PARIS: Fifty years after his death, writer Albert Camus is again the focus of controversy, as the left accuses French President Nicolas Sarkozy of trying to co-opt a thinker they claim as their own.

Camus, when he died in a Paris car crash on January 4, 1960, aged only 46, was one of the leading literary figures of his day, having won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1957.

But Sarkozy’s proposal in November to honour him by having his remains installed in the Pantheon, the resting place for French national heroes, provoked a wave of protest from France’s left.

Many commentators argued that Sarkozy was trying to exploit the left-wing philosopher’s legacy for political gain, and among those objecting was the writer’s son, Jean Camus.

His daughter Catherine, however, objected that the critics were themselves using the memory of her father for their own ends.

“I have seen my father

being transformed into

an anti-Sarkozy missile,”

she told RTL radio. But she

did admit she was surprised that the president had

proposed to honour her father in this way.

“Men of power do not usually like Camus,” she

said. Born on November 7, 1913, in Algeria, Camus

came from a very poor background. But his potential was quickly spotted by a teacher who encouraged him to develop his talents.

He published his first

book at the age of 24, then moved to Paris.

When much of France was occupied by the Nazis during World War II, he became active in the Resistance writing for and editing the underground newspaper Combat.

By the end of the war

in 1945 Camus had already published a number of key works, including “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus”, both in 1942.

“The Stranger” — also titled “The Outsider” in some English editions — became an international bestseller.

The story of a curiously emotionless man, a white Algerian, who shoots an Arab dead, it is told in the spare and limpid style for which Camus became known.

Camus’s writing, both his fiction and non-fiction, was about the search for meaning in life and the need to revolt.

While associated with

the left, he was nevertheless very much his own man

intellectually.

In 1945, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city

of Hiroshima, he was one

of the few western intellectuals to denounce it.

But unlike many radical writers of his generation, he also denounced the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, clashing bitterly on this question with Jean-Paul Sartre, the other leading French intellectual of the day.

For his biographer Olivier Todd, Camus was “ a dangerous writer”, challenging the ideological dogma that the end justified the means.

The idea of his remains finishing up in the Pantheon is anathema to Todd.

“That has nothing at

all to do with his personality,” he insisted.

Catherine Camus has still not said whether she would like to see her father honoured in this way.