How did Albert Camus die?

In the afternoon on January 4, 1960, French philosopher Albert Camus, author of The Stranger (1942) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), was riding in the front passenger seat of a Facel Vega driven by his friend and publisher’s nephew, Michel Gallimard. Camus and Gallimard were returning to Paris after spending the holidays in Provence, France. Gallimard’s wife, Janine, and their 18-year-old daughter, Anne, were also in the car. In the small town of Villeblevin, just over 65 miles (105 km) outside Paris, Gallimard lost control of the car. As police later noted, Gallimard had not been speeding, the road was straight, and the pavement was not icy (or even wet). The Facel Vega nonetheless veered into a tree, instantly killing Camus and gravely wounding Gallimard. Janine and Anne were not seriously injured. The car was destroyed.

Camus had not originally intended to return to Paris in that Facel Vega; his wife, Francine, and their teenage twins, Catherine and Jean, had traveled to Paris by train. Evidently, Gallimard had convinced Camus to ride with his family; the return half of a train ticket was found in Camus’s pocket. Also in the car were 144 pages of handwritten manuscript—the first part of a proposed epic autobiographical novel based on the writer’s childhood in colonial Algeria. The 46-year-old writer had predicted it would be his finest work. (The manuscript was later edited and published as The First Man in 1995 by Camus’s daughter Catherine.)

Many years after the crash, conspiracy theories began to develop. In 2011 an Italian newspaper alleged that the KGB—the Soviet security agency—had caused the crash. The allegation was based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noticed something strange in the diary (published as a book) of Jan Zábrana, a Czech poet and translator. Zábrana reportedly wrote:

I heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. According to him, the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole in the wheel at speed.

The diary entry claimed the order was “given personally” by Soviet foreign minister Dmitri Shepilov. It was in part a response to “an article published in Franc-tireur in March 1957,” in which Camus had denounced the so-called Shepilov Massacres of 1956 in Hungary.

Scholars and biographers of Camus have rejected these claims. As The New Yorker observed in 2011, “given the improvised nature of the auto journey on which Albert Camus was killed…it seems unlikely.”

In any case, his untimely death was terribly ironic: Camus, who famously theorized the absurd, died what many considered an “absurd” death. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus’s onetime rival, described the accident that killed Camus as “a scandal because it suddenly projects into the center of our human world the absurdity of our most fundamental needs.” In his mind, there was “an unbearable absurdity in that death.” Interestingly, Camus himself is reported to have said that the most absurd way to die would be in a car accident.