Is This the Most Racist Book Ever Written?

“A chilling novel about the end of the white world.”

That is a real strapline slapped on the front of a real book, that was sold in real bookshops, to real people – with the book in question being Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, first published in France in 1973, and still, SOMEHOW, doing the rounds to this very day.

It’s not one that’s just tucked away in some dusty far-right library either. No, it pops up in the offices of major political parties, on the reading lists of presidential advisers, in speeches about “migrant invasions” and “the West’s inability to defend itself”. And that, whether we like it or not, makes it an IMPORTANT book – one that’s worth getting your head around.

And funnily enough, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing today too; cracking it open, walking you through the story it tells, and seeing exactly why some love it, exactly why others roll their eyes at it, and also, whether or not, it could well be THE most racist book ever written…

The Beginning

Let’s start with the fundamentals; the story’s … well… story.

It opens in Southern France, with an elderly retired professor – Monsieur Calgues – standing on the terrace of his home and watching a recently arrived flotilla of ships sitting just offshore.

And straight away, it is notable how said fleet is described, quote:

”… stretching over that empty sea, aground some fifty yards out, the incredible fleet from the other side of the globe, the rusty, creaking fleet that the old professor had been eyeing since morning. The stench had faded away at last, the terrible stench of latrines, that had heralded the fleet’s arrival, like thunder before a storm.”

Next, Calgues notices, almost belatedly, that the door to his house is open – and he treats that small detail like a decision. The thought is presented as an aside, as if the stakes are too large to name directly:

“It was then that he had this fleeting thought, whose utter banality brought a kind of rapturous smile to his lips: ‘I wonder,’ he said to himself, ‘if, under the circumstances, the proverb is right, and if a door really has to be open or shut … ’”

To the reader, of course, the stakes in question are already quite apparent – the vessels jampacked with foreigners before Calgues, the open door that may be ought to have been locked behind him… it’s nothing if not quite on the nose.

Further too, it’s also pointed out that the home to which said door is attached – constructed by Calgues’ forerunners – was constructed in 1673. Again, what’s being done here is most apparent: the Calgues family, and by extension the French writ large, have stood atop that soil for a LONG time… and the newcomers have not.

From there, Calgues takes hold of a telescope, and what exactly sits before his home is explained in more detail:

“…thirty thousand creatures on a single ship! Not to mention the dead, floating here and there around the hull, trailing their white rags over the water, corpses that the living had been throwing overboard since morning.”

And if you thought that the usage of the word “creatures” there was… choice, to put it mildly … don’t worry, you aren’t the only one.

But more notable still though, is how Raspail, through the mouth of Calgues, further goes on to describe the corpse dumping, quote:

“A curious act, all in all, and one not inspired by reasons of hygiene, to be sure. Otherwise, why wait for the end of the voyage? … He believed as well, with firm conviction, that the corpses thrown out on the shores of France had reached their paradise too, to waft their way through it, unconstrained, forevermore. Even more blessed than the living themselves, who, throwing them into the sea, had offered their dead, then and there, the gift of salvation, joy, and all eternity. Such an act was called love….”

It’s a recurring theme of the novel: that for the foreigners being discussed – incomers from South Asia specifically – so important to them is getting to Europe, that indeed, doing so matters more than life itself.

Later, as night falls, the region loses power, and so Calgues lights oil lamps and turns on the radio, and through what he hears we are given our first teasing of the wider situation:

“The President of the Republic has been meeting all day at the Élysée Palace with government leaders. Also present, in view of the gravity of the situation, are the Chiefs of Staff of the three branches of the armed forces, as well as the heads of the local and state police.”

And:

“A communique from Army Headquarters confirms that two divisions have been deployed along the coast in the face … in the face of … (The announcer hesitated. And who could blame him? Just what should one call that numberless, miserable mass? The enemy? The horde? The invasion? The Third World on the march?) … in the face of this unprecedented incursion…”

But then, the scope of the ‘peril’ supposedly befalling France enlarges, because no sooner does Calgues turn his attention back to the beach – where the Military has set about burning corpses – than a new never named character enters the story, who makes himself known with the simple utterance:

“Pretty cool, man, huh!”

