Courage Before Greatness: The Albert Camus Story

There is almost no time I come across anything about Albert Camus that I don't discover something spectacular... or something completely new.

Camus is one man whose life, though short, was one of the deepest, most impactful, and most eventful I have ever come across.

Recently, I found myself reading about his life as a journalist, and it opened my eyes to a side of him that most people rarely talk about and it made me realize something.

I think we've spent so much time talking about what Albert Camus became that we've forgotten to talk about who he was.

I've seen beautiful biographies, documentaries, interviews, essays... all kinds of conversations about him. He is introduced as a philosopher, an absurdist, a Nobel Prize winner. Some people still spend hours debating whether the KGB assassinated him. I mean, that particular debate is probably happening somewhere in the world right now as we speak.

But I think we've missed the whole point. We rarely talk about what gave birth to all of that. We rarely talk about the quality that made all those things possible in the first place.

To me, Albert Camus was, before anything else, a remarkably courageous man. And I don't mean courage in the dramatic Hollywood sense, even though it kind of looks like it.

I mean the kind of courage that quietly costs people their careers, their friendships, their reputation, sometimes even their lives. The courage to tell the truth when everyone else would rather you stayed silent. The courage to stand alone when both sides want you to pick one. The courage to keep writing, even when every sentence might put a target on your back.

The more I learn about Albert Camus, the less I think his greatest achievement was writing The Stranger or winning the Nobel Prize. I honestly think those things were simply the consequences of the kind of man he had already chosen to become.

And I think that's the Albert Camus we don't talk about nearly enough.

In fact, I don't think you get to know as much about Albert Camus as we do today unless he had the courage to make the choices he made right from childhood to his teenage years.

Sometimes I ask myself, why does every single stage of this man's life seem to demand courage? Why would someone keep making choices that actively made his life harder?

Was it pride? Was it conviction? Or was he simply incapable of pretending?

Camus didn't suddenly become courageous when he became famous. If anything, courage was already there long before anybody knew who Albert Camus even was.

See where and how he started as a child…

He was born into an absolute blank slate in Algeria, in Africa. His father was killed in World War I when Albert was only eleven months old, so he grew up without a single memory of his father.

Camus and his family lived in a tiny two-room apartment in the Belcourt section of Algiers with no electricity and no running water. His grandmother was incredibly strict, his uncle was paralyzed, and his mother was a partially deaf, illiterate cleaning lady who was nearly mute from shyness and grief.

When Camus finally was able to go to school, he said he experienced what he called the shame that comes from feeling ashamed, because his mother couldn't read his school forms.

Thankfully, one of his teachers, Louis Germain, saw something in him. Mr. Germain volunteered to give Camus extra lessons and convinced his family to let him compete for a high school scholarship.

That took some courage.

And I don't mean taking an examination is extraordinary, I mean refusing to accept the future poverty had already assigned to you is.

If you have ever grown up in that kind of environment, you know exactly what I mean. Poverty has a way of convincing people that the future has already been decided for them. Camus refused to believe it had been decided for him.

And for a boy from Camus's background, simply daring to imagine a different life was already an act of courage.

And as if poverty wasn't enough, life tried to stop Camus again. At just seventeen, despite his promising athletic future, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Back then, tuberculosis was incurable. It is a death sentence. Once you contract it, you just sit back and wait for it to kill you gradually.

Camus had to give up his dream of becoming a professional athlete. From the age of seventeen, he lived with the constant awareness that death was no longer an abstract idea. Most people would have surrendered to that fear. Camus did the opposite. If life could be cut short at any moment, then every moment had to matter. So he turned to writing.

Looking back now, I don't think journalism was ever just a career for him. I think journalism was simply the first place his courage found work.

Yet, Camus didn't write comfortable essays from Paris. He worked for a liberal newspaper called ‘Alger Républicain’ and then he went straight into poor villages to expose how the colonial authorities were treating the Arab population.

Camus literally took on everyone.

When government censors cut his articles, Camus printed quotes by Voltaire instead. When they cut Voltaire, he reprinted an old peace treaty on the front page just to show how afraid the state was of the truth. A French court called his writing insane, and the authorities eventually shut the entire newspaper down in 1940 just to silence him.

You think that will shut him up right?! It didn't.

Then the war came, and the risks doubled. It became a matter of life and death. Then he doubled his trouble too and joined the French Resistance and became the underground editor for an illegal newspaper called ‘Combat’.

This time, he had no choice but to work under the false name "Beauchard”, not because he had become less courageous, but because being discovered meant execution.

There is one story from this period that sounds like something straight out of a movie. One day, while carrying proof copies of the underground newspaper Combat, Camus had to pass through a Gestapo checkpoint in Paris. Getting caught with those pages could have meant arrest... or worse. In a split second, he quietly slipped the papers to the actress Maria Casarès, knowing the officers were less likely to search a woman. Thankfully, she didn't hesitate. Neither did he. They walked straight through the checkpoint and kept going.

