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 brick making, 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.

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