Jean Raspail’s "The Camp of the Saints" is one of those books you can’t mention at a dinner party without setting off a minor war. It’s been denounced, suppressed, and maligned as a hateful screed. And yet half a century after its publication, the book still pops like a gunshot. Why? Because it asks the question that polite society has done its best to avoid: What happens when a civilization loses the will to guard its own front door?

The novel is a fable, a satire, and a warning all at once. The plot is blunt: A massive flotilla of migrants sails toward France from India, while Europe’s leaders wring their hands, draft statements, and find ways not to act. The cast is drawn as caricatures — professors, journalists, bureaucrats, priests — each one a stand-in for the institutions that on

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