The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom women fell for helplessly—the Don Draper of existentialism. This may seem a trivial thing to harp on, except that it is almost always the first thing that comes up when people who knew Camus talk about what he was like. When Elizabeth Hawes, whose lovely 2009 book “Camus: A Romance” is essentially the rueful story of her own college-girl crush on his image, asked survivors of the Partisan Review crowd, who met Camus on his one trip to New York, in 1946, what he was like, they said that he reminded them of Bogart. “All I can tell you is that Camus was the most attractive man I have ever met,” William Phillips, the journal’s editor, said, while the thorny Lionel Abel not only compared him to Bogart but kept telling Hawes that Camus’s central trait was his “elegance.” (It took the sharper and more Francophile eye of A. J. Liebling to note that the suit Camus wore in New York was at least twenty years out of Parisian style.)

Camus liked this reception enough to write home about it to his French publisher. “You know, I can get a film contract whenever I want,” he wrote, joking a little, but only a little. Looking at the famous portrait of Camus by Cartier-Bresson from the forties—trenchcoat collar up, hair swept back, and cigarette in mouth; long, appealing lined face and active, warm eyes—you see why people thought of him as a star and not just as a sage; you also see that he knew the effect he was having.

It’s perfectly reasonable, then, that a new book by Catherine Camus, his surviving daughter, “Albert Camus: Solitude and Solidarity” (Edition Olms), is essentially a photograph album, rather than any sort of philosophical gloss. Looks matter to the mind. Clever people are usually compensating for something, even if the wound that makes them draw the bow of art is no worse than an overlarge schnozz and sticking-out ears. The ugly man who thinks hard—Socrates or Sartre—is using his mind to make up for his face. (Camus once saw Sartre over-wooing a pretty girl and wondered why he didn’t, as Camus would have done, play it cool. “You’ve seen my face?” Sartre answered, honestly.) When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

And then the image of Camus persists—we recall him not just as a fine writer but as an exemplary man, a kind of secular saint, the spirit of his time, as well as the last French writer whom most Americans know something about. French literary critics sometimes treat him with the note of condescension that authors of high-school classics get here, too—a tone that the French writer Michel Onfray, in his newly published life of Camus, “L’Ordre Libertaire,” tries to remedy, insisting that Camus was not only a better writer but a more interesting systematic thinker than Sartre.

The skepticism of his native readers isn’t just snobbish, though. Read today, Camus is perhaps more memorable as a great journalist—as a diarist and editorialist—than as a novelist and philosopher. He wrote beautifully, even when he thought conventionally, and the sober lucidity of his writing is, in a sense, the true timbre of the thought. Olivier Todd, the author of the standard biography in French, suggests that Camus might have benefitted by knowing more about his anti-totalitarian Anglo-American contemporaries, Popper and Orwell among them. Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end—easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people—doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and looked at it, elegantly, upside down.

In America, Camus is, first of all, French; in France he remains, most of all, Algerian—a Franco-Algerian, what was later called a pied noir, a black foot, meaning the European colonial class who had gone to Algeria and made a home there. A dense cover of clichés tends to cloud that condition: just as the writer from Mississippi is supposed to be in touch with a swampy mysterious identity, a usable past, that no Northern boy could emulate, the “Mediterranean” man is assumed in France to be in touch with a deep littoral history. Camus had that kind of mystique: he was supposed to be somehow at once more “primitive”—he was a strong swimmer and, until a bout of tuberculosis sidelined him, an even finer football player—and, because of his Mediterranean roots, more classical, in touch with olive groves and Aeschylus. The reality was grimmer and more sordid. His father, a poorly paid cellarman for a wine company, was killed in battle during the First World War, when Camus was one. His mother was a maid, who cleaned houses for the wealthy French families. Though he was, as a young man, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, he understood in his marrow that the story of colonialist exploitation had to include the image of his mother on her knees, scrubbing. Not every colonial was a grasping parasite.

Camus was a first-rate philosophy student, and the French meritocratic system had purchase even in the distant province. He quickly advanced at the local university, writing a thesis on Plotinus and St. Augustine when he was in his early twenties. After a flirtation with Communism, he left for the mainland in 1940, with the manuscript of a novel in his suitcase and the ambition to be a journalist in his heart. He worked briefly for the newspaper Paris-Soir, and then returned to North Africa, where he finished two books. By 1943, he was back in France, to join the staff of the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat, and publish those books: first the novel “The Stranger” and then a book of philosophical essays, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Part of the paralyzing narcotic of the Occupation was that writing could still go on; it was in the Germans’ interest to allow the publication of books that seemed remote enough not to be subversive.

The novel and the essays announced the same theme, though the novel did it on a downdraft and the essays on uplift: meaning is where you make it and life is absurd. In the novel, Camus meant absurd in the sense of pointless; in the essays in the sense of unjustified by certainty. Life is absurd because Why bother? And life is also absurd because Who knows? “The Stranger” tells the story of an alienated Franco-Algerian, Meursault, who kills an Arab on the beach one day for no good reason. The no-good-reason is key: if it’s possible to act for no good reason, maybe there is never any reason to talk about “good” when you act. The world is absurd, Meursault thinks (and Camus seconds), because, without divine order, or even much pointed human purpose, it’s just one damn thing after another, and you might as well be damned for one thing as the next: in a world bleached dry of significance, the most immoral act might seem as meaningful as the best one. The drained, eye-straining beach where Meursault murders his victim is a place not just without meaning but without real feeling—it became the deadened landscape, and the cityscape, that was populated in the decade by everyone from Giacometti’s emaciated walking figures to Bogart’s private eyes.

