Jdi na obsah Jdi na menu

Albert Camus

Albert Camus might have been killed by the KGB for criticising the Soviet Union, claims newspaper

Car crash in which French literary giant was killed in 1960 was no accident, claims new theory


When the French philosopher, author and inveterate womaniser Albert Camus died in a car accident in 1960 just two years after winning the Nobel prize for literature, France's intellectual beau monde mourned what seemed an almost freakish tragedy.

In Camus's pocket was an unused return train ticket from his home in Provence to Paris. The 46-year-old writer had intended to travel back after the Christmas holidays by train with his wife Francine and their teenage twins Catherine and Jean. Instead, his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard offered to drive him.

Camus was killed instantly when Gallimard's powerful Facel Vega car left the icy road and ploughed into a tree. Gallimard died a few days later. As well as the train ticket, police found 144 pages of handwritten manuscript in the wreckage entitled The First Man, an unfinished novel based on Camus's childhood in Algeria and which he had predicted would be his finest work. The tragedy shocked and saddened France. But no one imagined that the crash had been anything other than an accident.




A year later, Camus further angered Soviet authorities when he publicly supported the Russian author Boris Pasternak, a fellow Nobel laureate and author of Doctor Zhivago, a work banned by Stalin. Corriere della Sera concludes that there were enough reasons for "Moscow to order [Camus's] assassination, in the usual professional style of its KGB agents". If true, it would reopen wounds among the millions of devotees of Camus's work. At the burial of the author of L'Etranger (The Outsider), La Peste (The Plague) and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) in the Lourmarin Cemetery near Vaucluse on the Côte d'Azur, one of Camus's coffin-bearers was a celebrated anarchist. The local football team also turned out, demonstrating his status as a man of the people as well as an intellectual. Even last year, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and a Camus fan, tried unsuccessfully to have his remains moved to the Panthéon, the last resting place of France's great and good.

Olivier Todd, a former BBC correspondent in Paris, whose biography, Albert Camus: Une Vie [A Life], was published in English in 2000, told the Observer that during research in Soviet archives he had not come across any reference to Moscow ordering the author's assassination. "My first reaction is that nothing about the activities of the KGB and its successors would surprise me, but this claim has left me flabbergasted. You have to ask yourself who would benefit from this coming out and why."



article original, modifié le 10 aout 2011 :


repris par l'ensemble des antennes de Radio Paris :





la seule théorie évoquant un assassinat évoquée par le compteur de pattes de mouches, wikipédia, qui se permet d'enfumer un peu plus son pigeon de lecteur par une citation hors contexte et donc tout à fait incompréhensible :

"L'écrivain René Étiemble déclara : « J'ai longtemps enquêté et j'avais les preuves que cette Facel Vega était un cercueil. J'ai cherché en vain un journal qui veuille publier mon article... »48."

cité par Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus, Éditions du Seuil (pour la traduction française), 1978, Éditions du Seuil, 1978, 686 p. (ISBN 2020050080).


mais si on cherche une synthèse sur sa position des événements en Algérie :

Albert Camus était contre l'indépendance de l'Algérie et écrivit en 1958 dans la dernière de ses Chroniques Algériennes que « l'indépendance nationale [de l'Algérie] est une formule purement passionnelle ». Il dénonça néanmoins l'injustice faite aux musulmans d'un côté, la caricature du « pied noir exploiteur » de l'autre. Camus souhaitait ainsi la fin du système colonial mais avec une Algérie toujours française