Renaud Camus, the "author" of the idea of "The Great Replacement"

 

Renaud Camus developed his conspiracy theory in two books published in 2010 and 2011, in the context of an increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric in public discourse during the previous decade. Europe also experienced an escalation in Islamic terrorist attacks during the 2000s–2010s, and a migrant crisis in the years 2015–2016, which exacerbated tensions and prepared public opinion for the reception of Camus's conspiracy theory. As the latter depicts a population replacement said to occur in a short time lapse of one or two generations, the migrant crisis was particularly conducive to the spread of Camus's ideas while the terrorist attacks accelerated the construction of immigrants as an existential threat among those who shared such a worldview.

Camus's theme of a future demise of European culture and civilization also parallels a "cultural pessimistic" and anti-Islam trend among European intellectuals of the period, illustrated in several best-selling and straightforwardly titled books released during the 2010s: Thilo Sarrazin's Germany Abolishes Itself (2010), Éric Zemmour's The French Suicide (2014) or Michel Houellebecq's Submission (2015).

The "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory was developed by French author Renaud Camus, initially in a 2010 book titled L'Abécédaire de l'in-nocence ("Abecedarium of no-harm"), and the following year in an eponymous book, Le Grand Remplacement (introduction au remplacisme global). Camus has claimed that the name Grand Remplacement "came to [him], almost by chance, perhaps in a more or less unconscious reference to the Grand Dérangement of the Acadians in the 18th century." As an epigraph to the later book, Camus chose Bertolt Brecht's quip from the satirical poem Die Lösung that the easiest thing to do for a government which had lost the confidence of its people would be to choose new people.

According to Camus, the "Great Replacement" has been nourished by "industrialisation", "despiritualisation" and "deculturation"; the materialistic society and globalism having created a "replaceable human, without any national, ethnic, or cultural specificity", what he labels "global replacism".  Camus claims that "the great replacement does not need a definition," as the term is not, in his views, a "concept" but rather a "phenomenon".

In Camus's theory, the indigenous French people ("the replaced") is described as being demographically replaced by non-white populations ("the replacing [peoples]") - mainly coming from Africa or the Middle East - in a process of "peopling immigration" encouraged by a "replacist power".

Camus frequently uses terms and concepts related to the period of Nazi-occupied France (1940–1945). He for instance labels "Colonizers" or "Occupiers" people of non-European descent who reside in Europe, and dismisses what he calls the "replacist elites" as "Collaborationist". In 2017 Camus founded an organization named the National Council of European Resistance, in a self-evident reference to the World War II National Council of the Resistance (1943–1945). This analogy to the French Resistance against Nazism has been described as an implicit call to hatred, direct action or even violence against what Camus labels the "Occupiers; i.e. the immigrants". Camus has also compared the Great Replacement and the so-called "genocide by substitution" of the European peoples to the Holocaust. 

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PS: Based on the numbers provided by Eurostat, the growth in the number of immigrants in the 27 countries of the European Union, between 2000 and 2024, was 55.56%.