Free Republic

Fifty years ago, in 1973, the French author Jean Raspail released a then seemingly far-fetched novel titled “The Camp of the Saints,” which portrayed a massive influx of immigrants to France and Europe. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, the narrative feels eerily prescient as countries like Italy and Poland grapple with real immigration pressures. The powerhouse countries of Germany and France tend to set the agenda on the immigration issue, while countries like Poland and Italy find themselves responding to events rather than shaping them. Recent weeks have seen this topic heat up, especially in Italy,...

Camp of the Saints is no longer fiction. The Biden administration has made it reality along the U.S.-Mexico border. Right before our eyes, the government of the United States is deciding that, in fact, the United States doesn’t really exist at all. In Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, a vast horde of starving Indians commandeers a flotilla of decrepit ships in the harbor of Calcutta. The flotilla sets sail for Europe, and slowly creeps around the Cape of Good Hope, past Sao Tome, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and finally descends upon southern France. As the fleet approaches, French society is...

One morning in 1972, the French author Jean Raspail was at his home on the Mediterranean coast when he had a vision of a million refugees clamoring to enter Europe. “Armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil,” he wrote. “To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.” At the time Raspail was a respected writer best known for his travelogues. But the racist novel that resulted from that episode, “The Camp of the Saints,” would become his most...

“The West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left.” “At every level – nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals – it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us.” So wrote the great French novelist, Jean Raspail, in...

Muslim Europe by Daniel Pipes New York Sun May 11, 2004 "Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione, or, "The Force of Reason." And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam. Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development. The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition and its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the...