Camus and Louis XVI: An Elegy for the Martyred King

Author(s): Susan Dunn

Source: The French Review, Vol. 62, No. 6, Special Issue: 1789-1889-1989 (May, 1989), pp.
1032-1040
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 62, No. 6, May 1989 Printed in U.S.A.

Camus and Louis XVI: An Elegy

for the Martyred King

by Susan Dunn

Le 21 janvier, avec le meurtre du roi-pretre, s'acheve ce qu'on a appeld

significativement la passion de Louis XVI. Certes, c'est un repugnant scandale
d'avoir present6 comme un grand moment de notre histoire l'assassinat public
d'un homme faible et bon. (Camus, L'Homme rovoltW 149)

In this passage from L'Homme revolte, Camus presents the death of Louis
XVI in terms that would have been applauded by any nineteenth-century
counter-revolutionary. The first sentence sets the tone: the ominous date,
symbolic of 1793 and the Terror, the antithesis of July 14th and the benign
axis of the Revolution, 1789; a solemn murder with resonances of deicide as
well as parricide. Reverting to the essence of the nineteenth-century
monarchist tradition, Camus borrows the royalist code-word Passion and
refers to it, somewhat cryptically, as significant.' The characterization of
Louis as the "roi-pretre" recognizes the priestly as well as political role
attributed to the quasi-divine, anointed French kings in the Middle Ages.
And yet Camus goes even further, labelling Louis's death an "assassina-
tion." For republicans like Michelet, the king's death, although misguided
and perhaps even tragic, was the clear result of a juridical process. The legal
basis for the prosecution of the king may have been questionable, and the
trial may have been flawed for a variety of reasons, but the king had been
represented by legal counsel and his fate voted upon. Only counter-
revolutionaries considered the execution of the king a "murder" or an
"assassination." Camus aggressively distances himself from the revolution-
ary tradition and especially from Jauris's vision of a proud France
"6ternellement r6gicide" (962). Regicide, for Camus, was neither the
necessary and definitive-although painful-rupture with a despotic,
archaic monarchical tradition nor a complex and tragic error: it was simply
a criminal deed and the celebration of this dreadful and cataclysmic event a
"repugnant scandale."2 Although the object of Camus's anger was the
pitiless Jacobin terrorists, the object of his nostalgia and deep regret was
not the monarchy as it had been, but rather a mythical monarchy that
never existed-a sublime, theocratic form of government, essentially moral
and merciful.
Camus's tone of respect and admiration for the unfortunate Louis XVI
approaches the elegiac mood of monarchist accounts of the regicide:
1032

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 CAMUS AND LOUIS XIV 1033

Louis XVI semble avoir, parfois, doute de son droit divin, quoiqu'il ait refuse
syst'matiquement tous les projets de loi qui portaient atteinte a sa foi. Mais a
partir du moment ou il soupponne ou connait son sort, il semble s'identifier, son
langage le montre, a sa mission divine, pour qu'il soit bien dit que l'attentat
contre sa personne vise le roi-christ, l'incarnation divine, et non la chair effray&e
de l'homme. Son livre de chevet, au Temple, est lImitation. La douceur, la
perfection que cet homme, de sensibilite pourtant moyenne, porte a ses derniers
moments, ses remarques indiff6rentes sur tout ce qui est du monde exterieur
et, pour finir, sa brbve d6faillance sur l'6chafaud solitaire, devant ce terrible
tambour qui couvrit sa voix, si loin de ce peuple dont il esperait se faire
entendre, tout cela laisse imaginer que ce n'est pas Capet qui meurt, mais Louis
de droit divin, et avec lui, d'une certaine maniere, la chr6tiente temporelle. Pour
mieux affirmer encore ce lien sacre, son confesseur le soutient dans sa
d6faillance en lui rappelant sa ressemblance avec le dieu de douleur. Et Louis XVI
alors se reprend, en reprenant le langage de ce dieu: "Je boirai, dit-il, le calice
jusqu'" la lie." Puis il se laisse aller, fr6missant, aux mains ignobles du bourreau.
(HR 150, emphasis added).

