The Camp of the Saints (French: Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by Jean Raspail

 

The Camp of the Saints (French: Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by Jean Raspail. A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through mass Third World immigration to France and the Western world. The name of the book comes from a passage in the Book of Revelation depicting the apocalypse. Almost 40 years after its initial publication, the novel returned to the bestseller list in 2011. It was first published in French in 1973 by Éditions Robert Laffont. It was first translated into English by Norman Shapiro, and first published in English by Scribner in 1975.

 

On its publication, the book received praise from some prominent French literary figures, and through time has also been praised by some critics and politicians in Europe and the United States. It has also been criticized by both French and English-language commentators for conveying racist, xenophobic, nativist, and anti-immigration themes. The novel is popular within far-right and white nationalist circles.

 

Background

The novel was authored by novelist and explorer Jean Raspail.[1][2][3] He had written several books before The Camp of the Saints, mostly travel works or adventure fiction. Several sources noted the book to be very different from the rest of his writings.[2][4] Raspail has said his inspiration came while at the French Riviera in 1972, as he was looking out at the Mediterranean, he had a "vision":

 

A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West. I literally saw them, saw the major problem they presented, a problem absolutely insoluble by our present moral standards. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.

 

In May of that year, he published a column outlining the novel.[4] Raspail spent ten months writing the book. During this time, he said this "vision" "never left me"; he described the book as a kind of emotional outpour.The name of the book comes from a passage in Revelation 20:7–9 in which Satan gathers an army from the nations of the earth and encircles "the camp of the saints".[6][7] In Raspail's story, the camp of the saints is Europe and Satan's army is a migrant fleet of a million people sailing from India.

 

Plot

In Calcutta, India, Catholic priests promote the adoption of Indian children by those back in Belgium as a form of charity. When the Belgian government realizes that the number of Indian children raised in Belgium has reached 40,000 in just five years, an emergency policy attempts to halt the migration. Desperate to send their children to what they call a "land of plenty", a mob of desperate Indians swarms the consulate. As a Belgian aid worker works through the crowd, an Indian gong farmer known only as "the turd eater", carrying aloft his deformed child, begs him to take them back to Europe, to which the worker agrees.

 

The worker and farmer bring the crowd to the docks, where there are hundreds of ships once owned by European powers, now suited only for river traffic. Nevertheless, the crowd boards, and a hundred ships soon leave for Europe; conditions on board are cramped, unsanitary and miserable, with many passengers including children publicly fornicating. As the ships pass "the straits of Ceylon", helicopters swarm overhead, capturing images of the migrants to be published in Europe. Meanwhile in the Russian Far East, Soviet troops see masses of Chinese ready to enter Siberia but are reluctant to fight them.

 

As the fleet crosses the Indian Ocean, the political situation in France becomes more charged. At a press conference about the crisis, a pro-migrant official is confronted by a journalist who demands to know if France will "have the courage to stand up to" the migrants when they reach the country. The official decries this question as morally offensive and threatens to throw the journalist out when he continues to yell. Other journalists seek to inflame tensions between the French and Africans and Arabs already living in the country. Over time, these journalists begin to write that the migrant fleet is on a mission to "enrich, cleanse and redeem the Capitalist West". At the same time as the fleet is praised by those in Paris, the people of Southern France, terrified of the migrants' arrival, flee to the north.

 

As the fleet approaches the Suez Canal, Egyptian military forces fire a warning shot, causing the fleet to steer south, around the Cape of Good Hope. To the surprise of observers, the apartheid regime of South Africa floats out barges of food and supplies, which the migrants throw overboard. The international press is thrilled, believing the rejection of these supplies to be a political statement against the apartheid South African regime. Western leaders, confident the migrants will accept supplies from their "more virtuous" nations, organize a supply mission, funded by governments, charities, rock stars and major churches, to meet the migrants off São Tomé. However, the fleet does not stop for these barges either, and when a worker from the Pope's barge attempts to board one of the ships, he is strangled and thrown overboard. The press attempts to contain coverage of the murder.

 

When the migrants pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, the French president orders troops to the south and addresses the nation with his plan to repel them. However, in the middle of the address, he breaks down, demanding the troops simply follow their consciences instead. Most of the troops immediately desert their posts and join the civilians as they flee north, and the south is quickly overrun by the migrants. Some of the last troops to stand their ground take refuge in a small village, along with Calguès, an old man who has chosen to remain at his home, and Hamadura, a Westernized Indian who is terrified of his "filthy, brutish" countrymen and prides himself on having more in common with whites than Indians. The troops in this village, a total of nineteen Frenchmen and one Indian, surrounded by what they deem "occupied territory", remain the last defense of Western values and "Free France" against the immigrants.

