A great writer and an outstanding moral figure of the twentieth century was responsible for the next text we are to analyse: Caligula by Albert Camus. Hannah Arendt, writing to her husband from Paris, described him as ‘the best man in France’. Yet in his lifetime the novelist, a Nobel laureate, beloved of thousands of readers, remained, as is well known, at times isolated and unheeded in a period of ideological conflicts, of opposed blocs and the maîtres à penser of the century. Today, however, a revaluation is rightly under way. His moral authority, lucidity, courage and intellectual substance are restoring his authority. His distinctive identity is unusual among intellectuals, embracing both his modest origins in the African periphery and the bourgeois circles of the intellectual capital of Europe. His familiarity with literary culture and the true, living culture of the theatre, his militant antifascist engagement and his independent, honesty of judgement – all these qualities today exert a new fascination.

And his position on the theme of the theatre of the tragic today appears both profound and extremely fruitful. The text presents another side of the modern elaboration of the tragic consciousness, the representation of an absolute passion, of life, love, power, creating a short circuit between man and God. This leads to the man becoming a tyrant and mistaking himself for a god against the backdrop of the absurd, the denial of meaning. The results is that he ravages the world and plunges it into chaos.