This new edition, the first in English, contains an informative introduction by Yale University French Studies scholar Alice Kaplan, who sets the material in the contexts of Camus’s life and work, and of the savagely conflicted politics of the time. Camus himself was deliberate in constructing his anthology, where each of the three major temporal concentrations – 1939, 1945, 1955–56 – constitutes an important landmark in the development of the Algerian tragedy. In his own introduction, he acknowledges that his testimony is ‘among other things the history of a failure’, by which he means France’s inability or unwillingness to act in a timely or effective manner to avert the intensifying catastrophe. But the statement is also true in another sense: despite his lucidity and his avowed anti-colonialism, Camus during his lifetime failed to accept that Algeria should or could be permanently separated from France; and, as Kaplan rightly points out, his premature death in 1960 means that we can never know how he would have reacted to the agreements enacting that separation. From the perspective of 2013 – the centenary of Camus’s birth – it is easy enough to tax Algerian Chronicles as suffering from a sort of wilful blindness regarding the course that history ultimately took. At the same time, as a record of passionate insights into the processes involved, the book still makes absorbing reading, not least because of the many portentous analogies between what happened in Algeria and what is happening in much of our world today.

The pre-war essays focus on injustice and famine in Kabylia, and are outstanding examples of Camus’s work as a committed and compassionate investigative journalist. Eyewitness testimony, combined with a wealth of carefully accumulated and sifted factual information, is delivered in a crisp, supple style of writing most impressive for the twenty-six-year-old that he was. These pieces were designed to persuade the French government and the colonial authorities to address social inequities in a particular area of a country in which the author still felt he intimately belonged. It is the work of an idealistic insider seeking better conditions for people he considers to be his fellow-countrymen, and for whom he feels responsible, in the name of the values of freedom, fraternity, and equality in which he has been raised and in which he believes absolutely.

By 1945 Camus was in exile (his continuous expressions of dissent had obliged him to leave Algeria for France in 1940). Although celebrated as the proponent of the philosophy of the absurd (as expressed in Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942), and respected as a Resistance activist, he had in many ways become ‘the outsider’ of his first novel (L’étranger, 1942). The ‘Crisis in Algeria’ section of the Chronicles is based on the massacre in the town of Sétif, which many historians see as a key moment in the collapse of French colonial rule. Sétif was in fact a metonymic precursor of the subsequent escalation of violence: an independentist demonstration led to the shooting of civilian marchers by panicky gendarmes, which provoked retaliatory murders (some particularly ugly) by protesters, and this resulted in the massive and indiscriminate repression of a whole population by the French police, army, and vigilantes (many thousands of Arabs were killed). Camus’s search for reasonable possibilities of reconciliation is admirable, especially in the context of a mainland French audience notoriously disinterested in colonial affairs and ignorant of them. He tries to transmit respect for Algeria and its mix of peoples, stressing their role (especially that of Arabs) in the fight for France’s liberation, and his belief that the core causes of friction did not lie with Algeria’s French population – largely industrious and modest rural and working-class people – but with a corrupt colonial system, and with a French government position that was ‘stupidity pure and simple’.

The tone of the 1955–56 essays is notably, and understandably, more strident. We remember that immediately after the French defeat in Indochina in 1954 there was a generalised uprising against French rule in Algeria, with an explosion of terrorist acts and wave after wave of incredibly violent repressive action by the French authorities, including extensive use of torture. It was the beginning of the Algerian War proper, one of the dirtiest and most divisive in France’s modern history, the aftershocks of which continue to reverberate through French society today. In this ‘Algeria torn’ section, Camus notes the widening gulf between the Arab and French populations, railing against the increasing extremism on both sides – the impotence and diffidence of French politicans, the pan-Islamic militants from Egypt and elsewhere who push the practice of systematic terror. ‘Before long, Algeria will be populated exclusively by murderers and victims. Only the dead will be innocent.’ He urges dialogue, the more urgent because of the numbers of civilians on both sides being wounded or killed; but there is real despair in these texts, akin to the chilling disillusionment that informs La chute (The Fall, 1956), the literary masterpiece that Camus was crafting at the same time.

The physicality of Camus’s attachment to his homeland is well illustrated in one of the short texts that this Kaplan edition adds as an appendix to the original. It is a lecture on Mediterranean culture dating from 1937, when Camus was twenty-four. Eschewing nationalism as a form of decadence, he nonetheless extols the Mediterranean as a ‘vibrant region, a realm of joy and smiles’: ‘The Mediterranean is a certain smell, a fragrance that can’t be put into words. We feel it in our skin.’ Algerian Chronicles is infused with bittersweet nostalgia for a personal lost paradise, a not infrequent ingredient of Camus’s writing generally. But the book transmits a wider angry grief in its demonstration that the most humane and reasoned ideals seldom work to diminish the destructive and self-mutilating brutalities that humanity, endlessly, inflicts on itself.

Camus has been well served here by Arthur Goldhammer, who is probably the most gifted living translator into English of French texts. Goldhammer, in his translator’s note, describes the challenges of capturing the purity, restraint, and discipline of Camus’s prose; and he expresses the hope that his work has done justice to what he calls ‘a precious document of a soul’s torment lived in real rather than eternal time’. He need not have worried: the author’s voice resounds with eerie clarity.