What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us About Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon and the Rise of the Populist Ri

What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us About Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon and the Rise of the Populist Right

Stridently anti-immigrant, The Camp of Saints was originally ignored or pilloried. Now, it’s found a following.


In 1973, a strange apocalyptic novel imagined the Southern coast of France suddenly overrun by hundreds of boats “piled high with layer on layer of human bodies” carrying hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Indian continent. Within 24 hours, as the military response fails, political elites capitulate and the French native population collapses morally, poisoned by their “damned, obnoxious, detestable pity” for “other races,” the West falls to the “black and brown” invasion “swarming” across its land.

Much has been made recently about this grandiloquent, often verbose and violently racist 325-page dystopia, The Camp of the Saints, written by the French novelist (and royalist) Jean Raspail. Forty-four years after its release, the book is said to have sold 500,000 copies, at least according to Raspail himself, and has become the bible of alt-right circles in the United States and in France.

It is also the surprising common denominator between two political figures who might well be among the most powerful actors in the years to come: French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, currently predicted to make it to the second round of the French presidential election after Sunday’s vote, and President Donald Trump’s controversial political adviser Steve Bannon. Both have cited the book with admiration as key to understanding the refugee crisis in 2015 and, more generally, the supposed threat to Western civilization posed by immigration. For them, the book is neither an allegory nor science fiction. It is a vivid description of today’s “migratory submersion” (Le Pen’s words) or “invasion” (Bannon’s), and the failure of political “elites” to respond with the necessary resolve to preserve what Bannon calls the “underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West.”

But Le Camp des Saints, to use the original French title, wasn’t always seen this way. In fact, it was initially panned by critics in France and sold poorly, only to rise in popularity since its first reprint, in 1985—exactly as the French far-right likewise ascended. To trace the novel’s popular trajectory over the past half-century is, in a sense, to trace the rightward political shift in France—and much of Europe and the United States—and to watch the trivialization of hostile rhetoric against immigrants and other “cultures.”

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/23/what-a-1973-french-novel-tells-us-about-marine-le-pen-steve-bannon-and-the-rise-of-the-populist-right-215064