Prophet and loss

In the summer of 1971, a well-traveled and widely esteemed French intellectual named Jean Raspail retreated to a borrowed villa at Boulouris on the French Riviera to get some writing done. The villa, just up the coast from celebrity-packed St. Tropez, was built in what Raspail called the “late-nineteenth-century Anglo-seaside resort style,” though it also had a finely carved, fortress-like wooden door from an earlier time. The view from the library overlooked a wide Mediterranean bay. One day, Raspail looked out from his promontory and wondered, “What if they came?” 

This question inspired Raspail’s third novel, The Camp of the Saints. The plot is so simple that it now fits into the screen of our phones. One Easter Sunday, old Professor Calgues looks into his telescope and sees a rusty flotilla bearing a million desperate Indians. Bodies wash up on the shore of the French Riviera. The soldiers who come to repulse the invaders flee from the beaches. As the first migrants come ashore, a floppy-haired young Frenchman clambers up to Calgues’ house. The son of a petit bourgeois shoe shop owner, he thinks the migrants are his real “brothers and sisters.” He tells Calgues that he will return with the “most wretched” of them:

“They know nothing about what you are, about what you represent. Your world means nothing to them. They won’t try to understand. They’ll be tired. They’ll be cold. They’ll build a fire with your lovely oak door. They’ll shit all over your terrace and wipe their hands on the books in your library. They’ll spit out your wine. They’ll eat with their hands from the pretty pewterware I see on your wall. Sitting on their haunches, they’ll watch as your armchairs go up in flames. They’ll use your embroidered sheets to play dress up. Every object will lose the meaning you attach to it.”

Calgues shoots his messenger but fails to forestall his message. The churches and the charities declare a humanitarian emergency. The media promotes activists who call the human tide a postcolonial reckoning, a chance for Europe to redeem the sins of empire. Politicians recoil from using military force against the tired, poor, and hungry masses. A government minister says that the flotilla is “a symbol heralding a sort of socialism at a global level.” The French must not only “think in terms of global solidarity.” They must “vibrate” in empathy, for this is “more a matter of the heart than of the mind.” The gates of the West are open. Though the government and its “partners” prepare “a general reception plan in a framework of international cooperation,” the reality is civil war, the destruction of France’s cultural patrimony, and the collapse of Europe.

Raspail, the author of this apocalypse, was the Catholic-educated son of a factory manager. Born in 1925, Raspail was attending an English-style boarding school 350 miles from home when the Germans invaded France in May 1940. In the traumatic collapse that followed, the 14-year-old Raspail cycled home alone in a sea of fugitive humanity. After the war, he worked in scouting organizations. In 1949, he joined a Catholic youth group’s re-enactment of Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet’s 3,000-mile canoe voyage from Trois-Rivieres in Quebec to New Orleans in 1673 — the year that Professor Calgues’ vacation home in The Camp of the Saints was built.

Encountering an abandoned Algonquin village on the shores of Lake Huron, the 24-year-old Raspail experienced an epiphany that shaped his writing and life. A fascination with the fate of the planet’s indigenous peoples in the age of universal technology became the running theme of his subsequent career as novelist and travel writer. In 1951, he drove from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska and encountered another vanquished and vanishing indigenous people, the Alakalus or Kawesqar, who would haunt his writing. By the end of the 1950s, Raspail was a respected traveler and novelist at a time when Paris was the center of Europe’s intellectual life and French intellectuals were celebrities.

In his scholarly introduction to the Vauban edition, Nathan Pinkoski of the Center for Renewing America calls Raspail’s oeuvre a “polyphonic hymn to the nobility and fragility of the world’s peoples.” If Raspail had “kept his study of unfamiliar tribes to the far-off places unfamiliar to most Westerners,” Pinkoski argues, he might still have an “unblemished reputation” as a writer of “arguably anti-colonialist sympathies.” Two decades before the globalization of the 1990s, Raspail synthesized the anti-globalist blend of hostility to technology, distrust of the flattening effects of American-style modernity, and apocalyptic predictions of environmental collapse.

But instead of securing a sinecure on the reading lists of the campus Left, Raspail became an underground hero to the dissident Right. It was not just that he made the vulgar error of including his own people’s melodies in the hymn of global diversity, and especially those of the Catholic traditions that made France la fille aînée de l’Eglise, “the Church’s eldest daughter.” He also used the melodramatic methods of speculative fiction to predict that mass immigration would cause a crisis in Western societies that had lost their sense of purpose.

