The Camp of the Saints: A Review

The Road to Damascus

I sit on a couch in a living room that is not mine. There is no artwork on the walls. Bear with me. This is all very relevant to the book. There is no music playing. The home is nicer than my own, paid for by a refugee resettlement program. The men are downstairs discussing politics. The women are upstairs solving a simple puzzle. The puzzle is a childish crossword. My two friends, with whom I had gone to visit this place, were across the room, wearing red veils on a couch opposite me. They were simply being polite. They are, of course, both childless. Me too. I want to go downstairs and talk politics with the men, but I know this would be impolite. I had not brought bikinis to welcome these newcomers to America, but they had given us hijabs. I had not brought children, but there were many children in their house. I imagine the world 200 years from now. I am doing the stupid puzzle.

I am wearing a pleated long black skirt and a sweater with long black sleeves. I think the word “stultifying.” I wish I could have a drink or two. I’d be dumber then. I could bear the stupid puzzle. I could even enjoy myself. But there’s no alcohol in the house. I let the men talk politics downstairs. Sitting on the couch, playing dumb, I imagine Mary Wollstonecraft. They ask me what six across is. I say, “Esther.” Would she settle for this? Mary, I mean. Would she do the stupid puzzle? Would she preserve her career, the respect of her friends, her nice salary, and her publishing opportunities, and do the stupid puzzle? Would she reign a pauper among the poor, omnipotent by their ignorance?

They are very religious. I am not. But I wonder if when I die, when my soul arrives at the white temples of heaven, walls grey in celestial night, if I will be welcomed. I imagine heaven as a kingdom, and beyond the kingdom, a far green shore. I imagine an infinite line of perfect park benches, nestled on the shore, beneath a row of swaying trees, stretching on forever. The benches overlook a pond of leaping, playful, yet-born souls. I imagine that once I arrive, I will have to explain myself. Not to God or Christ, or the keeper of the Book of Life, but to Mary. I imagine God will let her judge me. There’s humor in that. Something about a stone first thrown as well. Will Mary smile? Will she know I tried? I did try to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. Just like she did.

Nine down. “Magdalene.”

I stare at the women in the room. Their English is infantile. I feel my English is barely better than theirs. I think that perhaps if a sinner like me does the work of Christendom, God will grant me mercy. Maybe I will be allowed to worship the white throne and wander the green shore, to speak with spirits whose English is better than my own, who will make me feel illiterate and embarrassed by the poverty of my own tongue. They will give me puzzles I cannot solve. I want to meet the specters that built a second kingdom within God’s, of ink and piano and oil paint. But I also want to tell them, all the artists and writers I admire, that they made a terrible mistake. The cornerstone was laid two degrees too far left, so the tower bends in strange directions. Build the next three degrees too right this time, just in case. I’ll whisper this to the shimmering pond of tadpole souls, playing under the silver mirror, and when they build a kingdom, theirs will be more just than ours.

I am taken out of my daydream by some awful noise. Each letter I scrawl in the stupid puzzles crossword squares makes my pen screech like a nail hammered into reluctant wood on the verge of splitting. I didn’t even know I was doing the puzzle. I wonder why no one else can hear the screaming. I look around. Veils, all now, except me. Maybe I am more religious than I thought. Am I being dramatic?

I am not the one separating the men from the women. I am not the one who purchased them a home. I am not the one asking women to make themselves dumb. I did not build a home without art or music.

But I did have something to do with it. I was welcomed into their home, a home without music or alcohol or art, because I was one of the people who helped them get here.

I didn’t know then that if I had 100 days to give 100 lectures on 100 writers, if I had the time to teach them the names of each of the brilliant stars of the second kingdom of God, I could not make them understand. They love the stupid puzzle. I never realized, my whole life, that the beauty of the second kingdom was built on the mighty foundations of the first. And too late was I aware.

The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail

Vauban Books has released a new edition of The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 novel by the French Author Jean Raspail. Raspail was a devout Catholic, a famous Boy Scouts adventurer, and a beloved author of French books for boys and men. In France, he was a celebrated novelist who counted among his readers presidents, poets, artists, authors, and journalists of fame and renown. Across all of his works, he insists upon the beauty and pride of cultures, indigenous, European, African, and Asian. In his most infamous novel, he is concerned with the survival of European culture in particular. The Camp of the Saints tells the story of an exodus of migrants on a fleet of ships traveling from the third world to the first, focusing on the events that allow them to land in France, which, in turn, leads to the collapse of the French government, the broader Western world, and the launch of even more migrant ships in a spiral that ends Western civilization. The book explores the spiritual crisis at the heart of Western society, which leaves Westerners unsure of themselves, driven by guilt, and yearning for their own destruction.