Described as “young”, “feet bare”, “hair long and dirty,” and wearing a “flowered tunic, Hindu collar, Afghan vest”, the walking caricature of a ‘Hippie’ of sorts, is of course, a representative stand-in for those on the Western side of the story who see demographic change not as a threat, but as an event to be welcomed.

In their exchange that follows, Raspail leaves no doubt as to what he thinks of people who hold these views, as this extended quote shows:

“…tomorrow this country’s going to be something else. You won’t know it. It’s going to be born all over. … And you think you’re anything like them? Look, your skin is white. You’re a Christian, I imagine. You speak our language, you have our accent. You probably even have family hereabouts, don’t you?”

“So what! My real family’s all the people coming off those boats. Here I am with a million of my brothers, and sisters, and fathers, and mothers. And wives if I want them. I’ll sleep with the first one that lets me, and I’ll give her a baby. A nice dark baby. And after a while I’ll melt into the crowd.”

“Yes, you’ll disappear. You’ll be lost in that mass. They won’t even know you exist.”

“Good! That’s just what I’m after. I’m sick of being a tool of the middle class, and I’m sick of making tools of people just like me, if that’s what you mean by existing. My parents took off this morning.

And my two sisters with them. Afraid of getting raped, all of a sudden. They went and dressed up like everyone else. These real square clothes, I mean.

Things they haven’t put on in years, like neat little skirts, and blouses with buttons. So scared, you wouldn’t know them. … And my sisters, already up front, huddling together and staring at me, scared to death, like maybe I was the first one in line to rape them. And meanwhile I’m laughing and having myself a ball.”

This goes on for MANY pages further still, until the encounter comes to a head, with Calgues proclaiming:

“You? Why, you’re not my kind. We couldn’t be more unlike. Surely I don’t want to ruin this one last night, this quintessential night, with someone like you. Oh no, I’m going to kill you.”

And sure enough, he does, with a shotgun in fact, an action which Raspail describes as:

“Just a victory Western style, as complete as it was absurd and useless. And, utterly at peace with himself—more exquisitely at peace than he remembered ever being—old Monsieur Calgues turned his back on the corpse and went inside.”

From that protracted exchange, there’s a lot to takeaway, but here’s the key points. In Raspail’s view, Westerners who would welcome the influx are:

• Few in number.
• Hedonistic, motivated by impulse, novelty, and personal gratification rather than obligation or continuity.
• Alienated from their own society, expressing open contempt for family, class, religion, and nation.
• Eager for self-erasure, explicitly welcoming the loss of identity rather than fearing it.
• Sexually libertine, framing demographic change in explicitly sexual terms.
• Indifferent to the consequences for others, including women and family members.
• Parasitic rather than sacrificial, seeking meaning through absorption into a mass rather than responsibility within a community.
• Ultimately expendable – ones whose death warrants no grieving.

And so, Chapter 2 of the book ends with the basic framing of the novel laid out:

• South Asians are coming in, uninvited, en-masse – solely fixated on getting onto specifically French, but European soil more broadly, by ANY means necessary.
• The Government is treating the situation as a crisis.
• Right minded people, the sort who don a tie of a Sunday, work hard, pay their taxes, and go to Church, are TERRIFIED of a supposed coming wave of barbarism.
• A minority of supposed traitors exist who, for a myriad of reasons, welcome what is to come with open arms.

The End

The rest of the book then pulls back from Calgues’ terrace and rewinds the clock, explaining how the “Last Chance Armada” – as it gets dubbed – was created in the first place, how it then crawls across two oceans bound for Europe, and, above all else, what happens when it gets to Europe… with Calgues’ home and his little hilltop village serving as the fixed point everything keeps orbiting back to.

We’re taken to Belgian Consulate General in Calcutta, which is ringed by mothers holding out toddlers they’ve spent two years “fattening up” for adoption, all of them FURIOUS that a royal decree has just cancelled all such visas – 40,000 of which are said to have been issued to “Children of the Ganges” in the last five years.

