The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail is one of the most interesting and controversial novels of the 20th century. Which is why it’s good news that Vauban Books, a small publishing house, is coming out with a new edition, complete with a fresh translation by scholar Ethan Rundell. English-language copies of the book, first published in the U.S. in 1975, have been passed around like samizdat. The Camp of the Saints became popular again in the 2010s, but the rightsholders refused to reprint it until Vauban managed to secure the rights.
The Camp of the Saints depicts mass immigration destroying European civilization. In the novel a gigantic flotilla of boats filled with destitute Indians sets course for France to seek refugee status. After much handwringing, the government allows them to land rather than take the only other option available, which is to massacre them. France—and very quickly all of Europe—turns into a dystopian Third-World slum.
Raspail’s novel was written in the 1970s when the “boat people” fled Vietnam for Europe. The book caused an enormous sensation—it was a bestseller in France and the U.S., and eventually globally. Many have hailed it as a great and important work of prophecy. But, predictably, it was then and is now denounced as a horribly racist screed that only white supremacists would be interested in reading.
Contrary to the critics, The Camp of the Saints is a great novel, and Jean Raspail is a great writer. You should do yourself a favor and read it.
What of the book’s supposed racism? Well, it certainly contains much imagery that will shock the American reader. The Indian refugees are portrayed in vivid passages as wholly disgusting and bestial.
However, here I must point out a number of things. First, it seems that American and French cultures have different definitions of what counts as “racist.” To this Frenchman, it has always seemed puzzling that Americans seem to separate the signified and the signifier, or the thing itself and the intent. In American culture, any grossly negative or caricatured portrayal of a non-white person is seen as “racist” regardless of what was meant by it. “Blackface” is considered malum in se regardless of whether it’s done to wound or express contempt for a group of people, or whether one just decided to attend a costume party. (A French athlete was recently embroiled in controversy when he proudly posted photos of himself dressed up as a Harlem Globetrotter, in what he clearly intended to be a laudatory homage to a group he admired.)
This bizarre American form of Tourette’s can sometimes become downright vile: while the bodies of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, who had been murdered by Islamic terrorists for their refusal to stop mocking Islam, were still warm, American cultural commentators denounced their drawings as racist. A French person would have pointed out that while their caricatures of minorities were certainly unflattering, so were their caricatures of everyone else—and therefore concluded that there was no racism.
In fact in The Camp of the Saints, nobody looks good. Indeed, the novel’s central topic is not the refugees themselves but the bizarre form of cowardice and self-hate of Europeans that leads them to consent to their own replacement. In this sense, it is like Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, whose portrayal of Africans is decidedly “racist” by our contemporary standards, but whose portrayal of whites—and everybody else—is equally savage and outlandish.
Everything in The Camp of the Saints is over-the-top, not just its unflattering portrayal of refugees. It has a dreamlike quality, complete with baroque imagery, which is integral to the artistic style of the novel. This is what makes it such a powerful and fascinating work of art. To dismiss it as “racist” is not just inaccurate—it is philistinic.
It’s also worth pointing out that Raspail was not some caveman pumping out racist tirades from some cave somewhere. He wrote dozens of novels and received some of the most prestigious literary awards France can confer, including the Grand prix de littérature of the Académie française and the Prix Jean-Walter for historical writing. Raspail was made a knight and an officer of the Legion of Honor. Of course, France has historically been much more open-minded when it comes to honoring artists and intellectuals who may be politically incorrect.
Getting Past the Caricatures
As a young man, Raspail started out as a travel writer. His first publishing success was a recounting of a trip he took following in the footsteps of Father Marquette, the French Jesuit who discovered the Mississippi. Raspail kayaked down the length of the river, from Trois-Rivières in Québec all the way to New Orleans, exploring the history of a region that was once New France. He would later return to America and write ethnographies of remaining American Indian tribes in reservations, and would be a lifelong activist for protecting indigenous peoples—a strange pursuit for a “racist.”
