A controversy with Albert Camus in 1945 ...

 A controversy with Albert Camus in 1945 is still memorable. Camus, who had been active in the Resistance and was unable to get over the execution of some of his closest friends and fellow combatants, took a hard line during the early postwar “purges” (in Combat, the newspaper he edited at the time). One argument concerned the writer Robert Brasillach, who had worked for the Paris collaboration newspaper Je suis partout, which specialized in denun­ ciations. Mauriac, among others, had pleaded—unsuccessfully—that the death sentence should be commuted. Albert Camus later came to the conclusion that his own hard vindictive line had not been justified; he publicly declared that Mauriac had been in the right on that occasion. This self-criticism was also voiced in Camus’ last novel, La Chute. Camus had had the vision of “a France purged clean” and had later seen this to be an illusion. It may be attributable to Mauriac’s Catholic upbringing and mentality that he never believed in a “new-born” society in this sense; on the other hand, the kind of self-criticism practiced by Camus is hardly conceivable in Mauriac.

F. Bondy European Notebooks