When Clichés Become Policy

The reception of "The Camp of the Saints" among conservatives

It is an aspect of conservative thinking to search for sages, those venerable men whose epigrams limn enduring realities or pierce contemporary confusion. Sages, and the wisdom they profess, provide authority. Quoting a philosopher, a professor, or an ancient is like a Scriptural proof text or a secularized Doctor of the Church. Of course, gurus and sages are not unique to the Right – there are or have been Marxist and Foucauldian schools, for Heaven’s sake. But, post-Marxism, the Right is more invested in sages as a vessel for drawing upon tradition. One way we can see fissures on the Right is in their clashes over sages or symbols of the tradition – as dustups over Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley attest.

As often as not, the Right’s sages get debased by use as they are shuffled down the chain of ideological transmission. Someone like Richard Weaver might write a book that garners readers and followers. Other scholars and intellectuals might engage with his ideas. Columnists and television hosts may know the gist of his arguments. Others might just quote the title of his book. Theses become clichés; books become memes. The present vogue for Carl Schmitt hinges almost entirely on the ballyhooed friend-enemy distinction that does so much work for the illiberal right. (Heritage’s Kevin Roberts has got himself in trouble for leaning into the friend part of the equation).

Schmitt is the ur-sage of postliberalism. But he is not alone. On immigration, civilization and race, the French novelist Jean Raspail (1925-2020) is the man for the moment. More specifically, Raspail’s 1973 allegorical fever dream, The Camp of the Saints.

The Camp of the Saints imagines a future when the overpopulated Third World, represented by the streets of Calcutta, sets sail in a makeshift flotilla for the Côte d’Azur. This million-person mass threatens to overwhelm the West in human (really subhuman) misery. As Jeffrey Hart put it in a positive review of the English translation: “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health.” He “is to genocide what Lawrence was to sex.” In his telling, feckless leaders, ruined by liberalism, commit cultural suicide – led in part by the Catholic hierarchy. In the end, bien-pensant humanitarianism proves overwhelming and the West, we presume, falls. The book was a genuine controversy and a hit. It has sold something like half a million copies and received an immediate English translation through Scribner’s.

Generously, Raspail’s vision is a parable about civilizational values that carelessly posits suffering refugees as unwitting modern-day Visigoths, holding them up as a mirror to reveal Western man’s loss of faith in his own civilization. Less generously, it’s a racist screed that equates civilization with whiteness.

From Twitter anons to the White House, Raspail and Camp of the Saints have adherents. He and the book are lauded for their prescience and clarity of vision. “Before anyone else, Raspail foresaw the ‘Great Replacement’ of Europe’s peoples by their counterparts from the Global South,” writes Éric Zemmour. “He said it, wrote it, foretold it. But Cassandra is never believed.” The upshot, certainly, is that for Western Civilization to survive, immigrants must be repelled – and perhaps purged – and liberals (beholden to the ideology of Western suicide) must be crushed. Raspail is the useable sage for the makers of “Defend the Homeland” memes and policy.

Unsurprisingly, a new English edition has recently been published for the postliberal audience, complete with an introduction by Raspail-enthusiast Nathan Pinkoski. The noxious Pierre-Emmanuel Gobry praised it in the Claremont Institute’s American Mind. The article is winkingly headlined “The Great Reprinting” and calls it “required reading,” especially in what Gobry calls “the era of the Great Replacement.”

Gobry says interest in Camp of the Saints revived in the 2010s. Perhaps in his native France where Raspail was a controversial but nonetheless celebrated writer. The book has also had a secret half-life on the American Right. I don’t mean the overtly white nationalist Right, either, with its Turner Diaries and other bibliotheca. Rather, The Camp of the Saints became a minor touchstone, a cliché, and an appeal to sagely authority among the traditionalists and immigration restrictionists in the conservative and paleoconservative worlds.

