Very rare complete collection of Rivages, a periodical "of Mediterranean culture" with only two issues ever published in December 1938 and February-March 1939. Exceedingly scarce subscription leaflet bound at the beginning of the first issue. Only five copies recorded in WorldCat (BnF, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, NYU).

Bradel binding in full beige cloth, smooth spine, green shagreen title label, covers and spines preserved, contemporary binding.

Contributions by Albert Camus, Jules Supervielle, Emmanuel Roblès, Jean Tardieu, Gabriel Audisio, Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Eugenio Montale...

Rare copy of this short-lived periodical censored after only two issues. founded by Camus with Gabriel Audisio and Jacques Heurgon.

Launched when he was only twenty-four years old, it contains one of the very first expressions of Camus’s “Mediterranean humanism”. The young author published there a section of Noces and, above all, wrote the periodical's manifesto which already reveals the constant and vibrant presence of the Mediterranean at the very core of his work.

When Camus launched Rivages with his publisher and former classmate Edmond Charlot, the young writer had already finished university, founded the Théâtre du Travail and later the Théâtre de l’Équipe, campaigned for the Blum-Viollette law to extend voting rights in Algeria, contributed to the newspaper Alger Républicain, and even directed a Maison de la Culture in Algiers.

Camus’s “presentation of the review Rivages” which opens the first issue is often cited as a key to understanding his philosophy. Paradoxically he always refused to call himself a philosopher and was often criticized for this stance. His intimate convictions and ideals are nonetheless set forth in Camus' Rivages manifesto-plea for tolerance which rejects any fascist claim to Latin identity:

"It will not escape anyone that a movement of youth and passion for man and his works has arisen on our shores. Diverse, uncoordinated, and vehement tendencies express themselves with awkwardness and injustice. […] At a time when the taste for doctrines is striving to cut us off from the world, it is good that young men, in a young land, proclaim how attached they are to those few perishable and essential things that give life a meaning: sea, sun, and women in the light. These things belong to living culture, and the rest is a dead civilisation that we reject. If true culture cannot be separated from a certain barbarism, then nothing barbaric should be foreign to us. The point is to agree on the meaning of the word barbaric. And that already constitutes a programme."

With this new periodical, Camus called for the development of a literature of the Mediterranean in all its radiant unity and contrasts: “It is this shimmering vitality that can be found in works such as L’Envers et l’endroit or Noces, and even in certain passages of L’Étranger.” (Hélène Rufat, À travers et par la Méditerranée : regards sur Albert Camus). This remarkable text already foreshadows his position on Algerian independence, aiming to embrace a “variegated” culture and society in a spirit of reconciliation. Camus even slipped here the name of the most famous protagonist of his novels: “From his earliest writings, Camus set the frame of what he calls in 1938 in Rivages a thought inspired by the play of the sun and the sea.” One can already sense the figure of Meursault [a name made up of mer and soleil] who would, a few years later, become the hero of La Mort heureuse and the narrator of L’Étranger. We are already within that Mediterranean world which, as noted in L’Homme révolté, “remains our first and our last love” (François Mattei, La Pensée méditerranéenne d’Albert Camus).

Rivages was printed on the presses of Camus’s friend and other Rivages contributor Claude de Fréminville who had just founded a small printing house on Rue Barbès in Algiers. Together they created the CA-FRE press (Camus-Fréminville) and published Jean Hytier, Léo-Louis Barbès, Christian de Gastyne, and Blanche Balain. The second issue of Rivages includes the pre-original publication of the celebrated essay L’Été à Alger, which would later appear in Noces, also published by Rivages publisher Charlot. The third and final issue of Rivages about García Lorca was never released: the proofs were seized and destroyed by the authorities who began censorship even before France declared war on Germany. After the definitive interruption of Rivages, Camus extended his engagement for a free Mediterranean culture to the whole of Europe now ravaged by totalitarianism by becoming director of the resistant newspaper Combat.

Rare copy of this periodical containing one of Camus’s earliest literary works, conceived to awaken a sense of “Mediterraneity” - a shared foundation of culture and nature bathed in sunlight which would become the leitmotiv of his essays and works of fiction.