Voici la traduction en anglais littéraire, fidèle et fluide, adaptée à un contexte éditorial :

“You are the only one among Algerian writers who thought that this news—which I do not overstate in importance—might reach me at a time when all my anguish is turned toward Algeria.”

So wrote Camus to Mouloud Feraoun in an unpublished letter exchanged between the two writers in the days following his Nobel Prize in Literature.

Voici la traduction en anglais, dans un registre soutenu et éditorial :

“I found myself hoping for a truer future—by which I mean a future in which we would be separated neither by injustice nor by justice.”

A pioneer of the new North African Francophone literature, Mouloud Feraoun would become one of the leading voices of the nascent Algerian nation. Until now, only a handful of Feraoun’s letters to Camus had come to light, providing the sole surviving record of this vital correspondence.

Le Feu Follet Bookshop has rediscovered Albert Camus’s luminous replies, written at the heart of the Algerian tragedy and during the public silence the humanist writer had imposed on himself in the face of ideological absolutism.

Between the first letter of thanks, sent in 1951 by a modest Kabyle schoolteacher with literary aspirations, and the final open letter, in 1958, from a great Algerian writer who still claimed the title of schoolteacher, a friendship was born—a paradoxical friendship, marked by the firestorm of conflicting passions and the nameless war that would shatter Camus and ultimately sacrifice Feraoun, assassinated by the OAS four days before the Évian Accords.

Unpublished complete correspondence, composed of four autograph letters—three of them signed—written by Albert Camus to his friend Mouloud Feraoun, all on Nrf letterhead in black or blue ink.
Each letter bears a horizontal fold, inherent to its original mailing. 19 lines, 27 lines, 34 lines, and 13 lines.
Included are two photographic reprints from the 1980s, showing Camus alongside Feraoun during his stay in Algiers in April 1958.

The epistolary exchange between Mouloud Feraoun and Albert Camus was, until now, known only through the publication of Feraoun’s letters to Camus—published seven years after Feraoun’s death. Only Camus’s first reply had ever been made public.

This relationship between the two intellectuals consists of just seven letters (three from Feraoun and four from Camus), one telegram, one open letter, and a single afternoon spent together walking the streets of Algiers.
And yet, with the exception of the telegram—whose exact content remains unknown—each of these exchanges proved essential, not only for the two men but for any deeper understanding of the Franco-Algerian tragedy.

“Dear Sir,” “Dear Feraoun,” “Dear friend”...

Between the first letter of thanks, written in 1951 by a modest Kabyle schoolteacher with literary aspirations, and the final open letter of 1958, written by a major Algerian author who still identified himself as a schoolteacher, a friendship was born.
But it was a paradoxical friendship, marked by the conflagration of opposing passions and the nameless war that would break Camus and claim Feraoun, assassinated by the OAS four days before the Évian Accords.

Feraoun’s letters are riveting—intellectually honest to the core and unsparing toward his illustrious correspondent, for whom he nevertheless felt deep admiration. They bear witness to the awakening of Algeria’s historical consciousness and to the first stirrings of a new cultural identity emerging in defiance of colonial violence.

A pioneer of North African Francophone literature, Mouloud Feraoun would become one of the major writers of a nascent Algerian nation. His letters reveal the painful but necessary emancipation from the cultural and ideological domination of a France he both admired and owed much to—for his education, and for the language of his literature.

And Camus’s luminous replies—until now unknown—reveal themselves to be a powerful source of encouragement for the young author, far from the image of cautious neutrality often (and unfairly) ascribed to the Algerian-born Nobel laureate.

 

Confronted with the violence of unfolding events, it is well known that Camus—urged from all sides to take a stand—chose silence, the only attitude he considered worthy in the face of unbridled hatred. Feraoun himself would later acknowledge: "The fact that he confined himself to this silence is a sign of sympathy, if not more, for us."

Yet what Camus is confronted with in Feraoun’s letters is neither hatred nor fiery accusation. On the contrary, the schoolteacher—whose figure held such importance for Camus—is a man of quiet and generous intelligence, who speaks the same language: the universal language of literature. And the words of this kindred spirit are both worthy of the humanism Camus espoused and a painful testimony to the terrible guilt he inherited.

