Debate
Camus and Sartre on Revolt and History
1952 · Can one condemn revolutionary violence without siding with the existing order – and can one act within history without letting history justify murder?
In “L’Homme révolté” (The Rebel, 1951), Albert Camus argued that modern revolutions, by making history the final judge, had come to justify murder; among the results he named “slave camps under the flag of freedom”. In May 1952 Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes printed a sharply critical review by Francis Jeanson, and in August it published Camus’s reply, addressed to “Monsieur le directeur”, together with Sartre’s “Réponse à Albert Camus” and a second text by Jeanson. Sartre opened by saying that their friendship had not been an easy one but that he would feel its loss; the two never spoke again. In the Cold War the exchange became a test case for how intellectuals should judge revolutionary violence, communism and the Soviet camps.
Positions
Revolt that knows its limits
Camus distinguishes revolt from revolution. The rebel who says “no” to oppression also affirms a limit and a solidarity with others – “I rebel – therefore we exist” – whereas revolutions that make history the supreme tribunal, and its promised end the justification of killing now, turn into terror. In his letter he complained that Jeanson had passed over the book’s actual theses – the limit revealed by revolt itself, the critique of Marxist prophecy and of “objective guilt” – and had ascribed to him the view that all evil lies in history and all good outside it. His critics, he wrote, defended Marxism as an implicit dogma without daring to affirm it as an open politics.
Held by
- Albert Camus1913–1960
No standpoint outside history
Sartre replied that no one can judge history from outside: the question is not whether it has a meaning and whether we deign to take part, but, since we are in it up to our necks, to try to give it the meaning that seems best to us. Values beyond history, if any, show themselves only in human actions, which are historical by definition; and a revolt that declines to choose between oppressors and oppressed ends up serving the existing order. He agreed that the Soviet camps were unacceptable, but so was the daily use the so-called bourgeois press made of them. Jeanson had objected that the book ignored the historical and economic conditions of revolutions and was being applauded by the right.
Held by
- Jean-Paul Sartre1905–1980
Two half-truths?
Some later readers have treated the quarrel as a Cold War morality play in which Camus was simply proved right. Ronald Aronson (Camus and Sartre, 2004), who also wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Camus, rejects such a winner’s verdict: in his reading the Cold War pushed the two friends into opposing camps, and each saw only half of the truth – Camus the danger of revolutionary violence, Sartre the everyday violence of oppressive social relations built into capitalism and colonialism. Both, Aronson argues, were selective; they went on arguing indirectly in their work until Camus’s death in 1960.
Read more
- Albert Camus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Albert Camus (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Ronald Aronson: Camus and Sartre. The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (University of Chicago Press)
As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made