A Racist
Book’s Malign and Lingering Influence
“The Camp of
the Saints,” published in 1973, has been a must-read within white supremacist
circles for decades. Stephen Miller, Marine Le Pen and Steve King have touted
it in recent years.
By Elian Peltier and Nicholas Kulish
Nov. 22, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/books/stephen-miller-camp-saints.html
One morning in 1972, the French author Jean Raspail was at
his home on the Mediterranean coast when he had a vision of a million refugees
clamoring to enter Europe.
“Armed only with their weakness and their numbers,
overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready
to disembark on our soil,” he wrote. “To let them in would destroy us. To
reject them would destroy them.”
At the time Raspail was a respected writer best known for
his travelogues. But the racist novel that resulted from that episode, “The
Camp of the Saints,” would become his most famous, most controversial and,
surprisingly, most influential work.
For some 30 years, “‘Camp of the Saints’ has been one of the
top two books in white supremacist circles,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on
extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center leaked emails earlier
this month in which the Trump adviser Stephen Miller touted the book to
Breitbart staffers as a work with strong parallels to recent waves of
migration.
Published in 1973, the dystopian novel details how a
flotilla of Indian migrants reach France’s southern coast to invade the
country. Political elites fail to respond to the influx, and the continent is
overrun. For nearly half a century, the book has stoked fears of immigration
that have, to its supporters, seemed increasingly prescient as growing numbers
of refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in Europe in recent years.
“Raspail can boast himself about being a prophet,” said
Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the French Institute for
International and Strategic Affairs. “People now buy ‘The Camp of the Saints’
because they want to read the book written by the writer who saw what would
happen before everybody else.”
What Raspail described as a “parable” came to be seen as a
canonical text in white nationalist circles.
“The power of the book comes from the very vivid images of
near destruction of the white race, and the absence of resistance from the
government,” said Cécile Alduy, a professor of French studies at Stanford
University who has studied the discourse of the French far right.
Its leader, Marine Le Pen, said “The Camp of the Saints,”
which she read at 18, “left a great mark on her,” and urged French people to
read it to understand what she described as the country’s “migratory
submersion.” Steve Bannon claimed that European countries had been confronted
with an “invasion” similar to the one described in “The Camp of the Saints.”
Iowa Representative Steve King argued that the book’s story “should be
imprinted into everyone’s brain.”
In the United States, Beirich said the book stood alongside
“The Turner Diaries,” a race war novel by William Pierce, former head of the
neo-Nazi group the National Alliance, as the top fictional references for white
supremacists. The recognition of the place held by “The Camp of the Saints” in
such circles may have reached a new high last week, when it was revealed that
Miller, President Trump’s influential immigration adviser, had cited it.
In September 2015, while European countries struggled with
an immigration crisis, Miller encouraged Breitbart editors to write about
Raspail’s book. Three weeks later, the conservative website ran a story noting
that, like in the novel, contemporary Western leaders were “urging on ever
larger waves” of immigration, and may well be “unable to erect walls.”
“The Trump administration’s anti-immigration policy is a
direct consequence of taking ‘Camp of the Saints’ as a blue book for
governing,” Alduy said.
The migrants in “The Camp of the Saints” are portrayed as
diseased people who eat human feces — the group’s leader is nicknamed “turd
eater” — and their arrival is described as an “endless cascade of human flesh”
clambering ashore like an “anthill slashed open.”
Now 94 and a well-traveled monarchist, Raspail seems an
unlikely hero to the Americans for whom “globalist” is an insult. Indeed, when
“The Camp of the Saints” was published, few could have predicted that the book
would have such a wide-ranging afterlife.
The title is taken from the Book of Revelation in the Bible,
a reference to the army gathered by Satan who overrun the earth, including the
camp of the saints. Raspail drew on his experience documenting endangered
communities in Latin America and elsewhere to imagine what waves of outsiders
would mean for France’s culture, language and population.
“The Camp of the Saints” was translated into several
European languages but was hardly a runaway hit. It was published as a
hardcover in the United States in 1975 by Scribner and in a paperback edition
two years later. A 1975 New York Times review described reading it as “like
being trapped at a cocktail party with a normal‐looking fellow who suddenly starts
a perfervid racist diatribe.”
The reclusive heiress Cordelia Scaife May, who used her
fortune to bankroll the anti-immigration movement, gave $5,000 through her
Laurel Foundation in 1983 to a group called the Institute for Western Values to
distribute the English translation of the book in the United States. The Social
Contract Press, founded by John Tanton, the architect of the modern American
anti-immigration movement, published an English edition and still sells it
online.
The publisher’s note to the Social Contract edition explains
how, unlike in a work of nonfiction, “storytellers can advance notions
prohibited to others,” predicting that the book could “become the ‘1984’ of the
twenty-first century,” referencing the famous George Orwell novel about
totalitarianism.
Raspail’s book helped inspire “The Great Replacement,” the
idea that white populations of Western countries could soon be supplanted by
newer arrivals. Another French writer, Renaud Camus, developed the theory,
which has become increasingly popular in white supremacist circles over recent
years.
The man accused of killing 51 people in attacks at two
mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year, titled his manifesto
“The Great Replacement.” It was also cited by the shooter at a Walmart in El
Paso, Tex.
Although he has acknowledged that his book was “dangerous,”
Raspail has said in recent years that we would not withdraw a single line. He
has claimed that the invasion in “The Camp of the Saints” was an accelerated
version of what he called the “infiltration” faced by France over the past
several decades.
In France, a new edition published in 2011 became a best
seller. The book was published for the first time in Dutch in 2015. That same
year a right-wing press republished it in German.
Camus, of the French Institute for International and
Strategic Affairs, said Raspail attracted hundreds of fans at an October book
signing in Paris for his latest novel, adding, “Those who are obsessed with
decadence do like prophets a lot.”
Nicholas Kulish is an enterprise reporter covering
immigration issues. Before that, he served as the Berlin bureau chief and an
East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi. He joined The Times as a member of
the Editorial Board in 2005. More about Nicholas Kulish
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