In 1951, three years before the war but six years after the Sétif massacres, Camus is reproached by this promising young writer for the absence of the Arab community in his new novel, The Plague, as if "Oran were merely an ordinary French prefecture."

"Oh, it’s not a reproach," Feraoun clarifies. "I simply thought that, if this gulf between us did not exist, you would have known us better—you would have felt able to write about us with the same generosity you offer to all others."

It is, in fact, more than a reproach: it is a laying bare of Camus’s white conscience, despite his own poverty, his universalist thinking, his advocacy for Arab rights, and his early stances—dating back to 1938—in favor of equality: "The Kabyles demand schools as they demand bread... The Kabyles will have more schools the day we abolish the artificial barrier that separates European education from native education, the day when, on the benches of the same school, two peoples made to understand one another will begin to know each other."

In this first letter, Feraoun recalls that article from Alger républicain, but notes that its author is no more exempt than the colonists he denounces. He still stands behind the barrier and ignores the other he does not know. In his novel set in Algeria, there is no Algerian community, no shared fate—not even a tragic one. Sixty years later, Kamel Daoud would reach the same conclusion about The Stranger, exposing the paradox of a novel about exclusion that itself excludes.

The affront is terrible because it is true. And yet Camus does not defend himself. On the contrary, in his very first letter, he offers himself with complete honesty—something the public figure he had become could no longer do.

He begins by affirming his "fraternal" love for the Kabyle people, thereby immediately breaking with colonial paternalism. But above all, he acknowledges the absence of a shared Franco-Arab destiny: "To include [the Arabs of Oran] as characters, one must speak of the problem that poisons all our lives in Algeria; it would have meant writing another book than the one I wished to write." This admission—that it was impossible to introduce an Arab character into his fictional universe without radically transforming it—is the answer to all future criticisms. Camus is a writer of archetypes, not of social reality. Not only does he admit his inability to portray this history—"It requires a talent I’m not sure I have"—he entrusts that task to "the Arab." Thus, from this first exchange, Camus urges his young correspondent to become the writer of the Arab condition: "You will write it [...] because you know, effortlessly, how to rise above the stupid hatreds that dishonor our country."

It is 1951, and Mouloud Feraoun is already a friend of Emmanuel Roblès, while Gabriel Audisio has written a glowing review of his first autobiographical novel The Poor Man’s Son. He already belongs to the intellectual community. But what Camus reveals to him in this letter is that this community cannot bridge "this gulf that is stupidly widening."

In his 1951 letter, Feraoun confided to Camus: "If one day I manage to express myself calmly, I will owe it to [...] your books, which taught me to know myself, and then to discover others." Camus’s letter adds to this the necessity of undertaking a task that neither he nor any other pied-noir can accomplish.

Six years go by before their next exchange. The Algerian War breaks out, and men of good will are powerless against the onslaught of "stupid hatreds."

Feraoun has become the writer Camus foresaw. Along with a few others, he gave his people a voice, a history, a cultural legitimacy more powerful than any violence. But this history, he inscribed in Camus’s language—his literary and spiritual brother, who has just received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

And this prize is inextricably linked to the Algerian question, something critics from both the right and left would not fail to reproach. Conservatives denounced a purely political act, an "interference in France’s internal affairs" through the celebration of a dangerous leftist (Carrefour). Others mocked the glorification of a "perfect little polished thinker," a "philosopher of abstract freedom." There is no need here to recite all the proofs of Camus’s commitment during these dark years, nor to dwell on the injustice of the criticisms levelled at him. Though he is affected by them, Camus knows his former friends and his eternal enemies and expects little else from them. He also knows that his relationship with Algeria partly motivated the Nobel Committee’s choice.

If the reactions of metropolitan intellectuals do not surprise him, the painful silence of his Arab peers wounds him deeply. Only Feraoun, with whom he has had no contact for six years, telegraphs him immediately to offer congratulations.

