French Novel

What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us About Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon and the Rise of the Populist Right

Stridently anti-immigrant, The Camp of Saints was originally ignored or pilloried. Now, it’s found a following.

By CÉCILE ALDUY

In 1973, a strange apocalyptic novel imagined the Southern coast of France suddenly overrun by hundreds of boats “piled high with layer on layer of human bodies” carrying hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Indian continent. Within 24 hours, as the military response fails, political elites capitulate and the French native population collapses morally, poisoned by their “damned, obnoxious, detestable pity” for “other races,” the West falls to the “black and brown” invasion “swarming” across its land.

Much has been made recently about this grandiloquent, often verbose and violently racist 325-page dystopia, The Camp of the Saints, written by the French novelist (and royalist) Jean Raspail. Forty-four years after its release, the book is said to have sold 500,000 copies, at least according to Raspail himself, and has become the bible of alt-right circles in the United States and in France.

It is also the surprising common denominator between two political figures who might well be among the most powerful actors in the years to come: French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, currently predicted to make it to the second round of the French presidential election after Sunday’s vote, and President Donald Trump’s controversial political adviser Steve Bannon. Both have cited the book with admiration as key to understanding the refugee crisis in 2015 and, more generally, the supposed threat to Western civilization posed by immigration. For them, the book is neither an allegory nor science fiction. It is a vivid description of today’s “migratory submersion” (Le Pen’s words) or “invasion” (Bannon’s), and the failure of political “elites” to respond with the necessary resolve to preserve what Bannon calls the “underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West.”

But Le Camp des Saints, to use the original French title, wasn’t always seen this way. In fact, it was initially panned by critics in France and sold poorly, only to rise in popularity since its first reprint, in 1985—exactly as the French far-right likewise ascended. To trace the novel’s popular trajectory over the past half-century is, in a sense, to trace the rightward political shift in France—and much of Europe and the United States—and to watch the trivialization of hostile rhetoric against immigrants and other “cultures.”

When Raspail wrote the book more than 40 years ago, he was taking a break from a string of adventures in the Americas exploring far away countries. His anti-modernist philosophy took him to track ancient civilizations such the Incas and Indian tribes from the Andes that had been forced into extinction by the brutal force of the modern world. One day, gazing at the sea from his villa overlooking the Mediterranean, he pondered: “What if ‘they’ came?” The novel is the brainchild from that epiphany.

At the time that Raspail’s novel was first released, France was still sailing on the tail end of 30 years of post-war economic growth, and was still forcefully importing workers from the former colonies to fuel that growth. The far-right National Front had just been founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen (Marine’s father) and a handful of former Vichy regime supporters and fighters for the French Empire—with limited success, though: The party garnered barely 1 percent of the votes the first time it presented candidates in a national election, in March 1973. That same year, Raspail’s book was ignored by liberal and leftist literary critics. Even France’s biggest right-wing newspaper, Le Figaro, where Raspail was a contributor, tore apart the novel. Only a few far-right fringe publications like Minute and Rivarol, praised the novel as “visionary.” After it sold a disappointing 15,000 copies in its first year, its publisher, Robert Laffont, soberly said the book had not found its audience.

It’s not hard to see why many in France were turned off by Raspail’s volume. Opening it, they would have read putrid descriptions of “the terrible stench of latrines that heralded the fleet’s arrival” and of nameless Indian savages eating, literally, their own shit. They might have gasped at Raspail’s account of the “legions of the Anti-Christ” ready to rape and massacre the native French, and those already in Paris—the “Métro-troglodytes, black crabs with ticket-punching claws; the stinking drudges who mucked around in filth”—waiting in the shadow for “a new kind of holy war.” The true “heroes” of the novel, meanwhile, are those who believe in “scorn of people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest.” According to Raspail, “man never has really loved humanity all of a piece—all its races, its peoples, its religions—but only those creatures he feels are his kin, a part of his clan, no matter how vast.” (These quotes are taken from Norman R. Shapiro’s English translation of the novel.)

Over the course of its steady career, The Camp of Saints has been translated into a dozen languages, including an English version published in 1975 by Scribner and translated by Shapiro, the respected translator of Charles Baudelaire, Paul-Marie Verlaine and Jean de La Fontaine. But it is only in recent years that the book has started to be perceived less as a madman’s fantasy, and more as a metaphor for the times, at least in France’s conservative circles. The book’s flavor of transgression has not entirely evaporated, but it clearly now seems more palatable, thanks to the acclimatization of its once polemical ideas. It even has companions—on bookshelves and on the internet—that similarly speak of an increasing fear of the demographic “replacement” of native French people. Media figure Éric Zemmour’s 2014 French Suicide, for instance—a collection of essays that criticized the country’s sense of “national repentance” for colonization and what Zemmour calls the “religion” of human rights—sold more than 500,000 copies within a year.

