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.
