A Critic at Large April 9, 2012 Issue

Facing History
Why we love Camus.

By Adam Gopnik
April 2, 2012

Abjuring abstraction and extremism, Camus found a way to write about politics that was sober, lofty,
and a little sad. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum
T
he French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom
women fell for helplessly—the Don Draper of existentialism. This may seem a trivial thing to
harp on, except that it is almost always the first thing that comes up when people who knew Camus
talk about what he was like. When Elizabeth Hawes, whose lovely 2009 book “Camus: A Romance” is
essentially the rueful story of her own college-girl crush on his image, asked survivors of the Partisan
Review crowd, who met Camus on his one trip to New York, in 1946, what he was like, they said that
he reminded them of Bogart. “All I can tell you is that Camus was the most attractive man I have ever
met,” William Phillips, the journal’s editor, said, while the thorny Lionel Abel not only compared him
to Bogart but kept telling Hawes that Camus’s central trait was his “elegance.” (It took the sharper and
more Francophile eye of A. J. Liebling to note that the suit Camus wore in New York was at least
twenty years out of Parisian style.)

Camus liked this reception enough to write home about it to his French publisher. “You know, I can
get a film contract whenever I want,” he wrote, joking a little, but only a little. Looking at the famous
portrait of Camus by Cartier-Bresson from the forties—trenchcoat collar up, hair swept back, and
cigarette in mouth; long, appealing lined face and active, warm eyes—you see why people thought of
him as a star and not just as a sage; you also see that he knew the effect he was having.

It’s perfectly reasonable, then, that a new book by Catherine Camus, his surviving daughter, “Albert
Camus: Solitude and Solidarity” (Edition Olms), is essentially a photograph album, rather than any
sort of philosophical gloss. Looks matter to the mind. Clever people are usually compensating for
something, even if the wound that makes them draw the bow of art is no worse than an overlarge
schnozz and sticking-out ears. The ugly man who thinks hard—Socrates or Sartre—is using his mind
to make up for his face. (Camus once saw Sartre over-wooing a pretty girl and wondered why he didn’t,
as Camus would have done, play it cool. “You’ve seen my face?” Sartre answered, honestly.) When
handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know
they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests
that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-
looking get just by showing up.
And then the image of Camus persists—we recall him not just as a fine writer but as an exemplary
man, a kind of secular saint, the spirit of his time, as well as the last French writer whom most
Americans know something about. French literary critics sometimes treat him with the note of
condescension that authors of high-school classics get here, too—a tone that the French writer Michel
Onfray, in his newly published life of Camus, “L’Ordre Libertaire,” tries to remedy, insisting that
Camus was not only a better writer but a more interesting systematic thinker than Sartre.

The skepticism of his native readers isn’t just snobbish, though. Read today, Camus is perhaps more
memorable as a great journalist—as a diarist and editorialist—than as a novelist and philosopher. He
wrote beautifully, even when he thought conventionally, and the sober lucidity of his writing is, in a
sense, the true timbre of the thought. Olivier Todd, the author of the standard biography in French,
suggests that Camus might have benefitted by knowing more about his anti-totalitarian Anglo-
American contemporaries, Popper and Orwell among them. Yet in truth the big question Camus
asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better
tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to
much the same thing in the end—easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all,
you have to have a little faith in people—doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who
turned the question over and looked at it, elegantly, upside down.

I
n America, Camus is, first of all, French; in France he remains, most of all, Algerian—a Franco-
Algerian, what was later called a pied noir, a black foot, meaning the European colonial class who
had gone to Algeria and made a home there. A dense cover of clichés tends to cloud that condition: just
as the writer from Mississippi is supposed to be in touch with a swampy mysterious identity, a usable
past, that no Northern boy could emulate, the “Mediterranean” man is assumed in France to be in
touch with a deep littoral history. Camus had that kind of mystique: he was supposed to be somehow
at once more “primitive”—he was a strong swimmer and, until a bout of tuberculosis sidelined him, an
even finer football player—and, because of his Mediterranean roots, more classical, in touch with olive
groves and Aeschylus. The reality was grimmer and more sordid. His father, a poorly paid cellarman
for a wine company, was killed in battle during the First World War, when Camus was one. His
mother was a maid, who cleaned houses for the wealthy French families. Though he was, as a young
man, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, he understood in his marrow that the story of colonialist
exploitation had to include the image of his mother on her knees, scrubbing. Not every colonial was a
grasping parasite.