The book explores these themes through a varied number of characters, who receive portraits of their inner life and actions in varying length. Raspail tells us of presidents that shirk their duty to defend their borders; old professors who defend their homes from young communists set on looting; the last soldiers of the French army who understand the migrant’s most powerful weapon to be our pity, and so steel their hearts and shoot; the journalists who welcome the migrants, only to find their wives raped; priests, some loyal to the church and others traitors to it; the French, and whites, who become hated pariahs of the new regime; the migrants themselves, with no redeeming qualities except the banal facts of their number and uncultivated humanity; and the Beast, the devil; and maybe God, who, in concert, bring the migrants to France on suspiciously fair seas.

This edition has distinct features that set it apart from earlier releases. First, this edition is a new translation by Ethan Rundell, which uses as its source the 2011 edition of the novel, which features stylistic revisions, the removal of redundant passages, and includes a new preface from Raspail, “Big Other,” which reviews the novel’s dangerous career and relationship with twenty-first-century politics. Second, the actual text of the translation, in contrast to earlier editions, is much improved. For example, see below a short excerpt from the 1975 English edition compared with the 2025 Vauban translation: The Camp of the Saints, 1975:

“Listen. You and this house, you’re both the same. You look like you've both been around here for a thousand years. “Since 1673, to be exact,” the old gentleman answered, smiling for the first time. “Three centuries, father to son. And always so sure of yourselves, so damn sure of everything. Man, that’s sick!” “Quite true. But I find your concern a trifle surprising. Perhaps you're still one of us after all. Perhaps just a little?” “Shut up before you make me puke! Maybe you've got a pretty house. So what? And maybe you're not a bad old guy. Smart, and refined, and everything just right. But smug, man, so sure of your place. So sure that you fit right in. With everything around you. Like this village of yours, with its twenty generations of ancestors just like you. Twenty generations without a conscience, without a heart. What a family tree! And now here you are, the last, perfect branch. Because you are, you’re perfect. And that’s why I hate you. That’s why I’m going to bring them here, tomorrow. The grubbiest ones in the bunch. Here, to your house. You’re nothing to them, you and all you stand for. Your world doesn’t mean a thing. They won’t even try to understand it. They’ll be tired, man. Tired and cold. And they'll build a fire with your big wooden door. And they’ll crap all over your terrace, and wipe their hands on your shelves full of books. And they'll spit out your wine, and eat with their fingers from all that nice pewter hanging inside on your wall. Then they'll squat on their heels and watch your easy chairs go up in smoke. And they'll use your fancy bedsheets to pretty themselves up in. All your things will lose their meaning. Your meaning, man. What’s beautiful won’t be, what’s useful they’ll laugh at, what’s useless they won’t even bother with. Nothing’s going to be worth a thing. Except maybe a piece of string on the floor. And they'll fight over it, and tear the whole damn place apart. ... Yes, it’s going to be tremendous! So go on, beat it. Fuck off!”

The Camp of the Saints, 2025:

“Hey, you know what? You and your house, you’re a lot alike. You’d think the two of you have been here for a thousand years.” “1673, to be precise,” said the old gentleman, smiling for the first time. “Three centuries, father to son…disgusting, I look at you and you know what I think? I think you're perfect. That's why I hate you. And it’s here, to your house, that I’ll bring all the most wretched ones tomorrow. They know nothing about what you are, about what you represent. Your world means nothing to them. They won't try to understand. They’ll be tired. They’ll be cold, they’ll build a fire with your lovely oak door. They’ll shit all over your terrace and wipe their hands on the books in your library. They’ll spit out your wine. They’ll eat from their hands from the pretty pewterware I see on your wall Sitting on their haunches, they'll watch as your armchairs go up in flames. They’ll use your embroidered sheets to play dress up. Every object will lose the meaning you attach to it. What’s beautiful won't be beautiful anymore. What’s useful will become laughable. And what's useless will become absurd. Nothing will have any real value anymore, except maybe that bit of string left in a corner that they’ll fight over, breaking everything around them. Who knows? Now get lost!”