 

The immigrants make their way north, having no desire to assimilate to French culture, but continuing to demand a First World standard of living, even as they flout laws, do not produce, and murder French citizens, such as factory bosses and shopkeepers, as well as the ordinary people who do not welcome them. They are also joined by the immigrants who already reside in Europe, as well as various left-wing and anarchist groups. Across the West, more and more migrants arrive and have children, rapidly growing to outnumber whites. In a matter of months, the white West has been overrun and pro-immigrant governments have been established, while the white people are ordered to share their houses and flats with the immigrants. The village containing the troops is bombed flat by airplanes of the new French government, referred to only as the "Paris Multiracial Commune". Within a few years, most Western governments have surrendered. The mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three African-American families from Harlem; migrants gather at coastal ports in West Africa and South Asia and swarm into Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; London is taken over by an organization of non-white residents known as the "Non-European Commonwealth Committee", who force the British queen to have her son marry a Pakistani woman; millions of black Africans from around the continent gather at the Limpopo River and invade South Africa; and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants as they overrun Siberia.

 

The epilogue reveals that the story was written in the last holdout of the Western world, Switzerland, but international pressure from the new governments, isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders, along with internal pro-migrant elements, force it to capitulate as well. Mere hours from the border opening, the author dedicates the book to his grandchildren, in the hopes they will grow up in a world where they will not be ashamed of him for writing such a book.

 

Publication history

The Camp of the Saints was first published in French in 1973 by Éditions Robert Laffont.[8][9] The publisher believed the book would sell well, and to market the book printed 20,000 copies for an initial run and wrote over 350 letters marketing the book to established French booksellers. Upon its release, the book sold decently at about 15,000 copies. However, a word-of-mouth campaign (influenced by the news of the Vietnamese boat people) in the next few years increased its popularity, and it sold 40,000 copies in the next few years. The book continued to sell well and was reissued several times, including in 1981 and 1989 in paperback.It was reissued in hardcover in 2002.

 

An eighth French edition was published in February 2011, with a new preface called "Big Other". The publisher had initially refused to include "Big Other" for fear of being prosecuted for inciting racial hatred, but relented.To market this edition, Raspail appeared on Frédéric Taddeï's talk show, Ce soir ou jamais. In March 2011, the book returned to the bestseller list, ranking in the top five in bookstores in France, and by April 2011 this edition had sold 20,000 copies.[5] All its editions have sold about half a million copies.

 

An English language translation by Norman Shapiro was published by Scribner in 1975.[5][10] The publisher portrayed its publication as a major literary event, with a major ad-campaign that used the phrase "the end of the white world is near". The English translation sold well.[5] It was republished in mass market paperback format in 1977 by Ace Books in New York[13][14] and Sphere Books in London. John Tanton acquired the rights to the book in 1994 and printed a softcover edition through his publishing company The Social Contract Press[ in 1995. The Winter 1994-1995 issue of The Social Contract Journal was a special edition released to coincide with the new printing of the book, each article dedicated to discussion of the book and its themes.The book went out of print in English for several years, with print editions coming to cost hundreds of U.S. dollars.[21] This changed in 2025 when the book received a second English translation, done by Ethan Rundell, and was republished by Vauban Books.

 

Analysis

The Camp of the Saints is a work of dystopian or apocalyptic fiction. A key element of the text is the supposed vulnerability of the West, having lost its soul to materialism and a fixation on empty things in a period of decline and decay. Hence, Europe is deserving of extinction and the West so easily succumbs to mass migration in the narrative.[18] The book's tone largely presents these events as hopeless or inevitable, increasingly apocalyptic as the story goes on. The empathy and pity of the West towards non-white peoples is portrayed extremely negatively by Raspail, who presents it as their defining weakness that leads to their destruction; the book extensively criticizes French elites, who, in Raspail's view, are blinded by guilt from colonization, Catholicism, and humanitarianism.

 

According to literary scholar Jean-Marc Moura, native French people are described in the novel as [giving] in without a blow to the hyperbolic egalitarianism that 'swallows' them down to the rank of third-world men ... In such a context, racist deviations are inevitable ... The plot is thus biased, since the cards are dealt in such a way that racism and ostracism become conditions for survival. By painting the Third World in such aggressive colours, it gives Western characters little choice: destroy or die.

 

Raspail presents the West as seized by a sort of neurotic self-loathing of itself and all it stands for. Academic George Michael wrote that it was particularly the element of "a post–World War II Europe paralyzed by guilt" that was presented as making "the continent defenseless against the unwashed masses of the impoverished third world". A commentator for The Atlantic Monthly said that while the white characters are given depth, the non-white characters are uniformly disparaged and portrayed negatively, and their white sympathizers are portrayed even more negatively.

 

The novel is popular within far-right and white nationalist circles.In 2001, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described The Camp of the Saints as "widely revered by American white supremacists" and "a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries", and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory. Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter for the SPLC, notes that "[t]he premise of Camp of the Saints plays directly into that idea of white genocide. It is the idea that through immigration, if it's left unchecked, the racial character and content of a culture can be undermined to the point of oblivion."[3] Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus argues that The Camp of the Saints, with its apocalyptic vision of a sudden and violent mass migration swarming towards Europe, is even more radical than Renaud Camus's Great Replacement theory, and therefore probably more influential on white nationalist terrorists.