Postface

Summary

Who reads Camus? Were we to focus on the admittedly narrow world of academic publications and interest, we might well conclude that Camus has come to be an author more written about outside France than inside it. It was in France in the early 1970s that he was notoriously dismissed as an author whose philosophy is only suitable for sixth-form study. Long before that, as Olivier Todd reminds us, Sartre was decidedly patronising about the philosophical shortcomings of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, although somewhat more approving in his response to L'Etranger when these texts appeared in 1942. Yet Camus's ability to attract mass audiences both within the hexagon and beyond is undisputed. Jeanyves Guérin reported in the 1990s that statistically speaking, Camus remained the author most widely read by school pupils and university students in France. In a recent survey for French television, Camus was placed fifty-ninth in a poll to establish 'les plus grands Français de tous les temps' ('the greatest French people of all time'), above Sartre, who occupied ninety-fifth place. In the English speaking world, his work regularly features on undergraduate reading lists for courses on twentieth-century French literature, politics and philosophy.