pontificate

The pontificate is a brief, ironic episode in Jean-Baptiste Clamence's past, during his internment in a North African prison camp near Tripoli, where he was elected by his fellow prisoners to serve as a mock pope, a role that forced him to confront the burdens of authority, favoritism, and moral compromise, and which ultimately contributed to his later self-conception as a judge-penitent.

Origins and Election

The pontificate arose in a prison camp in North Africa, where Clamence was interned after the Allied landing in Algeria. The camp was a place of extreme deprivation: the prisoners suffered from thirst, destitution, heat, flies, sand, and lack of water. Among them was a young Frenchman of the Du Guesclin type, a Catholic who had crossed from France into Spain to fight, been interned by the Catholic general, and developed a profound melancholy after seeing that in the Franco camps the chick-peas were, as Clamence puts it, "blessed by Rome." This man, unhinged by his reflections and the sun, declared the need for a new pope who should live among the wretched instead of praying on a throne. He proposed that they choose a pope from among themselves, a complete man with his vices and virtues, on the sole condition that he agree to keep alive the community of their sufferings. When he asked who among them had the most failings, Clamence, as a joke, raised his hand and was the only one to do so. The Du Guesclin figure declared that nominating oneself presupposed the greatest virtue and proposed electing Clamence. The others agreed, in fun but with a trace of seriousness. Clamence himself was not altogether laughing; he considered that his little prophet was right, and the exhausting labor and struggle for water left them not up to snuff.

The Exercise of Authority

Clamence exercised his pontificate for several weeks, with increasing seriousness. His role was something like a group leader or the secretary of a cell; the other prisoners, even those who lacked faith, got into the habit of obeying him. The big problem in the camp was the water allotment. Other groups, political or sectarian, had formed, and each prisoner favored his comrades. Clamence was consequently led to favor his own, a first concession. Even among his own group, he could not maintain complete equality; according to his comrades' condition or the work they had to do, he gave an advantage to this or that one. He discovered that it was not as easy as he had thought to be a pope, and he remembered this later after giving a scornful speech on judges. The distinctions he made were far-reaching.

The Climactic Act and Its Consequences

The pontificate reached its defining moment when Clamence drank the water of a dying comrade. He convinced himself that the others needed him more than this fellow who was going to die anyway, and that he had a duty to keep himself alive for them. He notes that Du Guesclin was already dead by then, having stinted himself too much, and that had he been there, out of love for him Clamence would have resisted longer. But he drank the water, and this act, he reflects, is how empires and churches are born under the sun of death. The experience taught him that one must forgive the pope, because he needs it more than anyone else, and that is the only way to set oneself above him. The pontificate thus became a formative episode in Clamence's descent into the recognition of universal guilt, a precursor to his later profession as a judge-penitent, where he would again seek to dominate by first confessing his own crimes.