Vauban’s translation is the definitive edition of The Camp of the Saints. Another improvement: Vauban’s edition features a short introductory essay by Nathan Pinkoski that frames the introspective nature of the work. The question that inspired Raspail to author The Camp of the Saints came to him one day on the French coast: “What if they came here?” While “them” in this novel refers to poor Indian peasants and, later, the entirety of the third world, as Pinkoski beautifully explains, the book is really about “us” and our inability to believe in our own value. Pinkoski’s introduction expertly frames the novel, pointing the reader towards the countless uses of “Perhaps this is an explanation,” which Raspail concludes a large number of character portraits with. There are many explanations that Raspail offers, but the most prominent and consistent theme is a twofold crisis of spirituality and masculinity. The West’s lack of confidence cannot stand against the absolute confidence of the migrants. One is a thin cloud, the other a mountain. The former may be rich in art and literature and philosophy, and the latter, bare but for the desire to arrive in the land of milk and honey. But one remains vapor, the other rock.

The French lack confidence in themselves, which means they are unable to take action. The action they would need to stop the boats would be violence. Nothing else could stop the tide but the use of force to destroy the ships. Raspail makes clear that the movement is an invasion, a new technology of war, which exploits the remarkable, historically unknown pity the West has for the world. Because they are spiritually weak, they lack the courage to defend themselves. They do not believe they are worth defending. They are convinced they are guilty, and so, accept the migrants, even as they know they are in some way a death sentence. They have no defenders, and the few defenders they do have, they condemn. For four years, America’s southern border was open to nine million strangers. Daily in Britain, thousands of migrants arrive on dinghies. They come to the West in search of the land of milk and honey. They are welcomed by millions.

The migrants and the millions, in the book and in real life, do not consider that the bountiful West is that way because of its people, and if one changes the people, the West will no longer be bountiful. The millions forgive the new arrivals every sin, vice, and iniquity. They march in the street singing hymnals to prevent the deportation of the wife-beater, the child rapist, and the economic migrant, in the book and in real life. Raspail’s portraits of the traitors, whether priest, professor, president, or poet, are all insightful and fair, to the traitor and to the West. The countless architects of decline we have seen in our lives can be found in the book. They are allowed to speak in defense of the migrants and in defense of Western death. But theWest speaks too, in defense of itself. There are little to no direct allusions to specific historical characters (dated language was removed in this edition): the portraits were drawn decades ago by Raspail, yet they remain relevant and compelling. We can find in his portraits the real flesh-and-blood of our unfortunate drama. To describe this book as prophetic is somewhat inaccurate. The disaster has been going on for decades. In Raspail’s lifetime, he saw Marxists like we see now march for the end of Western civilization, he saw priests replace their faith in God with faith in Big Other, he saw yuppies demand the death of their parents; all we see now is merely the continuation of what he noticed. His book is less a prophecy than a historical chronicle of the enemies of his time. Which happens to be also ours.

The book ends with Switzerland’s slow but sure conquest by the new governments of the post-European world. At the end, there are no more Englishmen, there are no more French women, there is no more Europe. A new world is truly established. But this is not a world of post-national, raceless fraternity: white women are sex slaves and white men are hated pariahs. The new masters are incompetent and cruel, and incapable of maintaining first world norms and standards. So, having come to the land of milk and honey, and having killed the milkmen for their precious glass and raped the honeybees for their sweet nectar, they exact vengeance, in the end, on themselves. And what remains is a spiral into darkness.

Little Rabbits

In The Camp of the Saints, women are precious things, white wives; whores and prostitutes; those that cheer on the multitude’s conquest; those that are the conquerors; sex dolls for released prisoners; cattle tenders fattening their infants for adoption in the West; the desperate to flee; desperately ignorant; and desperately incapable of grasping their own precious nature, which their men, even those who surrender, are too painfully aware of. Here is a banal and unfortunate fact. During the thousands of rapes in Rotherham by mostly Pakistani men, white women and girls, but mostly girls, were called white kafir, white cunt, white pussy, white slag, white whore, white hole, white cunny, white woman, this is what you are for. White women are fetishized around the world. This is not a dramatic thing to note or say. This is not an arrogant thing to say. Africa and Asia consume billions worth of skin-lightening creams. White women are the most popular porn actresses. In migrant dinghies to Britain, migrants are shown porn of white women as advertisements. There have been many cases where, within days of their arrival in Britain, migrants rape white women and girls. None of this is dramatic. None of this is racist. The third world can do sex tourism too. And they prefer English girls.