Camus praises the king for believing in his own divinity and for
emulating Christ so perfectly that the Jacobins could be accused of
attacking Christ's earthly incarnation. Accepting royalist concepts, he
distinguishes between the king's mortal body ("la chair effraybe de
l'homme") and his mysterious supernatural essence ("l'incarnation divine").
Understandably, Camus does not admit to believing in the king's divinity,
but less understandably, his sympathy and admiration permit him to
imagine that "ce n'est pas Capet qui meurt, mais Louis de droit divin." In
word and in deed, Louis resembles "le dieu de douleur." Camus's king, all
perfection and douceur, dies a martyr's death. The Revolution's drums silence
the last words of pardon a merciful king wished to address to his people;
trembling, he yields his sacred body to the ignoble hands of the
executioner.

Like Michelet, Camus recalls that the execution was followed by scenes
of madness and suicide, but whereas Michelet pointed to such events in
order to illustrate the irrationality which was at origin of the subsequent
return to monarchy, Camus considers madness and suicide comprehensible
if not reasonable reactions to regicide. So clearly did the people perceive the
death of the king as an attack upon the Christian underpinnings of French
society and as a sign of the destruction of their meaningfully-ordered
universe that, following the decapitation of Louis XVI, many drowned
themselves, cut their own throats, or went mad. These reactions, Camus
insists, were not the product of insanity but rather were a response to an
awareness of the meaning and cataclysmic portent of regicide.
Madness and suicide were not an inappropriate beginning for the new
age of despair. The French Revolution's destruction of the sacred presence
that had given transcendent meaning to human history struck Camus as so
catastrophic that he was reminded that "de Maistre qualifiait la Revolution
de satanique" (HR 151). The reference to Joseph de Maistre, the prophet of
the counter-revolution whom even Ballanche and Chateaubriand regarded

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 1034 FRENCH REVIEW

as an ultra-reactionary, could be dismissed as a provocation if it did not

reflect Camus's deeply held sense that a satanic modern world had been
born in the blood of Louis XVI: "Le sang des dieux, qui 6clabousse une
seconde le pretre de Louis XVI, annonce un nouveau bapt me" (HR 150).
Camus, however, distances himself from de Maistre by suggesting that
perhaps Michelet, who had referred to the Revolution as purgatory rather
than as hell, was closer to the truth. But the "new light" and "new god"
which souls in the revolutionary purgatory were discovering was the fatal
one of their own infallibility and divinity (HR 151).
The nostalgia Camus displays for the ancien regime seems as surprising as
his attraction to the myth of divine monarchy. For Camus, a king, who
could bestow pardon and who incarnated the misericord of God, wreaked
less havoc on humanity than the revolutionary myth of infallible and
absolute justice. Referring to Biblical and medieval concepts of monarchy,
Camus portrays a king as the compassionate, merciful father of the
desperate and dispossessed: "[Le roil est, comme Dieu lui-meme, le recours
dernier de ceux qui souffrent de misere et d'injustice. Le peuple, contre
ceux qui l'oppriment, peut en principe faire appel au roi. 'Si le roi savait, si le
tsar savait...' tel est en effet le sentiment, souvent exprime, dans les
periodes de misere, des peuples franqais et russe. 11 est vrai, qu'en France au
moins, la monarchie, quand elle savait, a souvent tente de d6fendre les
communautes populaires contre l'oppression des grands et des bourgeois"
(HR 141).3 Of course, the king's mercy and generosity depended on his will
alone. His ability and freedom to act with compassion were known as
Grace, the fundamental and essentially arbitrary principle of monarchical
rule: "I1 distribue son aide et ses secours s'il le veut, quand il le veut. Le bon
plaisir est l'un des attributs de la grace. La monarchie sous sa forme
theocratique est un gouvernement qui veut mettre au-dessus de la justice
la grace, en lui laissant toujours le dernier mot" (HR 141). Camus hastened
to add that such a system could hardly be equated with justice ("si l'on peut
avoir recours au roi, on ne saurait avoir recours contre lui" 141), but given
the choice between absolute justice and absolute grace ("la justice a cela de
commun, et cela seulement, avec la grace, qu'elle veut tre totale et regner
absolument" 142), arbitrary grace appeared less threatening than the
Revolution's desacralized principle of rational and merciless justice (HR
142). Despairing of the modern age and denigrating Enlightenment
philosophy with the epithets jacobin and libertin, Camus lamented the
obliteration of the ancien regime and looked upon Louis XVI as the lost king
and savior.
For Michelet, the Revolution marked a rupture with the past, but more
important, it marked the beginning of a new republican era. For Camus
too, the Revolution signifies rupture with the past, but it is an end more
than a beginning. It signals the demise of a world which embraced a sacred
order and in which man and his history were not the supreme values.

