Books: Raspail’s Superb Scandal

The Camp of the Saints By Jean Raspail, translated by Norman Shapiro Scribner’s, 311 pp., $8.95 Earlier in this century, the avant-garde artist deliberately outraged bourgeois expectations. Fauves, cubists, dadaists, Joyce, Stravinsky: the riot outside concert hall or gallery, the novel confiscated by customs officer—these were the defining events. In a curious way Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints is reminiscent of that sort of thing. It, too, is an assault, a scandal. Respectable, comfortable reviewers in the TLS, the Times, and elsewhere have been reduced to sputtering, even as their predecessors were by Ulysses or Tropic of Cancer. Raspail’s novel ought to circulate in a plain brown wrapper, or perhaps in a Humboldt’s Gift dustjacket. In freer and more intelligent circles in Europe, however, the book is a sensation and Raspail a prize-winner.

In this novel Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health. Raspail is to genocide what Lawrence was to sex. His plot is both simple and brilliant. The time is the not-so-distant future, and the long-anticipated has come to pass. The so-called Third World is an overpopulated, disease-ridden outdoor slum. In Calcutta, as if seized by a last spasm, a million starving Indians take over whatever ships are at the docks and launch forth on the high seas. It is a wretched amorphous mass, a hundred dilapidated vessels inching around the Cape at ten knots, the mob cooking rice on briquettes of human feces, copulating in all possible combinations like a Hindu frieze come to life, stinking and undifferentiated. Gradually it becomes clear that the destination of the armada is Europe, France in fact, the Côte d’Azur. It is a “floating slum,” the “vanguard of an anti-world bent on coming in the flesh to knock, at long last, at the gates of abundance.” Other such armadas are being prepared in Asia and Africa, awaiting the French response.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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The Camp of the Saints By Jean Raspail, translated by Norman Shapiro Scribner’s, 311 pp., $8.95 Earlier in this century, the avant-garde artist deliberately outraged bourgeois expectations. Fauves, cubists, dadaists, Joyce, Stravinsky: the riot outside concert hall or gallery, the novel confiscated by customs officer—these were the defining events. In a curious way Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints is reminiscent of that sort of thing. It, too, is an assault, a scandal. Respectable, comfortable reviewers in the TLS, the Times, and elsewhere have been reduced to sputtering, even as their predecessors were by Ulysses or Tropic of Cancer. Raspail’s novel ought to circulate in a plain brown wrapper, or perhaps in a Humboldt’s Gift dustjacket. In freer and more intelligent circles in Europe, however, the book is a sensation and Raspail a prize-winner.

In this novel Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health. Raspail is to genocide what Lawrence was to sex. His plot is both simple and brilliant. The time is the not-so-distant future, and the long-anticipated has come to pass. The so-called Third World is an overpopulated, disease-ridden outdoor slum. In Calcutta, as if seized by a last spasm, a million starving Indians take over whatever ships are at the docks and launch forth on the high seas. It is a wretched amorphous mass, a hundred dilapidated vessels inching around the Cape at ten knots, the mob cooking rice on briquettes of human feces, copulating in all possible combinations like a Hindu frieze come to life, stinking and undifferentiated. Gradually it becomes clear that the destination of the armada is Europe, France in fact, the Côte d’Azur. It is a “floating slum,” the “vanguard of an anti-world bent on coming in the flesh to knock, at long last, at the gates of abundance.” Other such armadas are being prepared in Asia and Africa, awaiting the French response.