Title: The Stranger Author: Albert Camus Creation Date: 1942 Location: France Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
Albert Camus published L'Étranger in Paris in 1942, the same year as The Myth of Sisyphus. The essay articulates the philosophy of the absurd; the novel embodies it — more radically, because it does not explain. Meursault is a man who notices things without flinching and declines to perform the emotional responses the world requires — a constitutive incapacity for bad faith rather than deliberate rebellion.
The novel is short, written in the flat present-perfect of a man reporting facts. Camus described the style as American — Hemingway and Dos Passos — calibrated to record sensation without interpretation, presenting the world to someone who has not agreed in advance about what things mean. This is not nihilism. It is radical honesty.
The North African setting is not incidental. The heat of the Algerian summer, the light off the Mediterranean, the Arab beach — the physical landscape is inseparable from the philosophy. The sun that blinds Meursault on the beach, making the murder happen as much by physiological pressure as by intention, strips away pretence and leaves the bare fact of existence. What the novel does not say, and what this collection insists on, is that the sun was also the sun of a specific settler colony: a strip of sand under French administration in a country whose Arab majority had been ruled from Paris for 112 years when the book was written.
The Imperial Machine
The 1830 invasion under Charles X removed the Ottoman Dey from Algiers and initiated a pacification that by conservative estimates killed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Algerians. By 1848 Algeria had been absorbed into metropolitan France while the Muslim population was governed under the Code de l'indigénat, which made offences like "insolence toward a French official" punishable by summary administrative sentence. The pieds-noirs were granted French citizenship wholesale; the Algerian majority could become citizens only by renouncing personal status under Islamic law, which almost none did.
By the time Camus was writing in 1940–41, a million settlers controlled arable land, urban infrastructure, and courts, while eight or nine million Algerian Muslims lived under a legal system that denied them equal standing. A Frenchman who shot an Arab in 1942 could expect a lighter sentence than for shooting another Frenchman; such killings were rarely charged at all. Meursault's condemnation for failing to cry at his mother's funeral dramatises how colonial courts actually weighted things.
Camus was a pied-noir from a working-class family in Mondovi. His journalism at Alger Républicain documented conditions in Berber Kabylia during the 1939 famine with a specificity that made him a marked man among the settler establishment. He knew the machine from inside. L'Étranger takes it for granted, making the absent Arab and the absurd trial feel like natural features of the world Meursault moves through.
The Subjected People
The Arab on the beach has no name in L'Étranger, no face, no dialogue, no interiority. He has a sister — also unnamed — whose beating is rendered from the perspective of upstairs neighbours who hear the screaming through a wall. He appears twice: in the fight where Raymond is stabbed, and at the spring where Meursault shoots him five times. He dies without speaking. The prosecutor refers to him only as "l'Arabe." He has no name because he has no name in the document the novel is giving us.
This is not incidental. Camus arranged the narrative so that the reader's sympathy stays with the killer. Meursault's condemnation is the injustice; the Arab's death is the pretext. The novel's achievement and its scandal are inseparable: Camus persuaded several generations that this was a universal parable about bourgeois hypocrisy and existential authenticity, when it was a parable in a very specific geography in which a specific kind of body had been emptied of voice so that the metaphysical demonstration could proceed.
Behind the Arab stand the eight or nine million Algerians the novel does not depict: the Berber villagers Camus reported on in 1939, the Casbah residents who would rise in 1954, the half-million killed in the War of Independence, the harkis abandoned in 1962. They are not in L'Étranger and are not supposed to be. But they were in French Algeria when Camus was writing, and the beach on which Meursault shoots the Arab was their beach.
The Reckoning
Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) insisted, over the protests of French literary opinion, that L'Étranger could not be read as a universal parable without acknowledging the specifically Algerian colonial situation it elided. Said was not writing to cancel the novel but to read it properly. His argument — that the Arab's namelessness is political rather than stylistic, that Camus's later refusal to back Algerian independence is continuous with the novel's blind spots — has shaped how the book is taught in English-language universities ever since.
