Raspail has said his inspiration came while at the French Riviera in 1971, as he was looking out at the Mediterranean.
What if they were to come? I did not know who "they" were, but it seemed inevitable to me that the numberless disinherited people of the South would, like a tidal wave, set sail one day for this opulent shore, our fortunate country's wide-gaping frontier.[13]
The name of the book comes from a passage in the Book of Revelation (20:7–9 ) depicting the apocalypse. Satan influences most of the nations of the Earth to gather for one final battle against "the camp of the saints," before being defeated for eternity:
And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them.[14]
Plot
In Calcutta, India, Catholic priests promote the adoption of Indian children by those back in Belgium as a form of charity. When the Belgian government realizes that the number of Indian children raised in Belgium has reached 40,000 in just five years, an emergency policy attempts to halt the migration. Desperate for the chance to send their children to what they call a "land of plenty", a mob of desperate Indians swarms the consulate. As a Belgian aid worker works through the crowd, an Indian gong farmer known only as "the turd eater", carrying aloft his monstrously deformed child, begs him to take them back to Europe, to which the worker agrees.
The worker and farmer bring the crowd to the docks, where there are hundreds of ships once owned by European powers, now suited only for river traffic. Nevertheless, the crowd boards, and a hundred ships soon leave for Europe; conditions on board are cramped, unsanitary and miserable, with many passengers including children publicly fornicating. As the ships pass "the straits of Ceylon", helicopters swarm overhead, capturing images of the migrants on board to be published in Europe. Meanwhile, on the Russian Far East, the Soviet troops see masses of Chinese ready to enter Siberia but are reluctant to fight them.
As the fleet crosses the Indian Ocean, the political situation in France becomes more charged. At a press conference about the crisis, a French official who offers a speech in praise of the migrants is confronted by a journalist who claims he is merely trying to "feed the invaders" and demands to know if France will "have the courage to stand up to" the migrants when they reach France. The official decries this question as morally offensive and threatens to throw the journalist out when he continues to yell. Other journalists seek to inflame tensions between the French and Africans and Arabs already living in the country. Over time, these journalists begin to write that the migrant fleet is on a mission to "enrich, cleanse and redeem the Capitalist West". At the same time as the fleet is praised by those in Paris, the people of Southern France, terrified of the migrants' arrival, flee to the north.
As the fleet approaches the Suez Canal, Egyptian military forces fire a warning shot, causing the fleet to steer south, around the Cape of Good Hope. To the surprise of observers, the apartheid regime of South Africa floats out barges of food and supplies, which the migrants throw overboard. The international press is thrilled, believing the rejection of these supplies to be a political statement against the apartheid South African regime. Western leaders, confident the migrants will accept supplies from their "more virtuous" nations, organize a supply mission, funded by governments, charities, rock stars and major churches, to meet the migrants off São Tomé. However, the fleet does not stop for these barges either, and when a worker from the Pope's barge attempts to board one of the ships, he is strangled and thrown overboard. The press attempts to contain coverage of the murder.
When the migrants pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, the French president orders troops to the south and addresses the nation with his plan to repel them. However, in the middle of the address, he breaks down, demanding the troops simply follow their consciences instead. Most of the troops immediately desert their posts and join the civilians as they flee north, and the south is quickly overrun by the migrants. Some of the last troops to stand their ground take refuge in a small village, along with Calguès, an old man who has chosen to remain at his home, and Hamadura, a Westernized Indian who is terrified of his "filthy, brutish" countrymen and prides himself on having more in common with whites than Indians. The troops in this village, a total of nineteen Frenchmen and one Indian, surrounded by what they deem "occupied territory", remain the last defense of Western values and "Free France" against the immigrants.
The immigrants make their way north, having no desire to assimilate to French culture, but continuing to demand a First World standard of living, even as they flout laws, do not produce, and murder French citizens, such as factory bosses and shopkeepers, as well as the ordinary people who do not welcome them. They are also joined by the immigrants who already reside in Europe, as well as various left-wing and anarchist groups. Across the West, more and more migrants arrive and have children, rapidly growing to outnumber whites. In a matter of months, the white West has been overrun and pro-immigrant governments have been established, while the white people are ordered to share their houses and flats with the immigrants. The village containing the troops is bombed flat by airplanes of the new French government, referred to only as the "Paris Multiracial Commune". Within a few years, most Western governments have surrendered. The mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three African-American families from Harlem; migrants gather at coastal ports in West Africa and South Asia and swarm into Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; London is taken over by an organization of non-white residents known as the "Non-European Commonwealth Committee", who force the British queen to have her son marry a Pakistani woman; millions of black Africans from around the continent gather at the Limpopo River and invade South Africa; and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants as they overrun Siberia.
