Jean Raspail does not like receiving visitors. He is furious that another journalist shared his unlisted phone number, but when I show up at his flat in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, he is eager to talk about his forty-four-year-old novel that everyone from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Bannon is fond of citing. “It’s not a migration,” Bannon said in a January 2016 Breitbart interview about refugees in Europe. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”21 Bannon’s obsession with the novel prompted a flurry of belated reviews in early 2017 by Anglophone critics discovering Raspail for the first time.
Published in 1973, just five years after the heyday of French student radicalism, The Camps of the Saints was roundly panned by the French intelligentsia, and Raspail was denounced as a reactionary neocolonialist. Now he feels vindicated.
Raspail’s tone was scornful in the 1970s; he is even more bitter now at ninety-two. Frail but sharp, Raspail declares, “The political situation in France is chaos. It is heartbreaking, it is sad, all these people are puppets.” He never belonged to a political party and does not see a way out. “It bothers me because I am French, and I find that my country has become completely pathetic.”22
Raspail is an old friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen and tells me that he has known Marine “very well since she was two years old.” But he isn’t a fan of where the FN is going. It was never a party of power, and it shouldn’t be, in his view. “It was a party that had its usefulness,” he argues. “It was a party that pissed off others … raised important issues, and put on a good show.”
Raspail believes the FN was always more effective at shaking things up and bringing new ideas into the political debate. “That’s why people vote for them,” he adds. Their strength is in the field of ideas. But now, he laments, “they want power, they want to have a lot of MPs,” to gain real weight in the National Assembly. That, in his view, was their mistake.
Whatever the party’s electoral fate in the coming years, Raspail paints a dire scenario for France. “There are peoples who have disappeared without massacre, … they have been absorbed ethnically, intellectually, legally. They entered into another civilization and they disappeared.” And Europe is next. “We will become a minority, we white Europeans,” he assures me.23
Raspail does not like mixing; much of his writing focuses on disappearing tribes and languages. “We are a country, a civilization, a language, a way of life.… That is what made the country. If we blend it with something that does not correspond at all to what we are, it won’t work and we’ll be lost.” He says the same is true of Germans or the English, and it won’t mean the apocalypse, but the essence of what he considers Frenchness will disappear. Here, Raspail sounds a lot like Renaud Camus in The Great Replacement, or Barrès with his hallowed cemetery. “France will continue to function very well. It is a beautiful country, there are resources, … the railroads will work,” he imagines. “But it will not be the same people at all. It has nothing to do with me, so I do not want it. I was born in a civilization that is mine, surrounded by people who will be my compatriots. That is my reason for living!” he exclaims. “I do not want to share it with people who may not all be ill-intentioned but who will inevitably come to muddle and blur all of this.”
He posits a theorem about assimilation: “Any minority that refuses to adapt is lost. Second, any minority that adapts is lost. There is no solution.” He believes France is moving in the direction of adapting to Islam. He raves about Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which chronicles an Islamist takeover of France beginning with a moderate well-meaning Muslim candidate to whom the left rallies to keep the FN from power. “Houellebecq picks up where The Camp of the Saints left off.… I had foreseen a lot of things, and he, he finally understood that the great danger is not the invasion like in The Camp of the Saints, although that is it what we are now witnessing. Instead, we will be damned by our own weakness, by our cowardice.” The French, he argues, sounding a lot like the woman he has known so well since she was two, are being asked to adapt to Islam and “a generalist global consensus, … which is as dangerous to me as Islam.”24
Four decades after he wrote it, Raspail’s book is mostly denounced for its overt racism or lauded as prophetic by right-wing anti-immigration activists. But what is most striking about the novel is the way it captured the tone and content of both sides of a fictional debate that has today become all too real. Raspail’s chief villains are the liberal editors and radio hosts who lay out the red carpet for refugees. “When the heart gives way, it’s a Turkish bazaar,” he wrote disdainfully. The radio shows led by liberal hosts “paid for the inserts in those catalogues called newspapers, whose editors, decked out in suede, and barbecuefed, with their Riviera tans, cried out for human liberation through an end to profits, preached rejection of money, that enslaver and corrupter of souls, called for doing away with all social constraints and for abject equality,” he wrote. “It hit the spot. It sold. Whereas nothing else did.” He imagined priests “frantically scribbling with an eye toward the following Sunday” as ready-made sermons came across the airwaves.25
Today, Raspail sees the European dilemma in the same way his protagonists did then. His heroic right-wing newspaper editor, Machefer, tries to raise his own militia, telling readers, “Unless the government orders the army to take all possible steps to prevent this landing, it’s the duty of every citizen with any feeling for his culture, his race, his religion and traditions, not to think twice, but to take up arms himself.”26
One of the book’s heroes is the captain of a Greek ship who rams flailing refugees in the water. Other heroes include a not-so-fictional South African leader who threatens to fire on refugees without a second thought, a policy that Raspail’s protagonists advocate in France as the fleet approaches. A naval captain advises the French president, “We have to make a choice. Either we open our doors to these people and take them in. Or we torpedo every one of their boats, at night, when it’s too dark to see their faces as we kill them.”27
The novel’s climactic scene occurs when the French president is giving a radio address and falters just as he is about to issue orders to fire on the refugees coming onto French shores. In his speech to the nation on the eve of the refugee fleet’s arrival, the president declares, “Today it’s the poor who are on the attack, with their ultimate weapon.… I have, therefore, ordered the army to open fire, if need be, to prevent the refugees from effecting a landing.” But then he hesitates, backing off his orders and “asking every soldier and officer, every member of our police—asking them from the depths of my conscience and my soul—to weigh this monstrous mission for themselves, and to feel free either to accept or reject it.”28
I mention that Frauke Petry, the leader of Germany’s AfD, called for using live ammunition if Germany’s borders were overrun by refugees. In the novel, Raspail’s character backtracks at the last moment, but for the author, the question of whether to fire or not to fire is the essence of the book and forty years later captures the dilemma Europe faces.
