| abstract |
This thesis traces Albert Camus's philosophical development from his experiences in the
French Resistance to his famous stance on the impossibility of murder and his equation of
Marxism with murder in L'homme révolté (1951), which is viewed by many historians as the
catalyst for his acrimonious falling-out with Jean-Paul Sartre and split from the rest of the
mainstream French intellectuals. In examining this period, the work examines legality in
Camus’s philosophy of the absurd and how his engagements with the law shaped and ultimately
decided his eventual opposition to murder in all forms, particularly the concerning prevalence of
judicial murder, or capital punishment.
In doing so, this thesis attempts to shift the turn of Camus’s political consciousness back
to the immediate postwar era and the épuration (purge) trials of Nazi collaborators and the Vichy
régime and illustrate the persistence of Resistance-era in Camus's philosophical development. It
was at Liberation, with the purge trials impending that Camus believed in the possibility of the
instantiation of justice in the purge courts and the possibility of murder as a proportionate
response to the crime of collaboration.
The course of the trials, however, were to demonstrate to Camus that murder as a
pronouncement of justice was impossible and that the law, both in its metaphysical proportions
and actual proceedings, was inextricable to the absurd. It was this understanding that Camus
carried with him as he navigated the divided postwar political arena of France and eventually
translated into his philosophical meditation on revolt in L'homme révolté. The notion of l'esprit
de résistance then assumes a vital role in this philosophical development and assumes a meaning
in this thesis as the resonance of Camus's experience in the Resistance in his later political
activity and attempts to assert justice in the world in the face of legitimized murder, irrational
legality, and most overarching, the absurd.
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