Back in 1960 the New York Times reported that Albert Camus had died in a car crash, and that his body had been moved to a nearby town where the “Algerian-born writer’s body” was draped in a “large French flag”. Even in death the tension between France and Algeria, an opposition that haunted Camus his entire life, continued.

How appropriate and how absurd that, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death this January, France was once again divided over his legacy. President Sarkozy’s efforts to inter Camus’s body in the Pantheon to mark this anniversary, have led voices on the left such as Olivier Todd, Camus’s biographer, to accuse Sarkozy of trying to hijack the writer’s legacy for his own political benefit. There were even charges in the French press of grave-robbing. Foreigners may think this absurd. But few writers wrestled as heroically with the absurd as Camus, and even fewer in the knowledge that they would inevitably fail.

The absurdities begin with Camus’s proposed resting place, the Pantheon. Think of Mount Rushmore shrunk and shipped to Cooperstown. Looming over Paris, with “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante” inscribed across its pediment, this neo-classical pile is dedicated to perpetuating the memory of, well, great men. (The only woman who got in was Marie Curie.)

Yet, as soon as the ceremonial pomp and circumstance ends and the tombs close on these great men, their compatriots forget them. Victor Hugo, Jean Moulin, Emile Zola, Voltaire, Rousseau are known to most Frenchmen (and women). The other 70 or so residents are like character actors in old movies: we know we have seen them but cannot remember their names and won’t wait for the credits.

Commissioned by Louis XV and designed by Jacques Soufflot, the Church of Sainte Geneviève had scarcely opened for business when the French Revolution kidnapped the limestone hulk and relabelled it the Pantheon. Over the next century, the building changed identities as often as France changed regimes. When a republic sent a king packing, the crosses were taken down and the famous inscription put back up; when a monarchy (or a Napoleon) returned, the inscription was removed and the crosses dusted off. Only in 1885, when the Third Republic lowered Victor Hugo into the building’s bowels, did the Pantheon become a republican shrine in perpetuity.

While the nation’s thank you note to great men flickered on and off outside the dome, there was turmoil inside as well. For every newly minted grand homme, an older one was taken out of circulation. Robespierre and his fellow terrorists pushed out the first resident, le Comte de Mirabeau, soon after they inducted JP Marat. It was no accident that Mirabeau’s political moderation, unlike Marat’s bloody-minded fanaticism, was disliked by the Terror. Nor was it coincidental that, with Robespierre’s overthrow, Marat was hustled out the Pantheon’s back door. (He ended up in a neighbouring church and, contrary to popular belief, wasn’t chucked into the sewers.)

This game of musical mausoleums may seem absurd, but the symbolism was serious. Republican and reactionaries in France both understood the stakes involved: the Pantheon sought to create a new collective character, secular and republican, opposed to the older French identity associated with throne and altar. But this was not easily done in a nation as divided as France over its revolutionary legacy. The Pantheon widened rather than bridged France’s ideological rift.

Camus was born in French Algeria, where Arab nationalists justified their bloody struggle for independence by the same revolutionary values with which France had justified its own imperial rule for more than a century. Long before he won fame as author of The Stranger, Camus gained notoriety in Algiers in the late 1930s as a muckraking journalist, penning savage exposés of the French colonial enterprise. In his reports on starving Berbers or unjustly imprisoned Arabs, Camus was a consistent thorn in the side of his fellow pied noirs, the European settlers in Algeria who, unlike the Arabs and Berbers, became French citizens.

For Camus, French rule was not just inhumane, but also self-contradictory: France had failed to live up to its revolutionary trilogy of liberty, equality and fraternity. But rather than abandon Algeria, he thought, France had instead to shoulder its republican heritage: “If we have but one duty in this country,” he warned, “it is to permit a people so proud and humane to remain true to itself and its destiny.”

By the mid-1950s most Arabs believed this destiny would be realised only through independence. But such a prospect repelled Camus, who was as attached to his native Algeria as he was to France’s republican credo. By then a writer closely identified with man’s struggle for meaning in an absurd world, Camus tried to parlay his fame into the achievement of a meaningful and just settlement in Algeria. He insisted that pieds noirs and Arabs were condemned to live together. But as the Battle of Algiers revealed, the two peoples seemed condemned to go on killing one another.

Camus then fell silent on the torment of Algeria. He never again spoke publicly about the tragedy, apart from his remark that he believed in justice, but would defend his mother (who lived in Algiers) before justice. In January 1960, when he died in a car crash in southern France at the age of 46, his silence became permanent.

This silence is fitting. Instead of imposing a simple story about the past, the Pantheon, as a lieu de memoire, a site of memory or commemoration, spurs opposing national accounts. The French left denounces the right’s effort to kidnap Camus’s legacy, while the right ridicules the left’s wilful blindness to Camus’s true political allegiance. The left sees the Gaullist president’s proposal as a means to disguise the French role in the Algerian tragedy, while the right insists that Camus is a reminder that the war need never have taken place – that the French civilising mission was a good and great thing.

The glacial stillness of the Pantheon offers the proper coda to Camus’s last silence. True despair is not born, he believed, when we face a stubborn opponent or in the exhaustion of unequal combat. It comes “when we no longer know why we are struggling, or, indeed, if struggle is necessary”. This best explains his silence. The truths in Algeria were, for Camus, incompatible. His very life, not his native land, was an abstraction. Yet the abstract truths of 1789 were no less real and deeply felt.

Accepting the Nobel Prize, Camus remarked that “silence takes on a terrifying sense”. Fifty years later, we still can hear Camus’s silence. To which the glacial stillness of the Pantheon may well offer the proper home. Aux grands silences, le monde reconnaissant. (To moments of great silence, a grateful world.)