"You are the only one among Algerian writers who thought that this news—which I do not overstate in importance—might reach me at a time when all my anguish is turned toward Algeria."

"Struck to the heart," Camus replies to this companion in misfortune with a letter that marks the end of any illusions about peace and mutual understanding between the two peoples. "I suppose the others have inwardly accepted the separation from which we all suffer. And yet, if a Franco-Arab community has ever existed—above the injustices and the crimes—it is surely the one we Algerian writers formed, in perfect equality."

The writer who, a year earlier, had sought to influence the situation in Hungary by calling for intellectual unity, now discovers the absence of any artistic community capable of transcending "injustices and crimes." And this bitter realization is not addressed to a family member, but to the very initiator of the Franco-Arab literary community, to the first of Algerian Francophone writers, and one of the last who, like him, advocated "for a reconciliation founded on justice, which [Camus] wishes more than anything in the world."

In using the expression "Algerian writers," Camus clearly breaks with the colonialist stance that refused to grant the Arabs of Algeria the name "Algerians"—which would have been to acknowledge the existence of an Algeria separate from France, from which the "Europeans" would be excluded (Jacques Duquesne, A History of Islam and Muslims in France). More than proof of Camus’s engagement—still criticized today as supposedly timid—this expression, shared with Mouloud Feraoun, is the testament to the third path both men hoped for: an Algeria united by its shared history and culture, not enslaved to a segregationist power.

It is then that the friendship between the two men is truly born. Feraoun’s long reply is imbued with the tragic absurdity of their shared situation, but also—an astonishing reversal of roles—with the moral ascendancy that Feraoun now gains over his counterpart. Facing a disoriented Camus, Feraoun offers him "that imperceptible smile" and promises that "despite the high cost, and perhaps because of it, our people will succeed in building the fraternal world you have always believed possible."

A few months later, Camus, who had been suffering from a devastating literary drought, finally sets himself to the work that had haunted him since 1953: The First Man, a Bildungsroman that would place the schoolteacher figure at its center.

When Camus and Feraoun finally meet in April 1958, during Camus’s second and final stay in Algeria, it is as two friends reunited. Feraoun is perhaps the only "Muslim" intellectual who still shares with Camus the hope for a Franco-Arab future.

The hours they spend together on April 12 are, for both, an oasis of fraternity in a desert of misunderstanding and resentment. In the journal he would keep until the day of his assassination by the OAS, Feraoun recounts this timeless afternoon: "I felt as immediately at ease with him as with E. Roblès. His stance on events is just as I imagined: nothing could be more humane. His compassion for those who suffer is immense, but he knows, alas, that neither compassion nor love holds any power over the evil that kills, that destroys, that wants to wipe the slate clean and build a new world from which the timid, the skeptical, and all the cowardly enemies of the new Truth—or the Ancient Truth renewed by machine guns, contempt, and hatred—would be banished."

Shortly after returning, Feraoun sends Camus photographs taken at home with his family and at school with his pupils. In return, Camus sends one of the most moving letters he ever wrote about the Algerian tragedy—addressed to the only Algerian intellectual who fully understood and shared his humanist stance, even at the cost of his life. The night following "that afternoon of friendship [Camus] has not forgotten," Roblès’s son accidentally kills himself in Algiers while handling his father’s gun. For Camus, this absurd and terrible event is steeped in the Algerian curse, and the words of his letter echo the very conversation Feraoun recounted: "I realized just how powerless we can be in the face of certain misfortunes."

Yet what the author of the cycles of the Absurd and of Revolt writes to Feraoun after that afternoon is perhaps the most honest and perfect expression of the desperate struggle of the rebel philosopher: "I found myself hoping for a truer future—by which I mean a future in which we would be separated neither by injustice nor by justice."

History has remembered Camus’s claim that he would choose his mother over Justice. What he reveals here is that the humanism he defends is not a logic of prioritizing man over ideological truth, but a truth defined in light of the human being—a truth that transcends ideologies.

