We were born at the beginning of the First World War. When we were adolescents, we had the Depression. When we were twenty, Hitler came. Then we had the Ethiopian war; the Spanish war; Munich. This is what we got, in the way of an education. After which, we had the Second World War; the defeat; Hitler in our towns and homes. Born and brought up in such a world, what did we believe in? Nothing. Nothing but the stubborn negation into which we had been forced from the beginning. The world in which we had to live was an absurd world, and there was nothing else, no spare world in which we could take refuge. Confronted by Hitler's terror, what values did we have that could comfort us, and which we could oppose to his negation? None. Had the problem been that of the failure of a political ideology, or of a governmental system, it would have been simple enough. But what was happening came from man himself. We could not deny it. We saw it confirmed every day. We fought Hitlerism because it was unbearable. And now that Hitler has disappeared, we know a few things. The first is that the poison that was in Hitler has not been eliminated. It is still there, in all of us. Anyone who speaks of human life in terms of power, of efficiency, of "historical tasks," is like Hitler: He is a murderer. Because if all there is to the problem of man is a "historical task" of some kind, then man is nothing but the raw material of history, and anything can be done with him. There is another thing we know, and this is that we still cannot accept any optimistic view of human existence, no "happy end" of any kind. But if we believe that to be optimistic about human existence is madness, we also know that to be pessimistic about man's action among his fellow men is cowardly. We were against terror because terror is the situation where the only alternative is to kill or be killed, and communication among men becomes impossible. That is why we now reject any political ideology which raises global claims on human life. Any such ideology spells terror and murder. And we want the Reign of Terror to come to an end.

In a bald and clumsy summary, this is what Albert Camus had to say when he was asked to lecture in New York on the subject of "The Crisis of Man." Those who heard him speak had no doubt that he had the right to say "we." His was the voice of a whole generation of Europeans, and more especially Frenchmen, who, caught in a struggle that was both senseless and inescapable, have done more than any accepted notion of duty or "historical task" could ever have required of them, with no other moral aid but the quality of their despair.

The world of action, to them, has not meant an escape from the world of thought, as it has to some of their elder brothers. But neither could they be satisfied with ideas whose connections with actual conduct would be only tangential and general. In fact, this is what they most objected to. They somehow considered the world of thought more dangerous than the world of action, and were suspicious of it. Because of this, they were often considered skeptical, or cynical, or "nihilistic." All of us have heard people report that the youth of France did not believe in anything, while the Fascists and the Nazis had a faith. This kind of talk was current in France itself, before the war. Few persons seemed to take into account the fact that those young men had plenty of reasons to wonder, and that their attitude also implied that thought could be more real than any action, once its authenticity became evident. They were looking for a kind of integrity of which the examples around them were only too rare. In fact, if they had to believe what was shown them on the historical scene, there appeared to be integrity only in evil. The world of Nietzsche was far more real than the world of science, rational thinking, and humanistic moralism. Such being the case, the only sure guide could be loyalty to personal experience and the refusal to believe anything that could not be checked in terms of one's actual encounters with life. A kind of negative truthfulness. The best among those men knew that this was all they had with which to face armed brutality, death, and dereliction. Those who came through must now continue their search in a world no less absurd than the one in which they were born.

There are several eminent writers in France today, but none who has taken up with more decision and clarity than Albert Camus the intellectual and moral implications, as well as the human pathos, of such a situation.

It is a situation that consists essentially of intellectual, moral, and practical antinomies. The absurdity of life; despair; the impossibility of accepting general solutions; the evil in man—all these are questions, rather than answers. They would become meaningless the moment they were not faced with integrity. And it would not be too much to say that integrity is the outstanding quality of Camus' personality as an artist, a philosopher and a political journalist.