The Camp of the Saints and Spiritual Death of the West

The most important dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. Huxley and Orwell captured the two sides of modern despotism, one soft and seductive, the other hard and punitive. The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the century is Jean Raspail's Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It's an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies....

... the novel's genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term...

When interpreted by careless critics - and they are legion - The Camp of the Saints is framed as a fictional race war that stokes fears about genocide against whites... But this reading ­ misses the point of the novel. Raspail wishes to hold a mirror up to our own society: He is concerned with "us," not "them."...

It was not Raspail but Jean-Paul Sartre who first envisioned the Global South invading the Global North. In his 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, written as Charles de Gaulle was preparing to lower France's flags in Algeria, Sartre argued that decolonization was not enough to settle the score. France and the French deserved punitive subjugation. "Our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger," he wrote...

Raspail's chief purpose, therefore, was not to predict an imminent future. He sought to take seriously the sentiments of self-loathing and the desire for reverse colonization that were gaining strength in Europe...

At the climax of the novel... France will not defend itself. When the migrants alight from their boats and wade ashore, the West has already capitulated...

Civil society collapses; as a result, the migrants enjoy no real improvement in their condition...

The West's brand of moral universalism, Raspail's novel suggests, causes its demise...

Western multiculturalists are aware of this dynamic, which is why their activism increasingly tends toward the nihilism depicted by Raspail. The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to the future of humanity...