The book is a racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees, "a haunting and prophetic vision," TSCP says, "of Western Civilization overrun by a burgeoning Third World population."

The book characterizes non-whites as horrific and uncivilized "monsters" who will stop at nothing to greedily and violently seize what rightfully belongs to the white man.

Incredibly, although the book was widely reviled in Europe, its translation in English was greeted with excited reviews like the one in The Wall Street Journal that said the book had moments "of appalling power and occasionally a terrible beauty."

In 1982, Raspail boasted of the novel's foresight and explained his view that "the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles." Today, The Camp of the Saints is widely revered by American white supremacists and is a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries, the race war novel written by William Pierce, head of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. In fact, Pierce's publishing arm, National Vanguard Books, describes Raspail's book as "one of the most famous, popular, and important racialist novels."

Here are some excerpts:

[As the refugee fleet arrives on French shores, a noble old professor kills a fellow white who is depicted as having sold out his race and civilization. Afterwards, as he celebrates the killing, the professor reflects on the loss of white pride.] The old professor understood. 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 [white] youngsters' brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer [of compassion for other races] implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all.

[At one point, a French town, faced with the threat of diseased foreigners, issues an edict requiring Arabs to get a certificate of health before using its public swimming pools.] Retaliation took many forms. ... A hundred nice French girls, teaching school in Algeria, were suddenly hauled into the hospital and spread on the stirrups to be plumbed and explored by a squad of medical student commandos, whipped up to a frenzy. Two of them died as a result... .

[The book repeatedly characterizes non-whites as sexual carnivores, as in this scene aboard the refugee fleet that is heading for Europe.] But in time, very slowly, the flesh [aboard the ships] began to seethe. ... Perhaps it was the heat... . Most of all, the natural drive of a people who never found sex to be sin. ... [E]verywhere, a mass of hands and mouths, of phalluses and rumps. ... Young boys, passed from hand to hand. Young girls, barely ripe ... waking to the silent play of eager lips. ... Men with women, men with men, women with women, men with children... . And so, in a welter of dung and debauch — and hope as well — the Last Chance Armada pushed on toward the West.

[As the Third World slaughter of whites picks up speed, the book describes a scene in a pig-processing plant in which a black man slaughters his white boss after being asked to kill pigs more quickly.] "Sure 'nough boss," one red-spattered black said, "we can sure 'nough do one more at least..." The white man felt no more pain than any of the other pigs on the line. Stunned, hoisted, slaughtered. ... [Hung from a hook, the murdered boss' body] caused ... no special disgust [among the black workers]. They had seen such things before, after all. At market, in the Congo.

[As the novel nears its end, Lydie, depicted as a traitor to her white race, becomes a sexual plaything for the dark-skinned refugees who have now seized power.] Lydie ... died in Nice, in a whorehouse for Hindus... . At the time, each refugee quarter had its stock of white women, all free for the taking. (One of the new regime's laws, in fact. In order to "demythify" white women, as they put it.) ... [In the end, Lydie, along with other white female sex slaves, is confined by the "Hindus" to their] "White Female Practice and Experimentation Center."

[The novel ends where it began, with the arrival of the refugee fleet in France.] [F]irst to land were the monsters, the grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta. As they groveled through the wet sand like a pack of basset hounds, or a herd of clumsy seals exploring an unfamiliar shore, with their snorts and grunts of joy, they looked like an army of little green men from some remote planet. ... Yes, the country [France] would suit them fine. No question.

Intelligence Report
Spring 2001