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 CAMUS AND LOUIS XIV 1035

Cet &chafaud ne marque pas un sommet, il s'en faut. I1 reste au moins que, par
ses attendus et ses consequences, le jugement du roi est a la charniere de notre
histoire contemporaine. 11 symbolise la desacralisation de cette histoire et la
desincarnation du dieu chretien. Dieu jusqu'ici se mdlait A l'histoire par les rois.
Mais on tue son representant historique, il n'y a plus de roi. I1 n'y a donc plus
qu'une apparence de Dieu relegue dans le ciel des principes. (HR 149)

The regicide was the turning point in modern history; it constituted a di-
rect attack upon the divine mystery which had been the safeguard of
certain essential and universal moral and spiritual values.4 The power and
efficacy of the Christian vision had depended on the physical presence of a
king, the earthly incarnation of God. Opposition to monarchy and to
Christianity were one and the same: "Si on nie Dieu, en effet, il faut tuer le
roi." Once the inviolability and divinity of the king had been challenged and
disproved, Christianity was doomed. In the post-revolutionary world,
Camus argues, religion was inevitably demoted to a system of rational
ethical principles devoid of any references to the sacred and the supernatu-
ral. At most, God is disincarnated and reduced to the theoretical existence
of a moral principle. Man finds himself in a new world of rationalist and
absolutist ideologies which deny the relativity and uncertainty of his
knowledge and values and which exclude appeal to an authority higher
than man himself.
But perhaps even more important for Camus than the effect of regicide
on religion was its effect on history. Without a king to represent him on
earth, God disappeared from human history, and men were left alone to
create the meaning of their own destiny entirely within history. Historisme,
the most pernicious of doctrines, led directly to political crime and violence:
"Aux regicides succedent les d6icides du XXe siecle qui . .. veulent faire de
la terre le royaume oti l'homme sera dieu. Le regne de l'histoire commence
et, s'identifiant A sa seule histoire, I'homme . . . se vouera d6sormais aux
revolutions nihilistes du XXe siecle, ... une 6puisante accumulation de
crimes et de guerres" (HR 163). At the end of the section of L'Homme revolte
entitled "Les R6gicides," concerned with the effects of the execution of
Louis XVI, Camus, in a daring but not entirely justified leap from France to
the Soviet Union, locates the devastating moral and political consequences
of the deplorable regicide neither in France, le pays d'origine, nor, as Conor
Cruise O'Brien notes, in France's colonies or in Algeria (66), but in the
Soviet Union, the country to incur his greatest censure and wrath, the
country which would appear to have suffered the most from the repercus-
sions of 1793 and from historisme. On this point, Michael Walzer comments
that "in the two countries where kings were publicly condemned and
executed, revolutionary nihilism as Camus describes it has had no
triumphs. Of other kinds of injustice and crime, there have certainly been
no lack. But the specific horrors to which he points have been avoided. Not
so in countries where kings fared better-as in Germany, where the kaiser