A key moment for The Camp of the Saints was the release of its 2011 reprint edition, which sold more than 70,000 copies within four years. It also received extensive media coverage, including interviews in popular talk shows, and lavish reviews in mainstream weeklies like Le Point and L’Express, as well as the more conservative Valeurs Actuelles. The same Le Figaro that, 40 years earlier, had destroyed Raspail’s book, opened its columns to a long, genial interview with its author.

More recently, especially as hundreds of thousands of refugees from Africa and the Middle East began arriving in Europe in 2015, Raspail’s title has become something of a catchphrase in both the United States and France for Breitbart-like pundits, signalling a ready-made argument against “politically correct” humanitarianism and a warning against immigration’s deadly consequences for Western (read: Christian, white) people. On his radio show in October 2015, Bannon, then the head of Breitbart, referred to “a Camp of the Saints-type invasion” when describing the wave of refugees arriving in Europe.

The primary peddler of Raspail’s ideas in France, meanwhile, has been Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party. She first read the book, which was routinely sold at National Front’s rallies throughout the 1980s and 90s, when she was 18, and again in 2012; today, she keeps a dedicated copy by her desk in her office. But it was only at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015 that she decided to bring it to the attention of the general public. On September 2, 2015, in the middle of the worldwide outcry caused by the picture of a 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, washed ashore on the coast of Greece, face down in the sand, Le Pen tried to replace that image with another, scarier vision. On French radio, Le Pen, by then the leader of the National Front, spoke of the “hundreds of thousands of migrants who will come tomorrow”—what she called a “real migratory submersion.” Then came the pitch: “I invite the French to read, or read again The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail, because the images of cargo ships throwing hundreds of migrants—that’s The Camp of the Saints.”

Le Pen’s public admiration for the novel—which describes immigrants as “microbes” and uses race, in its most basic biological sense, as the key factor that explains individual motives and values societies’ fates—caused a stir in circles on the left. But today, public opinion in large part has been immunized against such indignations. A 2016 survey by Ipsos for the Institute of Political Science in Paris found that 65 percent of the French population polled believed there were too many foreigners in France, while 63 percent approved the statement “Today we don’t feel at home in our own country as we used to.” And Le Pen’s anti-immigration party has scored record electoral successes in the past few years, earning 25-28 percent of the vote in the past three national elections.

Today, in France and other Western countries, decrying the “unceasing flow of illegal immigration” or the “massive wave of illegal immigration washing ashore the coasts of France,” as Le Pen does in most of her rallies, has started to sound predictable. Worse: trivial, and almost dull.

At a rally in Paris on Monday, in the last few days of an increasingly tight presidential race, Le Pen announced, for the first time, a plan to temporarily ban all legal immigration on Day One of her presidency, if she is elected. A jubilant crowd of 6,000 supporters chanted, “France to the French” and, “It’s our home” (“On est chez nous”) in response. The National Front’s previous anti-immigrant proposals—cutting the net balance of immigration down to only 10,000 entrees per year, drastically limiting the possibility of being naturalized as French and taxing jobs held by foreigners an extra 10 percent—were apparently not seen as harsh enough. For nearly two years straight, Le Pen has led the polls in the presidential election. But her numbers had started to erode over the past couple weeks, as far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has risen and the right-wing François Fillon has stubbornly held on despite of his indictment for fraud in March. Instead of trying to accommodate voters at the political center, Le Pen took a sharp turn further to the right. She played it à la Trump and invented an even more extreme version of the “Muslim ban” to get the media’s and the voters’ attention.

It was a move right out of the Raspail playbook. It’s true that Le Pen has made a point of eradicating the “r”-word—“race”—from the new National Front’s vocabulary. (The word is still taboo in France because of its nefarious use during World War II.) Last year, she insisted to the conservative weekly Valeurs Actuelles, “Whether one’s skin color is black or white, whether one comes from the islands or Ardèche, one is French.” Yet her very next statement in the same interview was right in line with Raspail’s views: “But to be French cannot be reduced to simply ‘having been born in France,’” she added, confirming her intention to abolish the current right to citizenship for anyone born and raised in France. To Le Pen, blood, or jus sanguinis—the right to citizenship based on one’s parents’ or ancestors’ status—is the only legitimate way to be French. Blood, and a phobia for racial interbreeding, is also the subtext of Raspail’s book. In his preface to the 2011 reprint, he took pains to list all the names of his ancestors back to the age of Louis XIV, to prove that not one ounce of non-European blood runs in his veins. “[T]here is not a single name that could indicate any exotic ascendance,” concluding, with a sigh of relief, “I am not mixed-race!”

Raspail, for his part, seemed unfazed when he learned that Bannon had adopted his novel as a roadmap. “I’m not surprised. Other presidents read it. Reagan read The Camp of the Saints, so did François Mitterrand in France,” he declared in a March 9 radio interview on France Info. Was he proud of the book? “Proud? No. I was useful. It took to heart, unknowingly, what is, was and will be for a very long time the issue of the Western world.”

By choosing Le Pen as France’s next president—or not—French voters will soon tell us whether they agree.