Revolutionary Union Movement and Europe
As he wrote in L'Homme révolté (in the chapter about "The Thought on Midday"), Camus was a follower of the ancient Greek 'Solar Tradition' (la pensée solaire). In 1947–48 he founded the Revolutionary Union Movement (Groupes de liaison internationale – GLI) a trade union movement in the context of revolutionary syndicalism (Syndicalisme révolutionnaire). According to Olivier Todd, in his biography, 'Albert Camus, une vie', it was a group opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton. For more, see the book Alfred Rosmer et le mouvement révolutionnaire internationale by Christian Gras.
His colleagues were Nicolas Lazarévitch, Louis Mercier, Roger Lapeyre, Paul Chauvet, Auguste Largentier, Jean de Boë (see the article: "Nicolas Lazarévitch, Itinéraire d'un syndicaliste révolutionnaire" by Sylvain Boulouque in the review Communisme, n° 61, 2000). His main aim was to express the positive side of surrealism and existentialism, rejecting the negativity and the nihilism of André Breton.
From 1943, Albert Camus had correspondence with Altiero Spinelli who founded the European Federalist Movement in Milan—see Ventotene Manifesto and the book "Unire l'Europa, superare gli stati", Altiero Spinelli nel Partito d'Azione del Nord Italia e in Francia dal 1944 al 1945-annexed a letter by Altiero Spinelli to Albert Camus.
In 1944 Camus founded the "French Committee for the European Federation" (Comité Français pour la Féderation Européene – CFFE) declaring that Europe "can only evolve along the path of economic progress, democracy and peace if the nation states become a federation."
From 22–25 March 1945, the first conference of the European Federalist Movement was organised in Paris with the participation of Albert Camus, George Orwell, Emmanuel Mounier, Lewis Mumford, André Philip, Daniel Mayer, François Bondy and Altiero Spinelli (see the book The Biography of Europe by Pan Drakopoulos). This specific branch of the European Federalist Movement disintegrated in 1957 after Winston Churchill's ideas about the European integration rose to dominance.
Read more about this topic: Albert Camus
Famous quotes containing the words union, movement and/or europe:
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed beforea national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (18561924)
“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”
—Karl Marx (18181883)
“Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such progress is relished because it feels nice.”
—Paul West (b. 1930)