Conservative utopian or prophet of doom? - On the 100th birthday of Jean Raspail

Conservative utopian or prophet of doom?

On the 100th birthday of Jean Raspail

Werner Olles

Jean Raspail became known in Germany's right-wing conservative circles primarily through his magnificent dystopian novel ‘The Camp of the Saints’. Written in the early 1970s, the book was published in Germany in 1985 by Hohenrain Verlag and in 2015 in a new German translation by Antaios. Raspail was a literary prize winner of the Académie Française, author of numerous travelogues, reports and novels, many of which received prestigious critics' awards, he was a royalist, a traditionalist Catholic, an anti-communist and an anti-democrat in equal measure, and had the title of Consul General of Patagonia. In an interview with the magazine Réaction in the winter of 1993, which appeared in 2014 in the slim volume Der letzte Franzose (The Last Frenchman), he describes The Camp of the Saints as ‘my first serious book’ and affirms the attribute ‘prophetic’ attributed to it.

In fact, however, Raspail was anything but a racist. Born on 5 July 1925 in Chamillé-sur-Déme, France, to an upper-class family, the novelist describes, in his book They Were the First: Tragedy and End of the Fireland Indians (German edition, Munich, 1988), the disappearance of an ancient culture and, in this context, refers to ‘all these pretty and good consciences of good people’, the liberals and socialists who accelerate massification and practise the ‘great replacement’ (Renaud Camus). Raspail therefore professes an ‘excess of pessimism,’ but the dystopian ‘Army of the Saints’ is rather strongly inspired by a ‘prophetic realism’ when one compares what has been happening in Western Europe for over ten years now with what he once wrote.

The plot of the book is simple and can be described in a few sentences. Over a hundred ships carrying poverty-stricken refugees from the southern hemisphere land like a tidal wave on the lush coasts of southern France, one of Europe's open borders. These people are unarmed, pitiful and weak. Their strength lies in their numbers; they appeal to our compassion, lured by countless NGOs and left-wing liberal, green politicians who promise them milk and honey in the promised land of refuge. They are ‘the others’ who will soon be in the majority, and whom Europe, with its terrible ageing population and meagre birth rates, has nothing to counter. Raspail describes the book as ‘impetuous, angry, energetic, almost cheerful in its despair, but savage, brutal and repulsive in the eyes of the tender consciences that are spreading endemically’. The occupied and colonised country capitulates, the French flee north in droves, abandoning their homeland without a fight. But the old France is defended by a good dozen brave men, who are ultimately killed by their own army.

The prophet Raspail thus broke the silence surrounding the land grab and population exchange and exposed the collaborators of this incredible crime. The reaction of politicians and ministers, right up to the prime minister, was prompt. ‘We are all mixed race, there are no native French people,’ wrote Minister Besson; former Prime Minister Fabius rambled on about ‘the beauty of young French people with a migrant background’; Mitterrand declared, ‘My house is also yours,’ but did not dream of taking in any of the asylum seekers, and Chirac trumpeted about a "Europe whose roots are as Muslim as they are Christian! What made Raspail so desperate, angry and stunned was the question of why the French were so blindly, methodically, irresponsibly, even cynically participating in the sacrifice of their homeland on the altar of an exaggerated and hypocritical humanitarianism. The thought of it made him feel deeply nauseous. Were they really still French? For Raspail, it was clear: ‘Cowardice in the face of the weak is the most effective and deadly cowardice!’

Nevertheless, he is no longer as pessimistic as he used to be. He sees the Catholic minority fighting with their backs to the wall, the young priests are fewer in number but extremely motivated, the monks and nuns are watching and praying in the monasteries and abbeys, and those who are called are flocking to them. Could Christianity in France be moving towards the dawn of a rebirth? He admits that he did not foresee the power of Islam today, the best and most determined component of the flood of tribes and foreign cultures that are ready to storm our gates, which are not guarded anyway. He hears the church bells fall silent in the face of the ever-increasing number of mosques and minarets, veiled women, the establishment of Islamic holidays, the marketing of halal products and officially promoted Koranic instruction. 

But he is building on what ethnologists refer to as ‘isolates’: ‘Powerful minorities, perhaps ten million strong, who do not necessarily have to be white, because being white is not a colour or an origin, but an attitude!’ They will hold fast to our history, our culture and our traditions; they will draw strength from their communities, their solidarity networks, their schools, their geographical zones, their birth rates and their Christian, Catholic faith. The last isolates will hold out until the call for a Reconquista, and other European isolates will join such a movement.

Raspail insisted that the integration model would not work because the number of invaders would not stop growing. He rejected naturalisation on paper and instead recommended distancing oneself from the ‘mad Christian ideas’ – as Chesterton put it – the misguided human rights. All peoples could inspire enthusiasm, but if they were mixed too much, hostility would arise instead of sympathy; peaceful mixing was a dangerous utopia: ‘Just look at South Africa!’ The measures he proposed involved considerable coercion, and therefore he did not believe that they would be implemented. The only realistic chance lay in ethnic and cultural isolation. He already saw such a development emerging in the withdrawal of native French people from dangerous neighbourhoods dominated by North African, Islamist and criminal gangs. He also saw the mass demonstrations against gay marriage as a rejection of the imposed change in civilisation that the left was pushing through against the will of the people.

Raspail was aware that all this would ultimately be impossible without serious conflict. Anyone who desecrated the idea of the nation and distorted the history of France, as the left had been doing for many years, was to be regarded as an enemy, just like the media spreading lies. As a devout Catholic and royalist, he saw in these institutions an ethical, philosophical and religious attitude, a beautiful and noble idea that gave satisfaction to heroism and a sense of the sacred: ‘It is the spark of the sacred that elevates man to transcendence, but without God there is no king!’ The obsequious collectivism of politically correct thinking and its empty rhetoric provoked resistance in him. Not necessarily armed resistance, but a very decisive rebelliousness and a clear rejection of excess, relativism, liberalism, constant compromise and the petty cowardice of a pretentious, rootless society without a future, which disgusted and even frightened him. But this required the symbolic actions of uprisings.

A dream? Certainly, but a beautiful dream! Raspail: ‘I don't see any other dreams; we no longer know what goal to direct our dreams towards. When I write my books, I always tell myself a story, and it is almost always the same: the search for the absolutely unattainable dream!’ On 15 June 2020, Jean Raspail fulfilled his dream in Paris at the ripe old age of 95.