The Romanticism of Jean Raspail

One day, the French writer Jean Raspail looked out over the Mediterranean Sea and asked, “What if they came?” He answered the question with his 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian tale about the arrival of a migrant fleet from the third world, and the West’s suicidal welcome of it. Long hard to obtain in English, The Camp of the Saints is now appearing in a new translation from Vauban Books. Hailed by some as prophetic, denounced by others as racist, the book enjoys a growing influence. Stephen ­Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, has cited it, as has Steve Bannon. It is regularly invoked by right-wing influencers not otherwise known for their love of French novels.

Yet there is something strange in the book’s adoption by an ascendant right. For Raspail was above all a man of lost causes, an instinctive romantic. He was drawn not to populist leaders who seek and win the love of the crowd, but to lonely figures who are regarded with indifference or contempt by an unworthy society. The most troubling suggestion of The Camp of the Saints is not that the West is losing its identity, but that it deserves to die.

This idea appears in The Camp of the Saints, when an eccentric band comes together to oppose the new regime created by migrant arrivals. “Mind if I play along with you?” asks one character as he joins their company. He understands that their actions, though earnest, are not ­really serious. The problem is not just that the resisters have no chance of success; it is that they have nothing left to fight for. France—the France they believe in and would like to defend—­disappeared long ago. What has arisen in its place is something that Raspail’s heroes would rather oppose than defend. “The real enemy is always behind the lines, at your back, never in front of you,” says a colonel sent to stop the migrants.

Raspail’s description of a society succumbing to an invading force was informed by his childhood experience of World War II, when he cycled home from boarding school amid the chaos of Germany’s invasion of France. He recalled this period in Blue Island, a novel about a charismatic child who convinces his playmates to resist the Germans. “We’re at war, aren’t we?” he says. “But nothing and no one is worthy of it. Everything is so ugly.”

Raspail believed that Europe had lost contact with the traditions that gave it dignity, and he admired peoples who continued to live in accord with their inherited ways. In Who Will Remember the People…, he ­praises the Alacaluf Indians, who cling to their mode of life on the southern tip of South America as modernity comes rushing in. In his first novel, Welcome Honorable Visitors, he ­praises the postwar Japanese who preserve their dignity amidst defeat.

The words Raspail applies to one character in that novel could be applied to him as well: “Throughout the world, he hunted out the picturesque and the unusual, the exotic or the mysterious.” In Blue Island, an old writer, a stand-in for Raspail, encounters a woman he once knew. “You celebrate noble sentiments, lost causes, sublimation,” she tells him, before adding the deflating ­remark: “You amuse me.”

Today this self-deprecating writer is being taken very ­seriously. The Camp of the Saints is embraced for its unapologetic assertion that immigration involves conflict. Raspail is a writer keenly aware of the history of ­colonization—and decolonization. He believes that if one group is gaining confidence and projecting power, another must be losing its inheritance. This view is gaining broader acceptance across the West.

Yet some elements of the book seem less than prophetic. Raspail’s depiction of a Europe unwilling and unable to turn back migrants is belied by current developments. Mette Frederiksen, the left-wing leader of Denmark, has pursued a crackdown on migrants and joined with ­Giorgia Meloni in criticizing the European Court of Human Rights for making it too difficult to repel and expel them. Even more strikingly, Donald Tusk, the Polish leader beloved of Atlanticist liberals, has suspended the right of migrants to apply for asylum.

If The Camp of the Saints is of limited usefulness as a political tract, what are its merits as a novel? ­Raspail depicts the migrants as a teeming, inhuman mass—­wretchedness incarnate. They are, in his words, an “antiworld,” a nemesis sent to punish the West for its folly. Whatever one makes of this in moral terms (and it is certainly intended to provoke), it is dramatically inert. Because the migrants are presented as utterly alien, there is no point of contact between them and the novel’s central characters, no subterranean sympathies or uneasy recognitions to set off the tale of conflict.

Contrast this with Septentrion, which Raspail wrote six years after The Camp of the Saints. It, too, depicts a band of resisters defying an inhuman horde. But it is a richer, subtler book. The undifferentiated mass is made up not of foreigners but of neighbors, family members, and friends who have succumbed to “auto-persuasion by contagion”—a kind of mass-culture conformity. And whenever a resister finally has a fatal encounter with a member of the horde, he discovers that the member is himself, a double, a doppelgänger. The conflict is internal. What the characters fear in the enemy, they find in themselves.

Something similar is true of Who Will Remember the ­People…, Raspail’s novel about an Indian tribe holding to its old ways amidst the European onslaught. The most moving scene involves a British commodore who was once rescued by the natives and now has returned in command of his ships. He welcomes the unwashed natives aboard with honor, shocking his crew. But when he sees them face-to-face, he recoils. They smell, act grossly, and are half-dressed. At this moment, Raspail says, “he denies himself,” as Peter denied Christ. The commodore’s inability to recognize the other as his fellow amounts to a denial of the image of God in ­himself—a theological term that Raspail, a Catholic, uses elsewhere in the book.

Another striking episode in Who Will Remember the People… concerns a man with scholarly pretensions whose reports on the natives earn him membership in a learned ­society. Back home in France, he is horrified to find that the natives he had met are being exhibited as cannibals at the Paris Universal Exposition. He is dismayed by their exploitation. But he realizes that his writing likewise held them up for uncomprehending mockery in a way he had failed to recognize. “Behind a glib screen of words he had engendered contempt, hardness of heart, derision.”

It’s an interesting sentence, because it captures what many feel, not without reason, about ­Raspail’s description of the migrants in The Camp of the Saints. The story ­Raspail tells in Who Will Remember the People… is a complex one, from which no political lesson can be easily drawn. Without trying to absolve Raspail of his sins against tolerance, it seems fair to say that he did not believe the crucial distinction was between white or black, colonizer or colonized, but between people who conform with his romantic ideas of what it means to live nobly, and those who do not.

Such people can be hard to find. Perhaps that is why Raspail devoted himself to the Kingdom of Patagonia, a nonexistent polity on behalf of which he sought to claim territory, going so far as to plant its blue, white, and green flag on the tiny British isle of Les Minquiers. Sam Francis, the paleoconservative thinker, liked to mock more liberal conservatives as “beautiful losers.” He meant that phrase as an insult, but for Raspail it would be a high term of praise. There is a great ­distance between Raspail’s ­eccentric, despairing vision and that of a ­contemporary right that seeks to wield power in the here and now.