And in that mass, we also meet two key figures: ‘Ballan’, a European atheist philosopher who’s been helping sell the dream of Western salvation, and an Untouchable dung-roller named only as – and we aren’t kidding here – ‘The Turd Eater’, who carries with him a grotesquely formed child referred to as – again, not kidding here – ‘The Monster’.

From there, with ‘The Turd Eater’ becoming something of a leader to the masses, and with plenty of spurring on from a little cohort of Western Priests, as well as so called “do-gooders”, expectation becomes entitlement: if Europe will not open its doors willingly… said doors will be KICKED in instead.

The target becomes the decrepit steamer India Star, a “rust-eaten old tub” that once sailed the oceans, but that now finds itself confined only to “coastal and river service” – fit for nothing else.

A handful of agitators quietly persuade her Captain that if the people can pay – in jewellery and pooled rupees – that he can take them. Meanwhile, the ‘Turd Eater’ stands on a pier over the Ganges, and spins a sermon where Buddha, Allah and the Hindu gods pull Christ off the cross, build a ship out of the wood and sail to the Christian “kingdom”; Christ tries to follow, fails to walk on water, and drowns.

When he ends, the India Star is stormed. Ballan, in the chaos of it all, falls from the gangplank to his death, with his last words given as, “Forgive them, Lord…” – in what is yet more rather blunt messaging.

Then, within days, a hundred further ships up and down the Ganges are taken the same way, while a regiment ordered to block the roads throws its rifles into the river and disappears into the mob.

The description of the voyage becomes a mix of logistics and horror; the ships are so overloaded the decks barely sit above water. Wood is burned, then the dead are burned, then – when fuel finally runs out – the living start moulding their own excrement into dried “briquettes” to keep the rice pots going.

The armada also becomes a floating orgy. Raspail goes out of his way to describe an endless, indiscriminate swarm of bodies, sexes and even AGES all entangled on deck, with “rivers of sperm” – exact quote – running over the planks.

Despite all of that, the flotilla proceeds with clear seas – both literally and figuratively – with the waters remaining calm for nearly 60 days so that 99 of the 100 hulks can actually reach Europe; that one that didn’t make it being accounted for by a river tug that goes under mid-ocean. 3,000 die. Not ONE of the other ships makes any effort to pull survivors.

But they are, however, happened upon by a Greek freighter, the Isle of Naxos. Her Captain, Luke Notaras, orders “Steady as she goes”, and ploughs straight through them. For this, he is arrested upon his arrival in Marseille … and Raspail’s comments therefrom are… well, listen for yourselves, quote:

“Captain Notaras had everyone against him. In this day and age, let a rapist hack a little girl to bits, let a murderer bash in an old man’s skull for a hundred francs, or any such horrible crime of the sort, and modern justice will always trot out psychiatry to the rescue, or at least the excuse that our nasty, perverted society is really the culprit. But not so in the case of Captain Notaras and his dastardly deed. No one bothered to delve for profound explanations.

Captain Notaras was the white race incarnate, convicted of blind racist hatred. Period.”

After that, the reaction in Europe takes centre stage, and it’s a lot of commissions, communiqués, and talking. We are told of an ‘International Ganges Refugee Commission’ establishing itself in Rome, for example, which conducts an overflight of the flotilla, and reports that conditions are “normal” – a lie quite evidently, given Raspail’s earlier explanation of conditions onboard.

Elsewhere, however, like say, Egypt, the flotilla is being taken VERY seriously indeed – being met with outright panic in fact as it looms closer, quite evidently set on trying to transit through the Suez Canal.

They send out a single lone torpedo boat in secret, and an ultimatum is delivered: get the hell out of our waters or be fired upon. One tracer volley goes shrieking over the India Star’s bridge, ‘The Monster’ howls, and, without a word back, the armada simply swings away into the open Indian Ocean and goes the long way round instead. Oh how easy it is shown to be able to do something about the flotilla… if only one has the will to do so.

