Le Camp des saints
Signed presentation inscription (dedicatee erased): “Il y a de nombreuses clés dans ce livre. Les modèles ne manquaient pas pour camper le ministre Jean Orelle, l’animateur de radio Léo Béon, les éditorialistes Boris Vilsberg et Albert Durfort, les radios RTZ et Est Radio, l’archevêque, l’abbé Chassal et sa femme Lydie, etc., etc. Il y a au moins quelqu’un qui s’est reconnu tout de suite : Jean Daniel (Le Nouvel Observateur), dans Le Camp des Saints Ben Souad, dit Clément Dio. Son portrait occupe les pages 93 à 100 et il n’y a pas une ligne à changer. Depuis 1973, la rédaction et le service littéraire du Nouvel Obs. ont l’ordre de m’ignorer. Jean Daniel vit toujours, moi aussi, et rien n’a changé non plus. C’est de bonne guerre et je m’en suis toujours félicité. Jean Raspail. 12 février 2010.”
The camp of the clear-sighted against the camp of those blind to “migratory submersion”? “This book was born strangely,” the author explained in an interview with Le Point on 29 September 2015. “I was in the south of France, one day in 1972, at my wife’s aunt’s house near Saint-Raphaël, in Vallauris. I had a desk with a view of the sea, and I said to myself: ‘What if they come?’ This ‘they’ was at first undefined. Then I imagined the Third World rushing into this blessed country, France. It’s a surprising book. It took a long time to write, but it came by itself. I would stop in the evening and pick up again the next morning without knowing where I was going. There is an inspiration in this book that is foreign to me. I won’t say it is divine, but it is strange.”
A book reviled by some and hailed as prophetic by others, this novel-breviary resonates strongly with our times: “At first, Le Camp des saints did not do well. For at least five or six years, it stagnated. It sold poorly. After three years, sales began to rise. Success came through word of mouth and through the promotion given to it by right-wing writers. Until the day in 2001 when a boat of Kurdish refugees ran aground at Boulouris, near Saint-Raphaël, just a few meters from the desk where I wrote the novel! It caused a huge stir in the region. As a result, people started talking about my book again, and it reached a wide audience. I feel a little ashamed, because whenever there is a major wave of migrants, the book gets reprinted. It is consubstantial with what is happening.”
The deluxe-paper copies belong to the same first printing of 13 December 1972 as the ordinary first-printing copies — this numbered issue being of great rarity, since we know only of copies numbered 2, 4, 6, 7 and 18, along with one hors commerce copy. Only two are known to be inscribed.
Jean Raspail notes that his book has the peculiarity of having been published at a time when the problem of immigration did not yet exist, and above all before the enactment of laws that would probably prevent its publication today. Raspail did in fact reissue the book in 2011, with an added preface entitled “Big Other,” itself preceded by a note from the publisher.
“It is true that its content is not innocuous, since everything turns on the question ‘What if they came?’ — not extraterrestrials, but the destitute of the South, a million exhausted migrants landing on the beaches of southern France, facing locals who wonder whether they should send them home, lock them in camps, or shoot into the crowd — the solution finally adopted by the last diehards, while the rest of the population takes refuge in the north (…) Twenty-seven pages long, the preface is far less allegorical than the novel: it is the combative text of a man who disavows nothing regarding the ‘submersion’ of France by foreigners.” Mischievous and sly, Raspail quotes letters sent to him by figures one would not have expected to align with throne and altar as he does (Malraux, Mitterrand, Jospin, Badinter, Pinault, etc., though some are merely courteous acknowledgments of receipt). Cunningly, he reserves the defense of the triple angelus for himself, leaving General de Gaulle to defend the French as “a European people of the white race, of Greek and Latin culture and of the Christian religion” (1959). Provocatively, he points out to his detractors the pages that could be prosecuted (87 grounds) under the Pleven, Gayssot, Lellouche and Perben laws, were the book to appear for the first time today: “Unpublishable unless severely amputated.”
Leonello Brandolini, chairman of Éditions Robert Laffont, nonetheless asked that the preface be preceded by a two-page note signed by himself: “Jean Raspail knows my opinion, which is not the same as his,” it reads. Above all, no trouble intended, one senses between the lines. “It would have been dishonest of me not to reissue it, since it has never ceased to be reprinted,” he added.
“Not easy to own it all, contradictions included. In the month of this reissue, 30,000 copies were sold. Political scientists would do well to also examine the bestseller lists. Failing illumination, one sometimes finds reflections there.” (Pierre Assouline, Le Monde, 24 March 2011).