Oliver Gloag is associate professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He is the author of Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020).
The novelist Albert Camus is omnipresent in French cultural life, from TV shows to comic books, magazine covers and one-man shows. Camus-mania isn’t just a literary phenomenon: it draws on a deep well of political revisionism and colonial nostalgia.
French writer Albert Camus has become an iconic figure, celebrated by everyone from Emmanuel Macron to George W. Bush. But the idealized public image of Camus as a liberal humanist does not reckon honestly with the impact of French colonialism on his work.