Posted on February 8, 2011

Jean Raspail “Today,” The Camp of the Saints “Could Be Sued for 87 Reasons”

Patrice De Meritens, Le Figaro (Google translation), July 2, 2011

Thirty-eight years ago, Jean Raspail created a scandal by publishing “The Camp of the Saints,” a novel in which he imagined the flood of third world populations, driven by hunger and misery on the French coasts. A million boat people stepped on our land, in the vanguard of an inevitable invasion. The government procrastinated, then yielded. But a handful of patriots resisted, sword in hand . . . With the new legislation, the new edition of this book would likely be subject to prosecution. Jean Raspail takes the risk, and explains why.

Immediately after reading your novel in 1973, Jean Cau wondered: “What if Raspail, with” The Camp of the Saints “, was neither a prophet nor a visionary writer, but simply a relentless historian of our future?”

Jean Raspail — Good question, and we shudder to say yes. The book is inexplicable, written almost forty years ago, when the immigration problem did not exist. I do not know what I went through my head. The issue arose suddenly, “And if they could?” Because it was inevitable. The story came out in one gulp. When I finished the evening I did not know how I would continue the next day. The characters have emerged, invented as you go. Similarly for multiple plots. Henri Amouroux, passionate about history and demography, exclaimed after reading: “Oh, my God, I’ve never seen a prophet in my life, you’re first!” The book was simply in harmony with a fundamental question became acute today. Taboos are jumping, witness the passion that develops around Zemmour trial, the trial which is expected Feb. 18. It was blamed for one of those phrases that are pronounced rapidly during televised debates, the principle is the same thoughts short, not argued, the law of its kind. Attending the hearings I observed the many plaintiffs’ lawyers oppose the sole defender of Zemmour. A system of civil liberties — I do not like that word: it feels like the tirades of 1791 . . . — Continues through the courts those who only look at the truth. All medium and agitated on behalf of anti-racism, instrumentalizing a concept belongs only to consciousness. This environment has become more vigilant, radicalized. He wants nothing to yield. There will be obliged to trial Zemmour generating significant interest of changing attitudes. “Historian of our future,” Jean Cau wondered? God forbid for the events of the novel. But what is the problem of immigration, we are there.

If the style of your book has not aged a bit, the way you express yourself shows a certain brutality that belongs to another era. It starts, frankly, quite often . . .

That have not opened a quarter century, I will admit that rereading for its reissue, I startled myself, for with the arsenal of new laws, moved cautiously, minds have been formatted. To some extent, I do not escape either. What is the limit! But I do not withdraw. Not one iota. I am delighted to have written this novel in the prime of life and beliefs. The book is impetuous, desperate perhaps, but toned, I could no longer repeat today. I probably would have the same anger, but more tone. It is a book to share all my other writings. There are accents Marcel Ayme, a dose of Shakespeare’s tragic farce, a bit of Celine, a bit of Abellio, a touch of Jacques Perret. Where does this story? She is mine, yet it escapes me, as it will escape possible prosecution: whatever procedures, this novel is. It was released for the first time in bookshops series three months after the law Pleven, but not worrisome tee, because it was a time when freedom of expression remained almost intact. The judges were reluctant to crack down. What literary critics m’aient found abhorrent and beyond the pale, it was their freedom, exactly. But with the restrictive laws that followed — Gayssot (1990), Lellouche (2001), Perben (2004) — and the vigilance of the Halde, it is clear that Camp of the Saints would unpublishable today, except to be severely curtailed . I rééditein extenso, identical, page for page, with a preface that tells the story of his appeared tion: how it was received and how, despite the bad reputation it has earned me, it has become over years of a publishing phenomenon, translated into multiple languages, how Ronald Reagan and Samuel Huntington have read (he was part of the imaginary Clash of Civilizations), and especially how famous people in France, left as right, were able to openly criticize, but also, in the secrecy of private correspondence to me expressing their interest. I am forbidden to reveal the contents, except to occur if there is any procedure, but only for the edification of confidential court.

It almost seems that you want to find yourself on the dock?