The second wave came with Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête (2013), which gives the Arab a name — Musa — a brother — Harun — and a mother still alive seventy years later. Daoud reproduces Camus's rhythms and philosophical register while doing the one thing Camus refused to do: stand inside the house the killing emptied. The pairing of the two novels has become canonical, like Robinson Crusoe and Foe, or Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.
The reckoning is not finished. Camus is still defended by French readers who insist the novel is a universal parable and that the Algerian reading reduces a great book to politics. He is still attacked by readers who think the universal-parable defence is itself a symptom of what the book exists to disclose. Camus wrote a great novel whose greatness is inseparable from its blindness, and part of what makes it great is that the blindness is visible once you know what to look for.
The Reading
Part One
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know."
The telegram came from the home at Marengo, eighty kilometres from Algiers. Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
My name is Meursault. I am a clerk in a shipping office in Algiers, which is a French city, and I am French, and the men who sit in the doorways of the streets behind the port are Arabs. Maman had been at the home for some years. I hadn't the money to keep her with me. She cried for a while when I sent her and then she got used to it.
I asked my boss for two days off. He didn't look pleased, so I said it wasn't my fault. Afterwards I thought I shouldn't have said that.
I borrowed a black tie and a mourning band from Emmanuel and caught the two o'clock bus. It was very hot. I slept most of the way.
The director received me in his office. He said Maman had been happier at the home than with me. I said yes. He asked if I wanted to see her; the caretaker could unscrew the lid. I said no. He asked why not. I said I didn't know. He said, of course, and I felt I had said something I shouldn't.
The coffin stood on trestles with the screws already sunk in the lid. The caretaker brought me coffee. Then I wanted a cigarette. I wasn't sure whether I could smoke in front of Maman. I thought it over. It didn't matter. I offered the caretaker one and we smoked.
At about ten her friends came in from the dormitories and sat on chairs around the coffin. They moved their toothless mouths at me. I couldn't tell whether it was a greeting or a tic. One of the women wept the whole time, in little screeching sobs, and I wished she would stop. Towards morning I fell asleep in my chair.
We buried her the next day. The country was flat and the sun came up quickly. The tar shone and our feet sank a little into it. I felt the blood beating in my temples. The driver said the sun does the same to everyone, and I said yes.
Thomas Pérez walked behind us. He had been Maman's friend at the home. The residents said they were engaged. He was limping in a felt hat and kept falling behind, so he cut across the fields to catch the hearse where the road turned. His face was streaming, tears and sweat together. There was the red earth spilling over the coffin and the white roots mixed in with it, and there was Pérez fainting, folding up like a rag doll. Then the church, the sound of the earth, the night of the bus, and my joy when it was over and I could sleep twelve hours.
On Saturday I went swimming at the harbour baths and got tangled in the water with Marie Cardona, a typist who had worked in my office. I helped her onto a raft and put my head against her stomach and lay there with the sun on my face. That evening she asked what the mourning was for. I said Maman had died. She wanted to know when, so I said yesterday. She flinched a little but said nothing. We saw a Fernandel picture and laughed at it and she came back to my flat.
She was gone when I woke. Sunday I stayed on the balcony and watched the street: families in their good clothes, the young men with their hair oiled going to the cinema, then the lamps coming on. It occurred to me that another Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that nothing had really changed.
I ate every day at Céleste's, near the flat. Céleste is a big man with a moustache and an apron.
Old Salamano lived on my landing with a spaniel that had a skin disease. He had had the dog eight years, since his wife died, and it had lost its hair and gone the colour of scabs. They went out twice a day and it was always the same: the dog pulling until Salamano stumbled, Salamano beating it and swearing, then the dog pulling again. One evening the dog was gone, run off at the parade ground. Salamano stood in my doorway with his hat in his hands and asked what they would do to it at the pound. I said they kept them three days and then did as they liked. He went in. I heard him walking up and down all night, and through the wall a small strange sound, and he was crying. I don't know why I thought of Maman then.
