At the Chair of African Legal Studies, we recently discussed socio-legal approaches to law, talking about what, in the end, is legally binding.
On this occasion, I remembered a novel I read a couple of years back called ‘l’hôte’. The author, Albert Camus, is widely regarded as a prominent existentialist philosopher.[1] However, his work seemed to also reflect some socio-legal ideas. I found this intriguing and thought: Ultimately, this shows that questions of acceptance and oppression regarding (legal) norms are so crucial that they even made their way into early 20th – century literature. And they are even more central when addressing wrongful actions by colonising countries such as France or Germany.
Regarding that, we need to keep in mind that Camus himself was born in Algeria; however, his parents were French and had immigrated to Algeria as part of French colonial efforts.[2]
Therefore, we must critically examine whether his thought pattern needs to be contextualised due to the time and his cultural background originating from the colonising party in the respective country.
That said, let us examine the interplay between Camus’ novel and socio-legal research.
We will start by quickly delving into the story (I) and then look for traces of socio-legal approaches to it (II).
I. A Story of what is Law
In the abovementioned novel, Camus describes the life of a teacher with French roots, residing alone on a small mountain next to the local school. The students – young people from the villages afoot of the hill – must climb it to get to school. On the other side of the mountain lies the next town, about two day’s marches away.
One day during winter, when the kids cannot climb the hill due to the cold, the local French policeman reaches the teacher’s home together with someone else: An Algerian man who has murdered a member of his community for reasons of honour. This is forbidden by French (colonial) law, and punishment must be sought. By custom law of the region’s inhabitants, however, the conflict may be resolved differently: By making the person leave the community to try and make a living in the desert.
Having reached the mountaintop, the policeman asks the teacher to take the alleged murderer to the next town on the other side of the hill to stand trial before the French court.
The teacher cannot withstand the police officer’s persistence and accepts. During the night, he keeps the man in handcuffs and locked in the school building, considering whether to let him stand trial according to French law or let justice be served by local law.
The following day, he takes the man down to the other side of the hill.
Quickly, they stand at a crossroads: If they turn left, they will go to the town and the French law. If they turn right, the man will acknowledge his wrongdoing by going into the desert according to local custom.
The teacher uncuffs the man and leaves him at the crossroads, making it his choice to decide which law is his. As the teacher turns around, he sees the man walking into the desert.
II. Socio-Legal Approaches
First and foremost, this small story portrays the injustices and difficulties which occur when colonisers try to force their laws on a local population. It also shows that power is given to one man over the other solely because one is French and the other is not – which is the essence of the falsity of colonial thinking.
From a socio-legal perspective, various questions occur: Which law must be obeyed? And are the different norms considered in this scenario even legal norms for the population in the first place?
Of course, there is the perspective of the most potent party: Obedience can be forced by violence, which was often employed by the colonising nations.[3]
However, this does not mean the local inhabitants acknowledge this law as such. From what I have learned during my studies, this situation illustrates two opposite theories on what is a legally binding norm:[4]
On the one hand, the theories of oppression essentially say norms are valid if they can be and are forced upon the population. The law-making party, thus, is the one who is the strongest. Here, the state law dominates over other norms and is supposed to absorb all other forms of normative orders within the society.[5]
On the other hand, a positivist approach would lean on theories of acceptance, which view binding law as a separate entity from the state, being what the legal subjects in their consciousness acknowledge as binding norms.[6]
The distinction between those two approaches has led to many inquiries and studies.[7]
However, in Algeria, where our novel takes place, there is not merely a distinction between the French colonial law and the local community’s law. No, the French law has never been the local community’s. The latter did not create it. It was enforced upon the community. In non-colonised nations, ideally, this is different, as the population has taken part in the law-making process.[8]
Thus, two different systems exist next to each other, and the French were unable to erase the collective memory of these community norms completely. Hence, the population must abide by two systems: one by force and the other to live within and be accepted by their community.
III. The Essence of the Story
To conclude this inquiry, in my opinion, the story shows two things:
One: The normative systems often did not correspond, making it impossible to avoid punishment from either party. This caused massive pain and made the injustices committed by the colonisers even greater.
Two: The Algerian man’s choice of the path into the desert shows that force cannot wholly wipe out consciousness and the feeling of what is right or wrong in the community one belongs to. However, in many states, this originally imposed law in some form persists within the legal system and is nowadays – at least partially – oftentimes also acknowledged as binding or state law.[9]
And this is kind of the point and the challenge of pluralistic normative structures caused by colonisation:
Balancing different norms within one state which are not necessarily congruent.
[1] Aronson, Ronald, “Albert Camus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Winter 2022 Edition) <plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/camus/> (accessed 31 March 2025).
[2] See his biography under: <www.hdg.de/lemo/biografie/albert-camus.html> (accessed 31 March 2025).
[3] Violence was a constant instrument of oppression in Algeria. See eg <www.britannica.com/place/Algeria/Colonial-rule> (accessed 1 April 2025).
[4] Of course, there are many sub-categories which would be too much detail for the limited space of this blog post. Also, I would be happy about comments broadening my horizon as I come from German scholarship and thus am probably missing many approaches from other legal traditions.
[5] Cotterrell, Roger: The Sociology of Law (2nd edition London 1992) 137, calling this form of dominance the ‚absorbent state‘.
[6] Cotterrell, Roger: The Sociology of Law (2nd edition London 1992) 138.
[7] Dating back to the beginning of the 20th Century eg to Eugen Ehrlich’s Das lebende Recht der Völker der Bukowina (allgemeine Druckerei 1913) referring to the ’living law‘ distinguishing from the codified law at the time.
[8] Eg Chambliss, William J/ Seidman, Robert B: Law, Order and Power (Addison-Wesley Publishing 1971) 39, who call the codified norms ‘the institutionalized form of preexisting norms, developed in the course of the imperceptible, glacial movement of societies’.
[9] An overview over the Algerian legal system which is a combination of Islamic law and norms originating from French colonial law can be found here: <guides.loc.gov/law-algeria/introduction> (accessed 1 April 2025).
