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The French writer and explorer Jean Raspail was born on July 5, 1925 and passed away in 2020, less than a month shy of what would have been his 95th birthday. He is best-known to the world for his prophetic anti-immigration novel from 1973, The Camp of the Saints. The novel was published as the Great Replacement of native Europeans in their own countries — a transformation which is today clear to all who look at the facts honestly — was just beginning. It depicts how modern Europe, and eventually the entire Western world, meekly and ineffectively reacts as a fleet of ships carrying thousands of uninvited migrants from India who are determined to permanently settle there — or else — bears down on the Continent.

Saints reads as though it could have been written during the peak of Europe’s 2015 “migrant crisis,” which makes it all the more incredible given that it was in fact published more than 40 years earlier. It certainly far exceeds in quality, message, and prophetic accuracy that other infamous Right-wing novel of the 1970s that had a much more unfortunate and self-destructive impact on those who read it: William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. At the time that Saints was first published in French, and then translated into English in 1975, even many of those critics who derided it as “racist” conceded its literary merits and thought-provoking premise. It is a shame that the book has long since gone out-of-print in English, and secondhand copies now sell for exorbitant prices on the used book market.

Raspail, a traditional Catholic, was much more than a one-hit wonder, however. He won several prominent literary awards in France during his lifetime, and in 2003 the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor with the rank of Officer, which is the highest order of merit in France. Raspail spent the first decades of his career travelling the world, gaining experiences that would inform his later writings. He published dozens of books over the course of his long lifetime, both travel writings as well as fiction. Only a handful of his novels apart from Saints have been translated into English to date, however: Welcome Honorable Visitors, Who Will Remember the People, Blue Island, and Septentrion. Raspail’s sympathies as a man of the Right are made clear in several of his other books, especially Septentrion, which presents the decline of Europe as seen in 2041, and Sire, written in 1990, which depicts the monarchy returning to power in France in 1999.

As the everyday reality of life in Europe came to more and more closely resemble the dark vision he had conjured in 1973, Raspail did not hesitate to criticize the French government in his writings and interviews for its unwillingness to address the immigration crisis, for which he was unsuccessfully sued by the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism in 2004.

It is to be hoped that more of Raspail’s work will be made available to anglophone readers in the future, and that The Camp of the Saints will be returned to print — perhaps in a new translation, given that Raspail revised the novel subsequent to its translation into English.

The following items have been published about Jean Raspail at Counter-Currents:

Jean Raspail is also occasionally tagged here he is mentioned in passing at Counter-Currents.