Albert Camus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Revolt begins in the human heart.1 Before it becomes an idea, before it finds a program or a party or a name, it is a feeling — the complete, obstinate refusal to accept an order that would bring men to their knees.1 That is where it starts. Not in theory. In the chest. But a feeling alone is not enough. There comes a moment when revolt spreads from heart to spirit, when impulse leads to concerted action — and that passage, that transformation, is what I called revolution.1
The two are not the same thing, and confusing them has cost the twentieth century an enormous amount of blood. Revolt is prior; it is purer; it is the original no. What does that no contain? More than it first appears. When I said no to the world — to its absurdity, to the abstractions that threatened us, to the civilization of death being prepared — I was simultaneously saying yes.2
The yes is implicit in the no: there is a line that cannot be crossed, and by naming that line I was affirming everything that fell short of it, affirming that something in us rejects the scandal of human suffering and cannot be humiliated indefinitely.2 This is not a contradiction to be resolved; it is the structure of revolt itself. From this the social dimension follows directly.
In absurdist experience, suffering is individual — the solitary man facing a silent universe.3 But the moment rebellion begins, suffering becomes collective; the strangeness one man feels is recognized as something shared by all men.3 This is why I wrote: I rebel — therefore we exist. Not I think, therefore I am — that is the formula of the isolated mind.
Revolt founds its first value on the whole human race, not on the individual who initiates it.3 And this is also where revolt finds its limit — the limit it must respect if it is to remain revolt and not become its opposite. Any rebellion that claims the right to deny or destroy human solidarity loses its right to be called rebellion at all; it becomes acquiescence in murder.4
The rebel who kills in the name of rebellion has already betrayed the impulse that made him a rebel. This is the drama I traced in The Rebel — the way revolutionary thought, again and again, forgets its origin, forgets the living person who said no, and plunges into tyranny in the name of the very liberation it began by demanding.4 Revolt, then, is not a program.
It is a perpetual state of tension — it cannot dispense with memory, because without memory it loses the first promise that gave it meaning.4 The question one must ask of every rebellion, every revolution, every movement that claims to carry the human cause forward, is always the same: has it remained faithful to that first noble promise, or has it, through indolence or folly, become what it set out to refuse?
Revolution is not revolt. What carried the Resistance for four years was revolt—the complete, obstinate, and at first nearly blind refusal to accept an order that would bring men to their knees. Revolt begins first in the human heart.Between Hell and Reason, pp. 79–80
We said no to the world, to its essential absurdity, to the abstractions that threatened us, to the civilization of death that was being prepared for us. By saying no we declared that things had lasted long enough, and there was a line that could not be crossed, but at the same time we affirmed everything that fell short of that line.The Human Crisis, pp. 7–8
In absurdist experience, suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men.The Rebel, pp. 35–36
any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously its right to be called rebellion and becomes in reality an acquiescence in murder... Rebellious thought, therefore, cannot dispense with memory: it is a perpetual state of tension.The Rebel, pp. 35–36