I do not want to, but it would be tempting. As for an operation of public safety. We have lived too long in a world where all these people involved in government or in shaping opinion practicing double standards: one public and proclaimed, other staff and concealed, as if they had a double consciousness , the one that wears like a flag, and one that has taken refuge in the jungle of unspeakable thoughts, which expresses only small committee, and again. There is also the stupidity and dishonesty. That Chirac, for example, evokes a straight face “Europe whose roots are as much Muslim as Christian” is breathtaking. One imagines quite rad-soc, for sure, but Edouard Herriot never released such a bullshit. So I sent a book to our former president, respectfully regrets in my dedication he has not read The Camp of the Saints before beginning his first term.

In defense of politicians from left and right, or rather by way of extenuating circumstances (I say in my preface), we must recognize that if they went against the grain of the pack media showbiztique, right-of -the hommiste, teacher, fraternal, commercial, legal, gaucho-Christian, pastoral, psychological and so they sign at the moment they were sentenced to death civil. For, in the face, shakes a formidable phalanx of outcome in our own nation, and yet entirely committed to serve “the other” Big Other. The hydra of good feeling and handling, the slurry of humanitarian feeding all human miseries. Like the nightmare of Orwell’s Big Other sees you, watching you. He is the son of the prevailing thought, it circumvents the charitable souls, sows doubt among the most lucid, nothing escapes him. Worse, it leaves nothing to spend. And the good people as city leaders to follow him, anesthetized, stuffed with certainties angelic, but also secretly terrified by reprisals if they were to move away from the truths affirmed. Other Big and he twisted his neck to the French stock, to clear the ground. Thus it has been a champion of a pseudo-miscegenation Franco-French sum between regions and with our first European immigrants. “France is mixed,” scam historico-semantic imposing a shameless amalgam of mass immigration from outside Europe dating to do more than fifty years. It is true that France is the product of a great and beneficial mix, gravy on Gallo-Roman, Franks, Burgundians, Vikings, Visigoths, etc.. And Alsatians, Basques, Catalans , Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, Britons, Provençal, etc.., then Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Portuguese — was invited Europe to her home. Here they are, the French-born! And if they woke up today? They revolted against the edicts of sugary Other Big, soft against his conformism, its universal totalitarianism in the service of another?

Who is the other?

He who does not belong to our religion, our culture, everything that constitutes our civilization, and whose presence en masse will profoundly change the structure of our country. Is the theme of my book, which I placed an epigraph this sentence from the song of the twentieth Apocalypse: “The time for a thousand years ends. Behold, the nations that are emerging in all corners of the earth and equal in number the sand of the sea They will leave on an expedition to the surface of the earth, they will invest the camp of the saints and the beloved city. “Far the novel, in the true reality of ours, we will measure the fullness of immigration at the turn of the years 2045-2050, when the demographic shift will begin the final in France, and among our close neighbors in urban areas where two-thirds of the population, 50% of people under 55 will be non-European origin. Thereafter, this percentage will continue to rise more in the aftermath of weight two or three billion people, mainly from Africa and Asia, which will come in addition to the six billion human beings that earth today, and which our European home will oppose her birth and her glorious rump aging.

Good. We are now facing a charge of advocating xenophobia . . .

Demography is based on objective data. And the novelist keeps his rights: including the right to speak his characters. Staging a farmer does not make you a farmer; trace the life of a Nazi camp leader does not make you complicit in the Holocaust, telling Gandhi do not turn into a secular saint. The Camp of the Saints is a parable which condenses the shock of any awareness of native French against the installation of diversity. I also, unfortunately, I know use the euphemistic jargon of Big Movies to avoid prosecution, “the installation of Diversity”! In the novel: one hundred boats run aground deliberately on our shores, each charged with ten thousand people, with about two thousand dead by skeletal ship immediately thrown over the rail, due to illness and malnutrition tion. From there, the story clicks that respects the three unities of time, place and action. Allegorical text, where everything unravels in twenty-four hours nearly 400 pages, whereas in reality there is an infiltration over several decades. Faced with this movement, which I describe in fast turns the anxiety of living in this country, France, to which is attached by its roots, history, memories, pleasures, but we can no longer share core values with the new arrivals. Which was held under wraps by Big Movies through good feelings now nagging consciences.

