Comment

Stan Grant
A world of revolution or a world of rebellion

One of the soft indulgences of my life is to spend time browsing in a bookstore, preferably one with a healthy second-hand section, better if it has timber shelves and a ladder, with jazz or classical music playing quietly.

One such store is Henry Pordes Books on Charing Cross Road in London. It has an inviting window and a purposeful door, and inside are books that are made to last. There, nestled in the philosophy section, I recently found a rare early print of an English translation of Albert Camus’ L’Homme révolté (The Rebel).

I have multiple copies of the book but none like this. Its dust cover is faded yellow. There is a slightly decorative red border, the title written plainly in black. Underneath in red is the author’s name. So simple and clear. It is a book for adults.

The presentation of the book is worthy of the content. I devour it in a way I have not previously. I feel closer to Camus’ hand; I can feel his breath on each page. The beauty of the book enhances my engagement with it. Aesthetics matter, especially for Camus, who sought to treasure the aesthetic over the political.

For all his philosophical writings, his political activism, his call to the ethical life, Camus was an artist. He was a man of words. Take this line from the Return to Tipasa: “In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer.”

It is no wonder he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Camus is known for his existential novel of murder – L’étranger, variously translated as The Stranger or The Outsider – and his allegory of totalitarianism – La Peste (The Plague).

L’Homme révolté pulls together so many of Camus’ abiding dilemmas, culminating in the question: what is the correct ethical response to a world of murder? After we have killed God, we destroy ourselves and then seek its justification. This is the first thing to understand about the world Camus is writing into: God is dead and the human seeks to replace Him.

We are presented with a world of revolution or a world of rebellion. There is a difference. As Camus writes, “rebellion kills men, while revolution destroys both men and principles”.

Revolutions, says Camus, “are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder”. The revolution seeks the extermination of time, the end of history. The French Revolution of 1789 is a break from all that is holy. The clock is reset. Morality is in the hands of the human. It is, as Camus writes, formalised. The human as sacred is no more. The human is measured by rights.

What is there in a Godless world but the brutal desire for justice? Camus sees it in Spartacus the slave, who seeks not to overthrow the Roman masters but win “equal rights”. Camus tells us: “He wants to be master in his turn.”

“The slave starts by wanting justice,” he writes, “and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He wants to dominate.”

The Rebel is not the Revolutionary. The Rebel, says Camus, is someone who “says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation”. What does this mean? It means that the Rebel, seeing the death of God, wishes to renew faith in the world.

The Rebel may die for what the Revolutionary will kill. The ethical choice for the Rebel is to say yes to it all, to face the absurd question of life and yet affirm it.

“When the throne of God is overthrown,” Camus says, “the rebel realises that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order and unity that he sought in vain in his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God.”

Camus was an atheist. As a person of devout faith that’s where I might part company with him. I’m not alone in suspecting Camus did believe in God but could not explain God to a world that had decided it had no need of God.

The Rebel is disillusioned with the world, a blasphemer, but he is not destructive. He is not a Revolutionary who will slaughter to unite. The Rebel knows we suffer together. We all suffer from a condition of a fallen humanity with nothing to believe in but the God of ourselves.

The Rebel does not seek division. The Rebel rebels against the “incompleteness of life”.

Camus picks up where Nietzsche leaves off. It is not Nietzsche who killed God; we did. Nietzsche did not rejoice; he took us to the site of our murder and asked, now what?

In The Rebel, Camus confronts a world of insatiable appetite personified by the decadence of the Marquis de Sade. There is no love but a feeding frenzy of desire. Nature itself becomes mechanistic. Nature becomes power. As Sade might have said: all the creatures of the earth mean less than our desires.

Similarly, Camus rejects faith as the price we pay for evil: “If evil is essential to divine creation, then creation is unacceptable.” The knowledge of the truth of God cannot hide behind evil. Camus quotes Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, who says that “all the knowledge in the world is not worth a child’s tears”.

Between desire and faith is our lot. As humans we must reject it and then say yes. We must hold on to what is human even if that comes at the price of what we believed was holy.

We are all implicated in this world, but will we be complicit? Today we are more prone to revolution than rebellion. Our desire for justice excuses murder. It is not murder we condemn but the murderer. We choose our side and humans become mere body count.

Even those of good will, horrified at the excess of our world, make their choice about who is more worthy of our compassion. Our outrage follows the news cameras. We march for those we see or wish to see. Meanwhile, countless millions die off screen.

Camus demands we see it all. Human nature does exist. We are not the product of politics. We best serve those who suffer by rejecting the language of the political. Politics reduces the human to an abstraction. We become not someone to love but a point to be made.

Suffering, says Camus, is “a collective experience”. Every hostage or child dead in the rubble is us. Our tears are our only common language. Camus is bracing to read today when all too often we see a Jewish person as only an extension of Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics or a Palestinian as collateral damage for the politics of Hamas.

Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, Cameroon, Nigeria – everywhere human beings suffer for the world we have created. The Rebel says no to all of it and yes to a world where love might still mean something.

Don’t mistake this for a meaningless call to “love one another”. We do not love equally, but we love the same. It is absurd to think I would love my child as I would love a stranger, but I can recognise in the stranger the same capacity to love his child. This is what we share. This is what we build a world on. This is what we love.

If as human beings we “cannot refer to common values”, which we separately recognise, then, Camus says, we become “incomprehensible”.

It is fitting that I renewed my acquaintance with Camus’ Rebel in a gentle bookshop in a busy city. We all need those quiet places. We are drowned out by the noise. Camus writes that “with all my silence, I shall resist to the end”.

Not that he should not speak – that would be cowardly – but he would not speak to the words of the mad crowd. He would not bay for blood, nor excuse murder. He would say no to the world, a no that divides us against ourselves.

Camus’ silence is to say yes. Affirm the possibility that we might tame the beasts of our exile so that we do not unleash them on each other.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 30, 2025 as "Silent resistance".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.

RELATED READING