Then, off South Africa, a new approach is tried: pure charity.

Barges push out rice, water and medicine, under full media scrutiny. The refugees haul everything aboard and then immediately throw the food and water back into the sea, keeping only the medical crates. Commentators rush to frame this as some kind of dignified anti-apartheid gesture. Raspail frames it more blandly: the fleet will not be slowed, managed, or made to look “grateful”.

Western leaders then stage a big conscience event off São Tomé. Governments, NGOs, churches, and even rock stars bankroll an operation christened “Operation Heart of Gold” – complete with yellow heart badge.

The armada, again, however, does not stop. Relief teams trying to board are beaten back, cargo is hurled overboard, and when a papal barge persists, a naked strangled white man is dumped onto its deck. He is buried in secret. The press and the Vatican cover it up.

That theme of reality denial among Western leaders persists too. Even as the flotilla approaches France, and leadership begins to at least appreciate that there IS a serious situation looming – responses are weak and half cocked.

On Easter Monday, for example, France, supposedly, has a plan: the armada will be denied permission to land, and the Army will be given the power to open fire to prevent them, “if need be.”

The President, however, chokes on his own words when delivering that news, abandons the prepared speech, and tells every uniformed agent of the State to “weigh this monstrous mission for themselves”, and that they are free to accept or reject it. Five hours and seventeen minutes later, the sun comes up, and the Armada makes land all but unopposed; ramming ashore between Nice and Saint-Tropez.

The immediate scene Raspail then paints is one of CHAOS.

The south of France empties as people flee north. The newcomers ignore French law, don’t work, demand First World comforts and shoot or butcher those who resist – factory bosses, shopkeepers, ordinary citizens. Anyone and everyone who stands in their way.

They’re also joined by existing migrants and by various left-wing and anarchist groups. Pro-immigration governments then consolidate control, and remaining whites are ordered to share their homes and flats. The French Government is also rebranded as the “Paris Multiracial Commune,” and its aircraft eventually bomb Calgues’ little hilltop Village flat, at which point everyone is killed, Calgues included, as he chooses to stay and die in what is described as the last holdout of REAL France.

The epilogue then zooms out one last time to describe what can only be described as an ‘ethnic apocalypse’ of sorts taking over the world.

On the Amur, for instance, MILLIONS of Chinese peasants pour into Siberia – the Soviets pull back, and one drunken general fires “one bullet and one only” into a child before giving up. In New York, a “black tide” climbs floor by floor while the mayor shares Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem and lets a boy play with his unloaded gun. In London, a Non-European Commonwealth Committee “politely” takes over and one of its non-negotiable demands is that the Queen’s younger son marries a Pakistani.

South Africa is wiped off the map “like a beach submerged under the Limpopo tide”. New armadas form in Jakarta, Manila, Conakry, Karachi and Calcutta, bound for Australia, New Zealand and what is left of Europe.

Finally, the narrator reveals he is writing from Switzerland, the last Western holdout, which has just agreed to open its borders under international and internal pressure. He finishes by hoping that – one day – his grandchildren might read the account “without too much disgust” that his blood runs in their veins …

Analysis

So, that’s the story of The Camp of the Saints. It’s a compressed retelling that’s missing certain minor story beats – yes – but it’s representative enough to allow you to pick up the overall shape of what Raspail does, and thus allows us to start wrangling with what the book is actually for, and what it’s actually about.

Let’s begin with something fundamental too: the matter of whether or not it is actually racist, because yes, that is a question that apparently needs to be asked.

And as you likely deduced from our lead in there, and how we introduced the book at the very start of the episode, we happen to fall upon the ‘absolutely f*cking yes’ side of that particular debate.

The racism here isn’t a spattering of unfortunate lines that tarnish an otherwise interesting tome – The Mysterious Affair at Styles and that one n-bomb Agatha Christie drops therein springs to mind. No, in The Camp of the Saints, Racism IS the book – its entire load-bearing structure, its entire narrative engine, its entire point, meaning, and message.

