Go North
16th November 2024
Some writers are unjustly known for one book, no matter how many excellent works they may have written. Such has been the case—in the Anglosphere at least—for the prolific French novelist, travel writer, and explorer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) who had a fifty-year literary career, producing about forty books. That said, five of Raspail’s books have been translated into English over the past sixty years, which is probably a better average than most contemporary French writers.
The one book for which Raspail is known is, of course, his 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, which first appeared in English in 1975 and which has become a kind of ideological sounding board (an appreciation by Robin Harris of Camp of the Saints and Raspail appeared in the Winter 2024 print edition of The European Conservative). There is talk of a new edition of this novel, featuring a fresh English translation, appearing in the near future. Usually falsely derided as a racist work, Saints great fault today seems to be that it was eerily prescient, not only that mass, uncontrolled migration would come to the West from the Global South—not much of a prediction there—but that the powers that be in the West would either welcome this invasion or that they would prove to be morally, technically, and politically incapable of stopping this from happening. Nevertheless, Raspail’s most notorious book is but a small part of his legacy.