The epilogue reveals that the story was written in the last holdout of the Western world, Switzerland, but international pressure from the new governments, isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders, along with internal pro-migrant elements, force it to capitulate as well. Mere hours from the border opening, the author dedicates the book to his grandchildren, in the hopes they will grow up in a world where they will not be ashamed of him for writing such a book.
Analysis
According to literary scholar Jean-Marc Moura, native French people are described in the novel as "[giving] in without a blow to the hyperbolic egalitarianism that 'swallows' them down to the rank of third-world men ... In such a context, racist deviations are inevitable ... The plot is thus biased, since the cards are dealt in such a way that racism and ostracism become conditions for survival. By painting the Third World in such aggressive colours, it gives Western characters little choice: destroy or die."[10]
In 2001, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described The Camp of the Saints as "widely revered by American white supremacists" and "a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries", and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory.[15] Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter for the SPLC, notes that "[t]he premise of Camp of the Saints plays directly into that idea of white genocide. It is the idea that through immigration, if it's left unchecked, the racial character and content of a culture can be undermined to the point of oblivion."[16] Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus argues that The Camp of the Saints, with its apocalyptical vision of a sudden and violent mass migration swarming towards Europe, is even more radical than Renaud Camus' Great Replacement theory, and therefore probably more influential on white nationalistterrorists.[17]
After the book was translated into English in 1975, journalist Max Lerner wrote that it had "irresistible pace of skill and narrative".[20] Philosopher Sidney Hook said that it would "succeed in shocking and challenging the complacent contemporary mind."[20] In 1975, Time magazine panned the novel as a "bilious tirade" that only required a response because it "arrives trailing clouds of praise from French savants, including dramatist Jean Anouilh ('A haunting book of irresistible force and calm logic'), with the imprint of a respected U.S. publisher and a teasing pre-publication ad campaign ('The end of the white world is near')".[21]
Jeffrey Hart, in a 1975 National Review article, mocked the rejection of the novel by critics, deriding them as "respectable, comfortable reviewers", and lauded the book in those terms: "in freer and more intelligent circles in Europe, the book is a sensation and Raspail is a prize-winner[...] his plot is both simple and brilliant."[22] Syndicated columnist Garry Wills, writing in the Journal Inquirer, condemned the embrace of the novel by the "more 'respectable' channels" of American right-wing media, including Jeffrey Hart, drawing parallels between the "racial implications" of the book and the National Review's "overtly racist analysis" of school integration efforts.[23]Kirkus Reviews compared the novel to Mein Kampf.[24] In 1983, Linda Chavez called the novel "a sickening book", describing it as "racist, xenophobic and paranoid."[25]
In the early 1980s, the director of the French intelligence service SDECE, Alexandre de Marenches, gave a copy of the book to Ronald Reagan, who reportedly stated that he was "terribly impressed" with it.[4] The December 1994 cover story of The Atlantic Monthly focused on the themes of the novel, analyzing them in the context of international relations, while describing it as "the most politically incorrect book in France in the second half of the twentieth century".[2] Its authors, British historian Paul Kennedy and Columbia professor Matthew Connelly further wrote, "many members of the more prosperous economies are beginning to agree with Raspail's vision".[26]
Later reception
In 2002, columnist Lionel Shriver described the novel as "both prescient and appalling", certainly "racist" but "written with tremendous verbal energy and passion." Shriver writes that the book "gives bilious voice to an emotion whose expression is increasingly taboo in the West, but that can grow only more virulent when suppressed: the fierce resentment felt by majority populations when that status seems threatened."[27]
William F. Buckley, Jr. praised the book in 2004 as "a great novel" that raised questions on how to respond to massive illegal immigration,[28] and in 2014, Mackubin Thomas Owens noted Buckley's praise of it, while remarking that "Raspail was ahead of his time in demonstrating that Western civilization had lost its sense of purpose and history—its 'exceptionalism'."[29] In 2005, the conservative Chilton Williamson praised the book as "one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century."[30]
In March 2011, the book returned to the bestseller list, ranking in the top five in bookstores in France.[4] It has been favorably referred to by Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump's former Chief Strategist.[31][32][1][33] It has also been promoted by Trump's former senior policy advisor Stephen Miller,[1][34] GOP Congressman Steve King,[1] French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen[1] and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.[35] A 2001 report from the SPLC described the novel as "the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US".[36]
On February 26, 2021, the Australian Classification Board classified the book as "Unrestricted", without the consumer advice letter M for Mature, meaning that it was not found inappropriate for children under fifteen.[37]
The White Australia policy was a set of racial policies that aimed to forbid people of non-European ethnic origins – especially Asians and Pacific Islanders – from immigrating to Australia in order to create a "white/British" ideal focused on but not exclusively Anglo-Celtic peoples. Pre-Federation, the Australian colonies passed many anti-Chinese immigration laws mainly using Poll Taxes, with Federation in 1901 came discrimination based on the Dictation Test, which effectively gave power to immigration officials to racially discriminate without mentioning race. The policy also affected immigrants from Germany, Italy, and other European countries, especially in wartime. Governments progressively dismantled such policies between 1949 and 1973, when the Whitlam government removed the last racial elements of Australia's immigration laws.
