THE French take not an unjustifiable pride in what they call their ‘cultural exception’. Following this line of thought, nation-wide accolades become inevitable every year to literary and artistic icons on their dates of birth or death.

This year proves to be very special if you take into account the great number of events devoted to the memories of three legends of modern French culture.

Jean Cocteau was an unusual character in every sense of the word. Descendant of an aristocratic line, he devoted practically his entire life and career to non-conformism and Bohemianism. But what a life, what a career! He was a writer, poet, painter, dramatist, actor, moviemaker and a book illustrator all rolled into one. People who remember him talking his head off night after night in the café-bars of the Latin Quarter in Paris still wonder when did he find time to do all those things.

His works include more than a dozen books of poetry, just as many of literary criticism, five novels, 10 films as director and about a dozen plays, not to speak of innumerable paintings and drawings.

The other great figure badly missed this year is Edith Piaf. Unlike Cocteau, she came from a very modest background. Daughter of a street acrobat, she herself became a sidewalk singer at age 15 and her entire relatively brief life was a succession of tragic events. Apart from recording more than 100 songs and working in eight films, la Môme Piaf, or the ‘Little Sparrow’ as she was called, is remembered today through 16 books, 21 plays and six movies about her career.

It was preordained that the two should meet. They became great friends and Cocteau wrote a play, ‘Le Bel Indifférent’, with a role especially created for her. Curiously enough, they died within a few hours of each other on the 10th and 11th of October 1963 _ he at age 74, she at 47. Apart from many TV channels and cultural centres in the major cities of France, the legendary Cinema MacMahon in Paris is paying a lavish tribute on the 50th anniversary of their deaths by showing during a whole week movies about Piaf and films directed by Cocteau.

Then there also is Albert Camus who would have turned 100 this year had he survived his accident and had he, to allow our imagination to stretch a bit further, not smoked so many cigarettes. He was born in 1913 in what was then the French colony of Algeria. Son of a French labourer and a Spanish cleaning lady, he showed extraordinary intelligence early on. He practically never knew his father who was drafted by the army and was killed during the First World War in 1914. Little Albert was raised in extreme poverty by his mother alone.

His early years as a brilliant student and then as a struggling journalist and intellectual were mainly spent in Algeria. It was not until 1937 when he was expelled from the Algerian Communist Party at age 24 for his views, considered too individualistic and against the party ideology, that Camus moved to France to work as a journalist and writer.

During the 23 years that were left to him, he wrote five novels, seven collections of short stories, 12 non-fiction and philosophical works as well as six plays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957. Although his creativity covers a vast horizon, Camus explains his philosophy in a long essay, ‘The Rebel’, in which he tries to prove that personalities famed for fighting against established orders were motivated not by ideology but by the force of personal conviction.

The work with which Camus is best identified is ‘The Stranger’. Here the main character fails to understand why we have to conform to norms imposed by society if we do not really believe in them. ‘The Stranger’ is a pleasant young man who is willing to do whatever is expected of him by his friends and his employer. He totally lacks prejudice and hypocrisy, to the extent that by the end of the story he becomes irksome to people close to him. When he faces a murder charge he answers the accusations according to what he believes is the truth, and against the advice of his own lawyer.

Albert Camus died in a car accident in central France on Jan 4, 1960, only two months after his 46th birthday. This year, to celebrate the 100th year of his birth, re events have been organized all over France and the public libraries in Paris - there are more than 30 of them in the capital - continue to hold lectures, discussions and readings from his books.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

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