On its publication, the book received praise from some prominent French literary figures, and through time has also been praised by some critics and politicians in Europe and the United States, but has also been criticized by both French and English-language commentators for conveying racist, xenophobic, nativist, and anti-immigration themes. The novel is popular within far-right and white nationalist circles.
Background
The novel was authored by novelist and explorer Jean Raspail.[1][2][3] He had written several books before The Camp of the Saints, mostly travel works or adventure fiction. Several sources noted the book to be very different from the rest of his writings.[2][4] Raspail has said his inspiration came while at the French Riviera in 1972, as he was looking out at the Mediterranean, he had a "vision":[2][5]
A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West. I literally saw them, saw the major problem they presented, a problem absolutely insoluble by our present moral standards. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.
In May of that year, he published a column outlining the novel.[4] Raspail spent ten months writing the book. During this time, he said this "vision" "never left me"; he described the book as a kind of emotional outpour.[2] The name of the book comes from a passage in the Book of Revelation depicting the apocalypse.[2][6] 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. (20:7–9 )
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.
Publication history
The Camp of the Saints was first published in French in 1973 by Éditions Robert Laffont.[7][8] The publisher believed the book would sell well, and to market the book printed 20,000 copies for an initial run and wrote over 350 letters marketing the book to established French booksellers.[5] Upon its release, the book sold decently at about 15,000 copies. However, a word-of-mouth campaign (influenced by the news of the Vietnamese boat people) in the next few years increased its popularity, and it sold 40,000 copies in the next few years.[5] The book continued to sell well and was reissued several times, including in 1981 and 1989 in paperback.[5] It was reissued in hardcover in 2002.[5]
An eighth French edition was published in February 2011, with a new preface called "Big Other". The publisher had initially refused to include "Big Other" for fear of being prosecuted for inciting racial hatred, but relented.[5] To market this edition, Raspail appeared on Frédéric Taddeï's talk show, Ce soir ou jamais. In March 2011, the book returned to the bestseller list, ranking in the top five in bookstores in France, and by April 2011 this edition had sold 20,000 copies.[5] All its editions have sold about half a million copies.[4]
An English language translation by Norman Shapiro was published by Scribner in 1975.[5][9] The publisher portrayed its publication as a major literary event,[10] with a major ad-campaign that used the phrase "the end of the white world is near".[11] The English translation sold well.[5] It was republished in mass market paperback format in 1977 by Ace Books in New York[12][13] and Sphere Books in London.[14][15]John Tanton acquired the rights to the book in 1994 and printed a softcover edition through his publishing company The Social Contract Press[16][17][18] in 1995.[13] The Winter 1994-1995 issue of The Social Contract Journal was a special edition released to coincide with the new printing of the book, each article dedicated to discussion of the book and its themes.[16][18][19] The book received a second English translation in 2025, done by Ethan Rundell and published by Vauban Books.[4]
Analysis
The Camp of the Saints is a work of dystopian or apocalyptic fiction.[1][9][17] A key element of the text is the supposed vulnerability of the West, having lost its soul to materialism and a fixation on empty things in a period of decline and decay. Hence, Europe is deserving of extinction and the West so easily succumbs to mass migration in the narrative.[17] The book's tone largely presents these events as hopeless or inevitable, increasingly apocalyptic as the story goes on.[17] The empathy and pity of the West towards non-white peoples is portrayed extremely negatively by Raspail, who presents it as their defining weakness that leads to their destruction.[6]
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."[8] Raspail presents the west as seized by a sort of neurotic self-loathing of itself and all it stands for.[6] Academic George Michael wrote that it was particularly the element of "a post–World War II Europe paralyzed by guilt" that was presented as making "the continent defenseless against the unwashed masses of the impoverished third world".[7] A commentator for The Atlantic Monthly said that while the white characters are given depth, the non-white characters are uniformly disparaged and portrayed negatively, and their white sympathizers are portrayed even more negatively.[2]
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.[20] 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."[3] Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus argues that The Camp of the Saints, with its apocalyptic 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.[21] The novel is popular within far-right and white nationalist circles.[1][22]
