The French New Right was led by thinkers such as Alain de Benoist, who founded the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (Group for Research and Study of European Civilization, or GRECE), which promoted anti-egalitarianism and the veneration of authentic European identity. Purportedly inspired by the Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of cultural hegemony and “war of position,” the French New Right incubated ethnonationalism and identitarianism in scholarly and cultural niches. It emphasized themes such as authenticity, borders, patriarchy, and the threat of immigration to national identity. It also contested changing gender norms and the rise of a worldwide liberal order allegedly masterminded by global organizations such as the United Nations, with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The New Right decried policies that loosened immigration restrictions and promoted the social inclusion of minorities and women in education, the workplace, and politics.
Across the Atlantic, The Camp of the Saints was embraced by ideologues like Wilmot Robertson, who spearheaded proposals for a white ethnostate and published the antisemitic journal Instauration from 1975 to 2000. Instauration’s inaugural issue in December 1975 featured a review of Camp of the Saints as a “cautionary anti-epic” that is a “brilliant inquest of the West, the fictional climax of a racial inundation that started long ago,” and “leaves the reader reeling with doom.” As historian of ecofascism Miroslava Chávez-García has shown, the American white nationalist Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term “the tragedy of the commons,” praised Camp of the Saints and its exhortation to “save” Western society. Twenty years after its initial release, at a time when anti-Mexican racism pervaded California and on the heels of the passage of anti-immigrant Proposition 187, Hardin cited the novel to a Los Angeles Times reporter, carping about immigrants and opining that “things look much closer to that book than they did 10 years ago.”
The Camp of the Saints has been accreting influence for five decades. From the perspective of the United States, it gestures to early 20th-century tales about the Jukes and the Kallikaks, in which one bad seed turned an entire family line dysgenic, and generated an “army of idiots and imbeciles” that defiled society. Additionally, the book sits downstream from The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History by Madison Grant. Published in 1916, this treatise of demographic downfall foretold the demise of the United States under waves of immigration from Southern Europe, Asia, and other parts of the globe. The Passing of the Great Race served as a repository of (flawed) data and a nativist justification for the passage, in 1924, of the draconian Johnson-Reed Act, which placed strict quotas on immigrants from countries outside of Western Europe. Like Camp of the Saints, Grant’s tract has been reissued by far-right publishers, most notably in a 2016 centennial edition. It has been referenced by Stephen Miller and other MAGA extremists as inspiration for policies of so-called remigration, forced removal, and an end to birthright citizenship.
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Literary scholar Corina Stan aptly describes how the themes of Camp of the Saints have congealed into a “a political myth about migration.” Over the day in which the story unfolds, scores of immigrant others, crowded by the thousands onto ships, determinedly set out to make landfall on France’s southern shores. This plot, writes Stan, “draws on a well-established archive: the tradition of invasion novels, replacement theories, and other texts by far-right intellectuals and violent revolutionaries.” Rather than represent the arrivals as French-speaking immigrants from North Africa, which might have hit too close to home given France’s violent repression in Algeria (1954–62) and the massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961, Raspail anonymizes them into a featureless Indian multitude. This lack of historical specificity and reliance on a generically “Brown,” bloodthirsty trespasser has made the novel’s invasion sequence readily transferable to a range of geopolitical and ideological scenarios.
The construction of this racial myth has harmonized not only with traditional ultranationalist politics but also with the more recently formed Reconquête!, an Islamophobic ethnonationalist party organized by politician and author Éric Zemmour, who declared on the presidential campaign trail in 2022 that “the French people are being replaced by another civilization. This wounds me, this destroys me. I come before the French people to say, let’s together stop this evolution.” Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s observation that literary dehumanization frequently deploys a “lack of figuration,” Stan underlines Camp of the Saints’ endless descriptions of Brown migrants, portrayed as deformed, defective, and diseased. The metaphors fractionate and recoalesce into a carnivalesque parade of shapeless bodies and body parts, nameless, throbbing, and overflowing, and described in animalistic terms as groveling packs of desperate creatures. Toward the end of the novel, when the multitudinous bodies disembark from the ships, flooding French soil, they are like “grotesque little beggars,” “basset hounds,” and “a herd of clumsy seals.”
