Enemy of the Disaster: Selected political writings, Renaud Camus, Vauban Books, 2023, £19.99.
Renaud Camus is one of France’s most prolific writers, an accomplished stylist, who has published some 150 books including historical novels, art criticism, works on topography, philosophy, politics, and voluminous journals. His work is virtually unknown among Anglophone readers because hardly any of it has been translated into English. But mention his name in polite society, or in the public arena, and one runs the real risk of being reported under the government’s Prevent strategy as a proponent of “cultural nationalism”, which falls under the category “extreme right-wing terrorist ideology”.
Camus’s infamy derives, of course, from his formulating “The Great Replacement”, which, according to Wikipedia, is a “white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory” in which a global elite is seeking to replace white European populations with non-white peoples. Several far-right terrorists who have perpetrated mass killings claim to have been influenced by it. And Camus himself has been dropped by his original French publishers, put on trial for inciting racial hatred, and accused of antisemitism – “banished everywhere”, he declared in 2017. Yet Camus has consistently rejected the notion that there is a plot to replace the white populations of Europe, declared the Holocaust to be “the most extreme point of abomination that humanity has ever attained”, condemned the persecution of ethnic minorities, and opposed all forms of violence – not the conventional recipe for a white supremacist, or indeed a terrorist. Moreover, if Camus is to be branded an extremist, so also must two thirds of the French population, for a survey in 2021 revealed that 67 per cent of the French public, including a remarkable 44 per cent of voters on the Left, believe the Great Replacement is taking place.
Fortunately, thanks to Vauban Books, a selection of Renaud Camus’s political writings has at last appeared in English, giving Anglophone readers the opportunity to judge Camus for themselves. The Enemy of the Disaster conveys the essence of Camus’s political thinking and includes an invaluable introduction by Louis Betty, which puts the life and trials of Camus into much-needed context. It is superbly translated and edited, with meticulous and enjoyably mischievous notes providing the necessary background in French politics, culture, and history for the Anglophone reader.
For Camus, the Great Replacement is not a plot but merely an observable phenomenon across Europe: “the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question”. Where there was once one people, there is now another – something Camus first observed to his disquiet in the coastal regions of Languedoc, where ancient towns and villages had, over only a generation or two, acquired non-European populations. It is, he insists, “the single most important historical phenomenon … that France has experienced in the course of her history since it is bringing that history to an end”.
The essential pre-condition for the Great Replacement, argues Camus, is “the Great Deculturation”, the process by which the high culture traditionally transmitted by an aristocratic elite, a bourgeois class, is levelled. This process, which has been gathering pace over 60 years, has two main causes: the rise of “hyper-democracy”, which seeks to erase all forms of privilege and elitism; and the advent of the “sacred dogma” of anti-racism, an extreme delayed reaction to the Holocaust and European colonialism, which sees the Europe of old as eternally damned, and whose Newspeak has made any reference to the terms race, ethnicities, peoples, civilizations, nations, or origins in relation to the white populations of Europe taboo. All this has been reinforced by the advent of global capitalism, whose profits are served by the replacement of distinct national cultures by a global consumer culture, the creation of a “liquified humanity”.
Camus especially laments the demise of the term race, not in the perverse sense in which it was deployed by the Nazis, but the “rich and complex” sense attached to its use in French language and literature, from Racine to De Gaulle, which invokes “a long-shared history” and a deep sense of belonging to France. But the use of any term, or argument, with the slightest connection to Hitler, “to anything he did, anything he wrote, anything he thought”, is enough to mark one as a racist, a Nazi, and for anti-racists to “kill on sight”.
The effect of the Great Deculturation, then, has been to delegitimize the notion that distinct peoples bearing distinct cultures exist, or have ever existed, in Europe, leaving it defenceless against incoming non-European populations who, untainted by Nazism, have no intention of committing civilizational suicide. It is as if Europe were a patient who had suffered from a terrible cancer, Hitlerism, and who is endlessly operated on by a team of over-zealous surgeons. Not content with curing the patient, the surgeons decide to prevent any re-occurrence by removing all the vital organs, along with “all vital functions, instinct for survival, and desire for life”, and replacing them with “cold, artificial machinery”. The patient remains “officially alive” but can no longer feel or respond to anything.
The mantra that France “has always been a country of immigration”, in fact, was “created by foreigners”, and that therefore all occupants of France are “equally French”, is peddled insistently – just like its equivalent in this country. But if those who love France and are rooted in its culture and traditions are as French as those who consider a foreign country to be their true homeland, who “dance and shout for joy while waving a foreign flag when France is beaten or humiliated in some sporting event”, then being French cannot mean very much. Camus pays tribute to the contributions of past immigrants – Marie Curie, for example. But they came as individuals, not whole peoples. And the notion that “France only became France … after immigration came bearing the spark of life” is palpable nonsense. Camus quotes the famous words of De Gaulle – now unutterable – on the subject: that if ten million Muslims were to move to France, “France will no longer be France”.
Camus sees no point in trying to restore Christianity. “Alas, faith cannot be compelled”, and against the dynamism of Islam, “a half-dead religion is no match”. The only hope of averting “its mad journey toward the dustbins of history” is for France to “close herself off completely … to those who claim to settle here in order to rebuild on her territory the type of society they have left”; and then to defend and promote French culture “from within and without”:
Faced with the massed legions of the Great Replacement, we must ever more firmly assert our desire to keep our culture, our language of course, our art de vivre and way of being, our religion or what is left of it, our landscapes or what remains of them, our laws, mores, habits, dishes, and freedoms.
Camus is not the only writer to question the ideologies of anti-racism, multiculturalism, and diversity. Douglas Murray, Samuel Huntingdon, and Christopher Caldwell all come to mind. But Camus is exceptional, both for the depth and coherence of his analysis, and for the sheer force and eloquence of his prose. Camus is a master of rhetoric who employs its devices to maximum effect. The dazed reader is swept along. The metaphors stun. Irony is deployed to brutal effect. Above all, Camus is determined to confront reality, to speak the truth, to say the unsayable. His opponents, those who collude in the Great Replacement, are skewered and flayed. Camus has no counterpart in the Anglophone world.
Although Camus’s arguments are directed primarily to the French context, they apply almost word for word to our own. He makes frequent mention of England, whose situation closely parallels that of France, and for which he holds admiration and affection, just as he laments its tragic loss. However, Camus stands in sharp contrast to English conservatives who, though outspoken in condemning the deranged ideology of transgenderism, adopt a decorous silence on the existential cultural and civilizational question of our time for fear of being branded “racist”. It is vital that they, above all, read Camus before it is too late.
