Literature

The Rebel · L’Homme révolté

Albert Camus

Translated by Anthony Bower

“Je me révolte, donc nous sommes.” Camus on revolt, revolution, and the limits that keep rebellion human. In French and English.

Public domain in Canada and Hong Kong, where copyright ends fifty years after the author’s death. It may still be under copyright elsewhere: not for use or redistribution outside Canada or Hong Kong.

• # L'HOMME RÉVOLTÉ
• Albert CAMUS
• philosophe et écrivain français [1913-1960]
• (1951)
• ## L’HOMME
• RÉVOLTÉ
• Un document produit en version numérique par Jean-Marie Tremblay, bénévole,
• professeur de sociologie au Cégep de Chicoutimi
• Courriel: jean-marie_tremblay@uqac.ca
• Site web pédagogique : [http://www.uqac.ca/jmt-sociologue/](http://www.uqac.ca/jmt-sociologue/)
• Dans le cadre de: "Les classiques des sciences sociales"
• Une bibliothèque numérique fondée et dirigée par Jean-Marie Tremblay,
• professeur de sociologie au Cégep de Chicoutimi
• Site web: [http://classiques.uqam.ca/](http://classiques.uqac.ca/)
• Une collection développée en collaboration avec la Bibliothèque
• Paul-Émile-Boulet de l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi
• Site web: [http://bibliotheque.uqac.ca/](http://bibliotheque.uqac.ca/)
• **Politique d'utilisation****
• ****de la bibliothèque des Classiques**
• Toute reproduction et rediffusion de nos fichiers est interdite, même avec la mention de leur provenance, sans l’autorisation formelle, écrite, du fondateur des Classiques des sciences sociales, Jean-Marie Tremblay, sociologue.
• Les fichiers des Classiques des sciences sociales ne peuvent sans autorisation formelle:
• - être hébergés (en fichier ou page web, en totalité ou en partie) sur un serveur autre que celui des Classiques.
• - servir de base de travail à un autre fichier modifié ensuite par tout autre moyen (couleur, police, mise en page, extraits, support, etc...),
• Les fichiers (.html, .doc, .pdf, .rtf, .jpg, .gif) disponibles sur le site Les Classiques des sciences sociales sont la propriété des **Classiques des sciences sociales**, un organisme à but non lucratif composé exclusivement de bénévoles.
• Ils sont disponibles pour une utilisation intellectuelle et personnelle et, en aucun cas, commerciale. Toute utilisation à des fins commerciales des fichiers sur ce site est strictement interdite et toute rediffusion est également strictement interdite.
• **L'accès à notre travail est libre et gratuit à tous les utilisateurs. C'est notre mission.**
• Jean-Marie Tremblay, sociologue
• Fondateur et Président-directeur général,
• LES CLASSIQUES DES SCIENCES SOCIALES.
• REMARQUE
• Ce livre est du domaine public au Canada parce qu’une œuvre passe au domaine public 50 ans après la mort de l’auteur(e).
• Cette œuvre n’est pas dans le domaine public dans les pays où il faut attendre 70 ans après la mort de l’auteur(e).
• Respectez la loi des droits d’auteur de votre pays.
• OEUVRES D'ALBERT CAMUS
• ***Récits***
• L'ÉTRANGER. Roman.
• LA PESTE. Récit.
• LA CHUTE. Récit.
• L’EXIL ET LE ROYAUME. Nouvelles
• ***Essais***
• NOCES.
• LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE.
• LETTRES À UN AMI ALLEMAND.
• ACTUELLES I. CHRONIQUES 1944-1948.
• ACTUELLES II. CHRONIQUES 1948-1953
• L'HOMME RÉVOLTÉ. Essai.
• L'ÉTÉ. Essai.
• ***Théâtre***
• CALIGULA.
• LE MALENTENDU.
• L'ÉTAT DE SIÈGE. Théâtre
• LES JUSTES. Théâtre.
• ***Adaptations et traductions***
• LES ESPRITS, de Pierre de Larivey.
• LA DÉVOTION À LA CROIX, de Pedro Calderon de la Barca.
• REQUIEM POUR UN NONNE, de William Faulkner.
• ***Aux Éditions Charlot.***
• L’ENVERS ET L’ENDROIT. Essais (épuisé).
• Cette édition électronique a été réalisée par Jean-Marie Tremblay, bénévole, professeur de sociologie au Cégep de Chicoutimi et fondateur des Classiques des sciences sociales, à partir de :
• Albert CAMUS [1913-1960]
• **L’HOMME RÉVOLTÉ.** [1951]
• Paris : Les Éditions Gallimard, 1951, 133^e édition, 382 pp. Collection NRF.
• Polices de caractères utilisée :
• Pour le texte: Time New Roman, 14 points.
• Notes de bas de page: Time New Roman, 12 points.
• Édition électronique réalisée avec le traitement de textes Microsoft Word 2008 pour Macintosh.
• Mise en page sur papier format : LETTRE US, 8.5’’ x 11’’.
• Édition numérique réalisée le 8 avril 2010, modifiée le 13 juillet 2014 à Chicoutimi, Ville de Saguenay, province de Québec, Canada.
• Albert CAMUS
• philosophe et écrivain français [1913-1960]
• L’HOMME RÉVOLTÉ
• (1951)
• Paris : Les Éditions Gallimard, 1951, 133^e édition, 382 pp. Collection NRF.
• Table des matières
• [INTRODUCTION](#homme_revolte_intro). L'absurde et le meurtre
• **I. [L'HOMME RÉVOLTÉ](#homme_revolte_I)**
• **II. [LA RÉVOLTE MÉTAPHYSIQUE](#homme_revolte_II)**
• [LES FILS DE CAÏN](#homme_revolte_II_I)
