The Break That Never Healed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

For most of the 1940s, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were read as two faces of the same movement, friends who had met during the Occupation and who shared a magazine, Les Temps Modernes, that Sartre edited and Camus wrote for. The friendship did not survive Camus's 1951 book The Rebel, a long argument against revolutionary violence that took direct aim at the Soviet Union's record and, by implication, at the fellow-travelling sympathies of much of the French left, Sartre included. Les Temps Modernes ran a review by Francis Jeanson that dismissed the book as politically naive and philosophically thin; Camus answered with an open letter to Sartre rather than to the reviewer, and Sartre answered back in kind, in print, ending the friendship in public rather than in private. The disagreement was never really about literary style. It was about how far a person committed to justice could go in excusing violence done in justice's name, with Camus refusing any excuse and Sartre unwilling to abandon the Soviet experiment outright. The two men did not speak again in any real way, though Sartre, on hearing of Camus's death in a car accident in January 1960, wrote a public tribute calling him one of the last great representatives of a certain kind of moral seriousness, a generous word from a man who had broken with him for good eight years earlier.