Those coming from India, and later East and Southeast Asia more broadly – they’re written as a biological event. They’re even denied proper names, being slapped with derogatory monikers such as the ‘Turd Eater’ when they’re pertinent enough to the story to need referring to specifically, and reduced to mere adjectives when in the background – a “smell”, a “stain”, a “swarm”, and so on and so forth. On top of that, the novel doesn’t treat its goings on as an unfortunate and extreme situation involving some bad actors – it presents what happens as the true nature of the non-white world finally revealed.

So YES, given that racism is defined by Webster as “a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race … (and) behaviour or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief”, it IS a racist book … and it’d be nothing if not bold to try to argue to the contrary if you ask us.

And yet, to the contrary, people have indeed argued. We’re not talking just from those random Instagram annons who post ‘witty’ comments about calculators under Jewish posts either, or anonymous Telegram accounts named along the lines of HitlerDidNothingWrong1488. No, we’re talking REAL and SERIOUS people, ones that turn up on the six o’clock news, and that you may well have heard of.

For example, The Atlantic reported that Marine Le Pen – leader of the National Rally in France, and a MAJOR Presidential candidate – quote:

“First read it at 18 and keeps a signed first edition in her office.”

There’s also Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, who – according to the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities – stated that, quote:

“I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself. Migration has split Europe in two – or I could say that it has split the West in two. One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.”

Then there’s Steve Bannon, an American political strategist and media executive best known for serving as Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist in 2017, as per The American Sociological Association Culture Section, he stated that, quote:

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe … It’s not a migration. It’s an invasion!”

And those two final examples also lead into us talking about why the text has sticking power among some. Put simply: they see parallels between the events depicted in The Camp of the Saints, and recent history …

Raspail imagined roughly a million people turning up on Europe’s doorstep and the West having no idea what to do with them. Cut to 2015, during what we now call the ‘Refugee Crisis’, where the EU – plus Switzerland and Norway – DID in fact register around 1.3 million first-time asylum applications in a single year.

Zoom out further, and see how the EU’s foreign-born population has risen from roughly 10% in 2010 to about 14% in 2024, and countries like France now have 13.8% of their residents born abroad, with migration being the thing keeping overall headcounts growing as indigenous birth rates fall … and you just about understand the parallels some see in the book. OBVIOUSLY, we are not endorsing that perspective ourselves – just explaining it – because such is their logic.

There is, however, plenty of commentary around The Camp of the Saints that is not an endorsement of its ideas nor a rebuttal of them – just good old fashioned literary minded sorts giving it a once over, and reviewing on its technical merits, just as they would any other book.

And as a rule, the verdict you get from such sorts is… that it’s a bit sh*t … actually.

For example, Cécile Alduy – professor of French Literature at Stanford University, has said she feels, quote, “very confident … this is not a good novel”, and then proceeds to tear into it on technical grounds, saying that the narration is messy, the style heavy, the metaphors ridiculous, how there’s no real interiority or character development, and so on and so forth.

Gotta say, she has a point too. Even in our summary of the story – compressed and chopped up as it was – CLEAR contradictions and plot holes were apparent.

Example. The ships are explicitly described as being absolute junkers, just about fit for river and coastal service… and yet … only one of them sinks on a multi-thousand kilometre long voyage… when they’re also described as being so heavily laden that they sit dangerously low in the water… and are having their innards cannibalised for fuel. You’d be amazed if even one of them turned up on the coast of France under such conditions.

Then there’s the fact that the dead are described as being burnt on board later in the book, but then described as being ‘saved’ so that they can be dumped on European soil at the start of the book. Coherent storytelling, this is not, is it?

And they were just examples evident from our condensed retelling. You’d see the same throughout the book if you were to read it yourself; aspects that just don’t make any logical sense, contradictions that’ll have you constantly flicking back through the pages to double check whether or not you misremembered an earlier detail. Except you won’t have misremembered it… it’s just a bit of a sh*t book.

YET, despite all of that, there are people who will tell you that you SHOULD read it. And not in a ‘wow so prophetic’ way, but in a ‘you can’t fight what you understand’ way.