Camus was a first-rate philosophy student, and the French meritocratic system had purchase even in
the distant province. He quickly advanced at the local university, writing a thesis on Plotinus and St.
Augustine when he was in his early twenties. After a flirtation with Communism, he left for the
mainland in 1940, with the manuscript of a novel in his suitcase and the ambition to be a journalist in
his heart. He worked briefly for the newspaper Paris-Soir, and then returned to North Africa, where
he finished two books. By 1943, he was back in France, to join the staff of the clandestine Resistance
newspaper Combat, and publish those books: first the novel “The Stranger” and then a book of
philosophical essays, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Part of the paralyzing narcotic of the Occupation was
that writing could still go on; it was in the Germans’ interest to allow the publication of books that
seemed remote enough not to be subversive.

The novel and the essays announced the same theme, though the novel did it on a downdraft and the
essays on uplift: meaning is where you make it and life is absurd. In the novel, Camus meant absurd in
the sense of pointless; in the essays in the sense of unjustified by certainty. Life is absurd because Why
bother? And life is also absurd because Who knows? “The Stranger” tells the story of an alienated
Franco-Algerian, Meursault, who kills an Arab on the beach one day for no good reason. The no-
good-reason is key: if it’s possible to act for no good reason, maybe there is never any reason to talk
about “good” when you act. The world is absurd, Meursault thinks (and Camus seconds), because,
without divine order, or even much pointed human purpose, it’s just one damn thing after another, and
you might as well be damned for one thing as the next: in a world bleached dry of significance, the
most immoral act might seem as meaningful as the best one. The drained, eye-straining beach where
Meursault murders his victim is a place not just without meaning but without real feeling—it became
the deadened landscape, and the cityscape, that was populated in the decade by everyone from
Giacometti’s emaciated walking figures to Bogart’s private eyes.

In “Sisyphus,” though, Camus offers a way to keep Meursault’s absurdity from becoming merely
murderous: we are all Sisyphus, he says, condemned to roll our boulder uphill and then watch it roll
back down for eternity, or at least until we die. Learning to roll the boulder while keeping at least a half
smile on your face—“One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is his most emphatic aphorism—is the only
way to act decently while accepting that acts are always essentially absurd.

It was the editorials that Camus wrote for Combat that sustained his reputation. Editorial writers can
seem the most insipid and helpless of the scribbling class: they sum up anonymously the ideas of their
time, and truth and insipidity do a great deal of close dancing—the right thing to do is often hard but
seldom surprising. Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other
side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when
they’re arguing. It’s a form of conducting, really, where the writer tries to strike a downbeat, a tonic
note, for the whole of his section. Not “Say this!” but “Sound this way!” is what the great editorialists
teach.
What Camus wanted wasn’t new: just liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he found a new way to say it.
Tone was what mattered. He discovered a way of speaking on the page that was unlike either the
violent rhetorical clichés of Communism or the ponderous abstractions of the Catholic right. He
struck a tone not of Voltairean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft. Camus sounds serious, but he
also sounds sad—he added the authority of sadness to the activity of political writing. He wrote with
dignity, at a moment when restoring dignity to public language was necessary, and he slowed public
language at a time when history was moving too fast. At the Liberation, he wrote (in Arthur
Goldhammer’s translation):

Now that we have won the means to express ourselves, our responsibility to ourselves and to the country
is paramount. . . . The task for each of us is to think carefully about what he wants to say and gradually
to shape the spirit of his paper; it is to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to
restore to the country its authoritative voice. If we see to it that that voice remains one of vigor, rather
than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity, then much will
be saved from ruin.

Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity—even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of
Camus, and they were not the usual words of French political rhetoric. The enemy was not this side or
that one; it was the abstraction of rhetoric itself. He wrote, “We have witnessed lying, humiliation,
killing, deportation, and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who
were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no
way of persuading an abstraction.” Sartre, in a signed, man-on-the-scene column for Combat, wrote
that the Liberation had been a “time of intoxication and joy.” (Actually, Sartre kept off the streets and
let Simone de Beauvoir do the writing, while he took the byline.) Intoxication and joy were the last
things that Camus thought freedom should bring. His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility.