A clamp on the plaints

“A wave of non-white immigration into France triggers a dystopian reality in The Camp of the Saints in much the same way that privatization of public resources figures into the 1987 Paul Verhoeven film, Robocop, or government control does in George Orwell’s novel 1984.” This placement of The Camp of the Saints alongside Orwell’s masterpiece was not written by a white nationalist, but by Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Camp of the Saints is not controversial because it imagines the destruction of the modern West — Wells did that in The War of the Worlds back in 1898. The Camp of the Saints is controversial for four reasons: (1) It describes how modern sophisticates can be overwhelmed by less sophisticated aliens; (2) it affirms the existence of distinctive European peoples and cultures; (3) it predicts that uncontrolled immigration will destroy European societies because different peoples have different values; (and 4) and it describes the migrants as revolting. As recently as 2015, educated Europeans considered all four of these attitudes to be unacceptable. Today, the first three attitudes are the subject of vitriolic public debate, and public opinion is trending in Raspail’s direction. The fourth attitude remains controversial, as Raspail intended.

The Martians who overwhelm southern England in The War of the Worlds have superior technology. The Indians who overwhelm southern France in Raspail’s novel are a degraded mass of orgiastic fornicators and public defecators with no respect for human life. Their leader is known as “the coprophage,” an eater of feces. His prior vocation, “collecting shit all his life from all the latrines of the Ganges” and “molding this shit with his hands, day after day,” taught him the lowest common denominators about “man and his true nature,” and the molding of human clay into mass movements with the quality of religion and a quantity of numbers.

Meanwhile, the immigrant workers of Paris whose labor underwrites “white happiness” are so stupefied by being the “stinking drudges of the filthiest jobs” that they struggle to comprehend what is happening. It is “only among the Arabs” that the confrontation on France’s southern coast inspires thoughts of vengeance. “Nothing specific yet, just vague desires and repressed yearnings, like that of receiving a smile from a French woman instead of dreaming of raping her.” The “most fanatical” dream of “a new form of holy war,” and rally to a one-eyed preacher named Mohammed who hides a razor blade in the stockings of his wife, a French schoolteacher.

This is nasty stuff. Like much speculative fiction, The Camp of the Saints is at once serious in conception and cartoonish in characterization. Its detailed and schematic crudities are reminiscent of the novels of William S. Burroughs, only with a linear plot. The question is not whether it is literature, or whether some readers might take offense. The question is whether it merits the effort of reading. On April 21, following an online outcry, Amazon resumed selling The Camp of the Saints. 

Nathan Pinkoski argues that those who call The Camp of the Saints a “white supremacist tract” because it depicts migrants as “primitive and barbaric” miss the novel’s intellectual point and make Raspail’s argument for him. Raspail, like Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, is concerned with “us,” not “them.” Like Conrad, Raspail uses “their” barbarism to expose “ours.” Apart from a few soldiers, the indigenous French are nihilistic. The darkness at the heart of Europe stems from the vacuum where Christianity used to be. Like Brave New World and 1984, The Camp of the Saints is a moral anatomy.

Orwell anatomized our secret sadism and our cowardice before technologized groupthink and propaganda. Huxley anatomized the narcosis of the liberal paradise, a hedonistic flight into drugs and technology. Raspail also anatomized how mass communications turned against their creators. In the Camp of the Saints, images of suffering hordes create a paralysis of humanitarian guilt. But Raspail wrote more than a lurid dystopia about mass immigration. As a French intellectual, he wrote a philosophical novel. He was also a Catholic who took his title from the Apocalypse of Revelation’s vision of a bonfire of the virtues: “And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city; and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.” 

The 20th century produced Orwell’s Big Brother, the surveillance apparatus and washer of brains, and then Huxley’s velvet glove of therapeutic-eugenic control that we might call Big Mother. In his introduction to the 2011 edition of Camp of the Saints, Raspail called our time the age of Big Other. He characterized Big Other as the would-be successor to Christianity: “He is the Only Son of Dominant Thought, like Christ is the Son of God.”

In The Camp of the Saints, modernization in postcolonial states raises the birth rate without raising incomes or the food supply. Corrupt postcolonial politics is compounded by environmental collapse and the crypto-imperialist do-gooding of Western nongovernmental organizations, diplomats, and churches. The West’s near-ubiquitous media imagery of the West as a material paradise invites the wretched of what was then called the Third World. Another Western invention, cheap mass transport between continents, brings an unprecedented human wave to the First World.

Big Other tells the French that this is not happening, and then, when Big Other cannot deny that it is happening, that it is good and has always happened like this. The priesthood of Big Other operates in the “subsidized back rooms” of the NGO-charity complex and the “correctly consensual media outlets.” The doctrine of Big Other is pronounced in the furrowed-brow declarations of the “smart people.” A key tenet is the “innovative historical-semantic swindle” that the European nations have always been “a nation of immigrants.” Big Other placed the nation state and its people “on the altar of exacerbated humanism” as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of history. There will be blood.

