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The Camp of the Saints
By Jean Raspail
(1973)
Jean Raspail (1925--), a self-described "man of the
right," has succeeded nevertheless in making not just a career but a
name for himself in his native France, whose intellectual and literary
establishments have been predominantly left-wing since the eighteenth
century. (A regular contributor to Le Figaro, he was also the
recipient, in 1970, of the Académie Française's Jean-Walther Prize.)
His success as a conservative writer in a liberal culture, which in
some sense seems nearly miraculous, is partly owing to strength of
character and mind coupled with charm, and enormous talent. The
Camp of the Saints--one of the most uncompromising works of
literary reaction in the twentieth century--would have sunk most
literary reputations, while consigning the author himself to
nonpersonhood for his temerity having tackled the taboo subjects of
race, the Third World, and the future of the white race. Instead,
Raspail has continued in the thirty years since the novel's
publication to publish more books and garner further honors and
awards, including (in 1998) the prestigious T.S. Eliot Award sponsored
by the Ingersoll Foundation of Rockford, Illinois.
Raspail makes no pretensions in his book to
elaboration of plot, depth and subtlety of character development,
brilliance in dialogue, originality in style. For plot, he substitutes
linear narrative, almost journalistic in its single dimensionality;
for individual character, social psychology; for crafted dialogue,
impassioned monologue that barely strives for realism; for style, a
mordant, informal narrative that seems hardly to hear its own voice,
let alone rewrite, correct, and polish it. The narrator, who assumes
by turns the role of bard (or rather anti-bard, reciting his
"anti-epic"), historian, journalist, commentator, satirist, diatribist,
and prophet, is alternately distant and impassioned, philosophic and
emotional, bitter and sardonic, despairing and amused, loving as he
does his decadent and decrepit civilization for what it once was while
despising it for what it has become; aware that it deserves its fate,
perhaps, but also that its barbarian enemies and despoilers do not
deserve to inherit so much as the rotting remains of it. Jean Rapail's
Camp of the Saints has no living heroes. Or almost none.
Twenty men, to be exact, making up in their numbers the sole remainder
of what was once the conquering, dominant, and resplendent Western
World: more straight-forwardly the white world, whose end at
the hands of what once were called the colored races the book
chronicles, and attempts to explain.
Raspail sets his novel at the end of the twentieth
century or the beginning of the twenty-first; around the present time,
in fact. In Calcutta, a crowd of people has gathered outside the
Belgian consulate to press their children forward for inclusion in the
adoption program that would rescue them from a life of poverty by
relocating them with families in Belgium. When the consul declares the
program ended, a giant bearing a deformed monster with lidless eyes, a
flap of skin for a mouth, and stumps for arms on his shoulders
harangues the swelling crowd by reciting for them a parable about the
Hindu gods taking the "little Christian god" down from his cross and
exacting his kingdom from him, in return for his life. "Now the
thousand years are ended," the little god concedes, quoting almost
word for word from the Book of the Apocalypse (a text the giant, whose
trade is gathering human feces and patting it into bricquets for
cookfires, has surely never read). "The nations are rising from the
four corners of the earth, and their number is like the sand of the
sea. They will march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of
the saints and the beloved city.." Inspired by the charismatic turd
eater, the crowd presses on to the docks and commandeers a sixty-year
old four-stack liner, the India Star; also (with the
blessing of the prefect apostolic to the Ganges region, this time)
another big ship, the Calcutta Star. In no time, the popular
example has been imitated up and down the Ganges until a fleet of one
hundred ships, carrying a million people between them, sails for
Europe, the land flowing with milk and honey.
The West learns very soon of the fleet's departure,
and its intended destination. The governments of Europe are made
nervous by the thought of a million impoverished Third World refugees
landing on their shores, but "the beast" or "monster" that has been
subverting the West for the past two or three centuries is eager to
accept this latest Trojan horse and exploit its possibilities for
further subversion and destruction. The media, the churches (including
the Catholic Church, headed by a Brazilian Pope), the educational and
cultural establishments, the trade unions, most of government
itself-all are united in their determination to welcome what the
revengeful Ben Saud (an Algerian immigrant himself and grandson of a
black slave, now enjoying an immensely lucrative career as a left-wing
journalist under the name of Clément Dio) dubs the "Last Chance
Armada" in the name of the brotherhood of man, and of Christian
charity and love.
The President of the French Republic, though a
secret contributor to La Pensée Nationale (a right-wing paper
with a paid subscription of 4000), dares not set his government
forthrightly against the armada. As the Ganges fleet approaches closer
to Europe, the propaganda campaign on its behalf swells--concurrent
with a mass migration of the French public from the southern coastal
region to the north of France. The welcomers make two attempts to
provision the ships (one from South Africa, the other from France), to
which the refugees respond by throwing the proferred supplies
overboard, along with the fresh-killed body of one of the few white
passengers. And then, "At midnight, as Saturday passed into Sunday,
the first minute of Easter, the day of the Resurrection, a great noise
was heard along the coast, somewhere between Nice and Saint-Tropez.
The prows of ninety-nine ships plunged headlong onto the beaches and
between the rocks, as the monster child, waking from his cataleptic
sleep, let out a triumphant cry."