I
t was in the forties that Camus became intimate with Sartre. Though each had known the other’s
writing before meeting the writer, they became friends, in Saint-Germain, in 1943, a time when
the Café de Flore was not an expensive spot but one of the few places with a radiator reliable enough to
keep you warm in winter. For the next decade, French intellectual life was dominated by their double
act. Although Camus was married, and soon afterward had a mistress, and soon after that had twins
(by his wife), an American reader of Todd’s biography is startled to realize that after the twins were
born Camus’s life went on exactly as before—his deepest emotional attachment seems to have been to
Sartre and his circle. Indeed, the image of the French philosophers in cafés debating existentialism
dates from that moment and those men. (Before that, Frenchmen in cafés debated love.)

Philosophers? They were performers with vision, who played on the stage of history. Their first
conversation was about the theatre—Sartre asked Camus, impulsively, to direct the coming production
of his play “No Exit”—and not long afterward Sartre was sent, by the Resistance unit he had belatedly
joined, to occupy the Comédie-Française. (The Resistance actually had a theatre committee.) Camus
came into the theatre and found Sartre asleep in an orchestra seat. “At least your armchair is facing in
the direction of history,” Camus teased him, meaning that the chair looked more committed than the
sleeping philosopher. The wisecrack bugged Sartre more than he first let on, as such jokes will among
writers.

Sartre-bashing has become a favorite sport for Anglo-American intellectuals—in the past decades,
Clive James and the late Tony Judt have both kicked him around—and so it’s worth recalling why
Camus valued Sartre’s good opinion more than anyone else’s. Sartre’s appeal was, in no small part,
generational and charismatic. If you had asked people whose lives Sartre changed why they admired
him so keenly, they would have said that it was because in his book “Being and Nothingness,” and in
the famous 1945 speech “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” he had reconciled Marxism and
existentialism. To some, this may seem like not much of an accomplishment—they may feel rather as a
parent feels when a child has, over breakfast, reconciled Lucky Charms and Froot Loops in one bowl—
but at the time it seemed life-giving. Sartre had found a role for both humanism and history
—“humanism” meaning the Enlightenment belief that individual acts had resonance and meaning,
“history” meaning the Marxist belief that, in the impersonal working out of the dialectic, they actually
didn’t. Sartre said that you couldn’t know how history would work out, but you could act as if you did:
“If I ask myself ‘Will the social ideal, as such, ever become a reality?’ I cannot tell, I only know that
whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing.” And
again: “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is
therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” (There are moments
when Sartre sounds like Tony Robbins—only you can make you what you want to be!—which may also
have been, secretly, part of his appeal.) People aren’t born free and everywhere are in chains; they’re just
born. What better way to choose freedom than by unlocking the next guy’s chains, too?
Sartre’s move toward Marxism, and toward the French Communist Party, oddly mimicked that of the
French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s seventeenth-century “wager” in favor of Christianity: the faith might
be true, so why not embrace it, since you lose nothing by the embrace, and get at least the chance of all
the goodies the faith promises? In Sartre’s case, if the “social ideal” never arrived, at least you had tried,
and if it did you might get a place in the pantheon of proletariat heroes. This reasoning may seem a
little shabby and self-interested, but to those within Pascal’s tradition it seemed brave and audacious.
(Camus called Pascal “the greatest of all, yesterday and today.”) Faith in the Party, which Sartre never
joined but to which he gave his purposefully blind allegiance, so closely mirrored faith in the Church
that it borrowed some of the Church’s residual aura of moral purpose. It wasn’t that Sartre didn’t notice
the Soviet camps. He did. He just thought that you could look past them, as a good Catholic doesn’t
pretend not to see the Hell on earth that the Church often has made but still thinks you can see the
Heaven beyond that it points to.