The demography of France is monitored by the Institut national d'études démographiques (INED) and the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE). As of 1 January 2021, 66,142,961 people lived in Metropolitan France, while 2,230,472 lived in overseas France, for a total of 68,373,433 inhabitants in the French Republic.
Jean Raspail was a French explorer, novelist, and travel writer. Many of his books are about historical figures, exploration and indigenous peoples. He was a recipient of the prestigious French literary awards Grand Prix du Roman and Grand Prix de littérature by the Académie française. The French government honoured him in 2003 by appointing him to the Legion of Honor, with the grade of Officer. Internationally, he is best known for his controversial 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which is about mass third-world immigration to Europe.
The immigration history of Australia began with the initial human migration to the continent around 80,000 years ago when the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians arrived on the continent via the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea. From the early 17th century onwards, the continent experienced the first coastal landings and exploration by European explorers. Permanent European settlement began in 1788 with the establishment of a British penal colony in New South Wales. From early federation in 1901, Australia maintained the White Australia Policy, which was abolished after World War II, heralding the modern era of multiculturalism in Australia. From the late 1970s there was a significant increase in immigration from Asian and other non-European countries.
The Social Contract Press (SCP) is an American publisher of white nationalist and anti-immigrant literature. It is a program of U.S. Inc., a foundation formed by John Tanton, who was called by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) "the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement". Founded in 1990, it publishes the quarterly Social Contract journal, as well as reprints and new works.
According to the French National Institute of Statistics INSEE, the 2021 census counted nearly 7 million immigrants in France, representing 10.3% of the total population. This is a decrease from INSEE statistics in 2018 in which there were 9 million immigrants in France, which at the time represented 14% of the country's total population.
Post-war immigration to Australia deals with migration to Australia in the decades immediately following World War II, and in particular refers to the predominantly European wave of immigration which occurred between 1945 and the end of the White Australia policy in 1973. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Ben Chifley, Prime Minister of Australia (1945–1949), established the federal Department of Immigration to administer a large-scale immigration program. Chifley commissioned a report on the subject which found that Australia was in urgent need of a larger population for the purposes of defence and development and it recommended a 1% annual increase in population through increased immigration.
African immigrants in Europe are individuals residing in Europe who were born in Africa. This includes both individuals born in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Opposition to immigration, also known as anti-immigration, is a political ideology that seeks to restrict immigration. In the modern sense, immigration refers to the entry of people from one state or territory into another state or territory in which they are not citizens. Illegal immigration occurs when people immigrate to a country without having official permission to do so. Opposition to immigration ranges from calls for various immigration reforms, to proposals to completely restrict immigration, to calls for repatriation of existing immigrants.
The Chinese diaspora in France consists of people of Chinese origin who were born in or immigrated to France. Chinese form the second largest Asian group in France, with a population of roughly 600,000 as of 2017.
Renaud Camus is a French novelist and conspiracy theorist. He is the inventor of the "Great Replacement", a far-right conspiracy theory that claims that a "global elite" is colluding against the white population of Europe to replace them with non-European peoples.
Immigration to Europe has a long history, but increased substantially after World War II. Western European countries, especially, saw high growth in immigration post 1945, and many European nations today have sizeable immigrant populations, both of European and non-European origin. In contemporary globalization, migrations to Europe have accelerated in speed and scale. Over the last decades, there has been an increase in negative attitudes towards immigration, and many studies have emphasized marked differences in the strength of anti-immigrant attitudes among European countries.
Turks in France also called the Turkish-French community, French Turks or Franco-Turks refers to the ethnic Turkish people who live in France. The majority of French Turks descend from the Republic of Turkey; however there has also been Turkish migration from other post-Ottoman countries including ethnic Turkish communities which have come to France from North Africa, the Balkans, the island of Cyprus, and more recently Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. There has also been migration to France from the Turkish diaspora
Racism has been called a serious social issue in French society, despite a widespread public belief that racism does not exist on a serious scale in France. Antisemitism and prejudice against Muslims have a long history. Acts of racism have been reported against members of various minority groups, including Jews, Berbers, Arabs and Asian. Police data from 2019 indicates a total of 1,142 acts classified as "racist" without a religious connotation.