The nerve it took to do stuff like that… should be studied.

Now, fighting your enemies is one thing… What happens when you have to stand up to your high class friends? That is the lonely kind of courage most people would never take.

After the war, Camus was already a literary celebrity, running in the same circles as Jean-Paul Sartre.

At that time, the intellectual elite in Paris were heavily infatuated with Communism, arguing that political purges and violence were necessary to build a better world.

But in 1951, Camus published ‘The Rebel” and told them they were wrong. He argued that when a revolution starts justifying murder and tyranny in the name of a political system, it isn't a rebellion anymore, it’s oppression.

His friends turned on him instantly. Sartre's journal ran a review calling his work a lazy pseudo-philosophy.

Camus wrote back, saying that truth doesn't care about the political Left or Right.

Sartre responded this time with a public letter that ended their friendship right there on the front pages.

The Right already hated him, and now the Left hated him too. He was completely isolated because he refused to ignore Stalin's gulags just to stay popular.

And one will think that is enough courage already. Not Camus. He was just starting.

Then the Algerian War broke out in 1954. His homeland was tearing itself apart. The French military was using torture, and Algerian fighters were dropping bombs that killed innocent civilians who looked just like his mother.

In 1956, he flew to Algiers to give a speech calling for a civilian truce.

Outside the building, an angry crowd of French colonists gathered, openly screaming for him to be lynched. His friends were terrified, but Camus refused to leave the stage until he finished his speech.

In the speech, Camus told them that no cause justifies the deaths of innocent people. They had to hustle him out a back door to save his life.

And this is something I noticed about Camus. There is a kind of courage that earns applause. Then there is another kind of courage that earns enemies. Albert Camus had the second kind. By this point, Camus had managed to make enemies almost everywhere;

The Nazis wanted him silenced during the occupation. The French colonial authorities resented him. The Communist Party had already expelled him years earlier in 1937. Sartre and much of the Parisian Left publicly turned against him.

Then, after condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary and defending Boris Pasternak, he also earned the hostility of the Soviet Union. In March 1957, he attacked Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov in a French magazine, denouncing the "Shepilov Massacres." This was a public attack on a superpower. He actively supported Pasternak, and Pasternak's Nobel win in 1958 was a major embarrassment for the Soviets. Camus was seen as a free, invincible, and dangerous man.

He even made enemies of the French intelligence services, who kept files on him. He was a man who had chosen to be a problem.

So when the KGB theory surfaced decades later, claiming they sabotaged his car, people didn't dismiss it immediately. Frankly, Camus had spent his life offending powerful people who had a history of framing assassinations as accidents.

But then there is one problem… the theory depends on the KGB knowing something almost impossible to know.

Albert Camus wasn't even supposed to be in that car on that fateful day. He already had a first-class train ticket to Paris. It was still in his coat pocket when his body was found. He was planning to travel by train with his wife and children.

At the last minute, his publisher, Michel Gallimard, persuaded him to travel by car instead. Gallimard had his wife, Janine, their 18-year-old daughter, Anne, and their black Skye Terrier, Floc, in the back seat.

Gallimard loved fast cars, and he was driving a high-performance Facel Vega known for being difficult to handle. The crash near Villeblevin was so severe that the engine was torn from the chassis, throwing Camus from the car and killing him instantly at forty-six years old. The manuscript of ‘The First Man’ was found in his briefcase, covered in his blood.

Unless someone believes Gallimard himself was part of a plot to kill his own family and himself, which there is no convincing evidence for… the entire theory begins to fall apart.

And before I forget… Michael Gallimard died 5 days after the crash. His wife and daughter did not sustain any injuries but their dog Floc disappeared.

Yet people still want to believe he was murdered. And honestly... I understand why.

Maybe it isn't because the evidence is overwhelming, maybe it's because an ordinary death somehow feels too ordinary for someone who lived such an extraordinary life.

After all, this was a man who had stared down everything that life threw at him; poverty, tuberculosis, censorship, Nazis, angry mobs, political extremists, and some of the most powerful ideologies of the twentieth century. We simply don't want to believe a tree could stop a man who spent his entire life successfully standing up to everything else… a man like Camus.

But perhaps there is another way to look at it.

Whether Albert Camus died because of a conspiracy or because of a tragic accident, one thing remains beyond dispute.

Albert Camus was a remarkably courageous man.

He refused to tell people what they wanted to hear simply because it would have made him popular. He wasn't afraid to stand alone. He wasn't afraid to lose friends. And he certainly wasn't afraid to make enemies.

Maybe that is the rarest kind of courage anyone, writer or not, can possess.

Camus did his part, the rest is left to us.

So let me leave you with the same question I've been thinking about, is there a writer whose courage you think history hasn't fully recognized? I genuinely want to know who it is.