Resistance, Rebellion and Death Essays by Albert Camus

This essay collection has been for half a century a literary treasure hidden in plain sight.

Although Camus’ essays have never gone out of print, this collection languished until recently in the shadow of Camus’s more famous and canonical works, The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus. Some article I read mentioned that in the last year Camus’s life, he chose from the three volumes of Actuelles, twenty-three essays he considered most worthy of preservation in English. Yet, I could not find any English copy of Actuelles. Until recently, I realized the name Actuelles did not get carried over in the English copy, and here we have this book Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.

The twenty-three essays in this collection deal with the perennially current issues that periodically tore Camus from his creative writing.  By remaining flagrantly independent, in his essays, Camus spoke out both against the Russian slave-labor camps and against U.S. support of Franco’s Spain. By overcoming the immature nihilism and despair that he saw as poisoning our century, he emerged as the staunch defender of our positive moral values. Camus stated that the “writer’s function is not without arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it”. And Camus lived his words as he demonstrates his commitment to history’s victims, from the fallen maquis of the French Resistance to the casualties of the Cold War.

There is nothing in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death of the metaphysical Camus; all the subjects are socio-political, and the essay topics vary from the French Spirit, European civilization, colonial warfare in Algeria, to the social cancer of capital punishment, death, resistance, rebellion, and freedom. In this Camus is relatable, not because we necessarily are in concord his views or values, but because consistently and without rest man lived the views and values.

What I love about Camus is that he is a relentless journalist, an underground fight who is never less in actions in words.

Read carefully, then read it again. This it is a mature, carefully worded expression of the political, philosophical, and personal credo of a rebel whose bravery confronts us with the need to answer.