Last month, the 300th anniversary of Denis Diderot's birth prompted François Hollande to talk of reburying his bones in the Panthéon, the shrine of national heroes. Thursday's centenary of Albert Camus' birth, in contrast, has not seen the kind of festivities you might expect, either in the French capital or his childhood home, Algiers.
The lead role in feting him in France was reportedly assigned to Marseille, one of the current European capitals of culture, and a reasonable choice as Camus bought a house in Provence (which faces Algeria across the Mediterranean) two years before his death in a car crash in 1960, and is buried there. But, whether due to cock-up or conspiracy, Marseille-Provence 2013 has been as grudging as Paris in what it has offered by way of celebration. Camus was hence robbed of a big national "hommage", noted Le Point magazine, but at least "took the most beautiful of revenges on Google", which honoured him with its Doodle on Thursday.
Although The Outsider and The Plague are both set in Algeria, a full-blown Camus anniversary tribute there was always less likely. He came from a pied-noir (European settler) family, put the killing of an Arab at the centre of his best-known novel, and was (rightly or wrongly) seen as siding with France in his writings on the postwar independence struggle; as a result, "not a single official commemoration" took place in his native country, following the authorities' ban in 2010 on plans to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.
The continent as a whole has disowned him, in fact: although he was the first African-born Nobel literature laureate – and the second African-born laureate across all categories – the African Union's website's list of "Africa and diaspora" Nobel winners omits him, while welcoming Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as members of the diaspora.
For Algerians, the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy championed him when president – in unsuccessfully urging the transfer of Camus' body to the Panthéon, he was in effect appropriating him as French, not Algerian or Mediterranean – can't have helped. So on his 100th birthday, Camus was again an outsider, without a proper cake and belonging fully to neither. Which may be exactly what he would have wanted.