Camus moved toward a break with Sartre, and Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps Modernes, in 1951, after
the publication of his “L’Homme Révolté,” called in English, a little misleadingly, “The Rebel.” The
fault line between the two men was simple, if the fault-finding was complex. Sartre was a straight-out
fellow-traveller with the P.C.F., the Parti Communiste Français, and Camus was not. Sartre was
outraged on behalf of the Party by such episodes as the “affair of the carrier pigeons,” in which the
Party Secretary was found with pigeons in his car and was accused by the police of using them, like a
good revolutionary, to coördinate illegal demonstrations. (It turned out that, like a good Frenchman, he
was merely planning a squab casserole.)

In “The Rebel,” Camus writes (in Philip Mairet’s translation):

He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind,
dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world
again and again. Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history
who really advance its interests.

In English, this can come across as merely sonorous. In France in 1951, the real meaning was barbed
and apparent: only a moral idiot would give his allegiance to the Communist Party in the name of the
coming revolution. Camus spotted the catch in Sartre’s account of fellow-travelling as a leap of faith.
The only practical way to unlock the next guy’s chains, on Sartre’s premise, is to kill the guy next to that
guy first, since he’s the one chaining him up; kill all the jailers and everyone will be free. This sounds
great, Camus saw, until you’ve killed all the jailers and all you have is other jailers. There is no
difference between dying in a Soviet camp and dying in a Nazi camp. We should be neither
executioners nor victims; it is madness to sacrifice human lives today in the pursuit of a utopian future.

T
his position was rightly praised for its truth and oddly praised for its courage. After all,
opposition to both Fascism and Stalinism was exactly the position of every democratic
government in North America and Western Europe. It was Harry Truman’s position and it was
Clement Atlee’s position; it was Winston Churchill’s position and Pierre Mendès-France’s. It was the
doctrine of the liberal version of the Cold War: the true inheritors of “totalitarianism” were the
Communists, and had to be resisted.

Well, it was courageous, we say, because, though common people and politicians were wiser,
intellectuals in France believed the opposite. This is not false, but there is a subtler point at play. It is in
the nature of intellectual life—and part of its value—to gravitate toward the extreme alternative
position, since that is usually the one most in need of articulation. Harvard and Yale pay some of their
professors to tell the students that everything they believe is a bourgeois illusion, as the Koch brothers
pay their foundation staff to say that all bourgeois illusions are real, and the fact that neither is entirely
true does not alter the need to pay people to say it. The ideas we pay for, as Ayn Rand grasped when she
looked at her royalty statements, are those which define the outer edge. We want big minds to voice
extreme ideas, since our smaller minds already voice the saner ones.

In this sense, Sartre’s admirers are not wrong when they protest what seems to them the naïve
moralizing of his Anglo-American critics. Those admirers, who remain plentiful in Paris, insist that
Sartre was, above all, open-minded, that he reproached himself for his own errors, constantly revised
his mistakes, broke with the Soviets not all that long after siding with them—that his open-ended,
lifelong “recherché” was never meant to be concluded, and that you shouldn’t score it like a football
match, Right Views 3, Wrong Views 6.
 “What’s that look? C’mon, you’re scaring me!”

To accuse such a thinker of hypocrisy seems unfair, but perhaps he can be accused of too much
habitual happiness. For all their self-advertised agonies, the lives Sartre and Camus led after the war
mostly sound like a lot of fun. Their biographies are popular because they dramatize the agonizing
preoccupations of modern man and also because they present an appealing circle of Left Bank cafés
and late-night boîtes and long vacations. A life like that implicitly assumes that the society it inhabits
will go on functioning no matter what you say about it, that the cafés and libraries and secondhand
bookstores will continue to function despite the criticism. A professor at the Collège de France who
maintains that there should be no professors at the Collège de France does not really believe this, or else
he would not be one. This wasn’t a luxury that thinkers in Moscow, much less Phnom Penh, ever had.
Sartre’s great sin was not his ideology, which did indeed change all the time. It was his insularity. The
apostle of ideas as action didn’t think that ideas would actually alter life; he expected that life would go
on more or less as it had in spite of them, while always giving him another chance to make them better.
Nice work, if you can get it.

