Camus’s Meursault has been put on trial many times since the first appearance of L’Etranger in

1942. Acquitted as a hero of the Absurd, as Existentialist Man, or as victim of a society formed

to crush the individual, more recently condemned as a racist in complicity with the colonial

establishment, the stranger has perhaps still not received his final verdict. Although we do not

intend to give one here, we believe that the novel needs to be re-approached critically from the

perspective of the contrast between “existential”-literary and legal discourses. In this endeavor,

it will be useful to examine more closely the French code de procédure pénale as it applied to

colonial Algeria in the 1930's and the manner in which it functions within the novel’s narrative

structures. We also hope to shed new light on the “race” question, or the conflict between Arabs

and Europeans, colonized and colonizers, within the novel.

The two-part division of L’Etranger highlights both the clash and the intermingling of

literary and legal discourses. Although the entire work is narrated by Meursault in the first

person, the same events are in fact recounted twice–once as the narrator experiences them and

the second time as he perceives the court reconstructing them in the course of his trial. Thus in

the first half–with some notable exceptions–the reader experiences the events in the “isolated

blocks of time” famously described by Sartre, whereas in the second half the social discourse of

the legal system imposes itself on the events, linking them with a logic of cause and effect.

Significantly, most of the first half takes place in the “natural” world and the second in the

socially constructed world of courtrooms and prisons.

According to French law, an accused person in preventive detention may be examined for

an unspecified length of time by a juge d’instruction before his or her case actually goes to trial. .

judges. Meursault’s case is in a way almost decided during the eleven-month period of his

examination. The incompatibility of his mode of discourse with that of the law surfaces here as a

prelude to the courtroom drama. For example, Meursault’s refusal, or inability to twist the truth

by saying that he was merely holding back his natural feelings when he appeared to be

insensitive at his mother’s funeral is incomprehensible to the lawyer and the judge. What

Meursault seems to understand, if obscurely, is that the portrayal of emotions in a palatable way
to an audience is of necessity a mis-representation. His stubborn, paratactic, non-causal and non-

rhetorical discourse is a formal as well as a substantive threat to the body politic.

The trial itself illustrates the narrative approach to portraying the character of the

defendant that distinguishes the French (and European generally) legal system from the

American one. The cause-and-effect narrative constructed by the prosecution proves not only

premeditated murder but that the accused has “no soul” and no normal human feelings. The

defense attorney also tries to construct a narrative recounting an accidental killing, but his is

much less convincing. The “mechanism” created by the prosecution leads inexorably to the

guillotine.

Missing in these courtroom proceedings is any attention to or even mention of the victim

or the victim’s family. The victim is never given a name, nor is he even referred to as a man; he

is only called “the Arab”. Throughout this novel, Arabs have no human dimension; they seem

rather part of the natural background which human Europeans have “civilized..” Camus was

well aware that the chances of a colonial court convicting a Frenchman for killing an Arab in the

1930's were about as great as a those of a court in Mississippi convicting a white for killing a

black in the same period. Thus the choice of an Arab as the victim reinforces the fact that

Meursault is tried and convicted for something other than murder. Meursault resembles other

Euro-Algerians in that he acts a foreigner to the Arab majority, also perceiving them as less than

human. Yet he is also a stranger to the French colonials, hence exemplifying both meanings of

l’etranger. It is of course his “strangeness” that turns him into a scapegoat to be exterminated.

By refusing to participate in the colonial society’s legal discourse, he a refuses the construction

of cause and effect, the linkage of past with present, by extension, perhaps, the justifications of

history. Could his refusal to cry at his mother’s funeral signify a possible eventual refusal to cry

at the death of the mère patrie, or a refusal to acknowledge a link between the French past and

the North African present? In any case, his way of living in that present, defined by sun and sea,

and his utter refusal of causation, convention, and pretense, constitute a menace to a system

founded on these premises. L’Etranger, of course, is not only a portrayal of French colonial
society, although it is also that. The reason it has affected so many readers throughout the world

is that it strikes to the heart of the profound discord between the existential reality of living,

changing individuals and the constructions which legal and social discourse necessarily make of

that reality. On one level, it could be argued that the novel is about the differences between law

and literature.

Mary Ann Frese Witt, Eric Frese Witt, J.D.,

Professor, French and Italian Member of Bar, State

of Connecticut
North Carolina State University at Raleigh Member of French Bar