In his first letter, Feraoun had hoped to find the serenity necessary to fulfill his literary mission: the recognition of his people’s dignity. Seven years later, in the heart of the storm, Camus offers his friend the most profound validation of his work: "I also wanted to tell you that your calm, your courage (for serenity in the face of what we so deeply feel is a form of courage) did me more good in Algiers than a hundred other encounters. [...] Your work is of the kind one might read to Tolstoy’s peasants, [...] it does good, and it will go on doing good because there is no hatred in you, and because your revolts are generous."

The day after that letter, the Algiers putsch would shatter all hope of reconciliation.

 

September 1958. Feraoun had just read Actuelles III: Chroniques algériennes. The reception of the book was disastrous. The time was ripe for verbal and physical violence, and in this manichean world, Camus represented no faction. He had become an outcast. Feraoun, for his part, denounced the crimes committed on both sides, yet he knew that independence was now the only—and imperfect—path forward.

In this climate of hatred and death threats, Feraoun took up his pen and published in Preuves a remarkable response to Camus—anonymous yet transparent (“Know [...] that I am an Arab schoolteacher [...] Kabyle, and you now have all the necessary details”). Some tried to read this final plea—“to try to create the conditions for a true fraternization that has nothing in common with that of May 13”—as an attack on his friend. But the two men’s correspondence proves the opposite: this open letter, laced with references to their private exchange, was the ultimate act of friendship from the great Algerian writer, once again assuming for a moment the humble role of the 1951 schoolteacher, to the man who had inspired both his work and his struggle. In response to the article, Camus would publicly declare: “I feel infinitely closer to a Kabyle schoolteacher than to a Parisian intellectual.”

It is more than likely that Camus recognized the true author of Sources de nos communs malheurs. Yet he also knew the tremendous risk Feraoun was taking by publishing a piece that irritated both the FLN and the colonial authorities. So he thanked him in the same discreet manner, feigning ignorance of the author’s identity: “You will read, I hope, [...] the letter of a Muslim schoolteacher addressed to me, which touched me deeply.”

Camus’s reply was brief and powerful, like a condemned man’s final breath:

“I continue to hope for reconciliation—and for the moment when our friendship will be the rule for all in Algeria.” A near-mystical wish, and the lingering memory of the vain struggle that had united the two men in the common quest to recognize the Other.

Upon Camus’s death, Feraoun paid him a moving public tribute, offering in turn their shared Algerian identity, against all odds: “It must be said that Camus was Algerian in the physical sense of the word. [...] We regard him as an Algerian glory.”

Faithful to their shared commitment to integrity and independence, Feraoun, like Camus before him, declined all offers from the French state—including the prestigious post of ambassador offered by De Gaulle.

However, he answered the call of his friend Germaine Tillion, who founded the Social Educational Centers with a Franco-Arab team. “It is a matter of shouldering the overwhelming responsibility that makes the ‘scholar’ an educator, the visionary a guide; the doctor a healer, and the man a brother to other men.” (L'instituteur du Bled, Bulletin des Centres Sociaux éducatifs, no. 14, 1930)

More than twenty years after discovering Camus and his activism in Alger-Républicain, Feraoun applied to the letter the principles advocated by this “decent guy” who, despite his youth and “feeble voice,” “was already concerned about the fate of Muslim populations, at a time when I, the same age, was merely learning how to teach my class properly.” (Sources de nos communs malheurs: Lettre à Albert Camus)

On March 15, 1962, shortly after 11 a.m., an armed OAS commando stormed the Center’s premises in search of seven specifically named individuals, including Mouloud Feraoun. Having identified six of their targets, the commando led the victims to the corner of the building where two machine guns awaited them. Four days after the "Château-Royal massacre," the Evian Accords would seal Algeria’s fate—far from the fraternal aspirations of Camus and Feraoun, and their “generous revolts.”

>> Albert CAMUS Correspondance inédite complète de Camus à son ami Mouloud Feraoun : « Je me suis pris à espérer dans un avenir plus vrai, je veux dire un avenir où nous ne serons séparés ni par l'injustice ni par la justice »