The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail, trans. Ethan Rundell, Vauban Books, 2025, £19.45.
In his introduction to the 2011 French edition of The Camp of the Saints, reprinted in this volume, Jean Raspail recounts that the deputy mayor of one of Frances’s largest cities always had a stack of the books prominently displayed on his desktop, saying to his visitors as he offered them a copy, ‘Read this, you will never be able to forget it.’ With this timely new translation into English by Ethan Rundell, the first since Norman Shapiro’s in 1975 (long unavailable), Anglophone readers will be able to discover why this book caused outrage on the progressive left, leading to Raspail being vilified by the French establishment, and why it has achieved the status of a cult classic among those who have not fallen for the penitential dream of a multi-ethnic, multicultural paradise – and were able to acquire a copy.
Raspail’s book, first published in 1973, is a savage assault on those who, consumed by self-loathing humanitarian universalism, would ‘immolate’ France, Europe and the West to create a multi-ethnic, multicultural paradise. It takes the form of a novel that depicts the passage of a fleet of 100 decrepit ships carrying a million of the destitute and impoverished from the banks of the Ganges destined for the Promised Land of Europe. If they, the vanguard, are allowed ashore, the fleet will be followed by countless others, who are already assembling. The French military have been ordered to the South of France and stand ready on the beaches to repel the invaders. They are already burning the bodies of the dead, who have washed ashore in their thousands, in giant funeral pyres. But will they fire on unarmed civilians, the poor and the wretched, starving and dying on the ships just offshore?
The novel is usually termed ‘dystopian’, which is how it might have appeared half a century ago, but ‘prophetic’ would now seem more fitting, given the unfolding panorama of mass immigration, migrant crossings and drownings, diversity ideology, ethnic ghettos, rising street crime, ‘white flight’ and the rest of it. The parallels are blinding. The only mystery is why the migrants do not take a leaf out of Raspail’s novel and arrive on decrepit old ships instead of boats. Who would stop them?
Inevitably, the book caused a storm, even back in 1973, both on account of its subject matter and the derogatory language it uses to depict the hordes of migrants. Indeed, Raspail notes that under subsequent French laws outlawing incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence on account of race, ethnicity or religion, his novel would now be unpublishable. Raspail’s descriptions of the migrants – ‘fermenting since Calcutta in their filth and shit’, ‘dung-rollers’, ‘shit-kneaders’, ‘Ganges dwarves’, and ‘little monsters’ (to describe the infants, sometimes deformed, held aloft by their mothers) – are certainly hair-raising. But to damn Raspail as a ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ (The New York Times) misses the point, even if the offence caused to progressive liberals is severe. Raspail is merely ridiculing the progressive fantasy, the self-loathing that depicts ‘the other’ as an unimpeachable moral saviour, and the angelism that envisages a multi-ethnic, multicultural paradise. Instead, he depicts the reality: that people prefer to live with their own kind (the prospect of a migrant invasion causes a mass flight of native French to the north); that no amount of prostration will appease the resentment of the other; and that mass immigration merely turns the West into the Third World, destroying the civilizational achievement that attracted the migrants in the first place.
Ironically, Raspail would be the last person to qualify as a ‘white supremacist’ having spent a lifetime documenting and defending the world’s vanishing indigenous peoples. These have been the central themes of his literature and travel writings, earning him France’s highest literary accolades. It is precisely because he values the variety of cultures and civilizations of the world’s peoples, and because he is haunted by those that have vanished (like the Lake Huron Indians of North America, in whose deserted village he encamped on an early expedition), that he wishes to defend the ancient peoples of Europe and their civilizations. He makes clear in his introduction that he has no objection to ‘racial mixing’ and welcomes those of all races who have come to love France, its history and its culture. He merely has no illusions about the multi-ethnic, multicultural paradise. In the Spectator (5 July), Gavin Mortimer expresses concern that Raspail blurs legitimate ‘demographic worries’ (a nice euphemism) with ‘outright nativism’. But since the declared project of France’s radical left, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, is the creation of a new France through ‘creolisation’ (Michel Onfray terms this the Left’s version of ‘The Great Replacement’) fed by mass immigration, the battle lines have already been drawn.
The book’s powerful opening scene neatly encapsulates what is at stake. An old professor, whose family have lived in the same Provencal hillside house for over 300 years, has been pondering how much time he has before his village is overrun, when he is disturbed by an uninvited guest – a self-loathing young humanitarian who has come to greet the migrants. The young man announces that he is looting because ‘it’s all mine now’ and ‘tomorrow, I’ll give it all to them’. Contemptuous of his own family for fleeing, he can’t wait to greet ‘his real family’ coming off the boats. He will ‘have a child with the first one I see, a dark child, and then I’ll no longer see myself in anyone’. France will ‘be reborn’. The young man promises to bring the most wretched of the new arrivals to the professor’s house to make a fire out of the ancient oak door and generally trash the place. The old gentleman steps quietly inside and comes out holding a shot gun. ‘I’m going to kill you’, he informs his guest. That evening, his soul at peace, the old gentleman dines alone for the last time, feasting on the finest local delicacies, gazing at the fine objects and books that fill the house, the fruits of past generations, the riches of a civilization. It is a final act of love.
The book flashes back to describe the armada’s voyage, the humanitarian rot that has infected Western societies rendering them powerless to resist, the growing violence and anarchy on the streets of the cities, the festering hatred and resentment of the servant and menial classes drawn largely from the Third World, who see the arrival of the armada as a signal for a general uprising. Meanwhile the great and the good, motivated by the spirit of universal brotherhood, compete with themselves to raise money for the Ganges migrants to speed them on their way. The Pope sells off the treasures of the Vatican but merely succeeds in showing the Third World how rich he is. Raspail’s story sweeps the reader along, and the scene is finally set for the denouement on the beaches.
This new English edition, from the redoubtable Vauban Books, is based on Raspail’s updated and revised 2011 edition and aims to keep more closely to the spirit of Raspail’s original. It is accompanied by a superb introductory essay by Nathan Pinkoski and Raspail’s own extended introduction to the 2011 edition, entitled ‘Big Other’, in which the author reflects on his book’s reception, the power of the progressive establishment (‘the Big Other’), and where we are now headed. Raspail expresses his perplexity at why educated Frenchmen seem bent on destroying their country, even denying the existence of the native French or a distinct national culture. He wonders whether he might himself be ‘of mixed race’ but can find no ‘exotic ancestry’ whatsoever. And he notes that faced with the prospect of living in a diversified neighbourhood with ‘mixed accommodation’, the native Frenchman packs his bags and ‘leaves for elsewhere’.
As for the future, Raspail sees two possibilities. The first is that a minority of isolates – who remain ‘stubbornly aware’ of French culture and history, and ‘not necessarily of the white race’ – will persist in parallel communities; but they will eventually be ‘brought to heel’, and France will become a nation of ‘hermit crabs’ living in the cast-off shells of a vanished people. The second is that the isolates will engage in ‘a sort of Reconquista’. He thinks this less likely, but suggests that, when the time is right, someone might write ‘a dangerous novel’ on the subject. Fourteen years on, there is no novel, but Raspail would, one suspects, be more than a little interested in the activities of one Éric Zemmour, the leader of Reconquȇte! who has written the blurb on the back of the book.