C
amus wanted a better Republic. What he got was the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle is often given
credit for the myth of the Resistance, which is no more of a myth than the American myth of
emancipation; i.e., it really did happen, you just have to leave a lot of other stuff out to make what
happened sound like it was mostly good. But he also created another myth: that of the failure of the
Fourth Republic, in order to prove the necessity of his Fifth. In fact, the Fourth Republic, far more
parliamentary than the Presidential-monarchical Fifth, was no more than normally corrupt and
inefficient, and did a terrific job of moving France from paralysis to prosperity from 1945 to 1958. It
foundered exactly on the insoluble problems of decolonization, about which it could be no wiser than
its constituent parts.

Along the way, it solved philosophical problems. It may be hard to reconcile history and humanism,
but it isn’t hard to make laws that force capitalism to give workers more rights and comforts and
security than they had before, while still respecting the liberty of each man to run a small shop and
curse the government. It’s so easy that every wealthy Western country has done it, and was doing it,
even as its masterminds were arguing about whether it would ever be imaginable. These things are
easier to do than they are to think about—a Sartrean point that Sartre never quite got around to seeing.

Sartre responded to “The Rebel” with truly papal exquisitism. Rather than let the condemnation of the
heretic come from the seat of Peter, it would come from lower down, which would both imply a certain
papal ambiguity and allow the possibility of reproach and an eventual welcome home. The task of
condemning Camus was handed to a staff writer for Les Temps Modernes named Francis Jeanson, who
went after Camus full tilt, praising his prose style (praising a writer’s smooth prose is usually a way of
implying that he’s not too bright about the big ideas) and accusing him of being both a philosophical
naïf and an unwitting tool of the French right. Camus, replying, ignored Jeanson completely, and
directed his words exclusively to Sartre, as the “Director of the Publication.” Sartre, replying in turn,
tried to play the innocent: Jeanson wrote that, not me; by writing to me, you dehumanize Jeanson. In
this way, Sartre both protected and belittled Jeanson, implying that he was in need of papal protection,
and accused Camus of indifference to the little people Sartre was at that moment belittling. It was a
neat job. ( Jeanson, as it happens, was a genuinely interesting character, more Catholic than the Pope,
and even more heretical than the heretic, and has recently received a good biography by Marie-Pierre
Ulloa. While Sartre was far too comfortable and cunning to be any kind of example of Sartrean man,
and Camus far too touched by inner rectitude to be an instance of Camusean man, Jeanson was both.
A partisan of the Algerian rebels, he ended up, poor guy, in hiding for almost a decade, far from Saint-
Germain—the only man in the circle who thought they meant it.)

Each man knew where the other was vulnerable. Calling Sartre “Monsieur le Directeur,” that is, a kind
of literary bureaucrat, was Camus’s dig at his friend’s position; Sartre countered by condescending to
Camus’s philosophical pretensions. “And suppose you didn’t reason very well? And suppose your
thinking was muddled and banal?” he suggested. Infuriated, Camus chose to remind Sartre of the nap
at the Comédie-Française, saying that, as a militant who had “never walked away from the combats of
the time,” he was tired of being given lessons by those who had “never placed more than their
armchairs in the direction of history.” Like the word “upstart,” which makes Groucho declare war in
“Duck Soup,” “armchair” was the fatal insult. The two men never spoke again.

W
ounded by the exchange, Camus was silenced by the Algerian war. Sartre saw the world’s
crisis on a North-South, not an East-West, axis. The Soviet domination of Europe, and the
fellow-travelling acquiescence of the French Communist Party in that domination—indeed, its explicit
desire to extend it to Western Europe—might have been, perhaps should have been, Sartre’s central
subject. But his preoccupation was instead the wars of colonial empire that dominated French foreign
policy throughout the fifties, first the war in Indochina and then the one in Algeria, with Suez in
between. To see the central political story of the fifties as the attempt by the Western democracies to
hold on to their liberty is rational; but to see it as the attempt by the fading European empires to hold
on to their overseas possessions is not false, either, and recedes for us in memory only because it failed
so completely that we don’t even remember that they tried.
Though impeccably anti-colonial, Camus refused to take part in the sentimental embrace of the
National Liberation Front, the F.L.N., that became de rigueur in left-wing circles in those years.
Struggling to explain why he could not abandon the idea of a French Algeria—or, at a minimum, of
some decent compromise that would insure majority rule while protecting the rights of the “settler”
minority—he ended with the weak-sounding formula that he could not abandon his mother, which
made it seem merely a question of blood. Lacking a better way of putting it, he chose silence, and this
most indispensable of editorialists spent the last five years of his life, until his death, in a car crash, in
1960, with his own tongue under house arrest, vowing not to speak about the Algerian problem.

