Today is the 77th birthday of Renaud Camus, the French author of the concept of ‘the Great Replacement.’ If there’s one thing right-thinking people in both Europe and America know about Camus, it’s that he is a notorious villain whose name is on the lips of vile racists.
Until about a month ago, the only thing I knew about ‘the Great Replacement’ was that it’s a racist theory, originating on the French far right, that claims white Europeans are victims of a conspiracy to replace them with non-white Third World immigrants. I knew this because the U.S. media had told me so—and, to be fair, because the small group of racist white protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, had chanted, “You will not replace us!”
So, when a friend of mine, a respected professor whose work I admire, told me that he is a co-translator of a forthcoming book of essays by Renaud Camus, and asked me if I would blurb it, I was startled. Why would my friend have anything to do with a racist conspiracy theory? I was afraid to ask. I agreed to read the book, which will be the first book-length translations of Camus’ work into English, as a favor to him, but I was sure I would not be able to endorse it.
Imagine my shock when I read the thing, and discovered that I had been completely wrong about Renaud Camus! Imagine my all-too-familiar frustration when I realized that once again, the American media had lied to me about the European Right.
For one thing, Camus is not even a man of the Right, strictly speaking. He is an openly gay atheist whose political sympathies lie mostly with the Left. He’s an environmentalist who hates antisemitism, and who once denounced Jean-Marie Le Pen of France’s National Front. But Camus is also a French nationalist and patriot who despises the way France is losing itself to mass migration. Europe cannot be Europe, he argues common-sensically, when the place of Europeans has been taken by foreign peoples bearing foreign cultures.
For another, Camus rejects the idea that le grand remplacement is a conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s an observation. As he sees it, no secret cabal is orchestrating the replacement with malicious intent. But it is happening anyway, and it is visible everywhere in France today, as well as throughout Western Europe.
Camus began thinking about le grand remplacement around the turn of the century, when he was researching a tourist guidebook for rural France. He observed a group of veiled Muslim women together in a tiny village, and was shocked to see such people far from France’s big cities. He opened his eyes to what was happening throughout his country, as the migrant flow from Africa and the Middle East, which began about half a century ago, moved through France’s capillaries, and into la France profonde—Deep France, the symbolic guardian of the nation’s identity.
The French have had to deal with a sharp rise of crime committed by non-French people living among them, including grotesque high-profile murders committed in the name of Islam. Life for France’s Jews has become barely tolerable under continuous harassment by the new arrivals. Large areas outside France’s cities—the notorious suburbs—are entirely dominated by immigrants; even the police don’t dare to venture into some of them.
Moreover, assimilation of these populations into European norms is largely not happening. Why it’s not happening is a matter of debate—French racism, immigrant unwillingness to conform, and so forth—but that it isn’t happening is impossible to deny. Meanwhile, the spigot pouring migrants into Europe continues to flood the continent.
And few people are allowed to talk about it. Camus was once a respectable academic, but when he began talking about what mass migration was doing to France, he launched himself down the road to cancellation. Old friends refused to talk to him. Publishers dropped him. He was hauled into court on hate speech charges. If you are an American who has heard of him at all, you’re almost certainly like me, convinced that he must be some kind of far-right lunatic.
Why wouldn’t you think so, if the only thing you knew about Camus came from English-language media? In 2019, for example, The New York Times published a short profile of him under the headline “The Man Behind The Toxic Slogan Promoting White Supremacy,” mentioning two mass shooters outside of France who had cited ‘the Great Replacement’ in their manifestos. You would have to read the piece carefully to see that the writer never really grapples with Camus’s claims, and takes for granted that people who say such things are racist.
A far more careful and attentive writer, the French-speaking American scholar of politics Nathan Pinkoski, emphasized in a Compact magazine article last year that Camus rejects conspiracy theory, and holds neither Islamist militants nor globalist elites responsible for ‘the Great Replacement.’
“Because mass immigration was endorsed across the political spectrum, and by those with very different economic interests, these origin stories are for Camus unlikely, if not impossible,” Pinkoski wrote. “Rather, he believes, the cause of the Great Replacement is a mass social and cultural transformation on the part of Europeans.”
What Europeans have done, in Camus’ view, is to turn their backs on their own culture, to loathe it, to mock it, and to forget it. They have been taught to do this by leftist ideology in schools, by liberal media pushing multiculturalism, but also by consumerism, economic globalism, and the triumph of technology. Camus calls this the Great Deculturation—and it is something that is happening to the United States too, for the same reasons.
The Great Deculturation is a form of civilizational suicide. A decultured people is one that doesn’t believe their culture is worth defending. Those who do stand up for traditional European cultural forms and values risk being called fascists and racists, and exiled to the margins, as Camus has been. As an American new to Europe, it astonishes and appalls me that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is widely reviled by European elites, especially in the media, simply for wishing to defend the culture and sovereignty of his country, and of the continent. Interestingly, the former communist countries of Europe are the least decultured—but they’re getting there.
Camus describes this phenomenon—the silencing of anybody who dares to notice what’s happening, and to speak out—a fruit of “the second career of Adolf Hitler.” He borrows the phrase from his friend Alain Finkielkraut, the prominent Jewish scholar. As Camus sees it, Hitler nearly destroyed Europe by war during his first career. Now, by causing his odious name to be attached to anyone who wishes to cherish and defend European traditions and peoples, Hitler is succeeding posthumously in finishing off its civilization.
I plan to write in more detail about the new book, titled The Enemy of the Disaster, when it is published later this year. On his birthday, though, it is perhaps right to give him a merci for these provocative and intelligent essays, and to his translators for making them available to English speakers for the first time. I predict American and British readers will be as shocked as I was to discover that we have all been lied to about Renaud Camus and his ideas. The coming success of the translation in the U.S. market should make American conservatives wonder how many more urgent, vital ideas circulate among conservatives in continental Europe, but never make it past the liberal gatekeepers in the U.S. media.
The above essay is part of a short series on Renaud Camus. We hope
these various articles will reinvigorate discussion over immigration and
its challenges today. We hope to help raise awareness of his works,
nearly all written in French, in the lead-up to the worldwide premier of
the publication of the first English-language collection of essays by
Camus, Enemy of the Disaster, released on October 15th in the United States and to be released on October 17th in Europe and the rest of the world. Read the other essays in this series by Pierre-Marie Sève here, and Anthony Daniels here.
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