“I don’t concern myself with their motives,” Raspail says of the refugees and migrants arriving in Europe today. “They are poor, they are on the run, there are women and children. They are millions. If they enter, there will be millions more that will arrive after them. What do we do? Do we pull the trigger?” he asks. The answer for the book’s fictional president is no, but it’s clear Raspail sees his character as spineless. “We are encumbered throughout Europe, by the ex-Christian phenomena of compassion,” he says. “Compassion is fabulous … but it is obvious that without the use of force, we will never stop the invasion.”
“We do not send them home, we help bring them in,” he says. This, he maintains, is due to misguided impulses rooted in “two thousand years of Christian charity.” In Raspail’s view, that charity was “for the neighbour, for the people nearby.… Christian charity did not say to love the totality of the world,” he tells me. Raspail, a Catholic, is even
willing to criticize the pope. “He does not know what Europe is. He is not a European. It does not interest him much,” he laments. Whereas Pope John Paul II talked about nations and borders, Pope Francis is “willing to get along with the Muslims,” he complains. Indeed, his only sign of mercy is for fellow Christians. Should France open its arms to Christians from Syria? I ask. “We have to welcome them,” he says bluntly.29
Many critics have accused Raspail of being a white supremacist. Although his heroes in the book are mostly white and Christian, there is one assimilated Hindu who joins them in their last stand against the “invaders.” When the refugee boats arrive, only a small band of patriots holds out, including the murderous Greek captain, the editor Machefer, and the Indian man. They gather with the old professor in his stone house to keep a tally of the body count as they shoot down the “invaders.” Being white, Raspail likes to say, “is a state of mind.”30
In person, his views closely resemble those of his characters. For Raspail, so many years after he wrote The Camp of the Saints, it is still about religion and whiteness. Poles once came to France en masse, he recalls. “All the mines in the north were populated by Poles. But perfect gentlemen … they are Christians, they are European, and they are white. A Western civilization, then, it goes very well,” he says approvingly. Raspail begins to get angry when I ask him what he would do now.
“I am not the president of the republic,” he snaps. But eventually, he responds, “My answer is this: we are fucked.”31
Raspail sees a movement taking shape today, much like the small band of men who face down the refugees in his novel. “We’re fed up; we’ve seen enough.… In Marseilles, there are more Muslims than Christians now. They say, ‘It’s all right, they’re French, they’re going to vote.’” He rejects this. “No, there is going to be a resistance movement, and it has begun.… There are alliances that are being built unconsciously. Catholic movements, identity movements,” Raspail tells me.
As Amin Bagdouche, the doctor who treats migrants in the Calais Jungle, sensed after seeing his tires slashed and his van set on fire, the conflict has moved beyond the refugee issue. Something is brewing, a movement that attracts both ex-generals and hooligans, that posts the names and addresses of people to target on social media, and that has an appeal that exists “somewhere beyond the law.”32
The two men—a white nationalist celebrated by the anti-immigrant right, and the half-Algerian doctor who became a humanitarian activist—could not be more different, but their dark vision is strikingly similar.
“If the situation becomes the one I predict—catastrophic—there will certainly be resistance that is both tough and armed.… People will want to liberate their city,” the man who four decades ago foresaw a mass influx of refugees in Europe assures me.
“There is something that will explode, I cannot tell you what, I cannot tell you if I wish for it, I don’t know,” says Raspail. “But something will explode.”33
EPILOGUE
In our modern age, nationalism is not resurgent; it never died.
Isaiah Berlin
On the morning of November 9, 2016, I found myself giving a talk to a hundred people, some angry and some on the verge of tears, at the Open Society Foundations in New York.1 It was meant to be a small lunchtime seminar on the European far right. Given Donald Trump’s shock victory less than twelve hours earlier, it quickly became a discussion of “How could this happen here?”
The crowd was international and diverse. A woman with a German accent stood up and asked whether the proper way to respond to Trump was to resist, to recognize his voters’ pain but reject their misguided politics, or accommodate them. I told her that none of these solutions would help reverse populists’ advances in the United States or anywhere else they have gained influence and power.