The deportation of Roma migrants from France was subject of intense political debate in France and internationally in 2009 and 2010. After two fatal incidents, President of France Nicolas Sarkozy vowed in July 2010 to evict at least half of the 539 Roma squatting in land camps. The Government of France initiated a program to repatriate thousands of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma, as part of the crackdown. Between July and September 2010, at least 51 Roma camps were demolished, and France has repatriated at least 1,230 Roma to Romania and Bulgaria.
Sire is a 1991 novel by the French writer Jean Raspail. It tells the story of how monarchy returns to France as the 18-year-old Philippe Pharamond de Bourbon ascends the throne in 1999. The novel received the Grand prix du roman de la Ville de Paris and the Alfred de Vigny Prize.
The Great Replacement, also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory espoused by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."
Remigration, also called repatriation, is a far-right and Identitarian political concept referring to the forced or promoted return of non-ethnically European immigrants, often including their descendants who were born in Europe, back to their place of racial origin, typically with no regard for their citizenship. It is popular especially within the Identitarian movement in Europe. Some proponents of remigration suggest excluding some residents with non-European background from such a mass deportation, based on a varyingly-defined degree of assimilation into European culture.
Immigrant invasion—or similar phrases that imply that "immigrants are invading the homeland", is a rhetoric that is allegedly used by those who favor nativist, nationalist, and sometimes racist or xenophobic policies.
Asian immigration to Australia refers to immigration to Australia from part of the continent of Asia, which includes East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.The first major wave of Asian immigration to Australia occurred in the late 19th century, but the exclusionary White Australia policy, which was implemented to restrict non-European immigration, made it difficult for many Asian immigrants to migrate to the country. However, with the passage of the Migration Act 1958, the White Australia policy began to be phased out and Asian immigration to Australia increased significantly. Today, Asian immigrants from a wide range of countries play an important role in the cultural and economic landscape of Australia.
References
1 2 3 4 5 6 Peltier, Elian; Kulish, Nicholas (22 November 2019). "A Racist Book's Malign and Lingering Influence". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 22 November 2019. Retrieved 28 March 2020. Raspail drew on his experience documenting endangered communities in Latin America and elsewhere to imagine what waves of outsiders would mean for France's culture, language and population.
1 2 "Le camp des saints finit par obtenir une critique imposante, non pas tant par le volume (demeuré incomparable à celui que provoque le moindre texte d'une vedette de variétés) que par la qualité de ses laudateurs. Ils s'appellent Anouilh, Bazin, Cau, Clavel, Déon, Dutourd, Fourastié, Maulnier, Pauwels..." Deschodt, Eric (April 1985). Utopies en noir (in French). Le Spectacle du monde. p.71.
↑ "arrives trailing clouds of praise from French savants, including Dramatist Jean Anouilh" Gray, Paul (4 August 1975). "Poor White Trash". Time. Archived from the original on 15 August 2007. Retrieved 27 January 2014.
1 2 Moura, Jean-Marc (1988). "Littérature et idéologie de la migration: " Le camp des Saints " de Jean Raspail". Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales. 4 (3): 120. doi:10.3406/remi.1988.1182. [c]èdent sans coup férir à l'égalitarisme hyperbolique qui les 'ravale' au rang des hommes du tiers monde. (…) Dans un tel contexte, les déviations racistes sont inévitables. (…) Intrigue biaisée que celle-là, où les cartes sont distribuées de telle manière que le racisme et l'ostracisme deviennent des conditions de survie. À peindre le tiers-monde sous des couleurs aussi agressives, elle ne donne plus guère le choix aux personnages occidentaux: il faut détruire ou mourir.
↑ Moura, Jean-Marc (1988). "Littérature et idéologie de la migration: "Le camp des Saints" de Jean Raspail". Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (in French). 4 (3): 115–124. doi:10.3406/remi.1988.1182. ISSN0765-0752. ... a connu de nombreuses traductions et, en France, un accueil critique favorable.
↑ Zolberg, Aristide R (2006). "Managing a World on the Move". Population and Development Review. 32 (The Political Economy of Global Population Change, 1950–2050). Population Council, Wiley: 235. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.tb00009.x. ISSN0098-7921. JSTOR20058950. Kennedy and his coauthor evoked an impending apocalypse: "Many members of the more prosperous economies are beginning to agree with Raspail's vision"
↑ Posner, Sarah (2020). Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. Random House. ISBN9781984820426.
↑ Fears, Danika (12 November 2019). "Stephen Miller Pushed Racist Stories to Breitbart, Leaked Emails Show". The Daily Beast. Archived from the original on 12 November 2019. Retrieved 12 November 2019. Throughout their correspondence, Miller promoted racist ideas, sending her links from the white-nationalist website VDARE and recommending The Camp of the Saints, a French novel popular among neo-Nazis for its perpetuation of the "white genocide" myth.
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