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The Camp of the Saints Paperback – January 1, 1987

by Jean Raspail (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 618 ratings
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Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
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  1. Language
    English
  2. Publisher
    Social Contract Pr
  3. Publication date
    January 1, 1987
  4. Dimensions
    6.5 x 0.75 x 9 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1881780074
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1881780076
  7. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Social Contract Pr; Fourth American Edition (January 1, 1987)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1881780074
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1881780076
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.07 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 0.75 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 618 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
618 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the story interesting and mention that it gives food for thought. Opinions are mixed on readability, with some finding it well written and easy to read, while others find it difficult to read. Readers also disagree on the provocative content, with others finding it apocalyptic scenarios sketched with humour and whimsy, while other find it dark and dispiriting.

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StoryThemesTimely contentReadabilityProvocative contentContent
44 customers mention "Story"44 positive0 negative

Customers find the story interesting, brilliant, gripping, and hauntingly prescient. They also say the translation is superb and worth the effort.

"...This is not an easy book to read. But it is an important book to read...." Read more

"Great book, seeing the price I will have to go find where I put my copy" Read more

"...But all-in-all, it's worth the effort...." Read more

"Brilliant, prescient, and nauseating...." Read more

39 customers mention "Themes"33 positive6 negative

Customers find the themes in the book breathtaking, prophetic, and relevant. They also appreciate the author's wonderful descriptions of the surroundings and great perspective. They say the book is appropriate for the current time and a clear moral call about a long-running, dangerous situation.

"...Even as an English translation, the writing is powerful and a deeply intellectual and an analytical mind shines through...." Read more

"...Commonly ragarded as a racist tract, this book is actually rich in ideas and says more about the West than the East...." Read more

"...This book is a clear moral call about a long-running, dangerous situation that we all face...." Read more

"...It will shake you up, no doubt about that.This book gives food for thought,nourish yourself." Read more

5 customers mention "Timely content"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book timely and prescient. They also say it's an excellent book delivered promptly and well packaged.

"Brilliant, prescient, and nauseating...." Read more

"This book is right on the mark and very timely as we watch the caravans trying to cross the US-Mexico border...." Read more

"...Having said that I am very pleased with the fast shipping and packaging of the book. The Seller deserves the 5 star rating." Read more

"Excellent book delivered promptly" Read more

41 customers mention "Readability"25 positive16 negative

Customers are mixed about the readability of the book. Some mention that it's very well written, magnificent, and witty in the French style. However, others say that it is difficult to read and that many thoughts are jumbled together into massive paragraphs that can be as long as a page.

"...Even as an English translation, the writing is powerful and a deeply intellectual and an analytical mind shines through...." Read more

"...of itself is not so extraordinary as a fictional account, although well written and demanding of attention through its recreation of a reality some..." Read more

"...This is not a fun book to read. This is not an easy book to read. But it is an important book to read...." Read more

"...It is a triumph of literary genius, a call to arms, a pithy social commentary on the moral bankruptcy of the ruling class, and a reminder of what..." Read more

36 customers mention "Provocative content"11 positive25 negative

Customers are mixed about the provocative content. Some mention that the apocalyptic scenarios are sketched with humour and whimsy, and the book is terrifying, truthful, and suspenseful. They also appreciate the absurd, and say it's a call to arms. However, others say it’s dark, dispiriting, and almost creepy to read.

"...This is not a fun book to read. This is not an easy book to read. But it is an important book to read...." Read more

"...Chilling and overwhelming, not for the feint of heart, you almost feel you are there and can smell the BS." Read more

"...Apocalyptic scenarios are sketched with humour and whimsy and a clear appreciation of the absurd...." Read more

"...The characters are not well developed; and no, the book is no prescient wizardry...." Read more

4 customers mention "Content"0 positive4 negative

Customers find the content of the book racist.

"...as a glimpse inside the mind that is so disgustingly and violently racist that it doesn't even know it...." Read more

"...The author's treatment of the refugees is somewhat racist, but I can't be sure if the author is racist or only wanted to show the seamy side of..." Read more

"...Racist drivel that I cannot believe I bought. I've learned to not take recommendations from people that I barely know." Read more

"Unbelievably racist book!..." Read more

A Prophecy Coming True Today
5 out of 5 stars
A Prophecy Coming True Today
Jean Raspail wrote this book more than 30 years ago to warn us of the consequences of our political correctness when it comes to immigration. Sadly, few have heeded Raspail's warning and the recent riots in France are just the first skirmishes in the war to come.
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Top reviews from the United States

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent and transformative, but not for the faint of heart
Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2017
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Jean Raspail said that over the 18 months it took to write this book, it consumed and aged him. It is easy to see why, probing human nature to the depths explored in this book is exhausting to the soul, but yet, he did it and the results are sublime.