Seeking to eradicate xenophobic sentiments, as many anti-Trump and anti-Le Pen activists seem to believe they can, is misguided. They forget that tens of thousands of midwestern voters who supported Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016.2 The Michigan Democratic congresswoman Debbie Dingell predicted it might happen in her state. She was dismissed as crazy. “At Rotary clubs, local chambers of commerce, union halls and mosques, I noted that we could see a Trump presidency,” she wrote in the Washington Post two days after the 2016 election.3 Even after Bernie Sanders upset Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary, Democrats continued to ignore the state until literally the last minute.4
I’d felt the same fear as Dingell as I drove along a highway lined with Trump-Pence signs on the way to Detroit’s airport the day before the election, listening to radio reports that Obama had just flown in for a pro-Clinton rally—this in a state where Obama had decisively defeated Mitt Romney, the son of Michigan’s former governor, by a ten-point margin.
“I knew the Downrivers would support Trump both in the Republican primary and in the general,” wrote Dingell, referring to the blue-collar postindustrial sprawl to the south of Detroit that was once dominated by union households and staunch Democrats. “I witness the emotions and passions of their residents every day, and I believe they are what elected Trump president.”5
The distance from the northern tip of France, where Marine Le Pen took 57 percent of the vote, to the southeastern corner of Michigan, where Trump won 58 percent, is not so great, and the grievances of voters in both places are strikingly similar.6 They resent factories that close down and send jobs abroad, they fear both Islam and the growing number of immigrants they see in their towns (or hear about on television), and they bristle at the triumphalism of the globalist class that appears to be succeeding while they fall further behind.
At the end of my talk, a man who worked in the IT department stood up to make a comment; he was the last person to raise his hand, and many in the audience had already left. He explained that he came from the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and most of his family members had voted for Trump and not because they were racists or hated Muslims. Many of those who remained in the room looked genuinely shocked. They couldn’t imagine that anyone would vote for Trump for any other reason.
Since November 8, 2016, there has been a lot of blame among Democrats and a healthy dose of self-flagellation, too. Some blame Clinton’s Wall Street ties; others find fault in the modern Democratic Party’s obsession with identity politics. But the assumption that Americans have to throw gays and blacks under the bus in order to appeal to working-class whites is false. Building an electoral coalition is not a zero-sum game, and a party can have both objectives. There are real tensions, however, between the identity-politics model of progressivism and the old-fashioned leftist politics of class, and they need to be reckoned with.
Too many people of my generation have barely any memory of a left focused on the economic interests of the working class; to them, progressive politics is mostly associated with identity-based movements from transgender rights to Black Lives Matter, and those supporting a candidate like Trump are too often seen as incorrigible racists rather than alienated ex-Democrats. As the British writer Nick Cohen observed, “When the liberals despise the working class the opportunities for backlash politics are boundless.”7
The irony is that nativist politicians like Trump or Holland’s Geert Wilders are not particularly concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and their economic policies aren’t terribly helpful to workers and the poor. But because there is often no class-based counterargument coming from the left, it is easy for right-wing populists to seize that political terrain; it is an open space.
Trump’s popularity among working-class whites shows that rhetoric and cultural appeals matter more than details in an environment where there is no clear policy debate. Once the old battle lines disappear, realignment becomes very easy. The challenge for today’s left is to acknowledge these voters’ fears and offer policies that help address their grievances without making the sort of moral concessions that lead toward reactionary illiberal policies.
Many have compared the rise o
f Donald Trump in the United States to the ascendant populist parties of Europe. During the campaign, grassroots right-wing activists from Calais to The Hague expressed admiration for Trump and praised him as a reflection of their own ideals. Wilders even attended the Republican convention in Cleveland, where he headlined an LGB-Trump event along with Pamela Geller and Milo Yiannopoulos—speaking in front of a wall featuring photos of bare-chested men, Make America Great Again hats, and a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.
Wilders tried to take a page from the Trump campaign by becoming a social media sensation, but in the end, he lost the election. While Trump’s Twitter feed no doubt fueled his popularity in certain quarters, Wilders failed to learn a second lesson from his American idol. Trump campaigned tirelessly across the country, often holding three or more mass rallies per day. Wilders barely left his office, hoping to win an election simply by regurgitating his familiar anti-Islam slogans on Twitter.
Trump has been extremely successful at mobilizing a segment of the American population and earning their enthusiastic support, but his followers represent a declining demographic, which bodes ill for the long-term success of his brand of white identity politics. As Robert P. Jones wrote a few months before Trump’s victory, during the Obama years, white Christian America became a minority for the first time in US history, falling from 54 percent of the population in 2008 to 45 percent in 2015. “The passing of a coherent cultural world—where working class jobs made ends meet and white conservative Christian values held sway—has produced this powerful politics of white Christian resentment,” he wrote.8 Trump voters felt it viscerally.
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