L'Etranger

L'étranger [The Stranger]
First edition first issue for which no grand papier (deluxe) copies were printed, one of the rare first printed copies, no false statement of edition.
Black morocco by Devauchelle, spine in six compartments, gilt date to foot of spine, brown calf pastedowns and endpapers, covers and spine preserved, a.e.g., marbled slipcase edged in black morocco and lined with brown felt.
A fine copy in a superb binding.
Provenance: from the personal collection of french President Georges Pompidou, with his ex-libris to head of ffep.
We must look to Pompidou's political and ideological career for the key to the presence in his personal collection of this cold account of a death sentence, which would seem a long way from his passion for poetry and the great French classics. More than just a significant piece in the collection of this canny bibliophile, this very good and rare copy of the first edition of Camus' Stranger shows a particular attention paid to this text by a person who – through the power of clemency – had the power of life and death over people.
We know Camus' position in the question of capital punishment – he was an opponent from very early on – but this is not, however, the principal topic of this first novel which, although it narrates a trial that results in the death penalty for Meursault, does not discuss the legitimacy of that penalty itself.
Pompidou himself demonstrated his aversion for this most final of punishments early on and threatened to resign his Premiership when Général de Gaulle wanted to refuse General Jouhaud a presidential pardon for being one of the four leaders of the Algiers putsch. As president, Pompidou made widespread use of his “pardon power”, making 8,000 such pardons throughout his term, the largest number of the Fifth Republic. This systematic use of the pardon in a France still hesitant over the issue of the death penalty helped to shape minds. Nonetheless, it came to a halt in 1972 when Pompidou decided to pardon Paul Touvier (not from his death penalty – already issued – but from the exclusion order imposed on the militiaman, who was tried again in 1989 and was to be the first person to be given a life sentence for crimes against humanity).

This excessive use of clemency brought sharp criticism for the President and general incomprehension and Pompidou no doubt felt even more sharply than before that the act of clemency was not a simple repeal of the death penalty, but an inhuman responsibility. “The right of clemency is not a gift made to the head of state in order to allow him to exercise his whims,” he noted in his defense. “It is a responsibility, sometimes terrifying, that is imposed upon him and which he undertakes – with the help of information of course – nonetheless alone, with his conscience.” Exactly a year later, Pompidou refused a presidential pardon for the first time in the case of Roger Bontems, cleared of the double murder of a nurse and a janitor in the Clairvaux Prison by his fellow prisoner Claude Buffet, in which he was found to be merely an accomplice.

With both the pardon to a man guilty of crimes against humanity granted in the name of a France still seeking reconciliation, and the condemnation of a “man who did not kill” to appease popular anger, Pompidou had, with this impossible decision of clemency, to decide alone about the life or death of a man. Like the reader of The Stranger, Pompidou pardoned Touvier despite his horrible crime but, like the court at Meursault's trial, convicted Bontems – not for a murder that he didn't in the end commit, but because, as a pariah, he was a stranger to the community.

Bontems' execution was a tragic defeat for his lawyer, the most noted opponent of the death penalty, Robert Badinter, who personally pleaded for a pardon from Pompidou. In his book L'Exécution [The Execution], Badinter revisited this terrible affair and the question of President Pompidou's responsibility when his client appealed for a pardon:
“The President did not make us wait long. But why all this haste if this was to be a pardon? Other people condemned to death had been waiting months for the President to see their lawyers. No doubt, there was the problem of Buffet, who called for a strong line from the President and wanted to be executed as soon as possible. But this haste to decide seemed to me precisely to be playing into Buffet's hand. Were the President's abolitionist convictions as solid as I had believed them to be?...But no, my suspicion was absurd. Bontems would be pardoned. And the sooner the better. The President was right. The press had once more begun, since the appeal was rejected, to take an interest in the killers of Clairvaux as they called them, their use of the plural making my blood boil. A prompt decision would be necessary. The President's haste was nothing but a sign of his awareness of that. Nothing more...
I thought about the power of pardon. It seemed to me to conceal a devious ambiguity, one of those historical mystifications of carved-in-stone received ideas, the archetypes that shape our sensibilities. Obviously, the pardon is to the benefit of the condemned. It gives him one more chance in the face of injustice or the severity of the judges. But for the sovereign who has to exercise it, what does this right of life and death over all others mean?...Judges and juries do not in fact condemn the accused to die by the guillotine. They simply offer the prince the possibility of this execution. They open up to him an alternative: to let live or to have die. The choice is his. The prince alone decides definitively. It is in this that he is responsible and totally responsible, since he has total power, according to his pleasure, in his own way, without having to take notice of anyone beside himself, since he disposes absolutely, in a sovereign way, of the life of the man in question. Without doubt, he would not dispose of it if the chance was not presented to him. But this man they throw to the prince, in chains, already rejected by the people and his judges, for the prince to do with him as he sees fit, this reality, this responsibility, the prince cannot refuse. There is no death penalty, only a sentence of death that comes up to the prince from the court of assizes.”

Perhaps in reading The Stranger, Pompidou could understand, more than others, the terrible cry of the author. Confronted with the strangeness of the narrator, the reader cannot fully identify with him, but still less with the deadly logic of his judges. The reader is the prince to whom the sentence of death comes up and who must assume the responsibility Camus imposes on them, and which they take on, with the novel in mind, of course, but nonetheless alone, with their conscience. But of course, while the reader's responsibility is purely intellectual, the President's is all the more concrete and definitive.

Is there a pardon in Camus' novel? It is, in fact, still up in the air. Pompidou, unlike the reader without this terrible responsibility, could not have passed by this discreet detail at the end of the book. Meursault is not yet, in reality, definitively condemned at the end of the novel and it is unclear whether he will rejoin the community that fills him with such hate. He is still waiting for a possible Presidential pardon.
“I must accept the rejection of my appeal. At that moment, and at that moment alone I had so to speak the right, I gave myself a kind of permission to entertain the second hypothesis: I was pardoned. The annoying thing is that I had to restrain the power of the flaring of body and blood that stung my eyes with an insane joy. I had to make an effort to suppress this cry in order to think on it. I had to remain natural even in this hypothesis, in order to make more plausible my resignation to the former. Once I succeeded in that, I would have an hour of calm. That, at any rate, was something to think about”.

The abolition of the death penalty was one of the great struggles of a number of intellectuals and statesmen in the second half of the 20th century, including Camus and Pompidou. But in 1942, the young writer was not making a case against the death penalty, but rather exposing an absurd system confronted with human impenetrability. And when during the 1960s or 70s the statesman Georges Pompidou bought this first edition, he was himself confronted with the terrible reality of this “frightening responsibility” that is sentencing a man to die.

And while Meursault on the eve of his probable execution, opens himself in his anger to the “tender indifference of the world”, Camus calls down the ultimate judgement of the reader who, like the President, remains the only judge of human life in the silence that follows the “cries of hate” that end the novel.

A fine copy without edition statement from the personal collection of President Georges Pompidou, handsomely bound in black morocco.