Camus died on 4 January 1960 at the age of 46 in a car accident near Sens, in a place named Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute accepted his publisher’s proposal to travel with him.
Love the bluntness of the headline, combined with the decidedly unjournalistic poetry of the subheadline: “a conscience against the chaos.” Shows what a truly towering figure he was in French society. I can’t imagine an American newspaper giving the same treatment to, say, Noam Chomsky, the first American intellectual that comes to my mind. The fact that it took me more than a few seconds to come up with one is also telling.