American reviews of the translated version were largely critical. Papers called it “bilge,” “a fascist fantasy” and “”a psychotic fantasy.” Not so National Review. The Dartmouth English professor, NR editor, and somewhat populist conservative Jeffrey Hart set the tone for American conservative reception of Camp of the Saints, which NR called a “superb scandal.” Hart reveled in the books notoriety. He mocked conventional reviewers’ concern about racism as misguided, missing the deeper, civilizational meaning. Yet at the same time, Hart conceded the essentially racialized point. Most people, he wrote, notice other racial groups look “rather different and lives rather differently from their own. Such ‘racist’ or ‘ethnocentric’ feelings are undoubtedly healthy, and involve merely a preference for one’s own culture and kind.” It’s this insight that “Raspail hammers away at”: “no group can long survive unless it does ‘prefer itself.’”

Later in the review Hart admitted Camp of the Saints may be technically racist in that Raspail “accepts as historical fact that Western civilization is largely white.” The Frenchman leaves himself an escape hatch in that a Westernized Indian states “Being white isn’t really a question of color. It’s a whole mental outlook.” Nevertheless, Hart wrote, “Civilization involves particular forms of being. It is not an amorphous mass.” That being, Hart implied clearly, is white.

Despite Hart’s imprimatur, Camp of the Saints did not quite become a regular National Review touchstone. It did, however, achieve cliché status in the 1990s in Chronicles, a paleoconservative magazine with considerable crossover with NR. (Hart wrote at least twice for Chronicles.)

The paleoconservative circle around Chronicles were dispirited by Reaganite conservatism and especially George H. W. Bush-era Republicanism. They sought to ground the Right in something pre-modern (or post-post-modern), whether region, religion, or race. In the 1990s especially, the paleoconservatives, who always skirted racism, became especially concerned with immigration. The magazine staked out a position on immigration somewhere between NR and VDARE. (NR followed suit, via Peter Brimelow.) Alluding to Camp of the Saints became a short-hand for the imagery of poor mass migrants to Europe or the United States. In Italy in 1991, editor Thomas Fleming described Albanians “coming in such large numbers that the news footage reminded me of Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints.” A short item in 1998 describes “a scene seemingly drawn from Jean Raspail’s novel…”

When Chronicles writers dealt with him in greater depth, he became a visionary prophet – a Cassandra. After the left were obliterated in France’s 1993 election, E. Christian Kopff put it down “perhaps primarily” to Raspail’s writing. He called “those who love America need to begin to gird up their loins” and follow the French. In particular, he demanded the repeal of the 14^th Amendment in order to let Americans “defend themselves from being overwhelmed by a hostile foreign invasion.”

In 1995, a small white nationalist press in lakeside town in northern Michigan republished Camp of the Saints, advertising in Chronicles as a “prophetic book about the end of the Western World.”

Critically, in 1997, the editor of Chronicles, Thomas Fleming, selected Raspail as the winner of an Ingersoll Award. Granted under the auspices of Chronicles’ parent organization, the Rockford Institute, two Ingersoll Awards worth $20,000 each were granted annually – the T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing and the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters. Over some twenty years, the winners of these awards were impressive, and occasionally controversial.

Llosa was a controversial winner for some of his outré novels.

Raspail almost certainly won the award on the strength of interest in Camp of the Saints, although Fleming, like contemporary Raspail enthusiasts, cited his other, superior but less immediate books.

Winners of the T. S. Eliot award were meant to affirm “the best values of our civilization.” So, at the swanky awards dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, Raspail ruminated on “defending civilization.” He reminisced about his youthful journey through the United States and on the Americanization of Europe. Ultimately, though, he identified a commonality between France and the United States. They “and a few other countries are by their very nature inseparable, as they are part of the same Western civilization.” And, he went on, making the racial linkage explicit, “If it is still allowed to say so, without offending anyone, this Western civilization was made by the white race. It has even been called the white man’s burden.”

As the Southern partisan Fleming reflected on Raspail’s work, he connected the concurrent decline of civilization and American regionalism. “We,” he lamented, “are doing everything we can to change the nature of our culture and our people” by “the massive importation of aliens from the Third World, we are transforming our old European stock into an ethnic jumble” and “through ‘diversity’ requirements and so-called multiculturalism, we are systematically cutting all our links with the civilizations that have formed our character.”

