The Effort of Each

Today is the fourteenth of July, the day France remembers a crowd that pulled down a fortress and changed the world. So it is the right day for a sentence Camus spoke to a hall full of workers at a labor exchange in 1953. Freedom, he told them, is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

For a whole month, in June, we studied freedom, and we tended to picture it as something personal, the open field, the wall you cross alone. Camus now completes the thought and hands it back to the crowd. Freedom is not passed down from above by a generous ruler or a benevolent state. Nothing granted from above can be counted on, because what is given can be taken back. Freedom that lasts has to be made from below, and it cannot be made by one person. It is won, he says, by the effort of each and the union of all. Each must do their part, and the parts must be joined.

This is where the freedom of June and the solidarity of July turn out to be the same thing. My freedom and yours are not really separate projects competing for room. They are one project, held up by many hands. The fortress did not fall to a lone hero. It fell to a union of the ordinary, each doing their small part together.

It is why the private search for freedom always, in the end, opens onto other people. You cannot stay free alone. Someone kept the door open for you, and someone is depending on you to keep it open for them.

Today, do your part in some freedom larger than your own. Add your small effort to a common one. Freedom is not waiting to be handed to you. It is waiting to be won, by each of us, together.