As the President begins an address to the nation,
he is resolved to announce his decision to order the French army to
destroy the debarking hordes, now amounting to eight million people.
Instead, he ends by departing from his script to exhort the troops to
follow their individual consciences. As thousands of hippies, leftwing
priests, and other sympathizers race southward to welcome the Ganges
to France, the colored ghettos in Paris and other major cities rise
up; most of the army defects to marauding gangs of radical students
and other youths; prison guards free their prisoners; and the unions
revolt, all in the name of creating a new world. The government of
Paris collapses and is replaced by a "multiracial" coalition in which
whites enjoy token representation. The most celebrated of the friends
of the Last Chance Aramada (Clément Dio and two leftwing radio hosts
among them) are brutally murdered by the people whose cause they had
championed. White women are kidnapped and sent to brothels patronized
by colored patrons. The narrator (who, we learn, is writing some time
after the cataclysm that has brought down the white world, in an epoch
in which history has been rewritten to standards of political
correctness) explains that, "With France the Enlightened," inventor of
the Rights of Man, "glad to grovel on her knees, no [Western]
government [had dared] sign its name to the genocidal deed" of self
defense in the face of racial incursions across Europe, and in the
United States. Africans swarmed unopposed across the Limpopo River to
attack South Africa. The Chinese invaded the Soviet Union beyond the
Amur. In England, colored immigrants from the Commonwealth countries
converged (with British politeness) on London, to demand that the
royal family marry into the Pakistani community; in America, New York
was taken over by revolutionary blacks. The Western World collapsed,
the narrator explains, when the French Airforce dropped a bomb on a
seventeenth-century villa overlooking the beach where the Last Chance
Armada had landed, killing the owner of the house-one Monsieur Calguès,
retired professor of literature--and nineteen other resisters. These
numbered a former undersecretary for foreign affairs, an ex-deputy for
Pondicherry, a tank commander, a duke and two of his servants, and the
owner of an elegant brothel, who together had succeeded in reclaiming
and holding a Free French, whites-only zone by means of a sniper war
waged against the marauding Ganges immigrants and their French
collaborators. "Just a victory Western style, as complete as it was
absurd and useless," like M. Calguès' shooting of the hippy barbarian
who had broken into his home at the start of the invasion-but achieved
with panache and a sense of humor totally alien to leftists, and to
leftism.
Thirty years after its publication in 1973, The
Camp of the Saints has shown itself to have been prophetic, as
Western Europe, North America, and Australia suffer invasion by scores
of millions of immigrants from beyond the borders of the white world.
Prophetic powers were not, of course, required to foresee the danger
posed by global demographic trends compounded by the pusillanimity of
Western governments "morally disarmed" (as James Burnham would say) by
Third World suffering. Where Raspail demonstrates truly visionary
powers is in his understanding of the process by which key left-wing
elements in Western society, through their varying but related
motives, combine naturally with aggressive external forces to
cooperate in the destruction of the Western world. The death of the
West, it seems, is as much or more a Western project than it is a
Third World one. Certainly, it could not be accomplished by a hundred
Last Chance Armadas alone, so long as the West retained a sense of its
own identity, its nerve, and its selfconfidence intact. "In this
curious war taking shape, those who loved themselves best were the
ones who would triumph:" Those, that is, who feel "[t]hat scorn of a
people for other races, the knowledge that one's own is best, the
triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity's finest.."
The modern West's paramount enemy is Hate in its
social, ethnic, metaphysical, and theological forms: hatred of
quality, hatred of racial differences, hatred of intelligence, hatred
of Truth. Because all conflict is at bottom theological, this hate
must be understood as satanic in its nature and origin. Its totem and
figurehead is the turd eater's monster child from the Ganges, a
deformed counter to the Christ Child in Whose name Western
civilization assumed its form and development. And so it is not (Jean
Raspail tells us) the West itself, but rather this same Child Who
represents, finally, the object of attack from within and without what
used to be called Christendom.
Magnificent as Jean Raspail's thunder is, perhaps
the most moving scene in The Camp of the Saints is also its
quietest and most elegiac. Coming at the beginning of the novel (in
Chapter III), it describes M. Calguès' at supper by himself after
having spent his day observing the ninety-nine rusted ships beached
along the coast benlow his veranda. Having drunk a glass of wine and
poured another, sliced a ham into fine slices and arranged them on a
pewter plate, set out some olives, laid the cheese on a bed of grape
leaves, and filled a basket with bread, he sits down to his meal with
a contented smile.
"He was in love. And like any successful suitor, he
found himself face to face now with the one he loved, alone. Yet
tonight that one was no woman, no living creature at all, but a myriad
kindred images formed into a kind of projection of his own inner
being. Like that silver fork, for example, with the well-worn prongs,
and some maternal ancestor's initials, now rubbed almost smooth. A
curious object, really, when you think that the Western World invented
it for propriety's sake, though a third of the human race still grubs
up its food with its fingers. And the crystal, always set out in a row
of four, so utterly useless. Well, why not? Why do without glasses,
like boors? Why stop setting them out, simply because the Brazilian
backwoods was dying of thirst, or because India was gulping down
typhus with every swallow of muck from its dried-up wells? Let the
cuckolds come pound on the door with their threates of revenge.
There's no sharing in love. The rest of the world can go hang. They
don't even exist.". |
