His aim was to start by placing a limitation on the murderous character of the war through a “truce” that would outlaw all attacks on civilian non-combatants. … From the beginning the odds were heavily weighted against this idealistic sortie by Camus, perhaps a more effective writer than a politician. In France, led by his old friends Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the Left had dismissed him as a “bourgeois” renegade because of his criticism of repression in Stalinist Russia; acidly Simone de Beauvoir remarked that his language “had never sounded hollower than when he demanded pity for the civilians. The conflict was one between two civilian communities.” In Algeria the Muslims felt (not entirely without reason) that he understood their predicament less well than that of his own petit blancs; while to a large body of the more conservative pieds noirs he was totally suspect. Worst of all, the two men whom Camus selected as the Muslim lynch-pin of his campaign—Mohamed Lebjaoui, a prosperous middle-class merchant, and Amar Ouzegane, leader of the Algerian Communist Party and an old friend of Camus from his Communist days—had both become, secretly and unknown to Camus, members of the F.L.N. They decided to “penetrate” thoroughly the “civil truce” organisation and use it for their own purposes as an instrument of F.L.N. propaganda.

XREF: Connects to Camus's contradictions in the Algerian war, and to Edward Said's critique of Camus in Culture and Imperialism.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 394