The Camp of the Saints

It is surely time for a new edition of Mr. Jean Raspail's seminal apocalyptic novel The Camp of the Saints. First published in 1973 it last returned to the bestseller lists in 2011 and continues to sell well. The reason is its prescience. It is a novel about mass Third World migration destroying European civilisation. It has been condemned as racist and xenophobic but the scenario it presents grow more eerily real by the day. 

The plot concerns an ill-founded humanitarian gesture by the Belgian government whereby it offers asylum and passage to Europe to poor citizens of Calcutta. The Belgian embassy is quickly inundated with the swarming poor of that city as parents seek to give their children to the Belgians. The Belgians withdraw the offer too late. This begins a flood of illegal immigrants into southern France that grows to apocalyptic proportions. By the end of the novel the whole of Europe has been over-run by people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It is a novel about the dangers of open borders. It raises important questions about how the West should handle the prospect of mass immigration. 

In the last month or so, of course, we have seen the immigration policies of the EU unravel as European polities struggle to cope with a tide of unfortunate immigrants from North Africa and Syria. Large numbers of people are on the move - too many for the current system to cope. In large measure this is a problem of Europe's own making and it is difficult to feel much sympathy for the strain of Germany and others in dealing with the crisis: the crisis is a direct result of NATO's aggressive policies in Libya and Syria. Like the Americans in Iraq, they have recklessly dismantled entire nations and created a mass of displaced human beings. There is some justice in the fact that these people are heading for Europe. Why not? it was the Europeans who destroyed their countries in the first place. 

But, of course, the problem is much greater than that. Western sponsored wars in Libya and Syria (and Iraq and Afghanistan) are the acute cause of the problem, but even without those wars large numbers of people - unprecedented numbers - are on the move across the globe. Raspail's apocalypse is nearer to reality now than at any time since it was first published. 

Monseuir Raspail himself is an interesting writer. He is a traditional Catholic and strongly opposed to liberalism and communism. Widely travelled, his particular interest has been those peoples and places that have failed to come to terms with modernity. This is a matter that increasingly occupies the current writer too: the problem of failed modernities. There are many in the world, most notably Arabo/Islamic modernity, and they are feeding a growing tide of immigration pressure upon Europe, North America, Australia and other so-called First World nations. Le Camp des Saints is suddenly essential reading again for a fictional backdrop to the eventual consequences of this contemporary crisis.

An English translation in ebook format is available here.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black