The country will always be there, with its cathedrals, its beautiful villa management, with some changes due to progress, which will add cultural damage inherent in modern communications, but the real meta morphosis of this facility will come from heterogeneous populations with our authorization, or rather our denial. Now is the time of the hermit crab . . .

Hermit crab? You will be accused of racism . . .

Hermit crabs are known to protect themselves from predators by staying in empty shells of molluscs. You see that the comparison is extensive, and should not be treated as an insult. At this point, my future readers will see the attached, following the novel, the list of 87 grounds for possible legal action concerning Camp of the Saints sifted laws Gayssot Lellouche and Perben. I give the pagination and details of the lines.

It is a provocation?

To show the ineptness of the rationing of freedom of thought. Understand: I am 86 years old, I have nothing to lose. There are morons everywhere, many are of primary racism, hateful. I started my career as an exploration operator. We do not travel a lot, as I did, you do not write a dozen books about people having a racist approach, it would be completely idiotic. We are at a crossroads of conscience, political ties can change mentalities, it is time to republish this book. The economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy had it right in 1987 with L’Europe submerged. Sauvy, who was left! It’s time. This must be done now.

In your novel, your hero sniped at the invaders, then escape from this world by dying with weapons in hand. So a bit egotistical to resolve the problem. Rest of France. How do you see?

Much of our youth is already mutated, technologically, culturally, and the process of mixed sage bodies has begun. I do not judge the merits, except to observe the change of a people. There is little time to come, each European population had a particular character, and the French. But with the instillation of foreign genes, establishment of behavior and Religious Cultural Rights from elsewhere, with the self-generation population, one can only expect a greater awareness of communalism. There is no reason that second part of the twenty-first century, thirty million people recognize the need to transmit values, culture and, for some, a religion, which are not shared by the majority, practice a kind communalism French . . . What a paradox! Me that there were so opposite, that is that I support. I will not see this time I am dead. But it is clear that we French-born, will be isolated. Are there, in history, peoples who are bent on themselves to survive and emerge later? I do not know. In Atlantis, perhaps?

One can also imagine that this great mix of the future will work?

Yes. I absolutely do not deny it.

How do you respond to the suspicion of a frenzied selfishness?

That selfishness is sometimes a virtue. Guarantor of the family and our integrity, we can not dissolve us. We are currently witnessing a secular emotional exacerbation which was once the Christian charity, which was exercised with respect to its neighbor, but not the whole earth. Once at my grandmother, there was room for the poor, symbolic. Not that of millions of hungry people. Christian charity has already begun to lose. What to do? Strapping a selfish, even a little cruel. Rocard had the courage in his time, saying that France could not accommodate all the misery of the world. Message to convey certain bishops. But it takes extra character. When you see two hundred students and their teachers to give up against a handful of thugs from slapping some people, so he knows enough of a burst to close the case, it appears that we now have a sheep mentality.

Do you dream, as the Cid, a Reconquista?

The Camp of the Saints ended the absolute determination of the opening of borders, the narrator thinking of this phrase melancholy of an old prince Bibesco: “The fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune happened to us last week.” Well, that’s it. I am deeply in this country and see with pain, everywhere, all the pieces removed. It is despicable. A dream of reclaiming? Yes, I’m talking about. And I’m doing against Big Movies for a pirouette, saying that it is a novel he would write later. In all cases by someone else. I am so happy to have lived eighteen centuries in this country. Yet here we begin a new era and we are only at the first century.

Jean Raspail, a writer, journalist, traveler and explorer, is one of the most flamboyant feather in our literature. Author of numerous novels and stories, including “I, Antoine de Tounens, King of Patagonia” (Grand Prize of the novel of the French Academy), “Who remembers the men . . . ” (Chateaubriand price), “Sire” (Grand Prize novel of the City of Paris), “Seven riders left the city at dusk by the door of the West was more guarded,” “The Ring of the Fisherman” (Price Prince Pierre de Monaco), “Adiós, Tierra del Fuego,” he republished “The Camp of the Saints”, published for the first time in 1973.

[Less than a week after this interview appeared, The Camp of the Saints has soared to the top of bestseller list on amazon.com’s French site.]