In France, Raspail is better known for his historical adventure novels, which young teenage males of a certain Catholic conservative persuasion tend to read avidly.
Many of them involve the fictional Pikkendorff family, penniless aristocrats from Bavaria who end up as knights-errant, mercenaries, or colonial administrators in the service of other great families. One of his novels has members of the French and German branches of the Pikkendorffs secretly meeting in Switzerland to try to negotiate an armistice during World War I. Another leverages some fourth-wall-breaking postmodern tools, since it ostensibly presents itself as a first-person work of non-fiction written by Raspail in his own name. That novel features Raspail’s research into the Pikkendorff family, complete with extensive footnotes referencing nonexistent tomes of historical research. It ends with the depressing discovery that the last heir of the Pikkendorffs runs a successful chain of pizza restaurants.
Another novel, The Fisherman’s Ring, starts with the premise that the Council of Constance, which ended the Great Western Schism that had sundered the Catholic Church in two, had picked the wrong pope, and that ever since there has been a succession of secret, true popes.
Seven Riders takes place in a fictional, nameless country somewhere at the edge of Europe at some unspecified time, though the fact that people move either by horse or steam train gives a hint. It has been stricken by a series of unexplained events, including plagues and destructive madness circulating among the youth. The Margrave, the ruler of this broken kingdom, sends out seven riders to try to find the outside world and discover a remedy to the bizarre afflictions affecting the country. Above all, he wants to find his daughter Princess Myriam, with whom the head of the expedition, Colonel-major Silve de Pikkendorff, is secretly in love.
Perhaps Raspail’s most ambitious novel is 2003’s The Kingdoms of Borea, which is hard not to read as an implicit reply to critics of The Camp of the Saints. The work, which stretches over several centuries, takes place in a fictional country at the northeastern edge of Europe, by the Russian steppes and Scandinavian fjords. In the deep forests unexplored by the white man, at least until the modern era, lives “the little man with bark-colored skin,” an indigenous people of the forest who fear the white man. The mystery of the true identity and nature of the little man, who is always elusive, is the running thread of the plot. As European civilization and industry keep encroaching on the little man’s forest over the centuries, turning timber into factories, his people and their way of life are doomed to extinction.
This is another story about demographic replacement—but one where the whites are the clear villains and the non-whites are the clear victims. The novel is a tour de force, with contemporary descendants of 17th-century nobles and Jewish merchants somehow ending up on the path of their forebears and a stunning halfway reveal about the narrator’s true identity. It is a great historical fresco, a panorama of history’s greatest crimes.
A peaceful and prosperous Jewish community is ravaged by pogroms fomented by the kingdom’s evil ruler. One character immigrates to the Antebellum South, where he becomes a wealthy planter and happily joins the South’s rebellion, but not before freeing all his slaves. Upon returning to his home after the war, he is confronted by the devastation the Union Army caused and sets up schools and workshops for his former slaves. Another trace of the little man is found in East Prussia in 1945. Then, Raspail reminds us vividly, the ethnic German populations of Eastern Europe were systematically butchered by Stalin’s troops, a World War II genocide that is remembered by no memorial or museum.
All genocides are bad, Raspail seemingly wants to say through this book. This sounds like the most trite thing imaginable until you remember that some genocides are more politically useful than others. Don’t you understand? It’s always bad, he seems to be screaming, grabbing us by the lapels. It’s bad when white people are the perpetrators, and it’s bad when white people are the victims, says Jean Raspail, a lifelong anthropologist and activist on behalf of Native American tribes.
For Raspail, it is clear that pogroms of Jews are bad, and massacres of civilian German populations are bad. Antebellum slavery was bad, but so was destroying the South to stop it. It’s bad regardless of your politics. It’s bad even when the victim population cannot be held up as a politically convenient totem. Which is the least racist message imaginable. But in the era of the Great Replacement, it is the most politically incorrect and the most vital one we need to hear.