• [LA NÉGATION ABSOLUE](#homme_revolte_II_II)
• Un homme de lettres
• La révolte des dandys
• [LE REFUS DU SALUT](#homme_revolte_II_III)
• [L'AFFIRMATION ABSOLUE](#homme_revolte_II_IV)
• L'Unique
• Nietzsche et le nihilisme
• [LA POÉSIE RÉVOLTÉE](#homme_revolte_II_V)
• Lautréamont et la banalité
• Surréalisme et révolution
• [NIHILISME ET HISTOIRE](#homme_revolte_II_VI)
• **III. [LA RÉVOLTE HISTORIQUE](#homme_revolte_III)**
• [LES RÉGICIDES](#homme_revolte_III_I)
• Le nouvel Évangile
• La mise à mort du roi
• La religion de la vertu
• La Terreur
• [LES DÉICIDES](#homme_revolte_III_II)
• [LE TERRORISME INDIVIDUEL](#homme_revolte_III_III)
• L'abandon de la vertu
• Trois possédés
• Les meurtriers délicats
• Le chigalevisme
• [LE TERRORISME D'ÉTAT ET LA TERREUR IRRATIONNELLE](#homme_revolte_III_IV)
• [LE TERRORISME D'ÉTAT ET LA TERREUR RATIONNELLE.](#homme_revolte_III_V)
• La prophétie bourgeoise
• La prophétie révolutionnaire
• L'échec de la prophétie
• Le royaume des fins
• La totalité et le procès
• [RÉVOLTE ET RÉVOLUTION](#homme_revolte_III_VI)
• **IV. [RÉVOLTE ET ART](#homme_revolte_IV)**
• Roman et révolte
• Révolte et style
• Création et révolution
• **V. [LA PENSÉE DE MIDI](#homme_revolte_V)**
• [RÉVOLTE ET MEURTRE.](#homme_revolte_V_I)
• Le meurtre nihiliste
• Le meurtre historique
• [MESURE ET DÉMESURE](#homme_revolte_V_II)
• La pensée de midi
• [AU DELÀ DU NIHILISME](#homme_revolte_V_III)
• *À JEAN GRENIER*
• [9]
• Et ouvertement je vouai mon cœur à la terre grave et souffrante, et souvent, dans la nuit sacrée, je lui promis de l'aimer fidèlement jusqu'à la mort, sans peur, avec son lourd fardeau de fatalité, et de ne mépriser aucune de ses énigmes. Ainsi, je me liai à elle d'un lien mortel.
• HOLDERLIN.
• *La mort d'Empédocle.*
• [11]
• L’HOMME RÉVOLTÉ (1951)
• Introduction
• [Retour à la table des matières](#tdm)
• # The Rebel (book)
• The Rebel, Albert Camus
• An Essay on Man in Revolt With a Foreword by Sir Herbert Read
• Foreword
• With the publication of this book a cloud that has oppressed the European mind for more than a century begins to lift. After an age of anxiety, despair, and nihilism, it seems possible once more to hope—to have confidence again in man and in the future. M. Camus has not delivered us by rhetoric, or by any of the arts of persuasion, but by the clarity of his intelligence. His book is a work of logic. Just as an earlier work of his (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) began with a meditation on living or not livingon the implications of the act of suicide so this work begins with a meditation on enduring or not enduring on the implications of the act of rebellion.
• If we decide to live, it must be because we have decided that our personal existence has some positive value; if we decide to rebel, it must be because we have decided that a human society has some positive value. But in each case the values are not "given" that is the illusionist trick played by religion or by philosophy. They have to be deduced from the conditions of living, and are to be accepted along with the suffering entailed by the limits of the possible. Social values are rules of conduct implicit in a tragic fate; and they offer a hope of creation.
• The Rebel, that is to say, offers us a philosophy of politics. It is a kind of book that appears only in France, devoted, in a passionate intellectual sense, to the examination of such concepts as liberty and terror. Not that it is a theoretical work—on the contrary, it is an examination of the actual situation of Europe today, informed by a precise historical knowledge of the past two centuries of its social development. It is "an attempt to understand the times."
• Camus believes that revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of mankind. It is useless to deny its historical reality—rather we must seek in it a principle of existence. But the nature of revolt has changed radically in our times. It is no longer the revolt of the slave against the master, nor even the revolt of the poor against the rich; it is a metaphysical revolt, the revolt of man against the conditions of life, against creation itself. At the same time, it is an aspiration toward clarity and unity of thought—even, paradoxically, toward order. That, at least, is what it becomes under the intellectual guidance of Camus.
• He reviews the history of this metaphysical revolt, beginning with the absolute negation of Sade, glancing at Baudelaire and the "dandies," passing on to Stirner, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and the surrealists. His attitude to these prophetic figures is not unsympathetic, and once more it is interesting to observe the influence of Andre Breton on the contemporary mind. Camus then turns to the history of revolt in the political sense, his main object being to draw a clear distinction between rebellion and revolution. Here, and not for the first time, Camus's ideas come close to anarchism, for he recognizes that revolution always implies the establishment of a new government, whereas rebellion is action without planned issue—it is spontaneous protestation.