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 1036 FRENCH REVIEW

went into exile-or worse-as in Russia, where the czar and his family
were shot" (87).
Camus's positive remarks about Louis XVI and monarchy are not signs
of an improbable reactionary embracing of right-wing politics. Camus was
never a monarchist and always felt a greater affinity for the political left
than for the right. He was attracted by the myth more than by the reality
of monarchy. Monarchy is an issue only inasmuch as it represents a
charitable, divinely-inspired government theoretically founded on concepts
of grace and mercy.
In the post-war and Cold War atmosphere of the 1950's, characterized by
the growth of terrifying State power (HR 214) and the divorce of politics
and ethics, Camus expressed nostalgia for a regime in which political power
was finite and the moral authority of God and king infinite. Monarchical
sovereignty emanated solely from God, and monarchy was, in theory if not
in practice, an inherently moral, non-ideological rule. In L'Homme rbvolth, a
condemnation of modern political power, Camus sought a sublime
synthesis of ethical and political principles. It is only in the idealistic context
of a search which ultimately transcended political reality that he
resuscitated the memory of the French monarchy.5 The death of Louis XVI
was a "repugnant scandale" because the Jacobins extinguished pity and
decapitated the reign of pardon and grace, because the French republic was
born in an act of ideological murder.
In the immediate post-war period, Camus evolved from a stern advocate
of revolutionary justice to a compassionate moralist, a convert to the values
of charity and grace. His intellectual and spiritual evolution mirrors that of
Michelet. In the beginning of the Introduction to his Histoire de la Rivolution
francaise, Michelet had distinguished between Justice and Grace, the
warring principles of the Revolution and the monarchy. But in the final
paragraphs of the Introduction, he announced a new emotional under-
standing that Justice and Grace were one: "Pardonnez-moi, 6 Justice, je
vous ai crue austere et dure, et je n'ai pas vu plus t6t que vous 6tiez la
meme chose que l'Amour et que la Grace" (76). Camus's discussion of
regicide must be understood in the context of Michelet's vision of the
Revolution: "Michelet ne se trompe pas quand il ne veut voir que deux
grands personnages dans l'6pop6e revolutionnaire: le christianisme et la
Revolution. 1789 s'explique, pour lui, en effet, par la lutte de la grace et de
la justice" (HR 140-141).
Michelet and Camus both moved from rigid devotion to revolutionary
justice to an understanding of the supreme value of mercy. After the
liberation of France, Camus had demanded the death penalty for
collaborators. Jacobin measures seemed appropriate in 1944: "This country
does not need a Talleyrand. It needs a Saint-Just" (O'Brien 53). Camus
insisted on the moral necessity of remembering past crimes; amnesty, the
willful forgetting of the past, was anathema to him. Justice was founded on
memory and was antithetical to pardon or "grace:" "Qui oserait parler ici de

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 CAMUS AND LOUIS XIV 1037

pardon?.. . qui voudrait demander [A l'esprit] d'oublier? Ce n'est pas la

haine qui parlera demain, mais la justice elle-meme, fond'e sur la mimoire" (30
August 1944, Essais 259, emphasis added). Taking issue with Franqois
Mauriac who, repelled by the policy of epuration, urged forgiveness, Camus
derided Christian charity. 1944 was a year to settle scores: "Chaque fois
qu'a propos de l'6puration, j'ai parlk de justice, M. Mauriac a parl6 de charit&.
... La charite n'a rien a faire ici .... Je vois deux chemins de mort pour
notre pays.. . ceux de la haine et du pardon. Ils me paraissent aussi
d6sastreux l'un que l'autre. Je n'ai aucun goit pour la haine .... Mais le
pardon ne me parait pas plus heureux et pour aujourd'hui, il aurait des airs
d'injure. Dans tous les cas, ma conviction est qu'il ne nous appartient pas.
... En tant qu'homme, j'admirerai peut- tre M. Mauriac de savoir aimer
des traitres, mais en tant que citoyen, je le deplorerai, parce que cet amour
nous aminera justement une nation de traitres et de mediocres et une
soci6te dont nous ne voulons plus" (11 January 1945, Essais 285-287).
Camus's words echo the revolutionary rhetoric of Saint-Just-"They seek
to move us to pity; soon they will buy our tears"-and Robespierre
"Citizens, sensibility which sacrifices innocence to crime is a cruel
sensibility; clemency which compounds with tyranny is barbarous" (Walzer
127, 179).
During the next four years, Camus's ideas about pity and pardon
changed radically, and in 1948 he frankly admitted that he had been wrong.
In a talk to a Dominican order, he declared that "sur le point precis de notre
controverse, M. Franqois Mauriac avait raison contre moi" (Essais 372).
Camus repeated Michelet's discovery that grace and justice were not
antithetical and that humane justice was more intertwined with forgetting
than remembering. Both Camus and Michelet associated the concept of
grace with infinite love and mercy and not with the notion of the arbitrary
designation of certain souls for salvation. That metaphysical concept by
definition could never be reconciled with justice. Insofar as Christianity
retained the notion of arbitrary grace, it could only be a religion of injustice.
In 1944 Camus wrote: "le christianisme dans son essence (et c'est sa
paradoxale grandeur) est une doctrine de l'injustice" (Essais 271). The search
for a synthesis of justice and grace presupposed understanding grace as a
moral rather than a metaphysical concept (see Benichou 530-536). For
Michelet and for Camus, the problem of justice in the post-revolutionary
world was its utter lack of compassion: "Si la justice a un sens en ce monde,
elle ne signifie rien d'autre que la reconnaissance de [la] solidaritY; elle ne
peut, dans son essence meme, se separer de la compassion" (Rfflexions sur la
guillotine in Essais 1052).
Michelet had fervently believed that post-revolutionary republican
ideology could successfully incorporate the pity the Jacobins had banned,
but a century later, Camus had given up hope that the reigning ideologies
of the twentieth century could meaningfully synthesize and incorporate
justice and grace. In fact, not only were justice and grace irreconcilable, the