In “Sisyphus,” though, Camus offers a way to keep Meursault’s absurdity from becoming merely murderous: we are all Sisyphus, he says, condemned to roll our boulder uphill and then watch it roll back down for eternity, or at least until we die. Learning to roll the boulder while keeping at least a half smile on your face—“One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is his most emphatic aphorism—is the only way to act decently while accepting that acts are always essentially absurd.

It was the editorials that Camus wrote for Combat that sustained his reputation. Editorial writers can seem the most insipid and helpless of the scribbling class: they sum up anonymously the ideas of their time, and truth and insipidity do a great deal of close dancing—the right thing to do is often hard but seldom surprising. Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing. It’s a form of conducting, really, where the writer tries to strike a downbeat, a tonic note, for the whole of his section. Not “Say this!” but “Sound this way!” is what the great editorialists teach.

What Camus wanted wasn’t new: just liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he found a new way to say it. Tone was what mattered. He discovered a way of speaking on the page that was unlike either the violent rhetorical clichés of Communism or the ponderous abstractions of the Catholic right. He struck a tone not of Voltairean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft. Camus sounds serious, but he also sounds sad—he added the authority of sadness to the activity of political writing. He wrote with dignity, at a moment when restoring dignity to public language was necessary, and he slowed public language at a time when history was moving too fast. At the Liberation, he wrote (in Arthur Goldhammer’s translation):

Now that we have won the means to express ourselves, our responsibility to ourselves and to the country is paramount. . . . The task for each of us is to think carefully about what he wants to say and gradually to shape the spirit of his paper; it is to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to restore to the country its authoritative voice. If we see to it that that voice remains one of vigor, rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity, then much will be saved from ruin.

Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity—even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of Camus, and they were not the usual words of French political rhetoric. The enemy was not this side or that one; it was the abstraction of rhetoric itself. He wrote, “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction.” Sartre, in a signed, man-on-the-scene column for Combat, wrote that the Liberation had been a “time of intoxication and joy.” (Actually, Sartre kept off the streets and let Simone de Beauvoir do the writing, while he took the byline.) Intoxication and joy were the last things that Camus thought freedom should bring. His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility.

It was in the forties that Camus became intimate with Sartre. Though each had known the other’s writing before meeting the writer, they became friends, in Saint-Germain, in 1943, a time when the Café de Flore was not an expensive spot but one of the few places with a radiator reliable enough to keep you warm in winter. For the next decade, French intellectual life was dominated by their double act. Although Camus was married, and soon afterward had a mistress, and soon after that had twins (by his wife), an American reader of Todd’s biography is startled to realize that after the twins were born Camus’s life went on exactly as before—his deepest emotional attachment seems to have been to Sartre and his circle. Indeed, the image of the French philosophers in cafés debating existentialism dates from that moment and those men. (Before that, Frenchmen in cafés debated love.)

Philosophers? They were performers with vision, who played on the stage of history. Their first conversation was about the theatre—Sartre asked Camus, impulsively, to direct the coming production of his play “No Exit”—and not long afterward Sartre was sent, by the Resistance unit he had belatedly joined, to occupy the Comédie-Française. (The Resistance actually had a theatre committee.) Camus came into the theatre and found Sartre asleep in an orchestra seat. “At least your armchair is facing in the direction of history,” Camus teased him, meaning that the chair looked more committed than the sleeping philosopher. The wisecrack bugged Sartre more than he first let on, as such jokes will among writers.

Sartre-bashing has become a favorite sport for Anglo-American intellectuals—in the past decades, Clive James and the late Tony Judt have both kicked him around—and so it’s worth recalling why Camus valued Sartre’s good opinion more than anyone else’s. Sartre’s appeal was, in no small part, generational and charismatic. If you had asked people whose lives Sartre changed why they admired him so keenly, they would have said that it was because in his book “Being and Nothingness,” and in the famous 1945 speech “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” he had reconciled Marxism and existentialism. To some, this may seem like not much of an accomplishment—they may feel rather as a parent feels when a child has, over breakfast, reconciled Lucky Charms and Froot Loops in one bowl—but at the time it seemed life-giving. Sartre had found a role for both humanism and history—“humanism” meaning the Enlightenment belief that individual acts had resonance and meaning, “history” meaning the Marxist belief that, in the impersonal working out of the dialectic, they actually didn’t. Sartre said that you couldn’t know how history would work out, but you could act as if you did: “If I ask myself ‘Will the social ideal, as such, ever become a reality?’ I cannot tell, I only know that whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing.” And again: “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” (There are moments when Sartre sounds like Tony Robbins—only you can make you what you want to be!—which may also have been, secretly, part of his appeal.) People aren’t born free and everywhere are in chains; they’re just born. What better way to choose freedom than by unlocking the next guy’s chains, too?

Sartre’s move toward Marxism, and toward the French Communist Party, oddly mimicked that of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s seventeenth-century “wager” in favor of Christianity: the faith might be true, so why not embrace it, since you lose nothing by the embrace, and get at least the chance of all the goodies the faith promises? In Sartre’s case, if the “social ideal” never arrived, at least you had tried, and if it did you might get a place in the pantheon of proletariat heroes. This reasoning may seem a little shabby and self-interested, but to those within Pascal’s tradition it seemed brave and audacious. (Camus called Pascal “the greatest of all, yesterday and today.”) Faith in the Party, which Sartre never joined but to which he gave his purposefully blind allegiance, so closely mirrored faith in the Church that it borrowed some of the Church’s residual aura of moral purpose. It wasn’t that Sartre didn’t notice the Soviet camps. He did. He just thought that you could look past them, as a good Catholic doesn’t pretend not to see the Hell on earth that the Church often has made but still thinks you can see the Heaven beyond that it points to.