Women are not heroes in The Camp of the Saints. They do not resist. They do not defend. There is no Joan of Arc. The last camp of Westerners is composed of all men. There are soldiers, an Indian who knows what terrors his countrymen will bring to France, colonels, professors, a journalist and his loyal intern, a faithful but bad priest, and the tattered remains of government. There are no women among them. Women are not actors in the novel, except as victims and traitors. In the novel, there are good men and bad men, white thieves and black villains, Indian heroes, wise Arabs, white saviors, white soldiers, and one vicious Greek. This is because The Camp of the Saints is a novel about men, by a man, about how men should act in the face of civilizational suicide. Once, in Washington, D.C., I was walking on the metro with my husband beside me. A young black man, 15 or so, walked straight towards us and leaned forward, his shoulder first, to hit me. He was in the standard uniform of modern thieves: a Canada Goose jacket, a baclava. Right before he could hit me (I do not know why he would want to), my husband’s hand went out and caught the boy in the chest. The thief did not even stop. Like water against the bow of a ship, he simply moved on. Years ago, I had been on the metro another time. Wearing a cute skirt. A man sat next to me, and his fingers moved to my thigh. He wrote his number on a card and handed it to me. He was sixty.

“Man” is a literary device we no longer use. “Man” called to mind an upright creature, the thing on the right side of the Darwinian diagram. “Man” has a weight and dignity, and “Man,” of course, meant “Woman” too, which is why “Man” could have his rights and Mary Wollstonecraft could vindicate “Woman” of hers. “Woman,” unlike “Man,” was not at the end of the Darwinian diagram, but rather, next to “Man,” adjacent to him, proudly beside him. That’s quaint. Sexist even. As if upright “Man” was between “Woman” and the things to his left on the diagram. A dike. A wall. But what is the alternative? Men and women alone, barely speaking, incapable of spontaneous romance? Tinder, OnlyFans, 8,000 swipes for nothing? Childless, alone at thirty-three, proudly in denial? Desperately empathetic for foreign strangers who beat and rape much more than Western men, whom Western women now hate and scorn? Man, but not a man, a person, without a wife or children or a home or a future or anything at all but the boys? Two centuries of feminism driven mad because modern feminists—having realized feminism is inextricably and uncomfortably bound to “race” and “sex”—have embraced visions of a sexless, raceless world? And so, they welcome the millions. Driven ahead by guilt and narcissism, they embrace orientalist worship of the Other. As a price, they accept the rape of working-class white girls. In vindication, they proclaim all men equal.

Vindication means proven correct. In their quest for vindication, they welcome a ten-thousand-year-old ourobouros of rape, of fathers fucking daughters trading cattle for their cousin’s young, who they tell their son to rape in turn, to sail across the sea. Raspail tells us they will not see beautiful rights and the gilded cage and golden, shining empathy. Raspail tells us all they will see is holes and white skin ready for market day. Raspail is warning us: once you lose your men, you lose civilization, because you lose your warriors, and all civilizations, no matter how golden and radiant, need warriors. In the novel, men become weak because we call police and soldiers killers, we undermine their confidence, and so when the hour of our need comes, they defect. Women are some of the worst offenders in the destruction of the confidence of men. We dig our own grave before they come by condemning men for being men, for being brave defenders, for having conviction, and for seeing clear-eyed the stakes. For Raspail, the death of masculinity is inseparable from the death of spiritual strength and self-confidence. And the conservation of civilization is impossible without spiritual strength and the confidence of men. The death begins when young boys are in school, forced to write stupid humanitarian essays, disciplined into becoming the perfect creatures of schoolteachers, instead of becoming tough, heartless boys, which, for Raspail, is exactly what is needed to succeed in life.

For Raspail, civilization needs tough and heartless men who will coldly look the Other in the eye and see them for what they are: more often illiterate peasants, thieves, and rapists than anything like salvation. For Raspail, we even need men who will shoot and kill children, which is often necessary in the affairs of humankind, and will never stop being necessary. There is this notion that imagines we can end the killing of children by welcoming all the children of the world into Western nations. In the news, in the pews, the waves beat upon the dike, insisting that as soon as the dike is gone, the waters will be calm. In Raspail’s fiction and in our reality, certain people, especially women, imagine that paradise awaits, but for the dike that makes us “us” and “them” them. But where do the child soldiers march? Which languages do they speak? Why do women trust the water so, when it is the dike that keeps them warm and dry? In The Camp of the Saints, Rapsail offers us explanations.

