“The reign of beasts”: Albert Camus’ chilling diary entry on the brink of World War II
Before he became a major figure in 20th-century philosophy, Albert Camus was a journalist and an anti-fascist activist.
He worked for the newspaper Alger Républicain in his home country of Algeria, then known as French Algeria, and the years that he was active as a journalist and a socialist were particularly dangerous, as he graduated from university in 1933. He joined the Algerian Communist Party in 1936. As anyone with a cursory understanding of human history would know, those were particularly dangerous years to be politically active.
However, these years sharpened his moral compass, as one would hope they would. In fact, in 1935, he was a part of the French Communist Party. However, he jumped ship the year afterwards as he began throwing his weight behind fighting for the independence of his native land from its colonisers. Now, one would think that there are few things more important than fighting for a country’s independence in the face of colonisers, but this was 1930s Europe we’re talking about.
There was one very big coloniser actively making gains in its home country and making its intentions of expanding its territory by force very clear for all to see. At the time, it would have been very easy to have felt that the most pressing problems were the ones being fought at home. Understandable too. Not Albert Camus, though, who saw the way the wind was blowing across mainland Europe and did the unthinkable. He moved closer to it.
By 1940, World War II had truly begun, and, on a much smaller scale, the Alger Républicain was banned. These two events caused Albert Camus to move to Paris and, remarkably, volunteer to join the French army. Unfortunately, a childhood bout with Tuberculosis prevented him from joining the front, but nonetheless, Camus settled in Paris, taking a job at the newspaper Paris-Soir as a layout editor and working on his creative projects.
If this sounds like the actions of some blithely naïve 20-something with ideas above his station, they are not. Even at that age, Camus knew exactly what he was getting into, as his diaries explain. World War II began on September 1st, 1939. Seven days after that, Camus wrote a genuinely chilling diary entry. One that seemed to know just how excoriating to humanity’s very soul this conflict would be.
“We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realise that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves,” he begins, before talking about the horrific choice that befalls the continent and, eventually, the world. One where you stick to your guns and assist your community, or you look to the bigger picture and take up arms against a part of the world gone hopelessly mad. Both choices are sacrifices of your humanity, which only really assist the people at the top who stand to profit from all this bloodshed.
This aspect is not ignored by Camus, who writes in the most affecting part of the whole entry, “It is in this terrible loneliness both of the combatants and of the noncombatants, in this humiliated despair that we all feel, in the baseness that we feel growing in our faces as the days go by. The reign of beasts has begun.”
Perhaps I’m doing nothing more than falling for a media cycle that is trying to make us all terrified, but I wish I didn’t feel like I know what he was talking about.
