In 1973 a strange novel appeared in France that swiftly became a bestseller. The authour of "Le Camp des Saints" (The Camp of the Saints) was already known as a travel writer and novelist. Well-travelled, cultured and curious, his vision for this most notorious work came to him one morning in his home on the shores of the Mediterranean.
In his own words, that morning in 1972 he saw a vision of 'A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West. I literally saw them, saw the major problem they presented; a problem absolutely insolvable by our present moral standards. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.'
The novel that Jean Raspail spent the next eighteen months writing was set at some point in the coming decades and depicted a France - and Europe - in the process of being swamped by mass migration from the third world. The general catalyst for the migration is the growing disparity between the numbers of poverty-stricken people in the third world and the diminishing percentage of the world's population living in the comparative paradise of Europe.
With modern communications media, word of this disparity is no longer possible to hide and the third world turns to Europe. One million people set sail in a fleet of boats, but all the time untold millions are watching and waiting to get on boats themselves. Everything depends on the reaction of Europe to this first million. For strategic political reasons Raspail chose to make the migration come not from North Africa but from Calcutta, and head from there towards the French Riviera.
The novel's memorable opening presents an elderly, cultured professor sitting in his house on the south coast of France, listening to Mozart as the armada is landing. He thinks he is alone, as the ensuing anarchy has already caused the local population to flee. However, a young hippy-ish man invades his study. He is glorying in the 'new' country that is going to emerge, a country that will be 'born all over'. And the young man instructs the professor that he is 'through. Dried up. You keep thinking and talking, but there's no more time for that. It's over. So beat it!' For his part the professor accepts that the young man may be right: 'My world won't live past morning, more than likely, and I fully intend to enjoy its final moments.' And so he shoots the young man.
In the wake of the threat to the French Republic every arm of the state - like its European neighbours - buckles. When it is clear that the armada is on the way and that France will be overwhelmed not by force but by people simply landing peaceably on their beaches, everybody fails in their own particular way. The politicians dither, incapable of working out what their attitude should be and flipping wildly between attempts to accept the armada and their ideas of how to scupper it. When some of the military are ordered to torpedo the boats, they refuse to obey orders. Meantime the leaders of the church, weighed down by the guilt of their own wordly wealth, urge that the doors of France be opened. And all the time celebrities and media stars polish and preen their reputations in front of the media by depicting this moment only as a wonderful opportunity. Perhaps aware that any other ending would make his novel even more unacceptable, in the end Raspail allows the armada to land. France does not repel them.
It is not hard to see why Raspail's novel was swiftly and almost unanimously dismissed by the critics as a racist tract. But its uncomfortable precision, not least its depiction of the failure of European society once the migration begins, saves it from being only that. And the prophetic outcome predicted in the book more than fifty years ago has been a vast underestimation of what actually happened!
