Between History and Fiction: Algeria and Political Engagement in the Works of Albert Camus and Mouloud Feraoun

Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Mouloud Feraoun (1913–1962) were two contemporary Francophone Algerian authors whose works display a vital attachment to their lived experience in colonial Algeria. The Algerian War of independence (1954–1962), moreover, is a crucial event in their development both as writers and as politically engaged public figures. Whereas the lived experience of a poor childhood in Algeria informs their autobiographical novels — Camus’s Le Premier Homme (1994) and Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre (1950) — the Algerian War informed their modes of political engagement, particularly with regard to violence.Between History and Fiction investigates the various ways in which Algeria figures in the works of Camus and Feraoun. Their autobiographical novels are analyzed with respect to existing theories on the genre of autobiography in an effort to show how the genre itself is modified in order to conform to the social, cultural, and historical circumstances of their autobiographers. This is particularly relevant in my first chapter’s analysis of Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre, which defies the Rousseauian autobiographical model and invites a reading that ascribes it a more collective than particular dimension. By recording the life of any Kabyle of his generation as much as his own, Feraoun’s autobiographical novel helps to construct a fuller portrait of the Algerian communities in the first half of the 20th century and thus becomes historiographically important.In my second chapter, my reading of Camus’s autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme, shows that the author challenges contemporaneous views of Algeria as a nation. Instead, Camus proposes a new understanding of Algeria, which I qualify as a patrie, and which I elaborate in terms of different forms of memory, of forgetting, and of a call to create a foundational moment for a new Algeria in the present instead of searching for one in its past history. Following this reading of Le Premier Homme is a discussion of Camus’s role as a politically committed writer, an écrivain engagé. Beginning with the distinction between Camus’s form of engagement and that of his contemporaries, I challenge the widespread notion among critics that Camus was ultimately pro-colonialist for not standing up for Algerian independence. Instead, I defend his position as more closely aligned with the long tradition of the écrivain engagé, with his adamant opposition to indiscriminate violence, and with a different understanding of history.In my third chapter, I look at Mouloud Feraoun’s work as a form of littérature engagée. I begin by arguing that his novels perform a memorializing gesture by engaging characters, events, and forces in ways that record both the static and dynamic aspects of Kabyle society in colonial Algeria. I subsequently show that his work as an écrivain engagé culminates in the work he did in his Journal (1955–1962), where he records the events of the Algerian War for most of its duration. I read the Journal as a form of engagement by virtue of the way in which it bears witness to events that escape immediate understanding. By looking at Feraoun’s unrelenting opposition to violence, I also relate his form of engagement with the tradition of the écrivain engagé. Here, I bring back Albert Camus’s position as a way to show that the two men see eye-to-eye on numerous historical and ethical questions, especially where Algeria is concerned.Although this affinity between Albert Camus and Mouloud Feraoun is made more explicit in this last section, this entire dissertation is an attempt to (re)create and maintain a dialogue between these two figures. Taken together, their works complement the official history of Algeria and, furthermore, offer new avenues and paradigms toward understanding its cultural and political complexity from its independence in 1962 to the present