Raymond Sintès lived on the same floor. He says he is a warehouse guard, and in the neighbourhood they say he lives off women. He gave me blood sausage and wine in his room and told me about a Moorish woman he had been keeping, how he knew she was cheating him, how he'd hit her and she'd bled. He wanted a letter written — something with kicks in it — so she would come back and he could spit in her face and throw her out at the end. He asked if I would write it. I wrote it there and then with the wine in me. He said we were pals now.
The next Saturday she was in his room and there was shouting and a woman screaming, and the landing filled with people. A policeman came, slapped Raymond's face and sent the woman home. Afterwards Raymond asked me to say she had cheated on him. It made no difference to me. I did it.
Marie asked me one evening if I loved her. I said that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't. She looked unhappy. A week later she asked if I wanted to marry her. I said it made no difference to me and we could if she liked. She asked if I'd have said yes to another woman who asked in the same way. I said naturally. She said I was peculiar and that she loved me probably for that. My boss offered me a place in Paris. I said one life was as good as another. He said I lacked ambition.
On the Sunday, Raymond took Marie and me by bus out of Algiers to a wooden bungalow belonging to his friend Masson, at the end of a beach between the rocks and the sea. Masson laughed a great deal and said we would all have lunch. As we left the bus stop Raymond pointed out two Arabs in the road watching us; one of them was the brother of the woman. Marie and I swam. We ate fish and potatoes and drank a lot of wine. Afterwards Masson said he and I would walk on the beach.
The two Arabs were at the far end, near a spring. When we came up, the brother put his hand in his pocket. Masson took the second one. Raymond hit his man twice and split his mouth, and the brother drew a knife and cut Raymond's arm and slashed his mouth open. We got him to a doctor and brought him back bandaged. Then he went out again, alone, with his revolver in his pocket, and I went after him.
They were at the same place, lying by the spring, and one of them was playing three notes over and over on a little reed. Raymond asked if he should shoot. I said not yet, that he should take him on man to man, and that it was rotten to shoot a man for nothing. Then I said to give me the revolver, that if the other one moved or drew a knife I'd shoot. He gave it to me. The sun struck the metal. Then we walked back and Raymond went into the bungalow.
I couldn't face the wooden steps and the women, so I turned and walked back along the beach with the revolver in my pocket. The sun was the same as it had been the day we buried Maman. It pressed on my head. Every time I felt its breath on my face I clenched my teeth and went on. Behind the rock there was the spring and the shade, and I wanted to reach it. The Arab was lying there. He was alone. When he saw me he raised himself a little and put his hand in his pocket. I put my hand round Raymond's gun in my jacket. We stayed like that a long time. He drew his knife and held it up in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade at my forehead. The sweat in my eyebrows came down over my eyelids all at once, a warm thick film. The sky cracked open from end to end and the sea brought a thick fiery breath. The trigger gave.
"I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."
Part Two
They arrested me. My case was simple, they said. My lawyer asked whether I had felt grief that day at the home. I said I had rather lost the habit of examining my feelings, that I had surely loved Maman, but that didn't mean anything, and that all healthy people had more or less wished the death of those they loved. He stopped me and made me promise not to say that at the hearing. He left without shaking my hand.
The magistrate was polite. Then he asked about the four shots. Why had I paused, and then fired four more times into a body on the ground? I did not answer. He asked again, then went to a drawer and came back with a silver crucifix, which he waved at me. Every man who came into that room, he said, had wept before that image. If he ever doubted, his life would have no meaning. Did I want his life to have no meaning? I said that had nothing to do with me. He asked whether I believed in God. I said no. He said he had never seen a soul as hardened as mine, and after that he called me Monsieur Antichrist.