French letters

Raspail asked if the fate of Europe’s indigenous peoples in the postcolonial age would resemble that of the indigenous peoples in the age of European empire. Contemporaneous examples of this French specialty include Franz Fanon’s 1961 Third-Worldist polemic The Wretched of the Earth and Pierre Boulle’s 1963 sci-fi novel Planet of the Apes.

The preface to Fanon’s book was written by Jean-Paul Sartre. It was not enough that the European empires were all but over by the time Fanon’s book appeared. It was not enough that in 1959, Charles de Gaulle had announced that the Algerian civil war should end in the severing of a department from France and self-determination for Algerians. Colonialism had violated the dignity of the ex-colonized, and especially the dignity of the humiliated colonial male. This victimhood granted the global proletariat the right to use cathartic violence against the ex-colonizers. “Our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger,” Sartre wrote in his introduction to Fanon.

“This won’t happen,” Sartre added, regretfully. In 1959, far-sighted intellectuals did not think it conceivable that a million strangers might arrive overnight in Europe and wreak havoc. The only people who thought that possible were the degenerate rump of the pre-1945 fascist movements, and their projections rested on occult theories of biological destiny, not demography or cultural difference. Today, the truth is stranger than science fiction.

Like all utopias and dystopias, and like all satires too, Raspail’s novel is a thought experiment. He saw that civilizational self-hatred was winning the high ground of Europe’s universities, media, and governing institutions. He saw the desire for “reverse colonization” as a morbid symptom of a civilization with a death wish. The Lebanese-born Canadian psychologist Gad Saad calls it “suicidal empathy.” Today, Raspail’s lurid fictions are the material of western Europe’s daily news. If once he was stigmatized for his generalizations, he is now stigmatized for his accuracy.

In 1973, Raspail’s setup was a futuristic fiction. Since 2015, facts have borne out much of his analysis, and the emblematic details of his fiction have become historical images. That summer, a million refugees from the Syrian civil war begged for entry to the European Union. Many of them came by sea. Europe was shamed by footage of drowning migrants, especially the image of two-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body rolling in the shallows after the capsizing of the boat that was carrying his family from Turkey to Greece. 

The EU followed the media, the churches, the charity, and the NGO sector in declaring a humanitarian emergency.

“Wir schaffen das,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “We’ve got this.” The Syrian crisis, she said, was Europe’s chance to become the “humanitarian superpower” that its leaders wanted it to be. Europeans could atone for their imperialist past. Germany in particular could atone for the Holocaust through a symbolic act of supreme and selfless humanitarianism.

The Syrian refugee crisis of 2015 really did create a new Europe, but it was not the one Merkel wanted. By the summer of 2025, nationalist and anti-immigration parties led the polls in every major European state. Mass immigration had overloaded the social compact. The European nations, the world’s most affluent and stable societies, were coming apart. Their states are overwhelmed by welfare budgets and crime, their cities incoherent through unassimilated immigration. Europeans remain divided as they argue over who to blame, what to do, and whether, as good humanitarians, they should do anything at all.

In Raspail’s novel, the “crusading heroes” of no-borders humanitarianism are the hip minority journalist Clement Dio, the “incestuous writer,” the “pop guru,” the “pedophile professor,” and “the guy who took a shit on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” We recognize the first four as familiar faces in the diversified iconography of hyper-liberalism. But the last image seems absurd. As in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, the desecration is too literal, too depraved, an unhinged fantasy from a sick and racist mind. 

And then we see the recent footage of a migrant cooking a meal on the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Brussels. We read the testimonies of the young white girls whose mass rape in England over decades by mostly Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs” is the worst crime in modern Europe’s peacetime history, and is still almost entirely unpunished. We recall the Rwandan asylum seeker who, in 2021, murdered Olivier Maire, the 60-year-old priest who had invited him to live in his church while he awaited trial for setting fire to the 15th-century cathedral at Nantes. We see the words “Free Gaza” sprayed onto the Holocaust memorial at Lyon in 2024.

The day before Amazon suspended sales of The Camp of the Saints, a man walking his dogs in the fields of northern England came across a young man of Middle Eastern extraction, knocking a hole in one of the dry-stone walls that have marked human settlement in that part of the world since time immemorial. The dog-walker filmed their confrontation, as we do at the end of history.

“This is not your f***ing wall,” the man shouts. “You can’t go round smashing s*** up … It’s a dry-stone wall, it’s been up for hundreds of years.”

The youth does not seem to understand. He mumbles that demolishing the wall is easier than walking around it. 

CHIMPING OUT: A CIVIL WAR IN UGANDA BETWEEN TWO TROOPS OF CHIMPANZEES

“Dry-stone wall, hundreds of years,” the man repeats. He still sounds angry, but now there is an almost pleading note in his voice. “It costs thousands of pounds per meter to put it right. And you think you can come around here and smash a f***ing hole in it.”

The young man just smirks and walks away.

Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.