- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice IV.1 

Set in Moscow in 1906, Albert Camus’ The Just is one of the finest explorations of the morality of terrorism ever written. The Just is the story of a group of terrorists (they call themselves revolutionaries) who plot and carry out the assassination of the Grand Duke, in order to protest the tyranny of the Czarist state and strike a blow for the coming Revolution. Camus uses this setting to explore the different ideologies and moral issues at play in the question of terrorism, and more generally, in the justification of violence in the name of politics or history.  

At the heart of Camus’ play is the opposition between the human and the ideological, between ‘justice’ and ‘love’. On one extreme we have Stepan, who best represents the face of terrorism as we know it today. Stepan is a fanatic – he believes in nothing but his ‘cause’ and is consumed by a gnawing hatred and a desperate need for violence. When the terrorist’s plot requires them to murder children, Stepan argues that they should go ahead, justifying his callousness by arguing that the death of two children now will keep thousands of other children from starving to death later. The other terrorists swiftly reject this argument however, and the conversation that follows clearly exposes Stepan’s ‘concern for the people’ to be little more than hollow hypocrisy:  

“Stepan: Not until the day comes when we stop being sentimental about children, will the revolution triumph and we be masters of the world.

Dora: When that day comes, the revolution will be loathed by the entire human race.

Stepan: What does that matter if we love it enough to force our revolution on it, to rescue humanity from itself…

Dora: Suppose the whole human race rejects the revolution? …Would you strike at them too?

Stepan: Yes, if it was necessary, and I’d go on striking at them until they understood…I too love the people.” 

Can anything be more revealing of the hollowness of Stepan’s ideology?  

But where does this loathing of Stepan’s come from? It comes from the fact that Stepan has spent the last three years in prison – and the humiliation he underwent there has made him a bitter, twisted human being, capable of little but hatred and envy. It is one of the finer ironies of Camus’ play that Stepan, this monstrous ideologue, is in fact driven by motives that are entirely human.  

But Stepan is not the centrepiece of Camus’ play. He is, in fact, little more than a strawman, a caricature of an adversary hardly worthy of refutation by an intellect like Camus’. Camus’ real opponent is Yanek, the Poet. Yanek is the romantic ideal of the terrorist, the noble revolutionary, the man who opposes Stepan within the group and refuses to kill children in the name of fighting tyranny, the man whose justification for murder is that he plans to sacrifice his own life as well [1]. Yanek is a sort of suicide bomber, a man who believes that by sacrificing his life in assaulting tyranny he will commit a selfless act that will make the world a better place. Yanek’s version of justice is simple – it is legitimate to kill those who oppress you as long as you are willing to die in doing so – an eye for an eye, a death for a death. The manifest fairness of this, coupled with Yanek’s lively, emotional nature, makes him the more disturbing figure in the play, precisely because he is easy to relate to.  

The crux of Camus’ play is to demonstrate how hollow Yanek’s conception of ‘justice’ really is. In the first act of the play, Dora, a fellow terrorist, asks Yanek how he will be able to look upon the Grand Duke while he is killing him. After all, she says, “a man is a man”. Yanek replies: “I shall not see him…hatred will surge up just in time and blind me”. The implication is clear – it is only by blinding ourselves to the real humanity of our opponents, by seeing them as nothing more than ciphers in a larger political game, that we can justify our acts of violence against them. 

This blindness serves Yanek well. Eventually, he carries out the assassination and is arrested and put in prison, there to await hanging. Yet here the truth finally catches up with him, in the form of his victim’s wife, the Grand Duchess, who comes to the prison to confront him. Through this confrontation with the Duchess, and with the police chief Skouratov, Camus makes three points against Yanek’s ideal of ‘justice’.  

First, he points out that in taking the role of executioner upon himself, in dealing out justice without appeal, Yanek does exactly what the Grand Duke, the man he accuses of being a tyrant, did also. The Grand Duchess says “Your voice is exactly like his;…He used to say ‘That is just’, and nobody could question it”. If tyranny is defined as punishing someone without giving them any means to defend themselves, then Yanek is just as much a tyrant as the man he killed.  

