When the Algerian war broke out in late 1954 it came at the wrong moment both for France and for Camus. The French army, which had been obliged to surrender to the Indo-Chinese Viet-Minh rebels at Dien Bien Phu, was still smarting from its defeat. It blamed the loss of French Indochina (later known as Vietnam, although at the time it had also included the two smaller countries of Laos and Cambodia) on the civilians and it was determined there should be no more such defeats. French citizens were afflicted with the schizophrenia that runs amok at times of colonial crisis; passionately in favour of a French Algeria, they were equally passionate in their view that their children were not going to die in order to defend a bunch of lazy colonials. Then there was Camus, whose reputation as the defender of moral values was rooted in his editorials, first published in the clandestine Combat, the newspaper of the Resistance movement that bore the same name. Camus continued them in the legal Combat from the Liberation until 1947. His aim in these was to impose on politics the language of morality.

In 1947 he abandoned Combat and published The Plague. Here, Camus excludes ‘ideological dogma, political or judicial murder and all forms of ethical irresponsibility’ (Tony Judt, ‘On The Plague’, New York Review of Books, 29, November 2001). He advocates the forms of courage and work that help man to face death.