Conspiracy theories for bored Parisians

When the French philosopher and author Albert Camus died in a car accident in 1960 just two years after winning the Nobel prize for literature, France mourned a freakish tragedy.

In Camus's pocket was an unused return train ticket from his home in Provence to Paris. The 46-year-old writer had intended to travel back after the Christmas holidays by train with his wife Francine and their teenage twins Catherine and Jean. Instead, his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard offered to drive him.

Camus was killed instantly when Gallimard's powerful Facel Vega car left the icy road and ploughed into a tree. Gallimard died a few days later. As well as the train ticket, police found 144 pages of handwritten manuscript in the wreckage entitled The First Man, an unfinished novel based on Camus's childhood in Algeria and which he had predicted would be his finest work. The tragedy shocked and saddened France. But no one imagined that the crash had been anything other than an accident.

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has now suggested that Soviet spies might have been behind the crash. The theory is based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noted that a passage in a diary written by the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana, and published as a book entitled Celý život, was missing from the Italian translation.

Olivier Todd, a former BBC correspondent in Paris, whose biography, Albert Camus: Une Vie [A Life], was published in English in 2000, told the Observer that during research in Soviet archives he had not come across any reference to Moscow ordering the author's assassination. "My first reaction is that nothing about the activities of the KGB and its successors would surprise me, but this claim has left me flabbergasted. You have to ask yourself who would benefit from this coming out and why."

He added: "It's interesting and amusing and it is certainly true that KGB documentation is full of accounts of how the Soviets used the Czechs to do their dirty work. But while I wouldn't put it past the KGB to do such a thing, I don't believe the story is true."

(The Observer, 7 August 2011)