Camus felt as deeply for the seeming oppressor as for the oppressed. He grasped that the great majority
of the settlers in any country, and in Algeria in particular, were as much victims of the circumstance as
the locals, and made the same claims on decency and empathy. They were for the most part not rootless
colonists who had come for the main buck—and those who were would be replaced by a local boss
class. Colonialism is wrong, but the human claims of the colonists are just as real as those of the
colonized. No human being is more indigenous to a place than any other. This remains an
unfashionable, even taboo, position; one feels it still, for instance, in the condescension that American
leftists offer white South Africans. (Athol Fugard’s plays are a good antidote for this simplification,
while Mandela’s moral greatness was to see, and say, that the Boers were as much South Africans as the
Xhosa.) Camus wasn’t wrong. What he meant by his mother was his mother: not blood loyalty or
genetic roots but the particular experience of a woman who had labored all her life as a domestic
servant and was no more guilty of or complicit in colonial crimes than everyone else who lives on earth
is complicit in dispossessing someone. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t abandon his roots for a cause; it was
that he wouldn’t abandon his mother for an idea.

Camus called the tendency to dehumanize those who stood in the way of history the problem of
“abstraction.” He meant that we can always look past the humanity of the kulaks or the pieds noirs or
whoever is the necessary victim of the day. Read too much Marx, and you’ll look right past your own
mom. What’s a few hundred thousand peasants in the face of history? Camus thought that all systems
of ideal government were wrong, and all atrocities equally atrocious. To be a liberal in that sense, with a
style that conferred eloquence on compromise, was the accomplishment. When Sartre’s circle praised
Camus’s style and then objected to it, they were on to something. The threat he posed to totalitarian
thought came from his ability to attach these common-sense principles to a set of magisterial
arguments and timeless aphorisms. There is no better book to read for moral salt and sweetness than
his notebooks from the fifties, which are filled with chiselled epigrams: “Progress-minded intellectuals.
They are the tricoteuses of the dialectic. As each head falls, they reknit the sleeve of reasoning torn apart
by the facts.” Or simply: “Justice in the big things only. For the rest, just mercy.”

Liberalism is optimistic in English-speaking countries, and therefore always a little fatuous. Telling
Sisyphus that he’ll get that stone up there someday is an empty hope. He won’t. Camus imagined
Sisyphus committed to his daily act; he doesn’t encourage him to hope for a better stone and a shorter
hill. The counsel given is essentially the same—short-term commitment to the best available course of
action—but, by accepting that the boulder is always going to roll back down, Camus put a tragic mask
on common sense, and a heroic face on the daily boulder’s daily grind. It may have been the
handsomest thing he ever did. ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 9, 2012, issue.

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is
the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of
Liberalism.”

More: Albert Camus France Jean-Paul Sartre Philosophers Writers

This Week’s Issue

Never miss a big New Yorker story again. Sign up for This Week’s Issue and
get an e-mail every week with the stories you have to read.

Enter your e-mail address

 Your e-mail address

Sign up

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.

Read More

The Current Cinema

The Elegant Containment of “The French Dispatch”

Wes Anderson’s portmanteau of four stories confirms him as a director who trusts the
expressive powers of the sketch more than the heft of a finished portrait.
By Anthony Lane
Double Take

Sunday Reading: The World of Bill McKibben and Elizabeth

Kolbert
From the magazine’s archive: two essential works by two essential writers on the climate
crisis.
By The New Yorker

The Front Row

“The French Dispatch,” Reviewed: Wes Anderson’s Most
Freewheeling Film
In this comedic fantasy, based on the history of The New Yorker, Anderson reaches new
dimensions of decorative ingenuity and social observation.
By Richard Brody

Tables for Two

Daniel Boulud’s French Showpiece with a Manhattan View, Le

Pavillon
At his latest restaurant, in the midtown skyscraper One Vanderbilt, the chef continues
to elevate the essence of ingredients, in such dishes as oysters Vanderbilt and Noisette
Chocolat.
By Shauna Lyon
Cookies Settings