• Camus reviews the history of the French Revolution, of the regicides and deicides, and shows how inevitably, from Rousseau to Stalin, the course of revolution leads to authoritarian dictatorship. Saint-Just is the precursor of Lenin. Even Bakunin, to whom Camus devotes some extremely interesting pages (pointing out, for example, that he alone of his time, with exceptional profundity, declared war against the idolatry of science)—even Bakunin, if we examine the statutes of the Fraternity Internationale (1864-7) which he drew up, is found insisting on the absolute subordination of the individual to a central committee of action.
• All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State. "The strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time.
• The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror." The counterrevolutions of fascism only serve to reinforce the general argument.
• Camus shows the real quality of his thought in his final pages. It would have been easy, on the facts marshaled in this book, to have retreated into despair or inaction. Camus substitutes the idea of "limits." "We now know, at the end of this long inquiry into rebellion and nihilism, that rebellion with no other limits but historical expediency signifies unlimited slavery.
• To escape this fate, the revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore, return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits." To illustrate his meaning Camus refers to syndicalism, that movement in politics which is based on the organic unity of the cell, and which is the negation of abstract and bureaucratic centralism.
• He quotes Tolain: "Les etres humains ne s'emancipent qu'au sein des groupes naturels" human beings emancipate themselves only on the basis of natural groups. "The commune against the State . . . deliberate freedom against rational tyranny, finally altruistic individualism against the colonization of the masses, are, then, the contradictions that express once again the endless opposition of moderation to excess which has animated the history of the Occident since the time of the ancient world." This tradition of "mesure" belongs to the Mediterranean world, and has been destroyed by the excesses of German ideology and of Christian otherworldliness—by the denial of nature.
• Restraint is not the contrary of revolt. Revolt carries with it the very idea of restraint, and "moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion. It is a perpetual conflict, continually created and mastered by the intelligence. . . . Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found.
• We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender of which Barres speaks, is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps us always erect in the savage, formless movement of history."
• In his last pages Camus rises to heights of eloquence which are exhilarating. It is an inspiring book. It is particularly a book that should be read by all those who wish to see the inborn impulse of revolt inspired by a new spirit of action—by those who understand "that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love." Not to calculate, to give everything for the sake of life and of living men—in that way we can show that "real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
• Herbert Read
• The Rebel Contents Foreword Introduction Part I The Rebel Part II Metaphysical Rebellion The Sons of Cain Absolute negation A Man of Letters The Dandies' Rebellion The Rejection of Salvation Absolute Affirmation The Unique Nietzsche and Nihilism The Poets' Rebellion Lautreamont and Banality Surrealism and Revolution Nihilism and History Part III Historical Rebellion The Regicides The New Gospel The Execution of the King The Religion of Virtue The Terror The Deicides Individual Terrorism The Renunciation of Virtue Three of the Possessed The Fastidious Assassins The Path of Chigalev State Terrorism and Irrational Terror State Terrorism and Rational Terror The Bourgeois Prophecy The Revolutionary Prophecy The Failing of the Prophecy The Kingdom of Ends Totality and Trials Rebellion and Revolution Part IV Rebellion and Art Rebellion and the Novel Rebellion and Style Creation and Revolution Part V Thought at the Meridian Rebellion and Murder Nihilistic Murder Historical Murder Moderation and excess Thought at the Meridian Beyond nihilism
• Introduction
• Fin du texte
• The End