Raspail’s credentials are a lifetime spent in world travel and dispassionate sociological examination. He is an expert on recognizing the elements that lead to the extinction of civilizations and societies and has written a novel (a novel, not a government document) whose premise is the end of Western civilization, drawing heavily on past European and African revolutions and biblical theology. Even as an English translation, the writing is powerful and a deeply intellectual and an analytical mind shines through. Apocalyptic scenarios are sketched with humour and whimsy and a clear appreciation of the absurd.

Raspail reiterates that this is a parable: a superficial story combined with a deeper message. People who read the novel, anxiously searching to apply labels of racism, imperialism, supremacism, fascism etc, will be quickly satisfied, since after all one of the central themes is the toxicity of this behaviour and its consequences to society, and they are immediately and effectively caricatured. Don’t be intimidated by anyone into missing this incredible novel, every page is precisely tuned to evoke an emotion. The intellectual terrorism wielded abundantly by characters in the novel, is in plain view in many of the reviews and articles that you see. Raspail has an earthy approach that is more easily identified with the many societies he has observed, and his unflinching imagery may be unpalatable to some and courageous to others.

As with “The War of the Worlds”, “1984”, “Animal Farm” and “Fahrenheit 451” (to name a few of the most visible books of this nature), those most in need of the reflection this novel should inspire, will be the quickest to denounce both the novel and its creator, presuming to know him through a story he has told. But fiction novelists and fiction movie-makers are free (today and hopefully always) to imagine "what-ifs" and develop powerful themes, even if apocalyptic or dystopian, and readers and movie-goers are still free to read and view, and to examine their own minds, societies and consciences.
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Edward Brynes
5.0 out of 5 stars The truth people do not face
Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2017
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This ill-reputed narrative of the invasion of France by filthy outcaste masses from India has been reprinted several times since its publication in 1973 and seems to be going stronger than ever. Recently Steve Bannon called the recent migrations from Middle Eastern countries a ‘Camp of Saints’ type of thing”. Commonly ragarded as a racist tract, this book is actually rich in ideas and says more about the West than the East.“I had no idea this Steve, eh, Bannon existed at all,” the author said recently in an interview with Tablet magazine. “... a French journalist had me listen to what Bannon said about me the other day. I must say I was stunned. ... I don’t know this character and he has understood The Camp of the Saints. He has said that reading it made him see what should be done. Isn’t it extraordinary?”

The Camp of the Saints is about the decadence of the West. Author Jean Raspail, a conservative Catholic, sees the problem as a loss of stable values and order. The basic narrative is Revelations 20:9: “And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison, and will go forth and deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and will gather them together for the battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up over the breadth of the earth and encompassed the camp of the saints and the beloved city.” In the novel, Satan is “the dung man” a preacher who leads the Indian outcaste class (the nations in the four corners of the earth) to conquer the camp of the saints (the West). On his shoulder he always carries his offspring, the “monster child”: “at the bottom, two stumps, then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted; no neck but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head ... and a mouth that was just a flap of skin over his gullet.” His huge impoverished rabble has enough collective resources to commandeer a hundred rusted steamers plus provisioning and coal to bring these outcasts from India to the West, which turns out to be the south of France.

The proximate cause of this is the dung man's preaching. The author comments “The world is controlled, so it seems, not by a single specific conductor, but by a new apocalyptic beast, ... one that in some primordial time, must have vowed to destroy the Western World.” The monster child, evidently in touch with this beast, communicates with his father by eye-flashes and grimaces. Oddly the dung man sees an “atheist philosopher”, Ballan, as a redeemer who can save him. Meeting Ballan on a crowded Calcutta pier, the dung man pleads "Please take us with you ... Please." Ballan replies “Today’s the day, my friend. We’ll both be in paradise, you and I.” Ballan muses, “Seriously, God, is this your idea?” Shortly afterward, the stampede onto the ship knocks him overboard; his last thought before drowning is regret for rejecting the West.

