Alison Flood: New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB

By Dilip -
Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book argues he was assassinated by KGB spies for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.
Cambridge French literature professor Alison Finch was not persuaded. “Supporters of the assassination theory include a creative writer and film director; a Czech writer and translator whose family were persecuted by the communist regime and who had good reason to hate communism; the highly controversial lawyer Jacques Vergès, who became infamous for defending the indefensible.”… Finch questioned suggestions of French connivance. “This would mean that the assassination was approved at the highest level presumably by De Gaulle. This is implausible. De Gaulle, an accomplished writer himself, had great respect for French intellectuals, including those whose views he disagreed with” 
Albert Camus with his twins Jean and Catherine
Albert Camus with his twins Jean and Catherine in 1957. Photograph: 
Loomis Dean/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.

 Albert Camus will always be the outsider - and I'm proud of that, says the writer's daughter
"That there is no national celebration of his birth is natural; those in power in France have never liked Camus, and he detested those in power. He always said he was in the service of those who suffered history, not those who made it... Camus is still l'étranger [the outsider] in France. I find it astonishing that ministers don't realise what Camus represents for the country. I am proud of him and the image he gives of France."

Camus died on 4 January 1960 when his publisher Michel Gallimard lost control of his car and it crashed into a tree. The author was killed instantly, with Gallimard dying a few days later. Three years earlier, the author of L’Étranger (The Outsider) and La Peste (The Plague) had won the Nobel prize for “illuminat[ing] the problems of the human conscience in our times”. “The accident seemed to have been caused by a blowout or a broken axle; experts were puzzled by its happening on a long stretch of straight road, a road 30 feet wide, and with little traffic at the time,” Herbert Lottman wrote in his 1978 biography of the author.

Catelli believes a passage in Zábrana’s diaries explains why: the poet wrote in the late summer of 1980 that “a knowledgeable and well-connected man” had told him the KGB was to blame. “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed.”..  read  more: 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/05/albert-camus-murdered-by-the-kgb-giovanni-catelli
see also
Book review: ‘The Zhivago Affair’ was one of the most fascinating of the Cold War’s cultural skirmishes // Boris Pasternak's refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son's memoirs
Albert Camus: 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'
The Almond Trees by Albert Camus
Book Review: Albert Camus, the Guillotine's Relentless foe
Book review: Albert Camus' 'Algerian Chronicles’
Download a copy of Camus' famous essay: Reflections on the Guillotine
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