This paper attacks received ideas about Camus’s iconic hero as honest, modest, innocent, and even messianic. Reviewing these notions, first, as collated in Édouard Morot-Sir’s critical conspectus, ‘Actualité de L’Étranger’ (1996), I trace them back to Sartre’s seminal critique (1943), then to Camus’s characterisation of Meursault as ‘the only Christ we deserve’, in 1955. By close reading of the text, I show that, far from being the modern messiah of authenticity, Meursault is in fact a monster of male chauvinism and (...) an unreconstructed misogynist, whose much-vaunted indifference and amorality only thinly disguise a psychopathology of autism, egotism, paranoia and sadism. (shrink)

Sartre's evocation of ideological socialism in Dirty Hands ' protagonist Hugo, as opposed to the pragmatism of the realist, Hoederer, found an attentive audience in April 1948. The means are justified by the ends, Hoederer insists, although that means “getting one's hands dirty.“ Eighteen months later, Camus produced Les Justes , which offers an implicit rebuttal of Sartre's position. Kaliayev-like Hugo, an idealist and an intellectual-is rebuked by his hard-line colleague, Fedorov, for failing to throw his grenade at the Archduke's (...) carriage merely because he was accompanied by children. Kaliayev's vindication of the individual's moral conscience, even in the midst of collective action, counters Hoederer's position. For Camus, the ends do not necessarily justify the means; there are always lines to be drawn in the name of an ethical stance which, ultimately, protects human dignity from the allure of morally compromised “progress.“ Consideration of each playwright's notion of authenticity, as embodied in their respective protagonists, leads us to consider whether Sartre had, in effect, anticipated Kaliayev in the person of Hugo and foreshadowed his critique of Camus's L'Homme révolté, which led to their definitive quarrel. (shrink)