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. 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. 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. 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. Cécile Alduy is professor of French studies at Stanford University and a research fellow at the CEVIPOF in Paris.
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