At the beginning of the sixty day voyage, European opinion is divided concerning the migration. Missionary doctors and clergymen admit they have encouraged it and are vaguely gratified to be carried along by a grand revolution. Among the media “ ..[There was] no lack of clever folk, willing from the start, to spread endless layers of verbal cream, spurting thick and unctuous from the udders of their minds. ... Eternal France, in keeping with time-honored custom, owed it to herself to stand up, solo, and squeal out sublime and noble notes of love.” Grandest of the rhetoricians is Orelle, a government official who has won a literary prize, who intones: “All the privileged nations must stand up as one, must lend a solemn ear to the eternal question, ”Cain, where is Abel thy brother?” Among the journalists, there is a race activist, Dio, who has made a career of blowing up minor racial incidents into scandals. There is an impoverished, alert, skeptical fellow, Machefer, who asks embarassing commonsense questions of the idealists. There is Durfort, a noisy and brainless idealist-leftist. There is Vilsberg, whose favored pose is as Deep Thinker who can never make up his mind. The idealists and activists (Dio and Durfort) make lots of money while Machefer just scrapes along, but he at least is devoted to truth and common sense. Their incessant quarrels add some fun to this otherwise gloomy narrative; I thought of ‘Bonfire of the Vanities.’

As for the common man, we see workingfolks Marcel and Josiane hearing Durfort asking the people to take the "refugees" into their homes. Marcel (drill-press machinist at an auto plant) is outraged. But the author realizes that going to the people has limitations. “Marcel is the people, his mind is their mind, half Durfort and half suede [i.e. luxury], not exactly the most compatible couple, but getting along by and large. And the people won’t lift a finger to help. Not in either direction. ... Marcel isn’t any less bright than his forbear the serf. But the monster has eaten away his brain, and he never even felt it. No, Marcel won’t go running to man the ramparts against the Ganges horde ... Let the troops fight it out among themselves. And if they turn tail and run, it’s not up to Marcel to bring up the rear ... He’ll sit by and watch today’s forts being sacked, He’ll let them all go.”

French public opinion begins to turn to self-destructive after Dio publishes a long article, “Civilization of the Ganges”. “Arts, letters, philosophy ...” Here were “all the wonders that the Ganges had bestowed on us already ... how could we manage without these folk any longer!” - The Pope publishes tear-jerking messages. Socially-minded bishops call for something in spirit of Vatican III. The International Ganges Rescue Commission is formed from old hands with UNESCO and UNICEF -- “veterans in the rat race to gnaw the UN cheese”. The change in attitudes is overwhelming when Australia is vilified as racist simply for pointing out its right to exclude foreigners. Disgrace pours down on skippers on other ships that pass the migrants by. The fleet appears ready to pass through the Red Sea to Egypt, but when an Egyptian navy ship lobs a shell just above it, while the dung man and his monster child are on the bridge. This is enough to make the fleet change course and head around the Cape of Good Hope. The waters remain unbelievably calm throughout the long ocean trek. A storm comes up but the ships miss it only by a few hours. (The beast is on the migrants’ side.) Sufficient hints are planted to make the ending clear well in advance.

Despite appearances, The Camp of the Saints is not about race, but about the problem of assimilating the foreigner. There are billions of people for whom dung is a vital product for brickmaking, fuel and fertilizer, so it’s intimate in their lives. The question is how we deal with the two facts: world population is increasing rapidly, and there are so many people in the world whom we really don’t want to live with. What to do? The problem is of course compounded when there are memories of conquest and subjection. Practically every people has been under subjection at some time and held other peoples under subjection at other times, but few are willing to face facts in their entirety. No matter what you would include in a proposed solution, national boundaries are essential. Once we acknowledge the point, there is the further question of what to do when due to political pressures many people are enabled to get in who according to reasonable standards of civilized behavior should not have been let in. But now we have entered a strictly political realm. Like the author of this book I should know when to stop.
221 people found this helpful
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Russell
5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite book of all time
Reviewed in Canada on July 20, 2018
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I really couldn't put it down. I recommended it to my friends but they were afraid "it would be too depressing". Not true: the pace of the storytelling and the dark humor really counter-balance the theme of the novel.

Extremely vivid and immersive. A scathing examination of the cowardice of the western spirit, the Marxist elements of the media and politics, and the powerful foreign entities who sit comfortably in their high-rises while western civilization quickly digs its own grave.

Rather than crush your spirit, this novel will motivate you to speak your mind, and speak what you truly believe, rather than trod along with what is 'politically correct' for fear of social exclusion.

This writer is a literary genius who made a big sacrifice telling this story at the risk of his reputation and career.

