or perhaps above all, lies in the form taken by the nation state. Until the early sixteenth century, the largely peasant-led struggles – in which France holds the record – were fought on and for the bare earth. The 1358 uprising named after Jacques Bonhomme (a derogatory nickname for Guillame Cale, the peasant who became its leader) stands out for its scale, not its nature, from the many secular upheavals of those centuries, both in France—torn apart by a hundred years of war with England—and in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire. Even the popular uprisings with a religious background bore similarities. The Cathars in Languedoc, who were suppressed by outright massacres in the 13th century, were close kin to the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia in the early decades of the 15th century. The wars between Protestants and Catholics in France, on the other hand, at a time when the absolute state was taking its first steps, immediately became bloody political conflicts: the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the massacre of the Huguenots on the night of 23–24 August 1572 bear witness to this. Paris is not worth just a Mass, as Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre, said when he confessed his renunciation of Calvinism, but also a throne built upon blood that would continue to flow throughout the Ancien Régime.

No one at the top had planned the storming of the Bastille, a truly symbolic event that took everyone by surprise and even irritated the Jacobins. Yet that event ushered in ‘the great revolutionary festival’, in which the feared, exploited and subsequently marginalised figurehead became the sans-culotte. Not a teenager, but a grown man, usually with a wife and children, who dreamt of an egalitarian, not a collectivist, world: ‘We must bring down the giants / and make the little ones greater, / all at the same height / that is true happiness’, he sang.

On 14 July 1789, a crowd of artisans, the unemployed and members of the middle classes from the Saint-Antoine district roamed the streets of Paris in search of rifles and ammunition. They ransacked the Hôtel des Invalides, seizing 30,000 rifles, before moving on to the fortress, where the gunpowder essential for fighting the royal troops stationed in the city was stored. Although the Bastille was an ancient medieval prison and a symbol of oppression and absolute power, the thousands of rioters were not there out of historical knowledge. Commander Bernard-René de Launay was taken by surprise and had only 80 veterans and 30 Swiss guards to defend the fortress. As for the prisoners, there were only seven unfortunate souls: four counterfeiters, two mentally ill men and a libertine nobleman who had caused a scandal, Count Auguste-Claude-Marie de Solages – a sort of Marquis de Sade – who, for his part, had been released just a few days earlier to be committed to the Saint-Maurice asylum. The fortress was dismantled and the uprising took a new, dramatic turn that led to the Reign of Terror.

“Folle ed eroi, la rivoluzione come dramma,” wrote the historian Georges Duby. The Vendée – “a primitive rebellion and popular counter-revolution” – turned into a terrifying civil war. Far from merely beheading the king, the nobles and then political opponents, we are faced with mass extermination: at least 150,000 victims among the Vendeans, monarchists and traditionalist Catholics, and almost as many among the Republican troops who crushed the uprising. From 1793 to 1799, the western region bordering the Atlantic was laid waste by a series of military campaigns in which the ‘infernal columns’ were deployed, their task being to literally create a ‘scorched earth’ policy. In some cases, villagers were even locked inside their homes, which were then set alight. The insurrection regained momentum as the Napoleonic Empire began to decline: whilst the Battle of Waterloo was being fought, hostilities flared up again in the Vendée. Only the return of wigs and silk stockings brought the uprising to an end, but even today ‘Vendéen’ is an adjective that defines an identity which is by turns despised or sanctified.

The nineteenth century saw rebellion take root in the political struggle in modern forms. Although the liberal revolution of 1830 in Paris took place on the barricades, the masses, channelled into organised movements, trade unions and political parties, became political and social actors who, willy-nilly, had to be legitimised. Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the Little (that is, Louis Bonaparte) built short-lived empires; the former was followed by the Restoration, demonstrating that, as Duby writes, ‘revolutions are never won by those who make them’; the latter, overwhelmed by defeat at the hands of the Prussian invasion, was succeeded by the French version of the liberal republic, riven by violent currents and passions (anti-Semitism, which, with the Dreyfus trial, became a dividing line between right and left that also split the ‘upper classes’). The literary portraits by Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo present us with the image of a power that remains unyielding to the very end: when Inspector Javet, Jean Valjean’s incorruptible persecutor, falls into a moral crisis, he prefers to take his own life rather than break the law.