The Writing

Is The Camp of the Saints well written? The plot is simple. The writing is sometimes beautiful, other times so direct that I find myself in disbelief. “That could not be,” I think. But then I look out at the sea. Then I feel a hand crawling up my skirt. I look, and I see a dinghy on the shore. I look, and there is a red veil in front of me. I look, and there is a white man’s hand on a black boy’s chest, stopping me from getting robbed, and if his hand were not there, I would be robbed. I don’t want it to be this way. But if I say it’s not this way, it still is that way. I have read many reviews of The Camp of the Saints that compliment the plot, themes, and message, yet condemn or criticize the writing.

Raspail is no worse a writer than Hemingway. The difference is that one is on the left; one is on the right. When Hemingway bends his little rabbit over a picnic blanket, leaves her silly, cumming on the grass, then walks with dynamite and a rifle down the Spanish cliffside to blow up a bridge and Nazi train, we say (and say in public) the writing is good. When Raspail has an old professor drink his wine and pump his shotgun and place a slug in the chest of a long-haired suicidal communist who has promised to let the third world burn his lovely oak door, we say (and say in public) the writing is bad. The difference is that one is on the left, and one is on the right. They are both competent authors. Hemingway is not for everyone, nor is Raspail, but they are for someone, at both the height of their talent and low beats of their unapologetically masculine literary form.

This is the longest book review I’ve written, because in some way, it is inappropriate to review the book. Philosophers and writers are sometimes right, and if they are, a review feels inadequate.

If you were reading 1984 in a shack in the prole quarter in 1984, would you write a book review? If you were a gosling chick, reading Animal Farm, while the hungry pig paces ‘round your coop, would you write a book review? If you were an Alpha, wandering outside the lighthouse, watching the last man about to dive into an orgy with a dozen beta beauties, eager to fondle their embryonically optimized breasts, after having read Brave New World, would you write a book review?

Could you? Or would you storm out of the shack and scream to the proles to raise their shabby, long-forgotten colors? Or would you peck your wings bloody and feather-bare, to grow faster new feathers for flight? Or would you kill the last man before the orgy, shoving him, business-like, off a cliff, leaving the memory of Shakespeare dying at least with dignity?

What if you read The Camp of the Saints and there were boats landing on the shore? Would you write a book review? Or would you consider that Raspail was right? And so, shrive your stolen soul? Am I being dramatic?

I am not the one separating the men from the women. I am not the one who purchased them a home. I am not the one asking women to make themselves dumb. I gave no one a stupid puzzle. My home is full of whiskey and art. But I am partially responsible for them being here. And they are now here. And there are millions of strangers here with them, too.

And the worst part? When I was upstairs with the women, and my husband was downstairs with the men, an old Afghan whispered to him that the Christian man had to save the Muslim world from itself, because they had lost control, and Islam had become corrupted by extremists and warlords. And yet, as he said this, he did not consider his home without art, his children without music, me with my stupid puzzle: that what he fled, he had brought, and in doing so, had wrought upon us.

The best book review of The Camp of the Saints I can offer is this.

You purchase the book, you open it, and, glowing blue, the specter of Jean Raspail enters your living room. He enters kindly through the door, unheralded, unwelcome. Whatever whiskey or wine you have, he pours himself a glass. He drinks eagerly. Then, he sits down in your most comfortable chair and gives you a prophecy of the past, present, and future. No matter who you are or how mature your spirit, how sure your manhood or delicate your frame, you become a gosling chick before the cock. You are embarrassed by your downy feathers. The ghost leaves shortly after, politely through the door, which, though he could simply pass through as a spirit, he opens gingerly instead and closes all the same. The last thing the spirit does, to bid adieu: he smiles, and with a cheeky wink, his fuzzy brows a-furrow, raps his ghostly knuckles on your fine wooden door, and says, “Perhaps this is an explanation.” Your stomach churns. But beside the bile, there is something else. You never realized how heavy your downy feathers were. How bitter naivete tasted on your rough tongue. How burdensome the barbs of your soft coat bit against your strong wings, which were made for flight.

The Camp of the Saints is a beautiful and important book. If you buy and read just one book this year, make it this one. You will not regret it. An audiobook version is scheduled for release soon. If you are interested in history, literature, or politics, you should read the book. The novel may be the closest thing the West has to a true banned book, and for that reason alone, it demands your attention. A tattered, ragged copy has circulated around the halls of Congress for years, passed from hand to hand, all the worse for wear, but nonetheless lovingly passed from Senator to intern to reporter to priest. The book is available for a bargain price of $24.95 (I’ve seen older copies go for $250 on eBay, and on one occasion, over $2,000). The publisher and translator have taken painstaking care to provide an authentic and informed reading experience. This is the definitive edition of the most controversial book of the last fifty years. And the book is about you.