“Camus in the Just. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, 1942-1943”, under the direction of Anne Prouteau, illustrations by Jacques Ferrandez, Bleu Autour, “D’un lieu l’autre”, 208 p., €23.
On August 21, 1942, from the village of Panelier in Haute-Loire, Albert Camus (1913-1960) gave the news to his friend André Malraux (1901-1976). “It’s a beautiful country, a bit serious. I’m preparing for long days of boredom and work.” The writer has been living for almost three months in this village, a few kilometres from Chambon-sur-Lignon, where nearly 3,500 Jews, a third of them children, found refuge until 1944. But this meeting between the future editor-in-chief of the daily metro Combat and this high position of the Resistance is due to a combination of circumstances. Because if Albert Camus went to Chambon-sur-Lignon it was above all for health reasons.
In Oran, Algeria, it was his friend Dr. Henri Cohen who suggested to the writer a cure at altitude to treat the tuberculosis he had suffered from since he was 17. The disease has become the most terrifying part of him and weakens him day by day. “The feeling of death that is now familiar to me »register in your Notebooks of the time (volume II, 1942-1951, Gallimard, 1964).
Camus will remain in Chambon-sur-Lignon for fourteen months. He will speak little of this stay, which he experienced as “a forced retreat”but which was nevertheless decisive in terms of his literary production (he wrote the second version of The plaguepublished in 1947) and his political commitment. Camus in The RighteousUnder the direction of Anne Prouteau, with contributions from the writer’s daughter, Catherine Camus, the sociologist Nathalie Heinich, the researcher Rémi Larue, the poet Nimrod…, it sheds important light on this decisive period in the writer’s life.
A hard, narrow and lonely existence.
In the summer of 1942, Albert Camus was a young 29-year-old author who, thanks to the help of his friend the writer Pascal Pia (1903-1979), had just published his great novel, The stranger; a test, The myth of Sisyphusappears in the fall. Two works that inaugurate its “cycle of absurdity”. Committed to literature, Camus is also a journalist. In Algeria, he was a reporter for Republican Algiers and in Republican Night before this newspaper was banned from publication in March 1940.
When he arrives at Le Panelier, accompanied by his wife Francine, from whom he will soon separate because of the war, Camus stays in a pension, a “strong house built in the 13th century.my century “specifies Nathalie Heinich.
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