I would also recommend "Growth of the Soil" by Knut Hamsun and "Journey to the End of the Night" by Celine
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antonio gabrielli manca graziadei
5.0 out of 5 stars Il romanzo più orribile e terribile mai scritto
Reviewed in Italy on January 14, 2018
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Romanzo a tesi del 1973, da leggere quale vaccino contro il razzismo e la xenofobia.
È una descrizione apocalittica, repellente, disgustosa e suprematista dell’invasione della Francia da parte di un milione di indiani, feccia disumana del mondo.
È il ‘livre de chevet’ di Steve Bannon e, si immagina, di Donald Trump.
Si abbina perfettamente con il 'Mein Kampf’ di A. Hitler (edizione critica Free Ebrei).
Buona lettura!
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Amazon Kunde
5.0 out of 5 stars Schön geschrieben
Reviewed in Germany on December 30, 2016
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Jean Raspail weiß mit Worten zu verzaubern!
Die Art und Weiße wie er die Vorkommnisse inszeniert ist faszinierend!

Er schafft es auf raffinierte weise ein dutzend Persona, mit unterschiedlichen Ansichten, zu kreieren.
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Noëlle
5.0 out of 5 stars The nightmare became true
Reviewed in France on October 8, 2015
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What Jean Raspail announced and warned us about, in 1973, is happening just right now both in The USA and in the EU , the waves of immigrants , undocumented and unwanted have been launched together in our two continents to derail our economies and our societies, Jean Raspail warned us about the millions invading our countries without even firing a single shot, they are so many that incompetent governments are already pushing their own citizens out of their homes (see Sweden) or telling them to giving part of their homes or garages to accomadate people that have no hope nor wish to settle here peacefully to get work and help our economies to grow ;on the contrary the financial, social and cultural price will be enormous, then owerwhelming and eventually will mean the end of our societies and countries. Already canteens in Europe and America are told to avoid pork and ham and girls in Bavaria and Britain are told to dress humbly ( no short skirts...) not to offend the newcomers. In a video on youtube some immigrants from Pakistan demand women to accomadate their sexual needs in the shelters were they are given all kinds of foof and medical treatments!!!!
Read this book , it is really the tale of what is going on NOW
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Robert I P Henderson
5.0 out of 5 stars The Camp of the Saints tested against reality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2014
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[...]

The Camp of the Saints tested against reality

English translation from the French by Norman Shapiro, Professor of French Romance Languages and Literatures Department 3089, Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA. Email nshapiro@wesleyan.edu

[...]

Robert Henderson

The French writer Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints was published in 1973. It is notorious or famous, according to your politics, for its story of the Third World poor successfully invading the First World. The invaders come armed not with guns and bombs, but the potent weapons of their huge numbers and the knowledge that the self-destructive ideology of Western elites - what we would nowadays call the “anti-racist” part of political correctness - had warped the minds of most of those elites and also those of the masses of the First World, who have been beaten into a state where they either cannot see when their own interests are being sacrificed on the altar of one worldism or are cowed to the point where they are paralysed into inaction.

At the time of its writing the book was set in twenty or so years in the future. As the story opens a fleet of 100 ramshackle ships dubbed the Ganges Armada gathers in India and soon sets off for Europe. In the ships are one million of the subcontinent’s poor. The intention of the Armada is to run the ships aground on European shores – this is a strictly one way voyage - decant their cargo and present the land on which they descend with a dilemma, namely, allow the million to invade or resist them with force with the ultimate sanction being mass slaughter of the invaders.

It takes the ships fifty days to arrive on the northern shores of the Mediterranean with Southern France as the final destination. As the Ganges Armada sails the Western elites are either starry eyed about their dream of a world in which there is no us and them - no nation states, just Mankind with a capital M - or paralysed by the one-world propaganda which has been so assiduously fed to them.

Even those members of the elite who do not believe in the One Worldism have developed the peculiar state of mind which arises when propaganda is not only incessant but gainsaying the propaganda is seen as dangerous. Such people do not embrace the content of the propaganda, nor play along out of abject and immediate fear. Rather, they sublimate the fear and develop a feeling that to rebut the propaganda is somehow wrong, although if asked they could not say exactly where the wrongness lay. The state of mind is akin to that of a person who feels that a sick joke is inappropriate if expressed in company even if it makes them inwardly laugh. In short, they have been conditioned to think of certain ideas and words as unclean for no other reason that they have been told over and over again that these things are beyond the Pale. As for the masses, they have variously bought into the propaganda, had their true feelings suppressed by the constant propaganda as described above or been censored out of public life.

