[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

In publishing The First Man I said to myself, 'this is going to be awful,' but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I'm not afraid of [Albert] Camus' public. I'm afraid of what will be written in the papers.

You end up beating your head against a wall again, it doesn't work. Not if you make an abstraction of man. That's why [Albert] Camus is more a la mode now, because he always says 'yes, but there's man. That's the first thing, because myself, I'm a man.' And that's what solidarity .

Albert Camus was never abandoned by his readers. Camus is enormously read. He's the highest selling author in the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some years now. Sales haven't ever stopped, so to talk about rediscovering him would suggest that he isn't read anymore and that's not true.

It's true that women appear very little in [Albert Camus] works. They have a very marginal place.

Of course, [Albert Camus] wasn't an existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a man of combat. It wasn't for nothing that he directed the Resistance journal called Combat.

In fact it was always the Communist problem which was responsible for the opposition to [Albert] Camus. It was always and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding.