Renaud Camus

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Is Britain ready for France’s most controversial novel?

This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France’s most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in 2020, wrote many books during his long and varied life, but only one, The Camp of the Saints, is remembered. Even his admirers and sympathisers admit that the book isn’t a classic in the literary sense. In an article to mark the publication of a recent biography of Raspail, Le Figaro said the novel was guilty of a ‘certain kitschness, clumsiness, awkwardness and a nihilism that seems forced’. More than that, it has been accused of being overtly racist.

Monday

James Kirchick

The other Camus

From our US edition

Nearly two-thirds of French citizens say they fear that Muslim immigrants threaten white Christians with “extinction.” That bodes well for Éric Zemmour, France’s ubiquitous right-wing polemicist, candidate for its presidency — and prominent popularizer of the concept of le grand remplacement, the conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jews and globalist elites are conniving to “replace” Europe’s native population with Africans and Arabs. This paranoid thesis has inspired white supremacists across the world, and is an increasingly popular import on the American right. The man who coined le grand remplacement is the seventy-five-year-old novelist and travel writer Renaud Camus — no relation to Albert, but a kind of philosopher nevertheless.

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