page_title: Albert Camus
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: Albert Camus / Life / Death
context_page_description: Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, the second-youngest recipient in history.
  Camus was born in Algeria to French Pieds Noirs parents. His citizenship was French. He spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. He was in Paris when the Germans invaded France during World War II in 1940. Camus tried to flee but finally joined the French Resistance where he served as editor-in-chief at Combat, an outlawed newspaper. After the war, he was a celebrity figure and gave many lectures around the world. He married twice but had many extramarital affairs. Camus was politically active; he was part of the Left that opposed the Soviet Union because of its totalitarianism. Camus was a moralist and leaned towards anarcho-syndicalism. He was part of many organisations seeking European integration. During the Algerian War, he kept a neutral stance, advocating for a multicultural and pluralistic Algeria, a position that caused controversy and was rejected by most parties.
context_section_description: Camus died on 4 January 1960 at the age of 46, in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. He had spent the New Year's holiday of 1960 at his house in Lourmarin, Vaucluse with his family, and his publisher Michel Gallimard of Éditions Gallimard, along with Gallimard's wife, Janine, and daughter. Camus's wife and children went back to Paris by train on 2 January, but Camus decided to return in Gallimard's luxurious Facel Vega HK500. The car crashed into a plane tree on a long straight stretch of the Route nationale 5 (now the RN 6). Camus, who was in the passenger seat and not wearing a safety belt, died instantly. Gallimard died a few days later, although his wife and daughter were unharmed. There has been speculation that Camus was assassinated by the KGB because of his criticism of Soviet abuses.
  144 pages of a handwritten manuscript entitled Le premier Homme (The First Man) were found in the wreckage. Camus had predicted that this unfinished novel based on his childhood in Algeria would be his finest work. Camus was buried in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Vaucluse, France, where he had lived.  His friend Sartre read a eulogy, paying tribute to Camus's heroic "stubborn humanism".
caption: The bronze plaque on the monument to Camus in the town of Villeblevin, France. It reads: "From the General Council of the Yonne Department, in homage to the writer Albert Camus whose remains lay in vigil at the Villeblevin town hall on the night of 4 to 5 January 1960"
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