Re-appropriating Europe: Albert Camus's wartime Europeanism

The study of ideas of Europe in the works of Albert Camus is a relatively recent aspect of Camus scholarship, but one that has tended towards the teleological, reading Camus's stance on Europe as pioneering or at least anticipating modernday European integration. This article proposes a re-reading of Camus's Lettres à un ami allemand , of which the third letter (written in 1944) is one of the strongest expressions of Europeanism in the Camusian oeuvre. Unlike existing scholarship, it situates this text in the context of the various understandings of Europe of the resistance movements and the collaborators in Occupied France. Based on Higgins's understanding of resistance poetry as an effort to reappropriate language, and through comparison with Camus's hitherto largely ignored book review of works by Brice Parain, the article demonstrates how Camus's text constitutes an effort to reappropriate the discourse of Europe.