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’s a famous evildoer whose name is on the lips of vile racists.
Until about a month ago, all I knew about the “Great Replacement” was that it’s a racist theory, originating in the French far-right, that white Europeans are victims of a conspiracy to replace them by non-white immigrants from the Third World. . I knew this because the American media had told me, 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 he was co-translator of a forthcoming book of Renaud Camus’s essays and asked if I would delete it, I was surprised. 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 translation of Camus’ work into English, as a favor, but I was sure I couldn’t endorse it.
Imagine my surprise when I read the thing and discovered that I had Renaud Camus completely wrong! Imagine my all-too-familiar frustration when I realized that, once again, the American media had lied to me about the European right.
On the one hand, Camus is not even a man of the Right, strictly speaking. He is an openly gay atheist whose political sympathies lie primarily with the left. He is an environmentalist who hates anti-Semitism and once denounced Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Jew-hating stalwart of the French 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 with common sense, when the place of Europeans has been taken by foreign peoples with foreign cultures.
On the other hand, Camus rejects the idea that the great substitute it’s a conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s an observation. According to him, no secret cabal is orchestrating the replacement with malicious intent. But it is happening anyway, and today it is visible everywhere in France, as well as throughout Western Europe.
Camus began to think the great substitute around the turn of the century, when I was researching a tourist guide for rural France. He observed a group of veiled Muslim women together in a small village and was surprised to see these people far from the big cities of France. He opened his eyes to what was happening in his country, when the migratory flow from Africa and the Middle East, which began about half a century ago, moved through the capillaries of France and towards deep france— Deep France, the symbolic guardian of the nation’s identity.
The French have had to deal with a sharp increase in crimes committed by non-French people living among them, including grotesque high-profile murders committed in the name of Islam. Life for the Jews of France has become almost tolerable under the constant harassment of the new arrivals. Large areas outside the cities of France—the notorious suburbs—are completely dominated by immigrants; even the police dare not go into some of them.
In addition, the assimilation of these populations to European standards is not taking place to a large extent. Why it’s not happening is a matter of debate—French racism, immigrants’ unwillingness to conform, etc.—but it’s impossible to deny that it’s not happening. Meanwhile, the thorn that pours 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 started talking about what mass migration was doing to France, he launched himself down the path of cancellation. Old friends refused to talk to him. The editors dropped it. He was taken to court on charges of hate speech. If you’re an American who’s heard of him, you’re almost certainly like me, convinced he must be some kind of far-right lunatic.
Why wouldn’t you think so, if all you knew of Camus came from the English-language media? In 2019, for example, The New York Times posted a short Profile of him under the headline “The man behind the toxic slogan promoting white supremacy,” mentioning two mass shooters outside 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 confronts Camus’s claims and assumes that people who say such things are racist.
A much more careful and thoughtful writer, the French-speaking American political scholar Nathan Pinkoski, underlined in a Compact magazine article last year that Camus rejects the conspiracy theory and holds neither militant Islamists 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, such origin stories are unlikely, if not impossible, for Camus,” Pinkoski wrote. “Rather, he believes, the cause of the Great Replacement is a massive social and cultural transformation on the part of Europeans.”
What the Europeans have done, according to Camus, is to turn their backs on their own culture, hate it, mock it and forget it. They have been taught to do this by left-wing ideology in schools, by the liberal media that promote multiculturalism, but also by consumerism, economic globalization and the triumph of technology. Camus calls this the Great Desculturation, and it is something that is also happening in the United States, for the same reasons.
The Great Desculturation is a form of civilizational suicide. An uneducated people is one who does not think it is worth defending their culture. Those who defend traditional European cultural forms and values risk being called fascists and racists, and exiled to the margins, as Camus has been. As an American newcomer to Europe, I am shocked and horrified that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is widely reviled by European elites, especially in the media, simply for wanting to defend his country’s culture and sovereignty and the continent. Interestingly, the former communist countries of Europe are the least decultured, but they are getting there.
Camus describes this phenomenon, the silencing of anyone who dares to realize what is happening and to speak up, as the result of “Adolf Hitler’s second career”. He borrows the phrase from his friend Alain Finkielkraut, the prominent Jewish scholar. According to Camus, Hitler almost destroyed Europe by war during his first career. Now, by making his odious name attached to anyone who wishes to love and defend the traditions and peoples of Europe, Hitler succeeds, posthumously, in ending his civilization.
I plan to write in more detail about the new book, titled The enemy of disaster, when it is published later this year. On her birthday, though, it might be right to give her one thank you for these provocative and intelligent essays, and to their translators for making them available to English speakers for the first time. I predict that 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 US market should make US conservatives wonder how many more pressing and vital ideas circulate among conservatives in continental Europe but never get past the liberal gatekeepers of the US media. americans
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