The Rebel

Sartre paid tribute to him in his obituary notice: 'Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our cultural domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and of this century.'

The Rebel is described as 'one of the great humanist manifestos' by The Times and earned Albert Camus the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Sunday Times lauds Camus as 'the last French intellectual to take the side of humanity and talk its language ... a figure of immense moral stature.'

The Rebel is Camus's 'attempt to understand the time I live in' and is a brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt. Published in 1951, it offers a daring critique of communism, examining how it had faltered behind the Iron Curtain, leading to totalitarian regimes. Camus questions two events revered by the left wing — the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 — which he believed had resulted in the use of terrorism as a political tool.

In this towering intellectual document, Camus argues that hope for the future lies in revolt, which, unlike revolution, is a spontaneous response to injustice and offers a chance to achieve change without sacrificing collective and intellectual freedom.