Is Britain ready for France's most controversial novel?

Spectator

19 hours ago

This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France's most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in 2020, wrote many books during his long and varied life, but only one, The Camp of the Saints, is remembered.
Even his admirers and sympathisers admit that the book isn't a classic in the literary sense. In an article to mark the publication of a recent biography of Raspail, Le Figaro said the novel was guilty of a 'certain kitschness, clumsiness, awkwardness and a nihilism that seems forced'. More than that, it has been accused of being overtly racist.
Yet what made The Camp of the Saints such a sensation when it was published – and increasingly today among the online right – was its narrative. Raspail explained the idea for it came to him in 1972 as he looked out at the Mediterranean from the Côte d'Azur. 'The immigration problem didn't exist yet,' he said. 'The question suddenly arose: 'What if they came?''
In The Camp of the Saints, a million migrants from India land in the south of France in an armada of small boats. The left welcomes them with open arms and cries of: 'We're all from the Ganges now!' The French government requests that the rest of Europe accepts some of the arrivals, which it does. Seeing the generosity of Europe, more migrants from other Third World countries decide to head to the Old Continent for a new life. Europe collapses.
The Camp of the Saints was savaged by much of the American press when it was published across the Atlantic in 1975, and not just because of its language. 'Preposterous' was the reaction of the New York Times, which mocked Raspail's 'fancy that sometime in the near future the Third World, protesting the unequal division of the world's goods and western indifference to its misery, strikes back'.
In 2019, the NYT returned to the attack in an article entitled 'A Racist Book's Malign and Lingering Influence'. According to the paper, 'what Raspail described as a 'parable' came to be seen as a canonical text in white nationalist circles'. It namechecked Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump as two politicians influenced by the book.
Given its reputation, The Camp of the Saints is possibly the closest thing we have to an actual 'banned book' in the English-speaking world. It has never been published in Britain, and while it was reissued by a small American publisher in 1995, secondhand paperbacks cost upwards of £200 on Amazon. But that is about to change. The novel is soon to be released in English again, this time by an independent American publisher called Vauban Books, run by Ethan Rundell.
Rundell is a Francophile who studied in Paris in the 1990s (as well as Berkeley and Trinity College, Cambridge) and worked for many years in France as a translator. He founded Vauban Books in 2023 with Louis Betty, a professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Their mission is to translate into English books in French that are victims of 'ideological curation and gatekeeping… some voices are amplified, often for no other reason than they flatter the prevailing doxa on this side of the Atlantic; other voices, some of them quite prominent, are neglected or even actively suppressed when what they have to say runs counter to it'.
Among the authors published so far by Vauban are Renaud Camus, the originator of the 'Great Replacement Theory' – which holds that ethnic French and white European populations are being replaced by non-white people. Camus was recently barred from entering Britain because the government said his 'presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good'.
Rundell tells me it was a 'great honour' to be the translator of Camus. 'To publish Camus is to discover just how far we have gone in the direction of a post-literary society,' he says. 'His words are on all lips. Everyone has an opinion about him. And yet shockingly few people still seem capable of marshalling the basic curiosity – or perhaps I should say intellectual self-regard – needed to consult the source before rendering judgment on it.'
He believes the same applies to Raspail, which is why Vauban is reissuing his best-known work in September. 'It has become an object of reflexive condemnation, even though many of those condemning it have never read a word that Raspail wrote,' says Rundell. 'On purely liberal grounds – informed debate, the free circulation of ideas, the need to make important primary texts available to the public at large – the case for publishing it is self-evident.'
Even some supporters of the book take issue with many of the expressions it uses, but Rundell is braced for the criticism: 'I expect some people will be very angry that we are bringing it out, not least because it gives the lie to the imaginary, parallel world the progressive intelligentsia has constructed for itself and still seeks to impose upon the rest of us.'
Bien-pensants hate the book, adds Rundell, because it 'relentlessly mocks that same intelligentsia, which in many ways has hardly changed since the book was first published in 1973'.
Vauban Books hopes to have The Camp of the Saints ready for pre-order in Britain and Europe by the end of this month, although Rundell says he fears the distributor might 'refuse to carry the title'. With that in mind he intends to contact Toby Young's Free Speech Union. 'There may well be a battle ahead,' says Rundell.
The Camp of the Saints isn't a great book, but it is an important one. Its concern about mass immigration can often shift into revelling in racist tropes. In that sense, it speaks to our current debates, where the line between demographic worries and outright nativism is frequently blurred. But as Rod Dreher in the American Conservative has written: 'You don't have to endorse Raspail's radical racialist vision to recognise that there is diagnostic value in his novel.'