Craven Capitulation: Thoughts on Reading Jean Raspail’s ‘The Camp of the Saints’

by Albert Norton, Jr. (March 2026)

The Camp of the Saints was written in 1973 but came out in a new English translation in 2025, to renewed controversy. Many of the reviews in places like Goodreads dismiss it out of hand as a racist tract. But those are from undiscerning readers, in my opinion. They miss the flip side to racism, the self-abnegation of white Europeans on account of race, toward whom Raspail directs most of his criticism. He presents them as self-destructive in the face of imminent cultural decimation, willing to throw over the richness of their civilization because of misguided and unfounded guilt.

The basic plot can be simply stated without spoilers. An armada of nearly 1 million Indians, the poorest of the poor, leave their homeplace, going down the Ganges to the sea in leaky rustbuckets, sailing in the direction of Europe. At the end of the book, they land in France. The whole book is about their progress and the French response to it.

The author, Jean Raspail, died in 2020 but while he lived was a sort of adventurer, his writings often a celebration of indigenous cultures and the need to preserve them. One review I read emphasized that, in The Camp of the Saints, he was essentially turning that concern to preservation of European culture. Why is that objectionable? Because sentimental paternalism continues to displace equal dignity.

In the face of ethnic minority criticism, white Europeans have lost their nerve. The dominant spirit is craven, baseless guilt, an abiding anti-faith that Western colonialism somehow destroyed the rest of the world. The inequality that yet persists feels unbearable, though that inequality pre-dated colonialism. Indeed, the brief against colonialism is not primarily economic, but exactly the second-tier status the ongoing sentimental paternalism reinforces.

The dichotomy of haves and have-nots is understandable, but is often cast in Raspail’s book in racial terms, white and other. I can see why those hyper-sensitive to questions of race are blinded from seeing the more important truths this book explicates. On the other hand, the division seems legit because the contrast emphasizes the utter and debasing pusillanimity of the white Europeans. In fact, this is the great merit of the book. It’s as if Western civilization has lost the will to live.

This results from a failure to acknowledge basic human nature:

Man has never loved mankind as a whole—all its races, religions, cultures—but only those he recognized as his own, those of the clan, however large it might be. As for the rest, he forces his love, and it is forced from him, and when the evil is done, all that remains is for him to disintegrate. In the strange war that was coming, victory would go to those who loved themselves most. (p. 56)

This is a valid critique of the sort of humanism envisioned by Auguste Comte, replacing love of one’s own. It is a consequence of a kind of corrupt socialism of the heart: a love for humanity but not for humans. This is the root of all ideological systems, the introduction of mechanical theory into the workings of people, as with the disastrous Marxism that followed close on the heels of Comte’s innovation. Marxist presumptions pervade the glib speeches of the appeasers in this novel, all of whom make fine livings and enjoy social prestige, from their flowery affirmations of collective oppressor status, and false ennobling of the invaders assigned oppressed status.

There is an interesting inversion of Christianity in play. Repeatedly Raspail has his characters remark some version of the idea that the immigrant landing is a Second Coming, an event of redemption for the comfortable white French. “There are a million Christs on those boats who will rise from the dead tomorrow morning,” said one atheist who welcomed the invasion. (58).

The invasion itself (for that’s what it is) takes place on Easter Sunday. Priests carrying the Eucharist greet the invasion and are overrun by it. Christ engulfed by the crowd, this time, not the other way around.

The enfeebled French have taken the last vestiges of manly nerve and courage from genuine living faith, and their corrupted religious institutions serve a misguided self-sacrifice to the horde. No one really believes, but all selectively invoke the language and liturgies of sacrifice. Not divine sacrifice, this time, but the self-sacrifice of humanist post-Christian Western society, true religion replaced with blasphemous parody.

A presumption of guilt arises from the mere fact of the gap in material well-being between the prosperous West and the grinding poverty of poorly-governed places we euphemistically call “developing nations.” A suicidal tendency prevails, mainly from indifference to one’s own culture and a lost ability to assign worth to anything. The French government vacillates, at first, over whether to respond with violent resistance or to capitulate with economic assistance from the rest of the West that has been spared at least this particular invasion.

When the flotilla lands, those on the coast nearby suffer immediate displacement, robbery, and rape. Prices of everything instantly jump. Demand for police assistance rises precipitously, most calls unanswered. The country learned the hard way that:

It was one thing to notionally take in the Ganges migrants—all it cost were words, after all—quite another to take in those fleeing them! (246)

Too late to change course, however, and there’s no will to do so anyway. The devastation will be total.

The rats will only let go of the cheese that is the Western world once they’ve eaten it all. (270)

In the end, the capitulation is total, but in the run-up to it the “conscience of the world” is consulted, and a body of self-hating influencers steps in to heighten the nobility of debasement.

A listener who believes himself to be thinking while listening to his thought leader becomes more malleable than the one who is left to think for himself. (115)

And so it goes, always the individual conscience imbued by God gives way to the “conscience of the world” imbued by suave worders who tell us up is down, cowardice is bravery, and God is man, indeed the least virtuous of men.

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Albert Norton, Jr is a practicing attorney and the author of several books on the intersection of religious faith and postmodernism, including most recently The Discovered Self:  Identity in the Therapeutic Age and The Mountain and the River/Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine. You can follow him at albertnorton.com and albertnorton.substack.com.  .

NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast