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Words And Actions: Albert Camus Against Capital Punishment - Professor Ève Morisi at UCI's Center In Law, Society, and Culture

“Words And Actions” reevaluates Albert Camus’s commitment and contribution to the fight against capital punishment. Until recently, the extent, consistency, and multiple facets (literary, philosophical, and political) of this activism were largely underestimated—and, in some cases, unknown.
This paper reconstructs the key phases of the Nobel laureate’s abolitionist itinerary, examines both his personal motivations and the ethical reasoning on which he relied, and presents a multifold corpus and archival findings testifying to his official and unofficial defense of men condemned to death in France, French Algeria, and abroad in contexts as varied as Franco’s dictatorship, WWII and the purges that marked the Libération in France, the Greek Civil War, the repression perpetrated in Eastern Europe under the aegis of Stalinism, and the Algerian War of Independence. Reconsidering the depth and breadth of Camus’s abolitionism allows for a reassessment of the claim that the writer adopted an abstentionist stance during the Algerian conflict. At the same time, this examination enables us to hone our knowledge of the history of twentieth-century abolitionist thought and to appreciate the impact of poetics, whether in fiction, essays, editorials or public speeches, on the conception and implementation (or interruption) of lethal justice.

[Places are limited so please RSVP to rmedeiros@law.uci.edu]