Excerpted Passages from a New Translation of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints

American Greatness ^ | 6 Mar, 2026 | Ethan Rundell

[MtnClimber]

Selections from The Camp of the Saints revisit a dystopian warning about mass migration, cultural collapse, and the West’s moral paralysis—one that many readers now see as uncomfortably prophetic.

The following selections come from Ethan Rundell’s new translation of The Camp of the Saints (Vauban Books, 2025), a 1973 dystopian novel about a mass migration from the developing world to Europe that triggers political paralysis, moral collapse, and the unraveling of Western civilization, and whose warnings have lost none of their force.

The first passage is from the “Big Other,” Raspail’s preface to the 2011 edition of the book. It may be found on pp. 45–46 of the new translation, and it speaks directly to the existential choice now facing European and European-descended nations throughout the world:

WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, Islam is but one component of the submersion, the most organized, the most determined, but it is not on its own number. Ethnic groups, tribes, the most exotic nationalities jostle one another at our gates, and as soon as they have forced them, they set about producing heirs. To define this process, the demographer Michèle Tribalat has invented an amusing and prudent euphemism: self-engendering family flows. As for our own descendants, programmed at Big Other’s schools and conditioned from earliest childhood to behavioral and cultural “diversity” and the imperatives of a “plural” France, they will have no choice but to melt without protest into the new mold of the French “citizen” of 2050. All the same, let us not despair. What the ethnologists call isolates will surely persist, powerful minorities, perhaps twenty or so million French people (and not necessarily of the white race) who will still speak our language, salvaged more or less intact, and who will remain stubbornly aware of our culture and of our history as they have been transmitted to us from one generation to the next. It will not be easy for them. Faced with the various “communities” we today see forming on the ruins of integration and which, come 2050, will be permanently and institutionally established, they will constitute—I am seeking an appropriate term here—what one might call a community of French continuity. This community will rely on its families, its birthrate, its survival endogamy, its schools, its parallel networks of solidarity and security, perhaps even its geographical zones, its portions of territory, its places of safety, and, why not, its Christian and (with a bit of luck, if the glue holds) Catholic faith. This will not please everyone. At some point or another, conflict will break out, and these recalcitrant people will be brought to heel in a democratically legal, coercive, appropriate, and muscular fashion. This is moreover how The Camp of the Saints ends. And then what? After that, there will be but hermit crabs living in France, of all different origins, all living in the shells cast off by the representatives of a species forever vanished but once known as the French—a species that in no way heralded, by who knows what genetic metamorphosis, those who will go by that name in the second half of this century. There is another hypothesis: that these last isolates resist so far as to engage in a sort of Reconquista. While doubtless differing from the Spanish one, it will draw its inspiration from the same motives, with some possibility that, in Denmark, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Northern Italy, in Austria, and why not elsewhere in Europe, other isolates of the same kind join the movement. And even if one does not believe this, there would be a dangerous novel to write on the subject. Its author is perhaps still not of this world, but, in one form or another, this book will see the light of day at the right time. Of that, I am sure.

Turning to the novel itself, we have selected a passage from the Belgian consul’s remarks to the Bishop of the Ganges on pp. 73–74. It speaks nicely to the vanity of Christian and, more generally, liberal humanitarian immigrationism:

The only thing they take away from all your proselytism is the fact of Western wealth, which you symbolize for them. You represent abundance to them. Thanks to your mere presence, they’ve learned that it exists somewhere on earth and that you’re racked by guilt for not sharing it. . . .

The passage describing Clement Dio’s journalistic technique on pp. 107–8 could be describing a typical day on NPR:

Over the course of his editorials, the anti-Joan of Arc became, in turn, the despised Arab worker; the pornographic publisher on trial; the exploited Negro builder; the censored director . . .

This passage (pp. 82–83) describes the quasi-metaphysical force driving Western public opinion into the arms of self-destruction:

The world seems to be controlled, not by a single orchestra conductor, but by a new apocalyptic beast, a sort of anonymous, omnipresent monster who has vowed, first and foremost, to destroy the West. The beast has no specific plan. It takes advantage of the opportunities that present themselves, the crowd assembled on the banks of the Ganges being but the most recent and most consequential of them. . . .

The following selection reflects the vanity and parochiality of Western opinion regarding matters elsewhere in the world (p. 99):

If one wishes to understand Western opinion as regards the immigrant fleet or indeed anything else of a foreign nature, one essential fact must be borne in mind: to wit, that it did not give a damn about anything. Strange though it may seem, being informed about such things only increased its bottomless ignorance, spineless reactions, and crass vanity, to say nothing of the bad taste of its ever more sporadic outbursts . . .

Many of the novel’s most striking passages concern conditions aboard the migrant fleet. Page 145:

On board, life was purely vegetative: eating, sleeping, economizing one’s strength, meditating on the great hope and the paradise where fountains of milk and honey flow, towards calm rivers thick with fish, lapping at fields ever in harvest. Only the turd-hunting children, running hither and thither, making cups of their hands, gave any sign of life in this immobile crowd . . .

Pages 193–94:

The overall impression was yet stronger, deeper. Darker, also. I don’t know how to put it. It would sound trite. The sheer mass, all that filth. Real mass, real filth. Countless people, an abyss of squalor, nightmarish visions, free-for-all of genitals, swarming misery . . .

Here, the newspaper editor Machefer speaks to the conceit of freedom of the press and the ambiance of growing censorship in Western public opinion (pp. 127–28):

I’m your alibi. Without me and a handful of other survivors in more or less the same sorry state—poof!—there is no more freedom of the press because there is no more difference of opinion. The time will come when that won’t bother you anymore, but you still have to wait a little longer. . . .

The final passage quoted here reflects the pope’s stance (in the novel) on the migrant fleet:

You are implored to open wide your doors—just now by the pope, leader of our sick Christian world. But I tell you, I beg you, to close your doors, close them quickly, if there is still time!

[MtnClimber]

I sent the PDF to two people who requested it. Anyone else that wants the PDF send me a private reply (FR Mail) with your email address and I will send you a PDF copy of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints.

[dynachrome]

It’s always better to have hard copies of books like this and “Unintended Consequences”.

[MtnClimber]

I agree. I don’t have this, but I do have Unintended Consequences. RIP John Ross. I hope they buried him in his Dodge Viper. He was a road racing fan and took classes at Road Atlanta with his Viper. On his website he told me that he got heavy pressure from the US.GOV not to publish his book.