Friday

Albert Camus and artists of the libertarian Left in France

Albert Camus wrote his most celebrated book The Plague (a novel) in 1947 and a quite anarchic book The Rebel in 1951. In the 1950s he was drawn ever closer to the struggling journals of the anarchists, after breaking with the authoritarian communist Jean-Paul Sartre and, wrongly, associating many of the ideas of Bakunin with Bolsjevism. His biographer Herbert Lottman has commented on his association with Pierre Monatte, who published Révolution Prolétarienne, Maurice Joyeux of Le Libertaire and Le Monde Libertaire, and with the Spanish exiles who produced Solidaridad Obrera in France until, as Lottman explains, "the paper was eventually banned by the de Gaulle government to avoid giving offence to General Franco."
In his political isolation he had recourse to "the men and women of political movements with which he could still sympathize, those of the far-out left, who on their own chosen terrain were often as lonely as he was." Other French avant-garde artists had, around that time, also broken with authoritarian communism, like André Breton and some other surrealists.
Surrealists like Breton and Benjamin Péret had become members of the libertarian Left, while another surrealist called Salvador Dali wasn't supporting the anti-authoritarian movement at all. Péret had even fought as an anarchist in the Spanish civil war. French anti-authoritarian singers like Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré have also become well-known, certainly in the sixties and seventies. Today, radical artists in France get little attention. Some members of the libertarian Left in France recieve a lot of media attention, like the activist and farmer José Bové or the philosopher Michel Onfray, but their political views aren't always coherent.