Not long ago, a book party like this would have been unthinkable: a Washington celebration of one of the most notorious French novels ever written. But on a frigid December night, some 50 people crammed into Butterworth’s, a Capitol Hill restaurant favored by the MAGA elite, to celebrate the rerelease of The Camp of the Saints, which had gone out of print in English decades ago. The dystopian novel by the French author Jean Raspail depicts the destruction of European civilization by barbaric migrant hordes that arrive, uninvited, by boat. It has been mostly reviled since its publication, in 1973. But prominent figures of the French right have hailed it as prophetic, including Marine Le Pen, who first read it at 18 and keeps a signed first edition in her office. The novel has also influenced two architects of Donald Trump’s immigration policies: Stephen Miller, the current deputy chief of staff, recommended it in emails to Breitbart News reporters, and Steve Bannon, the president’s former consigliere, makes frequent reference to it.

Until its retranslation and republication in September by a new publishing house called Vauban Books, The Camp of the Saints had been like samizdat. Worn English-language editions circulated among many hands. When Bannon suggested a few years ago that I read it, I realized that a print copy could cost $200 or more. My new edition cost $25 from Barnes & Noble. And now here it was, being handed out at the party at Butterworth’s put on by the publishing house to guests sampling beef tartare on crostini.

As they sipped their cocktails, Ethan Rundell, who translated the novel and is the editor in chief of Vauban Books, read from a 2011 essay in which Raspail reflected on his novel’s notoriety and relevance. Raspail thought that Europe had not heeded his warning, and predicted that come 2050, “there will be but hermit crabs living in France, of all different origins, all living in the shells cast off by the representatives of a species forever vanished but once known as the French.” But, Raspail continued, there was hope among the so-called isolates, resisters who insisted on the preservation of European culture. “There is another hypothesis: that these last isolates resist so far as to engage in a sort of Reconquista.” The guests juggled their drinks and hors d’oeuvres in order to applaud. Despite the pleasantness of the surroundings—perhaps because of it—the hollow disquiet I’d had since I finally read The Camp of the Saints for myself started to feel even worse.

[From the December 1994 issue: Must it be the rest against the West?]

I do not believe in suppressing books, this one included. The Camp of the Saints is not a good novel, but it is an important one. Dystopian fiction helps structure political myth; political myth helps structure policy. In the same way that The Handmaid’s Tale looms over abortion politics, or The Terminator lurks over artificial intelligence, The Camp of the Saints hangs over immigration politics—for a small but important stratum of right-wing thinkers and politicians. It illuminates much about the worldview of nationalist conservatives who are ascendant in America, France, and many other democracies. The problem is what that light shows: the profound fear that European-American civilization, which in this view is inseparable from whiteness, faces an existential threat from migration—and that extraordinary measures can be justified in response.

The Camp of the Saints is an apocalypse story. Its title is borrowed from the Book of Revelation in verses about Gog and Magog, the satanic hordes who arrive at the end of days. Their “number is as the sand of the sea”; they “went up on the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city.” In the novel, the camp of the saints is Europe; Gog and Magog is a migrant fleet, 1 million strong, that sets sail from India. The novel’s infamy is due to its description of this horde as a mindless mass and as “the beast”; it does not have young but “monster children”; it reeks of excrement for miles (“the emigrating Ganges stunk, as never had carnal India stunk before”); its members are shameless people packed so closely together that “over the bodies, between breasts, buttocks, thighs, lips, fingers, ran streams of sperm.” The mass has essentially one speaking member, the “coprophage” (literally “shit-eater”), who leads the fleet while his demonic and deformed monster child sits on his shoulder. “It was thus that, in shit and lust—but also hope—the Last Chance Armada pushed on towards the West,” Raspail writes. He affords the foreigners no humanity whatsoever. They are on par with zombies or space aliens.

Raspail, who died in 2020, was a writer mostly of travelogues who won some of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. By his account, the idea for the novel came to him when he was staying in a large villa overlooking the Mediterranean and an unshakable question occurred to him: ”And what if they came?” His defenders say his critics are too obsessed with his grotesque descriptions of the horde. “The novel isn’t directed against migrants; it’s directed against French people,” Rundell told me. “They were almost generic threats that appeared in the horizon.” The book, he said, is “not about the fall of the West, because the West has already fallen. It just doesn’t know it. It’s a revealing.”

Raspail does indeed spend most of his novel skewering French elites. They are so addled by aspirations to universal humanitarianism, by guilt over colonization, even by Catholic social teaching about immigration, that they invite their own destruction. They cannot see that the migrants already in France are a fifth column that will aid the invaders in their quest. In the novel, the country’s hapless president notes that “there will still be genocide, but we’re the ones who will disappear.” One of Raspail’s heroes replies in the affirmative: “We’ll die slowly, eaten away from the inside by millions of microbes injected into our body.” The French army, thoroughly rotted from within by self-hatred, abandons its mission and deserts rather than open fire on the migrants.

What people say they admire about Raspail is his prescience. The Atlantic’s 1994 cover story about global demographic trends opened with a discussion of The Camp of the Saints, “a controversial and nowadays hard-to-obtain novel.” Éric Zemmour, the right-wing French pundit and former presidential candidate, called Raspail a Cassandra who “foresaw the ‘Great Replacement’ of Europe’s peoples by their counterparts from the Global South.” In 2022, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, gave a speech recommending The Camp of the Saints “to anyone who wants to understand the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself.” Over the past decade, uninvited mass migrations of people to Europe, many of them by boat, and to America via the southern border have prompted debates that Raspail anticipated: Some humanitarians think that borders should be effectively opened to all who desire asylum; policy makers in the European Union and in the Biden administration dithered in dealing with mass migration.

Raspail was wrong, however, in his suggestion that “the servants of the beast” would have made migration uncontroversial. In the novel, he says that “France greedily swallowed the anesthetic: when the time came to cut off both her legs, she would be good and ready for the operation.” In reality, migration and cultural anxieties have become the new fault line of politics in the West. Ordinary people recoil at images of border chaos, here and in Europe; they lodge protest votes against the politicians responsible for the mismanagement and force them out of office. At the same time, many millions of people have assimilated through ordinary channels without heralding the end-time—including, I think, myself, a son of Pakistani immigrants to America.

[From the April 2019 issue: White nationalism’s deep American roots]