It was “time to draw a line in the sand, dividing those who will defend Europe and America from their enemies: multiculturalists on the left flank and corporate multinationalists on the right.”

Raspail once again made his point explicit in an op-ed titled “The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic” in Le Figaro in 2004. By 2050, he warned, “French stock” will amount “to only half the population of the country, the remainder comprising Africans, Moors and Asians of all sorts from the inexhaustible reserve of the Third World, predominantly Islamic, understood to be fundamentalist Jihadists.”

The patterns of use around Raspail and Camp of the Saints were well and truly established by this stage. It operated on several levels. It revealed liberals’ apparent lack of sophistication: they could only see racism, not parse texts with nuance or understand an allegory. But simultaneously, it was a prophetic vision of a demographic tsunami engulfing Europe and America, which was, objectively, racial in basis. Finally, it was – as with most conservative literature – a critique of contemporary liberalism (including neoconservatism), as empty and cowering or openly cheering Western destruction. Every appeal to Raspail the sage draws on one of these tropes with greater or lesser sophistication.

The Chronicles paleoconservatives were the intellectualized expression of a culturally despairing, dyspeptic politics, antagonistic to the Republican mainstream, and against globalization and immigration. Of course, Pat Buchanan was part of the circle and their preferred political candidate. Sure enough, in his 2002 book The Death of the West, subtitled “How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization,” Buchanan made a rote reference to Camp of the Saints.

National Review, increasingly immigration skeptical under editor John O’Sullivan, returned to Raspail in 2001. Just about 25 years after Camp of the Saints’ publication, “a slow, gradual, peaceful invasion of a wealthy First World by an impoverished Third World will proceed essentially unhampered—exactly as Jean Raspail predicted in 1973, though not exactly in the manner he predicted,” reported O’Sullivan. He meant it would occur through illegal immigration and Western states’ soft-hearted failure to deport migrants. Indeed, O’Sullivan found Camp of the Saints “extremely prophetic” in its depiction of “what Raspail calls ‘The Beast’— what Tom Bethell and Joseph Sobran call ‘The Hive’” – and, we might add, what Curtis Yarvin trendily calls “The Cathedral.” These are the real enemy: “the vast retinue of progressive opinion-mongers in politics, journalism, religion, and other institutions, who, without being organized in any way, invariably come up with the same slogans, analyses, condemnations, and programs to advance the suicide of the West.” Buckley praised the book too in 2004.

O’Sullivan added very little novel to his analysis. Rather, he applied the Raspail, sage-like, to slightly changed circumstances with a new, newsy episode. The complaint and analysis and hyperventilating remains the same – as it does with Raspail’s celebrators today. For good measure, we also see another recurrent idea, the Beast/Hive/Cathedral complaint about progressive hegemony. Expect nothing more than the old hits from Pinkoski and Vauban Press.

I have always thought anti-immigration (or anti-Islam, for that matter) traditionalists create a bind for themselves. On the one hand, they depict the modern liberal state and attendant “Hive” as utterly destructive to traditions, especially religious ones. Christianity is being corroded away. On the other, though, Latin American immigrants, Muslims, or “Third World” migrants are somehow uniquely unassimilable. The anti-immigration Right’s politics of despair imagines Christian or a broader “Western” culture as uniquely fragile and weak. Perhaps they see their lamentations as a call-to-arms, a spark of “the moment is now” urgency. But to me it undermines their claims to believe what they say they believe. (In a way, Michel Houellebecq squared this circle.)

In describing The Camp of the Saints, O’Sullivan notes how scathing Raspail was to all his subjects, including many of the Christians. “Insofar as they are faithful to Christian tradition, it is more because it is their tradition than because they are Christians,” O’Sullivan noted. In this way, perhaps, Raspail has unwittingly skewered those who have come to see him and especially his nightmare as representing the Wisdom of the Saints.