Invasion and Replacement Fantasies: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints and the French Far Right
This chapter engages critically with Jean Raspail’s best-selling novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), in which one million Indians invade Europe through France, leading to the “conquest” of the West a few days later. In 2011, Renaud Camus transformed this fictional scenario into the Great Replacement theory, eagerly adopted in European and American far-right circles. The chapter shows how, by mobilizing the genre of the invasion novel and the biblical scenario of the Apocalypse, the novel has been instrumental in forging a political myth about migration that the far right has embraced whole-heartedly and used to justify its anti-immigration stance. Situating the novel in the political context of the rise of the National Front in 1970s France, the chapter examines Raspail’s-and more broadly the far right’s-disavowal of the republican ideology of colonialism, maps the complex landscape of immigration to France in the aftermath of decolonization, and reads closely the unapologetically racist representation of refugees and immigrant labor in The Camp of the Saints.