Second, Camus insistently reminds us of the fact that the Grand Duke, this symbol of oppression, was also a human being. When Yanek says that he threw his bomb at tyranny, Skouratov replies: “No doubt, but you still killed a man”. The Grand Duchess too, speaks of her husband in personal terms, talking about how just a few hours before his death he was sleeping peacefully in an armchair, how he loved the peasants and would often go drinking with them. Her point is simple – Yanek is a killer, and he who kills cannot justify himself. The murderer cannot be his own judge.  

Faced with her insistence that he is a murderer Yanek breaks down. He makes a brave attempt to convince himself that she is his enemy – screaming and shouting at her to go away – but in the end he cannot bring himself to despise her. And this is Camus’ third critique of Yanek. In showing Yanek’s anguish, Camus exposes this romantic heroism of ‘a death for a death’ for what it is, a shallow and cowardly attempt to escape the consequences of one’s action. Yanek does not choose death because he is a hero willing to sacrifice his life, he wants, no, needs to die because the knowledge of his crime is too much for him to live with. If he is allowed to live it becomes impossible for him to deny that he is anything more than a common murderer – only the certainty of death allows him to maintain this pathetic charade of being a martyr for his cause.  

So much for Yanek. But what of the cause itself? Here also, Camus, with history as his silent witness (the play was written in 1950, after the worst excesses of Stalinism), exposes the emptiness of the terrorist’s hope. The first note of doubt is sounded by Skouratov, who remarks: “You begin by wanting justice, but in the end you set up a police force”. But it is Dora, who, in the final act of the play, prophecizes most accurately the days to come: 

“Can we be sure no one will go any further? Sometimes when I listen to Stepan, I’m afraid: perhaps others will come and justify themselves by our example and not pay with their lives!”  

This is how the just are corrupted. This is how ‘justice’, grown inhuman, becomes little more than vengeance and the lust for power. This is how murder is committed in the name of revolution, how the terrorist mind, warped by hatred, twists its purpose to the slaughter of innocent men and women and proclaims that such killing is just.  We live in a world populated by Stepans. And it is a cruel world not only for those who are victims of such violence, but also for those (like Dora, like Yanek) who fall prey to the temptation to commit violence in the name of being just. As Dora says to Yanek: “There is warmth in the world, but it is not for us”.  

The Just is a rich and rewarding read, not least because Camus is too intelligent a writer not to recognise the benefits of ambiguity. In less sophisticated hands, this could have been little more than a long diatribe about the evils of terrorism and violence. Instead, it is a text fraught with nuanced argument and allegorical subtleties. As a philosopher, Camus recognises the importance of making a strong argument for the terrorist’s point of view, in order that the counter-argument may be equally strengthened – and his choice, as a dramatist, of making the terrorists the main protagonists of the play ensures this. His treatment of the terrorists seems, at first glance, sympathetic; the story is told from their perspective, and it is their case that is forcefully, even passionately made, but Camus is just clever enough to let the holes in their argument show through, and the final message of the play is clear.  

Justice without humanity is meaningless. We cannot demand justice for our people by becoming inhuman ourselves; that way leads only to violence and negation and death, an endless spiral of vengeance and murder. We must not, in pursuing our ideologies, our symbols, our abstractions of justice, lose sight of the real human cost of our actions. As Dora puts it:  

“If death is the only way, then we have chosen the wrong path. The right path leads to life…”.  

As we think about the way to respond to last week’s terrorist attacks, and the cries of anger and retribution ring out around us, that, I think, is a point worth remembering.  

[1] An argument that Camus has explored elsewhere – see The Rebel.  

(The Just was originally published in French under the title Les Justes. All quotations in this article are taken from the translation by Henry Jones, published by Penguin in 1970)