WWII letter from Albert Camus to Charles de Gaulle re-emerges

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of Albert Camus’s death, and fittingly, a previously unpublished letter by the writer has recently emerged.

Camus sent the three-page typed letter to Charles de Gaulle in 1943, reports the Guardian, to express a number of fears about occupied France’s future.

But in particular, he feared that World War II would decimate his country’s intellectuals and thinkers.

According to the Guardian, Camus wrote the letter at the request of the “Information Commissariat” of the Committee of National Liberation, so that French forces abroad could assess the attitude under the Vichy regime.

You can read more excerpts from the letter in the Guardian’s article or see the text in full in an upcoming book, Camus: Des Pays de Liberté (Camus: Countries of Freedom), by historian Vincent Duclert.

Camus, whose best-known novels include L’Étranger (The Stranger) and La Chute (The Fall), received the Nobel Prize for Literature when he was just forty-four — three years before his death.

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