The Rebel

The Rebel (L'Homme revolte, 1951) extends Albert Camus's philosophy of the absurd into a study of political revolt. It argues that the act of rebellion begins from a legitimate demand and a real limit, a line the rebel says must not be crossed, and that a revolution which claims total license to remake history and human nature betrays that limit and becomes the tyranny it set out to end. Its critique of revolutionary violence, aimed in part at currents in Marxist and Soviet thought, was the immediate cause of Camus's public break with Jean-Paul Sartre's circle in 1952.