The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants

In college I read Camus and Sartre and other French writers of that ilk. I know I read The Plague and The Stranger, perhaps others. I was not taken by any of them. Perhaps I was a callow youth, perhaps I lacked sufficient contextual knowledge to appreciate them, perhaps they were bad translations. I could not comprehend why they were held in such regard.

But the negative perception has lasted and I don't think I have ever read anything further by Camus and perhaps only one or two things by Sartre.

I came across this passage by Albert Camus which causes me to rethink. Perhaps I did not appreciate their literature but might enjoy their essays? From Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1960, which includes this essay "Homage to an Exile", originally from a speech delivered on 7 December 1955 at a banquet in honor of President Eduardo Santos, editor of El Tiempo, driven out of Colombia by the dictatorship.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good conscience by shouting to them: if you want the happiness of the people, let them speak out and tell what kind of happiness they want and what kind they don't want! But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom.

That's a pretty contemporary view for our own times.

Reading Albert Camus's Wikiquote page is sufficient to motivate me to load up some electronic books of his. The essays, not the fiction. I am not ready to go that far yet.