The Camp of the Saints

Inspiration

Raspail has said his inspiration came while at the French Riviera in 1971, as he was looking out at the Mediterranean.

“What if they were to come? I did not know who "they" were, but it seemed inevitable to me that the numberless disinherited people of the South would, like a tidal wave, set sail one day for this opulent shore, our fortunate country’s wide-gaping frontier."

The name of the book comes from Book of Revelation, the Biblical end of the age:

In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints, the city He loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them.

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 for the chance 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 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 some passengers publicly fornicating. As the ships pass "the straits of Ceylon", helicopters swarm overhead, capturing images of the refugees on board to be published in Europe.

As the fleet crosses the Indian Ocean, the political situation in France becomes more charged. At a press conference about the crisis, a French official who offers a speech in praise of the refugees is confronted by a journalist who claims he is merely trying to "feed the invaders" and demands to know if France will "have the courage to stand up to" the migrants when they reach France. 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 forces fire a warning shot, causing the fleet to steer south, around the Cape of Good Hope. To the surprise of observers, the apartheid government 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 South African government. Western leaders, confident the refugees will accept supplies from their "more virtuous" nations, organize a supply mission, funded by governments, charities and major churches, to meet the refugees off São Tomé. However, the fleet doesn't stop for these barges either, and when a worker from the Papal barge attempts to board one of the ships, he is strangled and thrown overboard. The press attempts to contain coverage of the disaster.

When the migrants pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, the President orders troops to the south and addresses the nation of his plan to repel the migrants. However, in the middle of the address, he breaks down, demands 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 migrants 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. 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. The village containing the troops is bombed flat by airplanes of the new French government, referred to only as the "Paris Multiracial Commune". In a few years, most Western governments have surrendered. The mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese peasants as they flee into 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, forces 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

A translation by Norman Shapiro was published by Scribner in 1975 (ISBN 0-684-14240-6). It was republished in mass market paperback format by Ace Books in 1977 (ISBN 0-441-09120-2), and in softcover format by The Social Contract Press in 1995 (ISBN 1-881780-07-4); The Washington Post reports that reading the novel "focused" the ideas of John Tanton, Social Contract Press' founder.

Response

The book was a success in France, praised by right wing intellectuals such as Michel Déon, Jean Cau and Louis Pauwels. After it was translated to English, Max Lerner said that it had "irresistible pace of skill and narrative", while Sidney Hook said that it would "succeed in shocking and challenging the complacent contemporary mind". In 1975, Time magazine panned the novel as a "bilious tirade" that only required a response because it "arrives trailing clouds of praise from French savants, including Dramatist Jean Anouilh ('A haunting book of irresistible force and calm logic'), with the imprint of a respected U.S. publisher and a teasing pre-publication ad campaign ('The end of the white world is near')". Kirkus Reviews compared the novel to Mein Kampf, while Jeffrey Hart in the National Review lauded it, stating "in freer and more intelligent circles in Europe, the book is a sensation and Raspail is a prize-winner ... his plot is both simple and brilliant". In 1983, Linda Chavez called the novel "a sickening book", describing it as "racist, xenophobic and paranoid". The December 1994 cover story of The Atlantic Monthly focused on the themes of the novel, analyzing them in the context of international relations. (This was at about the same time that The Social Contract Press chose to bring it back into U.S. publication).

In 2002, Lionel Shriver described the novel as "both prescient and appalling," certainly "racist" but "written with tremendous verbal energy and passion." Shriver writes that the book "gives bilious voice to an emotion whose expression is increasingly taboo in the West, but that can grow only more virulent when suppressed: the fierce resentment felt by majority populations when that status seems threatened."

William F. Buckley, Jr. praised the book in 2004 as "a great novel" that raised questions on how to respond to massive illegal immigration. In 2005 the conservative Chilton Williamson praised the book as "one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century." In 2001 the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as "widely revered by American white supremacists and is a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries," and as recently as October 2015 condemned the novel as "the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US."

The book returned to the bestseller list in 2011, and beginning in 2015 has been frequently referenced by Steve Bannon, former chairman of Breitbart News and current chief strategist to U.S. President Donald Trump.