Prison was not so bad after the first months. What I missed was cigarettes, and the sea, and women. Then I learned to remember. I would lie on my bunk and go through my flat, every object in it, every mark on the wood. A man who had lived one day could live a hundred years in a cell without being bored. Marie came once, in a striped dress, and shouted across the grille that we'd be married. I shouted back yes. She did not come again; she was not my wife.
The trial was in June. The courtroom was full of light and the fans did nothing to the heat. There were journalists. I had the odd impression of being one too many. Then the parade began, and it was about Maman.
The director of the home said Maman had complained of me, that I had not wanted to see the body, that I had not cried once, and that I had left straight after the burial. One thing had surprised the staff: I hadn't known Maman's age. The caretaker said I had smoked and slept and drunk white coffee. Pérez was asked whether he had seen me cry and said no, and then, asked whether he had seen me not cry, said no again, and there was laughter.
Céleste came in twisting his panama hat and said I was a man, and that everyone knew what that meant. Asked to be specific, he said that in his opinion it was a stroke of bad luck, and everybody knew what bad luck was, it left you defenceless. He wanted to go on and they told him it was enough. He turned and looked at me before he sat down, his eyes shining and his lips trembling, and for the first time in my life I wanted to embrace a man. Salamano said I had been kind about his dog. The prosecutor asked whether this was the dog that had run away. Raymond said the quarrel was chance, and the prosecutor asked whether it was by chance that I had written the letter. Marie was made to give the date of the swim, the film we had laughed at, and the night after it. The prosecutor said that the day after his mother's death this man was swimming and laughing at a comedy film. Marie burst into tears and said it was not what they had made of it, and they took her out.
Nobody asked much about the beach. My lawyer raised his arms and said, come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man, and the prosecutor rose and said that he accused this man of burying his mother with crime in his heart. He said he had looked into my soul and found nothing. When they asked why I had gone back down the beach with the revolver, I said quickly that it was because of the sun. There was laughter. It was as though the case were being conducted without me.
They read the verdict in the evening. In the name of the French people my head was to be cut off in a public square. All the faces were turned to me with the same expression, and I thought this was probably deference.
In the cell I thought about the machine. It never fails. You climb no scaffold to reach it: it stands on the ground and you walk to it as you would walk to anything. They come for you at dawn. I stopped sleeping and listened for the footsteps, and when the light came and nobody had come, I had another day. Then I would think about the appeal, and then about there being no appeal. It made no difference. Whether you die at thirty or at seventy, others go on living.
The chaplain came without my asking. He sat on the bunk and said the sentence would be lifted but I must discharge a burden, and that men as sure as I was had wept. He called me my son. Then something broke in me. I took him by the collar of his cassock and shouted everything at him. None of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive. He lived like a dead man. I was sure of my life and sure of my death, and that was all I had, and it held me as tightly as this. From the depth of my future a dark wind had been rising towards me all my life long, and as it passed it levelled everything that was offered me. What did it matter that Marie should offer her lips to somebody else, or that his God, or the lives men choose, should be anything at all. One fate was to elect me, and with me thousands of millions of others. The warders pulled him away.
He went, and I slept. I woke with stars on my face, the smells of night and earth and salt cooling my temples, the sirens sounding on the harbour. I thought of Maman, and of why, at the end of her life, she had taken a fiancé, and why she had begun again. Nobody had the right to weep for her. And I felt ready to begin it all again too.
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again."
"For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
Matthew Ward's 1988 Vintage International translation is the standard English edition and the one most readers encounter. Ward restored the bleached, short-sentence American rhythm Camus admired in Hemingway — a corrective to Stuart Gilbert's earlier, slightly mannered British version. It is the translation most English-language scholarship now cites.
Translated by Matthew Ward. The standard contemporary English translation — flat, precise, and closely calibrated to Camus's Hemingway-inflected prose.
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