Camp of the Saints

The Novel Europe Pretends Not to Have Read

Jean Raspail published Le Camp des Saints in France in 1973. It describes an armada of one million migrants sailing from the Ganges Delta to the coast of southern France, and the paralysis of a Western civilization that has lost the will to defend its own borders. The novel was immediately denounced, widely read, and never quite forgotten.

What the Book Does

Raspail's scenario is deliberately extreme. The flotilla is not an invasion force but a mass of unarmed, starving humanity, which makes the Western dilemma worse, not better. The French government, the Catholic Church, the media, and the intellectual class each respond with their own form of surrender: some out of guilt, some out of ideology, some out of cowardice. Raspail rotates between the ships, the corridors of power in Paris, and a handful of dissenters who see what is coming and cannot stop it.

The novel is satirical, grotesque, and deliberately provocative. Raspail was not writing policy analysis. He was writing a fable about civilizational exhaustion, and he loaded it with the kind of imagery designed to make comfortable readers uncomfortable. Whether you read it as prophecy, provocation, or something in between, it remains one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century.

About This Edition

Author: Jean Raspail
Publisher: Vauban Books
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9798988739999
Translation: Vauban Books (Redoubt) English edition