But human nature has not been utterly transformed. There is the natural human response to trouble of thinking it will not happen. While the Ganges Armada is a long way off heads are buried in the sand with non-pc thoughts such as that the ships will all be sunk by rough weather and seas before they reach Europe because of their decrepit state. Hardly anyone in a position of authority or influence is realistic and honest about the outcome of the Armada if it reaches its destination , namely, that it will be an invasion which if not resisted will overturn the societies into which the human cargo, full of misery and entitlement, is decanted. Instead they either preach the message that the arrival of the Armada will be a great blessing for it will allow the West to show its generosity of spirit by welcoming the invaders with open arms or indulge in the hypocrisy of secretly hoping the ships will founder at sea.

But the weather is unusually clement and the Ganges Armada comes closer and closer until its arrival off the French Mediterranean coast is imminent. This causes the vast majority of the population of the South of France to abandon any pretence of seeing the ships’ arrival as anything other than a threat and the vast majority flee to the North of France. This is only a temporary place of safety and before long much of the French elite also hot-foot it to Switzerland , thinking wrongly that it will be a haven against the One Worldist mania –eventually the Swiss fall prey to the same lack of will to resist the invaders and opening their borders to the invading Third World hordes.

The most naïve of the One Worlders advance towards the point at which the ships will make landfall in the sublimely silly expectation that they will be welcomed with open arms by the invading one million. Once they arrive the One Worldist simpletons are at best ignored and at worst attacked. They also find that they are at risk from the Third World immigrants and their descendants who are already in France.

When the Ganges Armada finally arrives and sheds its cargo of one million there is little resistance because not only have most of the population fled , but the French armed forces prove worthless, most having been robbed of the will to resist the invasion with brute force by the ceaseless propaganda which has been fed to them. The result is mass desertions.
The Ganges Armada is only the beginning. Other fleets full of Third World misery to west upon the West are being prepared. Nor is it just a seaborne invasion. Even as the Ganges Armada is at sea huge numbers of Chinese are massing on the Chinese border with the Asiatic Russian territories.

The novel ends with France overrun and the white native French population reduced to not exactly slavery but an irrelevance as power shifts to the non-white migrants who were either in France before the Armada arrived or are part of the Armada and its successor Third World invasion. The same general thing happens throughout the West, with the white native population everywhere becoming subordinate, becoming strangers in a strange land which was once theirs but is now utterly changed.

How prophetic is the Camp of the Saints? Raspail understood when he published the book that it would not be prophetic in the detail of his imaginings, but only in his general message. Indeed, in his short preface he admits that the detail of the action in the book is unrealistic: “I had wanted to write a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if the specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem farfetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. We need only glance at the awesome population figures predicted for the year 2000, i.e., twenty-eight years from now: seven billion people, only nine hundred million of whom will be white.”

The invasion of the First World has not occurred as dramatically as Raspail portrayed it. If it had perhaps even the Quisling politically correct politicians of the West would have been forced to resist it with force, both because they feared the fury of the people they supposedly represented and for fear of what the reality would be if such an invasion force had landed. Instead the immigration has happened piecemeal, surreptitiously. There has never been a dramatic massing of Third World immigrants to gain entry to the First World Promised Land in one fell swoop, just an incessant trickle through numerous points of entry. The nearest events to what Raspail describes are the various boat people arriving in the West from Latin America, Africa and Asia. But although large in aggregate, each individual attempt at invasion contains hundreds at best and most commonly in numbers of less than ten. When seaborne they come not as an imposing fleet but singly or as a small flotilla at worst. More commonly their illegal entry is by plane, train or motor vehicle, a handful at a time.

Where Raspail was strikingly astute is his prediction of the immense weight of “anti-racist” politically correct propaganda which the West has seen. He l catalogues all the politically correct grotesquery we have today with definitive characters. There are those in positions of authority and influence such Albert Dufort, the trendy radio journalist, who prostitute themselves and their country by representing the Ganges Armada and the other soon to be launched Third World invasion fleets, not as a threat but as a great opportunity to show their humanity. There are those drawn from the ethnic minorities already well ensconced in French society such as the Algerian Ben Suad (who goes by the name of Clement Dio) whose lives are devoted to biting the hand that feeds them. Perhaps most forlornly there are the French young who have had their natural tribal feeling sucked from them: “ That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one's own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity's finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters' addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all. In their case it wasn't a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment, most interesting to find in the flesh and observe, at last, in action.” Chapter 1

All of this is most impressive because when the book was written political correctness was in its early stages. In Britain a couple of Race Relations Acts had been passed in 1965 and 1968, and one worldism, especially with a Marxist tinge, was very popular in academia. But there was no general propagandising of the British population and punishments for being non-pc about race and immigration had barely begun to get a hold on British society. Even in the United States, the most advanced of states promoting “anti-racist” measures , measures such as “positive discrimination” and “affirmative action” were still in their infancy. The secular inquisition of individuals accused of pc “crimes” that we know today with people increasingly being sent to prison or routinely losing their jobs did not exist. The long march through the institutions still had a good distance to go.