The logic goes like this: if you want to see where all the ‘invasion’, ‘replacement’, ‘white genocide’ talk actually gets its imagery and emotional wiring from, you have to look at foundational texts. Just read it not because it deserves your respect, but because it shows you the machinery with the casing taken off – the cheap tricks, the blunt metaphors, the way a bad story can still burrow in … and so on…

The Most Racist?

But what of the question we posed way, WAY back at the start of the episode: is The Camp of the Saints the most racist book ever written?

Well, we have to admit to the fact that, frankly, that was a bit of a baited question to get the ball rolling – because how DO you even answer a question like that? By what metrics are we to tally up how racist a book is or isn’t?

Do we go for something objective, like the average number of gamer words dropped per page? Or, do we try to be more nuanced, and do it based on messaging? But then, how do we decide what is bad racism, and what is REALLY bad racism? Can an accord ever even be reached on that matter, or is it an entirely subjective personal to you one?

You get the idea then – it’s a question that can’t be answered, at least if we’re trying to be genuine in what we say … but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a strong list of contenders for the title all the same, however.

There’s the obvious ones, like Mein Kampf. You won’t need that one explaining to you, we’re sure. BUT, because we don’t want to send you away without learning anything, here’s a fact for you: Our go to edition, James Murphy’s 1939 translation, contains the word ‘Jew’, and variations thereof, 513 times … the more you know.

Then there’s the less obvious ones, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the OG of antisemitic fiction. It was first cobbled together in the early 1900’s, published in book form in Russia in 1905, and sits on top of stolen material from an 1864 French political satire – Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu – pretending to be the minutes of a secret Jewish world-government meeting.

It is also a book that just will NOT die. Seriously, spend enough time – which ain’t much – in certain circles of the internet, and you’ll see it come up. It’s always presented as if it’s some great revelation, one that we’re all tools for not being privy to as well … when actually, the only tools are the ones who take it totally at face value, and miss its well documented, and easily verifiable, history of being a fabrication.

Or, how about The Turner Diaries? Published in 1978 under the pen name ‘Andrew Macdonald’ by American neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, it’s basically a wish-fulfilment fanfic: a plucky band of white supremacists overthrows the U.S. government, hangs ‘race traitors’ from lampposts, nukes cities, and wipes out Jews and non-whites in a global race war. Subtle, it is not.

It’s also one of those books that keeps turning up in real-world case files – cited as an influence on Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, picked up almost wholesale by the U.S. neo-Nazi group ‘The Order’, which named itself after the novel’s fictional terror cell and went on to murder Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Denver in 1984, and found in the reading habits and hard drives of everyone from Mississippi spree-shooter Larry Shoemake, to Germany’s National Socialist Underground, whose members kept the German edition, Die Turner-Tagebücher, on their computers while they were carrying out a racist killing campaign.

You’re spoilt for choice then, is what we’re ultimately getting at, as The Camp of the Saints is not some lonely outlier – it’s one of several heavy hitters from the ‘probably best not to read it on the bus’ sub-section of fiction.

Whether it’s the most racist of the lot almost doesn’t matter; what matters is that is IS racist, and that it’s still being read, quoted, and quietly nodded along to in surprisingly mainstream arguments. That, in the end, is why we’ve spent all this time on it today: not to marvel at its craft – there isn’t any – but to look through the soundbites, so that next time it comes up… you’re ready …

Key Takeaways

• Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel ‘The Camp of the Saints’ depicts a flotilla of South Asian migrants invading Europe and destroying Western civilization.
• The book is explicitly racist, reducing non-white characters to dehumanizing slurs and presenting them as a biological threat rather than individuals.
• Despite poor literary quality and plot holes, the novel remains influential among far-right politicians like Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and Steve Bannon.
• Some readers claim parallels to modern migration patterns, though the article rejects this framing as flawed and dangerous.
• The work joins other racist texts like ‘Mein Kampf’ and ‘The Turner Diaries’ as foundational literature for white supremacist ideology.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Camp of the Saints and when was it first published?