During the turbulent years between the two world wars, when the ‘myth of the State’ – whether fascist or Nazi – took hold, France never found a stable footing, not even during the Popular Front’s tenure from 1936 to 1938. The same underlying instability persisted throughout the country in the decade following liberation from the Nazis. Amidst unstable governments and constant political upheavals, Poujade emerged, and with him populism burst onto the European stage. He was not the first on the Old Continent, for in Italy he had been preceded by Guglielmo Giannini with his ‘Uomo Qualunque’ movement, founded in 1944 as ‘neither fascist nor anti-fascist’ (how many similarities there are on both sides of the Alps, even if the French and Italians will never admit it); yet he did not enjoy the same success, perhaps precisely because of the mass parties. Born into poverty in 1920 in a small town in the impoverished Occitan province, Pierre Poujade, a bookseller and stationer, led the 1953 protest by the ‘shopkeepers’ – neither right-wing nor left-wing – against politicians, intellectuals, professors and the elite who held sway in the halls of power in Paris, against the European Community and the Treaties of Rome (certain hatreds, like certain loves, are forever). With the appearance of a bricklayer, a ‘maçon’, though not a Freemason (at least not as far as is known), a passionate orator and charismatic leader, he wedged his Union for the Defence of Traders and Artisans into the crisis of the Fourth Republic, characterised by hysterical parliamentarianism, coalitions that sprang up and collapsed in the space of a morning, and weak, fluid parties, ready to shatter into pieces like mercury balls. In 1956, the united middle classes rose up in revolt and the party known as the UFF (Union et Fraternité Française) secured two and a half million votes (13 per cent) and 52 seats in the National Assembly. Among them was Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had only just laid down his Legionnaire’s uniform. It seemed the start of a triumphant march, but then General de Gaulle arrived and, with the establishment of the Fifth Republic (a ‘white coup’, according to François Mitterrand), he changed the game – not just its rules.

No other country has experienced so many rebellions of every kind and nature, even in more recent times. Why is that? We have ventured the idea that, ultimately, absolutism in France has changed its appearance but not its nature. This ties in with the ease with which the masses are mobilised as a means of achieving one’s own ends; the nobility and feudal guilds did so, just as modern political parties and interest groups do today. This dynamic coexists with a culture of revolt that occasionally culminates in revolution but more often turns in on itself, fizzles out, only to flare up again. The fuses may change over time, but the gunpowder remains ever ready to explode.

When L’homme révolté was published in 1952, Camus – an anti-fascist and member of the Resistance – had already completed his break with communism – or rather, his move beyond it – towards a democratic ‘new humanism’, extending to a variant that today would lead us towards American libertarianism. This is where the dispute with Jean-Paul Sartre arose. Rebellion stems from the very essence of man (Kant had described him as a crooked piece of wood; trying to straighten it only serves to break it); his rejection of chains is the way of being true to oneself and the very nature of one’s existence: ‘I rebel, therefore I am’, says Camus; it is a way of asserting one’s identity and dignity, of escaping the absurdity that is life. If today’s ‘nihilists’ really do this to assert themselves, as many claim, then they can be described as Camus’s great-grandchildren. But rebellion always turns destructive, and rebels either become useful idiots in the hands of the existing power structure or are subsumed into a new power structure that is a source of fresh alienation.

Revolution descends from on high and imposes a dogma; it seeks to force reality, history and the masses into a straitjacket; it is a betrayal of revolt, based not on man as he is, but on man as he will be – in the sense of how he will be manipulated (literally) to create a figurine, the ‘man of marble’ and then the ‘man of iron’ from Andrzej Wajda’s films. Rebellion, too, however, has its limits, Camus explains, and in doing so he can speak to today’s young rioters. We can find this in one of his most quoted lines from the novel The Plague: “Do not walk behind me, I may not lead you. Do not walk in front of me, I may not follow you. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” This is the development of the ‘meridian thought’ that revolves around the sense of limit and helps us to understand and accept reality in order to change it, not to destroy it. Ultimately, Sartre too arrives at a similar conclusion regarding violence, which may become necessary but must nevertheless be regarded as unjustifiable. To the impossible question we posed at the outset, there is therefore only one answer: today, Camus would have reaffirmed his sense of limitation—a sense oriented towards progress, not restoration—declaring that violence must be condemned all the more by those who wish to understand the deep-seated reasons that triggered it.