The book’s general argument that the West would be subject to massive immigration which would radically change their societies is correct. In Britain the last national census in 2011 showed this for the population of England and Wales combined :

White was the majority ethnic group at 48.2 million in 2011 (86.0 per cent). Within this ethnic group, White British1 was the largest group at 45.1 million (80.5 per cent).
The White ethnic group accounted for 86.0 per cent of the usual resident population in 2011, a decrease from 91.3 per cent in 2001 and 94.1 per cent in 1991.
White British and White Irish decreased between 2001 and 2011. The remaining ethnic groups increased, Any Other White background had the largest increase of 1.1 million (1.8 percentage points).

The population of England and Wales at the time of the census was” 56,170,900 in mid-2011, with the population of England estimated to be 53,107,200 and the population of Wales estimated to be 3,063,800”. In a generation the white population, British and foreign , has dropped by 8% and those describing themselves as white British were only 45 million out of 56 million.

There is also strong evidence that the idea of deliberately encouraging mass immigration of the unassimilable to change Western societies has been practised by Western Governments. Think of the words of a Tony Blair special adviser Andrew Neather :

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.
But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote.
This shone through even in the published report: the "social outcomes" it talks about are solely those for immigrants.
And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour's 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.
The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

In May 2014 the British think tank Policy Exchange published a report on racial and ethnic minorities entitled A portrait of modern Britain. The headline grabbing statistic in the report is the claim that ”the five largest distinct Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities could potentially double from 8 million people or 14% of the population [now] to between 20-30% by the middle of the century. Over the past decade, the UK’s White population has remained roughly the same while the minority population has almost doubled. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are the fastest growing minority communities with ethnic minorities representing 25% of people aged under the age of five.”

Because immigrants and their descendants have a substantially greater propensity to breed than that of the native white British population and that fact coupled with the much younger average age of immigrants than that of native Britons means that the Policy Exchange projections are realistic.

What the Camp of the Saints should do is force people to accept at both an intellectual and emotional level what mass immigration represents. It is a form of conquest, and conquest of the most pernicious and fundamental kind when it consists primarily of those who cannot or will not fully assimilate into the native population. Oncesuch immigrants are in a country in large numbers, the country is faced with two terrible choices: either capitulate to the fact of their conquest and allow the country to dissolve into a motley multicultural mess occupying a single territory or forcibly remove the immigrants and their descendants through expulsion or massacre. Nor should it be imagined that the dissolution of the country into racial/ethnic blocs will mean an absence of war. History tells a single simple story about racially and ethnically divided territories: violence is an inevitable and ineradicable part of such societies and the more the different groups within a territory begin to be of equal size the greater the risk of conflict.

The question which Raspail brings us to is this, is the invasion to be permitted through an excessive and fatal excess sentiment or is it to be resisted through force, including in the final extremity the mass killing of men , women and children, or will the invaders be permitted to come, breed and settle the territory of the original population? Mass immigration is conquest, just as surely as an armed invasion is conquest. A people who forgets that or buries their collective head in the political sand hoping the bogeyman will go away is doomed.

There are weaknesses in the novel purely as a literary work, although the fact that I am commenting on an English translation should be born in mind. There is little character development, the dialogue is feeble, the language flowery, there is a good deal of Gallic intellectual exhibitionism and a considerable amount of what I can only describe as a third person stream of consciousness. The last I must confess is not to my taste. Raspail also gives his story a strong flavour of the leftist student protest of 1968 and the widespread attraction to the Western intelligentsia of Marxism, especially in its Troskyite manifestations. This seems like another world today even though the period is only 40 odd years ago and may make the work seem alien or simply dated to some readers.

But these weaknesses do not diminish the importance of the book, for it is Raspail’s general message which matters. The message is important both because its general thrust is true and for the shameful fact that it is saying things which if expressed in a new work being offered for publication today would ensure that it did not find a mainstream publisher in the West.
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