You can buy all kinds of things on Amazon, from sex toys to “Mein Kampf.” Yet last week, Amazon decided that Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, “The Camp of Saints,” was beyond the pale of respectability.
Vauban Books, a small independent publishing house, had been selling a new translation of the book for months. Sales had been going well. But a number of media outlets, from Le Monde to New York Magazine, had noticed the new edition and condemned it. So, on April 17, Amazon removed the paperback edition, notifying Vauban Books on the 20th that its edition of “The Camp of Saints” had violated the company’s “offensive content” policy.
Vauban Books issued a press release protesting Amazon’s actions but wasn’t optimistic. However, a social media storm rose to its rescue. The story was picked up in mainstream media.
By the end of the day, Amazon had reversed course, claiming the removal was an “error.” Thanks to the attention the attempt at censorship provided, purchases of the book soared; as of Friday, it’s reached No. 5 on the list of bestselling books on Amazon.
Because I wrote the critical introduction for the new edition, this affair briefly turned me into a banned writer. I’m sure I’ll be speaking alongside Margaret Atwood at the next “banned books” conference in no time. But while I await the invitation, it’s worthwhile clarifying who Raspail is and why “The Camp of the Saints” is important.
By the time he died in 2020, Raspail was the author of 40 books—over a dozen of them novels—and winner of numerous prizes, including the Grand Prix de Littérature de l’Académie Française, which France’s most prestigious academic institution awards a writer for lifetime achievement. Raspail was a literary romantic. His books describe the sufferings of almost vanished nations and lost peoples from around the world.
Ignore the pull quotes from “The Camp of the Saints” about migrants that you see from the legacy media and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Raspail was perfectly capable of providing sympathetic portrayals of non-Europeans and indicting Europeans for their own moral failures.
His 1986 novel “Qui se souvient des hommes” (“Who Will Remember the People…”), which won two literary awards, details the struggles of one South American tribe to survive. One scene involves a British commodore; an admirer of native cultures, he welcomes them onboard his ship. But they smell. They act grossly. Face-to-face with the natives, the commodore recoils. Yet Raspail, the narrator, passes judgment on the commodore: “He denies himself,” as Peter denied Christ.
Such reflections would be at home in any more spiritually attentive 20th-century postcolonial literature. But Raspail committed an unpardonable offense. He wondered whether the fate of the Indigenous peoples of Europe would be similar to the peoples who had vanished in the wake of European colonization.
That’s the core scandal of “The Camp of the Saints”—to classify white Europeans as another “native” group, endangered by a new world.
The crucial difference between Europeans and other threatened peoples is that the danger comes less from without than from within.
“The Camp of the Saints” is best read as a long thought experiment. It imagines how Westerners would respond to a flotilla of 1 million migrants who intend to arrive on the shores of France. The novel is a fictional depiction of the civilizational consequences of Western self-loathing.
The targets of the novel’s mix of tragic plot and biting satire are several. There is the left-wing intelligentsia: They herald the coming of the migrants as the dawn of a new age of multiculturalism. There are the churchmen: They see the influx of migrants as the Second Coming, a final triumph of the weak over the strong that will atone for the West’s sins. And then there are the left-wing radicals: Now that the European empires are gone, they want to decolonize the home front as well.
“Our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in 1961. “The Camp of the Saints” shows the logical consequences of this decolonial creed. It culminates in violent reverse colonization. The process is helped along by Westerners who are taught to despise themselves and think the world would be better off if they didn’t exist.
This creed of self-annihilation ends up consuming the progressive intelligentsia and the church. In the novel, the World Ecumenical Council comes to the following conclusion: “that modern Western society cannot be reformed and must therefore be destroyed so as to build upon its ruins a new world equitable for all, so help us God.”
Raspail is a fitting Cassandra for our era. When The New York Times reviewed “The Camp of the Saints” in 1975, the reviewer regarded its central plot as “preposterous.” Now, as Western societies reckon with the consequences of mass migration that the book described too well, powerful actors such as Amazon work to limit its reach. But in a way, reading the novel in terms of current events misses its deeper themes.
“The Camp of the Saints” can be read as a political prediction of what would happen to the 21st-century West. But the more profound reading is to think of it as an exercise in “metapolitics,” what Joseph de Maistre called the “metaphysics of politics.” Such exercises show the intuitions and insights required to grasp our deeper reality, or at the very least, identify which ones are missing from the present.
For Raspail, the roots of our malaise lie in a deep spiritual sickness. We have lost the capacity to love ourselves, our people, and our culture. The power of “The Camp of the Saints” lies in how it uses the drama of mass migration to hold up a mirror to ourselves. It forces us to reckon with our moral cowardice and encourages us to defend what is good and noble in our own beleaguered civilization.
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