In Albert Camus’s vision, justice is meaningless without an equally passionate commitment to liberty. Photograph by Loomis Dean / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

Some writers speak to us through the window of their time—we need to get back to where they once belonged to truly focus on the shape of their ideas—and a few speak to us permanently, jumping, with wormhole-like fluidity, from their time into ours. The latter are an unpredictable bunch, and their presence doesn’t seem to depend on a certain quality of thought as much as on a kind of lucidity of spirit. We have to work hard, for instance, to make sense of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical writings, with their odd brew of German theory and contemporary French politics. Reading them is (rewarding) work. But Albert Camus, Sartre’s great colleague and rival, still speaks to us directly, even though his time is as remote from ours as Sartre’s. Camus was not a broad thinker—or even, in a sense, an original one—but he earned the quality that kids used to describe, admiringly, as “deep.” (As in “Leonard Cohen is deep.”) What he said on every subject was always simple and profound, and usually right. We read him as our contemporary, and he rarely lets us down. He is still hugely popular, as his daughter, Catherine, said not long ago, because he writes not in an attempt to find the plot in history and get in on the right side of it but in the name of history’s victims.

This thought is set in motion by the discovery, last year, in France, of a previously unknown letter by Camus, found in the archives of Charles de Gaulle by the biographer and scholar Vincent Duclert, which Camus had sent from Paris to London sometime in 1943. Unsigned but instantly identifiable by tone and context, it is headed “From a Resisting Intellectual” and was excerpted by the newspaper Le Figaro last month; with the agreement of Catherine Camus, it also appears in a new book, by Duclert, about her father. It’s an odd letter and very French: a sonorous philosophical account of the crisis of the French Resistance and its future, stepping delicately through various minefields of inter-Resistance solidarity, and yet a letter that, though intently rooted in its own time, nonetheless manages, with eerie prescience, to speak to some of the quarrels of our own.

Camus, a French-Algerian by birth, spent the war first in Lyon, where he wrote drafts of his novel “The Stranger,” and then in Paris, where he wrote editorials for the underground Resistance journal Combat. (Indeed, the tone and style of the letter is so close to that of the editorials that it instantly jumps out as his.) The shape of the circumstance is well known. The Resistance, in a complicated pattern, was ostensibly led from London by a right-wing military leader, de Gaulle, but fought in France by a coalition of conservative, Catholic, patriotic, and fiercely anti-Nazi forces—along with a restless and suspicious assembly of Republican “liberal” forces, including old-time socialists, supported by a strong component of Communists who, having sat out the beginning of the war, at the time of the Stalin-Hitler pact, came fiercely and bravely into armed resistance once the Soviet Union was invaded.

In the letter, Camus writes first of the foundering of the “élite”—the intellectual and administrative and even military class who were the pride of French meritocracy. He begins on a note of balanced, even-eyed vision that, difficult to maintain at the best of times, was heroically hard to keep at a moment of such, well, existential stress. “Here I very briefly summarize the feelings of a French intellectual,” he writes, “in the face of the current situation as it can be observed from within the interior. To put it plainly, one’s first feelings would be those of anguish. My deep conviction is that the form of war that metropolitan France has adopted, and in which we are all engaged, can lead either to the rebirth of this people or to its definitive fall.”

The failings of that élite were, it seemed, responsible for the “strange defeat” of France, as the historian Marc Bloch put it. (As Picasso remarked to Matisse, the French generals were “the professors of Beaux-Arts”—i.e., part of the same blind administrative cadre.) How could one think of this élite now, the letter asks, and how ought it to reconstitute itself after the war was won—if it was won? A nation dies, Camus writes, because its élite melts, literally. But that élite can be remade not from the traditional class of administrative exam-passers but from a new élite of the resisters, whose expertise is rooted in “real experience” and who keep their reality about them. He complains that direct and armed resistance within France has not as yet been met with military action from outside—overestimating, perhaps, the resources of the French Army in exile but impatient for the “second front” that had long been promised but was delivered only in June of 1944.

On what foundation can the future of France be built? Torn between the American and Soviet models—at a moment when the prestige of the Soviet Union, due to the success of its Army against the Nazis, was at an all-time high—Camus speaks up for Russia and its social experiment but says delicately that France can only “admit with difficulty the idea of a preponderant State where all liberty would disappear.” He writes that, while we have to seek social justice of the kind that the Soviets at least pretended to pursue, claims of personal liberty cannot be scanted or treated as secondary. Critical of an ascendant American power that he identifies as “a future that far too much resembles the past,” and in which, “under the pretext of liberty, justice is put deliberately to one side,” Camus goes on to insist, nonetheless, on the centrality of liberty as the essential protector of history’s victims. What, then, is the ideology of the French Resistance? “If we have a doctrine to formulate,” he writes, “it would be one of a balance of justice and of liberty, certainly difficult to realize, but outside of which nothing can be done.”

Justice and liberty: what demands could be more basic, even more fatuous? But, with Camus, a simplicity of speech can never conceal the significance, the high stakes, of his articulation. Tempted by the Soviet model, he nonetheless refuses it, recognizing it as too brutal and monolithic; presented with what was perceived as a Western imperialist model that seemed to offer more of the same path that had led France to its downfall, he calls for a revolution in justice, along with a perpetual renewal of freedom. In Camus’s vision—which he no doubt shared fruitlessly with de Gaulle, who had other, less philosophical things to worry about—justice, including economic justice, is meaningless without an equally passionate commitment to liberty.

These truths are, or ought to be, easy enough for us to affirm today. To do so at the height of the war—when rhetoric and political exigencies could and did lead many otherwise intelligent people to either slavish allegiance to Stalin or, still worse, collaboration with the Nazis—took Camusian clarity. It wasn’t easy to say all this at a moment of crisis. Yet these are Camus’s perpetual themes: the need for liberty not as a commonplace cliché but as a condition that fills our lives; the freedom to think for ourselves and not be stampeded by mass approval; the dangerous grip that the abstractions of ideology can have on us; the responsibility to see injustice clearly and to have the courage to fight it; the readiness to conclude, as Camus’s character Jean Tarrou, from his novel “The Plague,” does, that “there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” And all of them still need to be heard, again and again.