Albert Camus spent Christmas 1959 at his house in the Vaucluse with his family and his publisher, Michel Gallimard. After New Year, instead of returning to Paris by train with his wife and children, he decided to get a lift with Gallimard, a fan of fast cars, and his family, in their 4.5 litre Facel Vega HK500. Camus saw his family off at Avignon station on January 2 and set off the next day with the Gallimards. They stayed the night near Macon, set off again on January 4, lunched at Sens and, an hour or so later, crashed at high speed into one of the plane trees lining a straight stretch of road. Camus was killed outright, Gallimard died a few days later but Mme Gallimard and their daughter survived. There was little traffic at the time but someone remembered that the car was travelling fast and “waltzing” just before impact. Another witness recalled that the speedometer was stuck at 145 kph, though a third swore it read zero. Mme Gallimard said that something seemed to “give way” under the vehicle just before the crash.
For Giovanni Catelli, Camus’s death was no accident, but a political assassination. His book, first published in Italy in 2013, starts with the assumption that sets the tone: “Fate doesn’t conspire against a man just like that – that’s something men do”. So which men did it? Camus, voice of reason and Nobel prizewinner, certainly had enemies. French nationalists believed he had sold out to the Algerian rebels who, in turn, thought he was too moderate in his support for their struggle. The right resented his Resistance credentials, the left thought he had betrayed the cause. His criticism of fascist regimes riled Spain and his hostility to Soviet interventions in East Berlin and Hungary, plus his championing of Boris Pasternak, displeased Communist Party hardliners everywhere.
In Prague in about 2010, Catelli found a “crystal clear clue” which revealed unambiguously that Camus had been murdered by the KGB. The clue was a passing mention in the memoirs of the poet and translator Jan Zábrana (Cély život, A Whole Life, 1992) who had been told by a well-informed, well-connected but, alas, unnamed man that agents had placed a device inside a tyre of Gallimard’s car which would blow it at a pre-set high speed.
