Conducive Camus

For all of those who haven't yet read French author and Absurdist philosopher Albert Camus' work Reflections on the Guillotine (1957), a wonderfully connotatious title, I recommend preparations for doing so shortly. It might just be the best piece of debaucherous debating you've ever experienced. Among the best French writers that ever lived, Camus stopped short of slandering against nothing and nobody he didn't like, and once remarked famously to a friend and former Communist party comrade; "I'd defend your right to live under any circumstances, but if I face the firing squad you'll have to condone my murder." Or something of the kind. Extremely independent-minded, he argued vehemently against capital punishment in France, in 1957 (when the essay was published) the only democracy on the European continent to perform executions, and may well have contributed to steep the tide in favour of abolition. The last court-ordered beheading in the country, of another Algerian-born Frenchman, took place 20 years after Reflections was published, four years before President Mitterrand suspended the use of Madame Guillotine forever. There didn't seem to be an inch of sympathy for cold-blooded killers Camus was accused of vindicating in his ruthless quest to abolish executions, and this alone makes him, in my view, one of the last century's great debaters. I'd love to see his comments on the present carnage in his native Algeria's fellow ex-colony Syria, where the archangel of death for political convenience has made its presence known in every building block, in almost every shape. (For my opinions on that debauchery, and its persistent and typically national socialist-level use of the more primitive noose, see my second-to-last post.)

Wonderfully eloquent and brave. Albert Camus (1913-1960).

The final execution in France is announced. Hamida Djandoubi lost his head at 04.40 at Baumettes Prison, 20 years after Camus published Réflections sur la Guillotine. It was the last time the weight and blade held at disposal by the judiciary was let loose with fatal intent. Camus himself died in a crash less expected than the "months or years" he decried in 1960, locked within a framework of iron both more blunt and advanced, embodying into his last his typical forwardness. He lived neither to see Algeria's rise as an independent state but made his views abundantly clear, yet with a characteristic lack of dogmatism, in his masterpiece L'Etranger, whose eponymic protagonist faces the prospect of death imminent and eternal with glee.