The Quarrel That Never Mended

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In October 1951 Albert Camus published The Rebel, an essay arguing that rebellion against injustice carries its own built-in limit, a line a rebel says must never be crossed, and that a revolution claiming total license to remake history and human nature crosses that line and becomes the tyranny it set out to replace. The book read, to many on the French left, as an attack on revolutionary politics generally and on Soviet communism specifically. In 1952 Jean-Paul Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes ran a long, hostile review by Francis Jeanson, and Camus responded with an open letter addressed not to Jeanson but to Sartre himself. Sartre's reply was blunt and personal, and the two men, close friends through the years of the Occupation and after, never spoke again in the same terms. The break is often told as a literary feud, but its center was a real philosophical disagreement: whether a revolution is answerable to any limit at all, and whether an intellectual's solidarity with a revolutionary cause outweighs an honest account of what that cause does in practice.