Reception
Initial reception
The Camp of the Saints received an initially positive reception in France, including from prominent literary figures, with eight out of ten critics focusing on the "prophetic" nature of the story.[8][23][11]Jean Cau, for example, wrote: "what if Raspail, with “Le Camp des Saints”, was neither a prophet nor a visionary novelist, but simply an implacable historian of our future?".[24] It was praised by journalist Bernard Pivot and intellectuals such as Jean Anouilh, Hervé Bazin, Michel Déon, Thierry Maulnier, and Louis Pauwels.;[23][5][25] however, two decades later, The Atlantic in the U.S. denied that the book had received a positive reception in France.[2] Anouilh called it "a haunting book of irresistible force and calm logic".[11] It has also been criticized by both French and English-language commentators for conveying racist, xenophobic, nativist, and anti-immigration themes.[1][2][8][26]
After the book was translated into English in 1975, it received several reviews from contemporary American outlets.[9][10][27]Edmund Fuller wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "it is possible that [The Camp of the Saints] [...] projects the most savage view of the human race since the 4th voyage of Lemuel Gulliver."[6]Kirkus Reviews compared the novel to Mein Kampf,[10] while Library Journal said it would "succeed in shocking and challenging the complacent, contemporary mind", and called it a "philosophical dissection of the erosion of Western civilization".[9]Publishers Weekly described it as "strange but remarkable", but with a certain inevitability of the plot that some readers may find unbearable.[25]Kirkus said of the book that it "takes important and chilling facts that very few people are willing to face, and digs into them like a hyena into carrion".[10] Richard R. Lingeman of The New York Times called it "avowedly racist" and said the experience of reading the book was "like being trapped at a cocktail party with a normal‐looking fellow who suddenly starts a perfervid racist diatribe".[27] Dale G. Copps in Bookletter (a spinoff of Harper's Magazine) described the book as a "powerful one, there is no denying that", with Raspail in "perfect and intricate command of his theme", yet also "dogmatic and propagandistic". He described the author's voice as "virulently racist" and said the book was a defense of white supremacy; Copps said Raspail "treats the overwhelming liberal bias with such scorn one wonders why he felt the Western world was even worth saving".[28]
Fuller called it far-rightist in political orientation, but said it portrayed even the right-wingers badly.[6] Fuller called it a "bitter, ugly, possibly destructive book", racist but with "moments of appalling power and occasionally a terrible beauty".[6] Paul Gray writing for Time magazine panned the novel as a "bilious tirade" that only required a response because it "arrives trailing clouds of praise from French savants" and from an established publisher.[11]Jeffrey Hart, in a 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."[29] Syndicated columnist Garry Wills 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.[30]
Later reception
In 1983, Linda Chavez called the novel "a sickening book", describing it as "racist, xenophobic and paranoid."[31] 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.[5] 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".[32] Neo-conservative writer Daniel Pipes has cited the work in the context of the "Islamization of the European continent", while Ronald F. Maxwell, who sympathized with the book's themes, considered making a feature film out of the novel.[7]Samuel P. Huntington was also influenced by the book.[5]
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."[33]
William F. Buckley, Jr. praised the book in 2004 as "a great novel" that raised questions on how to respond to massive illegal immigration,[34] 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'."[35] In 2005, the conservative Chilton Williamson praised the book as "one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century."[36] A review in The Times of the second English translation called it "savagely, even gleefully, racist" in its depiction of the migrants, but also "closely, horribly relevant to our dilemmas".[4]
The book has become popular among some far-right politicians.[4] It has been favorably referred to by Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump's former Chief Strategist.[1][37][19][38] It has also been promoted by Trump's former senior policy advisor Stephen Miller,[1] GOP Congressman Steve King,[1] French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen[1] and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.[39] A 2001 report from the SPLC described the novel as "the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US".[20]
1 2 Deschodt, Éric (April 1985). "Utopies en noir". Le Spectacle du Monde (in French). Paris. p.71. ISSN0049-5794– via Google Books. 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...
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