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 1038 FRENCH REVIEW

two were irremediably absent. He explicitly addressed the issue of

Michelet's search for a synthesis of justice and grace, concluding that
whereas the nineteenth century had still retained hope that the revolution-
ary concept of justice could be reconciled with grace, the twentieth century
had tragically annihilated both: "Comment vivre sans la grace, c'est la
question qui domine le XIXe siecle. 'Par la justice' ont repondu tous ceux qui
ne voulaient pas accepter le nihilisme absolu. Aux peuples qui d6sesperaient
du royaume des cieux, ils ont promis le royaume de l'homme.... La
question du XXe siecle, dont les terroristes de 1905 sont morts et qui
d&chire le monde contemporain, s'est peu a peu pr&cisee: comment vivre
sans grace et sans justice?" (HR 269-270).
Camus's 1944 demands for retribution were an error of judgment but
perhaps also a symptom of the age of godless ideologies in which only guilt
and not pardon was a reality. Justice and freedom were the issues; pardon
was morally irrelevant ("la charite n'a rien a faire ici") and psychologically
and metaphysically impossible. In his last novel, La Chute, as in L'Homme
rkoolte, Camus paints a grim tableau of life in the twentieth century. The
cruel impossibility of absolution in a godless and kingless world is at the
source of the suffering of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the protagonist of La
Chute. True pardon, remarks Clamence, is not an empty ritual, but lies in
the genuine synthesis of forgiving and forgetting, in political and moral
amnesty. But Clamence, a modern anti-hero, cannot offer clemence.6 Of
short memory, he simply forgets in spite of himself; pardon is neither his
intention nor his gift: "I1 arrivait que mes oublis fussent meritoires. Vous
avez remarque qu'il y a des gens dont la religion consiste a pardonner
toutes les offenses et qui les pardonnent en effet, mais ne les oublient
jamais. Je n'6tais pas d'assez bonne 6toffe pour pardonner aux offenses,
mais je finissais toujours par les oublier" (LC 55). The twentieth century
lacks ideological and spiritual foundations for forgiveness; it is able to issue
only pronouncements of guilt: "Ils condamnent, ils n'absolvent personne
... [Le Seigneur] est parti pour toujours, les laissant juger et condamner, le
pardon a la bouche et la sentence au coeur. Car on ne peut pas dire qu'il n'y
a plus de pitie, non, grands dieux, nous n'arretons pas d'en parler.
Simplement, on n'acquitte plus personne" (LC 122-123).7 Pardon has been
demoted to one of the antagonistic and ironic elements in the destructive
cycle of lost innocence, self-condemnation, and condemnation of others:
"Ma grande id6e est qu'il faut pardonner au pape. D'abord, il en a plus
besoin que personne. Ensuite, c'est la seule mani"re de se mettre au-dessus
de lui" (LC 135). Clamence painfully channels his thwarted thirst for
salvation against himself and society: "Et moi, je plains sans absoudre, je
comprends sans pardonner" (LC 151). An irremediable fall from grace, a
relentless consciousness of guilt in a world which knows no pardon
constitute the sad condition humaine.
In Camus's vision of the development of the Occident, the decapitation
of Louis XVI was the single most significant event in French history. No

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 CAMUS AND LOUIS XIV 1039

person, no institution, and no ideology could henceforth replace the king

who, like God, comforted and rescued the poor and the suffering. In the
cold, sunless, foggy universe of La Chute, the roi-soleil is absent and a
tortured and pitiless "citoyen-soleil" (LC 100) reigns in his place.8
Clamence's fall mirrors an entire civilization's fall from grace, of which the
execution of Louis XVI was emblematic. The Jacobins' denial of mercy to
Louis XVI, on the grounds of political ideology and for the sake of
expediency, inaugurated the age of cruel, utopian ideologies whose
humanitarian ends justified their merciless means. The beheading of the
king signalled the end of a Christian and monarchical reign of mercy and
grace and the beginning of the era of political murder. The defenseless
Louis XVI, the first victim of the Terror, represents all subsequent victims
of political terror and symbolizes man's sorrowful exile from the kingdom
of mis&ricorde.9
Camus's interest in a real and an imagined French monarchy is not a
retrograde fantasy. Grace, the fundamental principle of monarchy,
represented for Camus the ethical potential of politics. His meditation on
the decapitated king and on monarchy, the political institution that
dominated a thousand years of French history, suggests not only that the
execution of Louis XVI still occupies a place in the French national memory,
but that kingship and monarchy constitute one of the "cognitive and
emotional continuities that historians who focus on change and revolution
too easily disregard" (Brown 260).

