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Albert CAMUS & COLLECTIF

Révolte dans les Asturies

Pour les amis du théâtre du travail, Alger 1936, 14x19,5cm, broché.

Révolte dans les Asturies [Revolt in Asturias]
 

The very rare first edition of this four-act play, the first work that Camus published together with his company the Théâtre du Travail, with Jeanne-Paule Sicard, Bourgeois and Poignant.
A very good copy of this modest in appearance but nonetheless foundational work of all of Camus' œuvre.
 
This copy is in a half black morocco chemise over paper boards by Boichot, with a slipcase edged in black morocco to match.
Much more than a simple youthful collaboration, Revolt in Asturias is really the first work by Albert Camus humanist writer, politically engaged playwright, philosopher of the absurd, political rebel and activist. No other first literary attempt has the political and poetic power of a writer called upon to mark his century through his writings and intellectual insight.
 
Almost entirely written by Camus (only the radio texts, the interrogation in Act IV, and the scene with the council of ministers are not by him), this ostensibly collective work was primarily so due to the young Camus' desire for solidarity and community with his fellows. Camus, from the foreword onwards plays down his evident paternity of the work: “an attempt at co-creation, let us say. It's true. Its only value lies in that.”
This passion for co-operative creation that Camus found in football and which he tried to find also in the theatre, constitutes a fundamental aspect of the thinking of the author of The Plague and The First Man. Revolt in Asturias, this “attempt at co-creation” published by “E.C. for the friends of the Théâtre du Travail” bears even on the cover Camus' ideal of a united society, not individualist and yet capable of struggle and solidarity. And when Fréminville was shocked by the neat but transparent anonymity of this work of which “it is enough to read ten lines to recognize the style [of Camus]”, the latter replied: “We should maybe think about the superiority of the work to the workman.”
 
There were thus no names printed on the work itself and even the publisher resorted to using two initials which some jokingly referred to as: “Éditions Camus”. In fact, behind the initials E.C. was a 21 year-old young man as yet unknown, Edmond Charlot, a schoolfriend of Camus'. Like Camus he owed his vocation to Jean Grenier and like Camus he began his career in publishing with this anonymous work. Without premises or money he succeeded in having it printed by a sympathetic printer, Emmanuel Andréo, in 500 fragile booklets all dispersed within two weeks but very few of which stood up to the violent buffeting of the century.
This first collaboration was to mark the beginning of one of the most faithful publishing friendships between Camus and his Algerian publisher who would go on to publish a few months later the first personal work by his friend, Betwixt and Between, and would later become the indispensable Mediterranean link for the writer, exiled far from his native land.
 
This key meeting could very well not have taken place. Revolt in Asturias, initially conceived as a “canvas [on which] the actors will be invited to embroider...in the manner of the Commedia dell'Arte,” (Albert Camus by Olivier Todd) was not intended to be printed, as Camus points out in his foreword: “The theatre is not written down, or if it is it's simply a stopgap.” Its publication, decided after a ban on staging the play by the extreme-right wing Algerian authorities was thus a strong political gesture that echoed the themes of the piece itself. Inspired by the violent repression in Spain against miners the year before, which had claimed almost 2,000 lives, the subject chosen by Camus is in effect an early proof of his active engagement in the struggle for freedom. He would again show the same courage in his resistant writings, Combat and Letter to a German Friend, as well as his collective political stand against the death penalty or individual stand for the utopistic idea of a Franco-Arab alliance in an Algeria torn asunder. It was, in fact, “to benefit the unhappy childhood of Europe and indigenous peoples” that this first performance was meant to be staged at the time when none of the other future intellectuals who would fight for Algerian independence were yet concerned with the great racial injustice in the French département of Algeria.
 
Though never acknowledged by Camus as his true first work, this anonymous first piece is shot through with the luminous personality of its young author. But if this Revolt really earns its place in the front line of the Camus canon, it is thanks to the foreword that he wrote in haste when the play was banned. “Unable to be played, it will at least be read,” wrote Camus, inviting the reader to “translate into forms, movement, and lights what is implied here” and then “put this attempt back into its rightful place.”
 
Thus he presented this first literary attempt under the triple aegis of theatre, recital and essay, the three modes of writing that would define his work to come.
 
More than that, this introduction in the form of a manifesto seems to announce the three great programmatic themes that would guide this humanist writer's work, the cycle of the Absurd, of Revolt and the unfinished one of Love: “[this essay] introduces action into a framework that is barely suitable for it: the theatre. It is enough, incidentally, that this action lead to death, as is the case here, for it to achieve a certain form of grandeur that is particular to mankind: absurdity. And that is why, if we had to choose another title, it would be Snow... Two years ago, it covered our comrades who were killed by the bullets of the Legion. History has not remembered their names.”

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