The Camp of the Saints is a novel by Jean Raspail, first published in France in 1973. It is described as having a real strapline on its cover stating ‘A chilling novel about the end of the white world.‘

Who is Monsieur Calgues and what does he do in the novel?

Monsieur Calgues is an elderly retired professor who stands on the terrace of his home in Southern France watching a flotilla of ships carrying foreigners arrive offshore. He ultimately kills a young hippie-like character with a shotgun, an act described as ‘a victory Western style, as complete as it was absurd and useless.‘

How are the migrants from South Asia depicted in the novel?

The migrants are depicted in extremely dehumanizing terms. They are referred to as ‘creatures’ rather than people, denied proper names, and given derogatory monikers like ‘The Turd Eater.’ They are described as a ‘smell,’ a ‘stain,’ a ‘swarm,’ and are portrayed as being solely fixated on reaching Europe by any means necessary, with getting there mattering more than life itself.

What is the ‘Last Chance Armada’ and how does it reach Europe?

The ‘Last Chance Armada’ is a fleet of decrepit ships carrying roughly a million people from India. The ships are stormed and taken over, with people paying in jewellery and pooled rupees. The voyage involves horrific conditions including burning wood, then corpses, then dried excrement for fuel. Despite being overloaded junkers, 99 of 100 ships reach Europe after a nearly 60-day voyage.

How does the French government respond to the armada’s arrival?

The French government’s response is weak and half-hearted. On Easter Monday, France supposedly has a plan to deny permission to land and authorize the army to open fire if needed. However, the President chokes on his words, abandons his prepared speech, and tells uniformed state agents to ‘weigh this monstrous mission for themselves’ and that they are free to accept or reject it. The armada lands unopposed.

Which prominent political figures have endorsed or referenced The Camp of the Saints?

According to the article, Marine Le Pen (leader of France’s National Rally) first read it at 18 and keeps a signed first edition in her office. Viktor Orbán (Prime Minister of Hungary) has recommended it to understand ‘the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself.’ Steve Bannon (former Trump chief strategist) has described migration as ‘almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion.‘

What parallels do some people see between the novel and recent events?

Some see parallels between Raspail’s imagined scenario of roughly a million people arriving on Europe’s doorstep and the 2015 refugee crisis, when the EU plus Switzerland and Norway registered around 1.3 million first-time asylum applications in a single year. They also note that the EU’s foreign-born population rose from roughly 10% in 2010 to about 14% in 2024.

What are the technical criticisms of the novel as literature?

Professor Cécile Alduy of Stanford University has criticized it as ‘not a good novel,’ citing messy narration, heavy style, ridiculous metaphors, and lack of interiority or character development. The article also points out plot holes and contradictions, such as ships described as unfit junkers somehow completing a multi-thousand kilometer voyage, and corpses being described as both burned on board and saved to dump on European soil.

What other books are mentioned as contenders for ‘most racist book ever written’?

The article mentions Mein Kampf (with James Murphy’s 1939 translation containing the word ‘Jew’ and variations 513 times), The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an antisemitic fabrication from 1905 based on stolen material), and The Turner Diaries (a 1978 neo-Nazi novel by William Luther Pierce cited as influence on Timothy McVeigh and other violent extremists).

What ultimately happens in the novel’s conclusion and epilogue?

In France, the south empties as people flee north, newcomers ignore French law and kill resisters, pro-immigration governments take control, remaining whites are ordered to share homes, and the government is rebranded as the ‘Paris Multiracial Commune.’ Calgues’ village is bombed and everyone killed. The epilogue describes a global ‘ethnic apocalypse’ with Chinese pouring into Siberia, a ‘black tide’ in New York, non-Europeans taking over London, South Africa wiped off the map, and new armadas forming worldwide. The narrator writes from Switzerland, the last Western holdout, which has just agreed to open its borders.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: Is This the Most Racist Book Ever Written?
• Hero image source by P. Horálek/ESO / openverse, by.

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