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Notes

1Early nineteenth-century pro-royalists, such as Joseph de Maistre, Ballanche,

Chateaubriand, Balzac, and the young Victor Hugo, assimilated Louis XVI and Jesus Christ
and interpreted the execution of the king in terms of Christ's Passion. Louis XVI was either
expiating the sins of the Enlightenment or the crimes of his own dynasty, in both cases
voluntarily sacrificing himself for the salvation of France. See my article, "Louis XVI and his
Executioners."
2Claude Mauriac commented that this passage from L'Homme revolte was "insolite mais
d'autant plus emouvant" and that "le ton 6tait presque celui de la complicite" ("L'Homme
revolte d'Albert Camus" 106).
3One of the principles of monarchy to which Bossuet referred was that "le prince doit
pourvoir aux besoins du peuple ... L'obligation d'avoir soin du peuple est le fondement de
tous les droits que les souverains ont sur les sujets. C'est pourquoi dans les grands besoins,
le peuple a droit d'avoir recours a son prince." As his Biblical example, Bossuet cited Genesis
XLI, 55: "Dans une extreme famine, toute l'Egypte vint crier autour du roi, lui demandant
du pain." (Politique tiree des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte 74-75).
4Lest one think that Camus overestimates the significance and the consequences of the
regicide, it is interesting to read Jean-Frangois Lyotard's factitious pronouncement,
according to which the regicide constitutes a specifically French and specifically modern
crime which is the point of origin of all modern French thought: "Nous Frangais, nous
n'arrivons a penser ni la politique, ni la philosophie, ni la litterature, sans nous souvenir que

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 1040 FRENCH REVIEW

tout cela, politique, philosophie, littbrature, a eu lieu, dans la modernite, sous le signe du crime.
Un crime a ete perpetub en France en 1792. On a tue un brave roi tout-a-fait aimable qui &tait
I'incarnation de la lbgitimite'. ... Nous ne pouvons pas ne pas nous souvenir que ce crime est
horrible. Cela veut dire que lorsque nous cherchons a penser la politique, nous savons que la
question de la lbgitimite peut etre posee a tout instant . . .11 en va de meme pour la
littbrature. La difficulte que les Ambricains, et aussi bien les Anglais ou les Allemands, ont a
comprendre ce qui chez nous s'appelle &criture est lib a cette memoire du crime. Quand nous
parlons d'6criture, l'accent est mis sur ce qu'il y a de necessairement criminel dans
l'ecriture ..." ("Discussion Lyotard-Rorty" 583). Like Camus, Lyotard elevates the regicide,
rather than the Terror or the Revolution, to the position of watershed in French history.
Second, like Camus, he envisions centuries of monarchy as a golden age before the
revolutionary Fall. Lyotard then makes the hallucinatory assertion that not only French
history but French language and thought bear the mark of the founding crime of regicide.
5In 1944, Camus wrote: "Nous ne croyons pas au realisme politique. Notre methode est
differente. . . . Elle veut essayer de provoquer dans la vie politique de ce pays une experience
tr s limitbe qui consisterait . . . a introduire le langage de la morale dans l'exercice de la
politique" (7 octobre 1944, Essais 273-274).
6Jean-Baptiste Clamence's name has most often been associated with Saint John the Baptist,
vox clamentis in deserto.
7Clamence's use of the apologetic expression "pardonnez-moi" is frequent enough for one
to wonder whether it is an indication of a genuine longing for pardon (see LC 16, 18, 121, 135).
80On several occasions, Clamence compares himself to the king of a new, sad kingdom: "je
me sentais fils de roi" (33), "je ne m'ennuyais pas puisque je regnais" (41), "je regne enfin, mais
pour toujours" (150).
9Camus began La Chute as a story for the collection L'Exil et le royaume.

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