I never read it before, I just kinda took it as read, but:
please read the new Rundell translation.
I gave up making notes of passages I wanted to remember or quote; there are too many on every page.
If, (like I did) you think you know the work because you know the basic premise,
You don’t.
Agreed. I posted something about this book late last year.
Great review, sorry I missed it at the time.
Right now, my heart is breaking reading it.
I’m tellin’ ya, man, nobody is better at this kinda thing than a Frenchman. Houllebecq is Raspil’s worthy successor.
It is on my ever-growing stack of books, and will be next on the list after the current book – which, sad to say, disappointingly turned out to be by yet another Woke woman. I feel like Charlie Brown get sucked in by Lucy yet again. 
Meanwhile, there is an excellent discussion of “Camp of the Saints” by John Carter: The Camp of the Living Dead - by John Carter
It’s sad but one must face reality. That’s something that the European leaders in the book refuse to do.
A little over halfway through, and I am totally battered by this book. I can believe it seemed just…fantastic in 1973. But now…oh my God I’m remembering those Syrians during the 2011 mass migration who sewed their own lips shut. It’s all coming true. I want to take a break from reading it but I can’t. I hope my BMD comes down here soon to drag me out for our nightly walk.
Eeeekh, now that I know what’s going to happen I don’t know if I can finish! Great review, though…Thanks, @Gavin—I think.
Is pity merely a luxury good? Because pity is the key to this entire book. If you can’t kill pity in yourself, you either kill yourself, or you submerge yourself in the wretched mass. Because you can’t entertain pity except from outside, and above.
“In the nightmare of the dark/All the dogs of Europe bark./ And the seas of pity lie/Locked and frozen in each eye.” (w. H. Auden)
People cooking their food using briquettes of dried human shit, like they do onboard the India Star in the book Aren’t you gagging just trying to imagine that? No, stop, do NOT try. Now just try stopping to imagine it.
Last year or so, there was a rash of articles about high school kids doing “fundraisers” (for what cause, I can’t imagine) by doing , ah, “unconventional” things to each other, like licking peanut butter off other students’ bare toes, or licking each others’ armpits. People, evidently, paid to see that.
Was it merely funny? Was it just like those jokes beloved by adolescent boys where the punchline reveals that one character has eaten something disgusting, and, oh but wait! he wasnt even the FIRST person to eat it! It had already been regurgitated by somebody else! The joke itself isn’t funny, what’s funny, to the joke teller, is the listeners’ nauseated revulsion to it.
I just couldn’t see these fundraisers like that, but it took me a while to figure out why the phenomenon bothered me as much as it did.
And here’s what I decided: such activities, now being practiced by our shining youth, are de-humanizing. De-sensitizing people to what it means to be human. Or at least to be a civilized human. (I wrote about this on ST’s blog, inuinoueritas.org, “Welcome to Rising Gorge”,3/28/24) Who DOES that kinda thing: eating their own and others’ excrement or vomit, licking private and odorous body parts? Deliberately consuming disgusting or tainted food?
Animals.
Oh, and “saints”: devoutly religious people seeking to mortify the flesh. We reenact it in a very mild, sanitized form with the foot-washing ritual tradition on Good Friday.
If we can’t resist wallowing into the sewage in these contexts-
They for what purpose were we supposedly created “a little lower than the angels”?
I just finished the book.
There are some novels, some poetry, most of it French, of which you’ll never be able to rid yourself once you let them into your perception. Les Fleurs du Mal.
On one level i thought, this is a story re-enacted in the life of each individual. The Kabbalah says whenever one person dies, an entire universe is lost. True: as you get old you see every paradigm you’ve lived by totter and fall, every blessed calico scrap of wholesome “common sense” shredded.
The book is probably more bearable early in life, before you begin to experience that heedless impersonal dissolution on a personal level.
Once I entered the book, much like any white person who came near the engulfing crowd of the wretched, I was carried along, I couldn’t stop, it was like the Ancient Mariner and the Wedding Guest. I could not choose but hear.
So I’m warning you :DON’T reаd it. Advance at your peril. Sauve qui peut. I alone am left to tell thee…..
You were brave and so should others be to face the ugly reality. Else we shall perish from the Earth. All is not yet lost. This is a dark, if not the darkest, hour. Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain. And remember, we are not the French.
We are not the French, but— you hafta admit that our government, and the American Left has since 9/11 been behaving exactly like the French gov’t and Left do in the novel!
Pul Ehrlich, author of “The Popultion Bomb” (1968) dies this week. Great article about him on The Free Press. I commented tht he is the first public asshole I remember. He was hugely wrong about Every.
Single.
Thing.
about which he ever opined—but he ws tremendously influential, nonetheless.
ANYWAY: the connection with Camp of the Saints is that Ehrlich was moved to write the book by an experience he had in India, a huge dense mass of starving, wretched people mobbing the cab he was in, begging and importuning. He became convinced that such was the fate of the globe.
From his obsession grew China’s drastic one-child policy and female infanticide, mobile vans traveling around India performing vasectomies under unsanitary conditions, young Americans sporting buttons reading “Stop at Two”….he imposed his vision and related policies on the world. I wonder if Raspail had read his book?
At about the same time, Norman Borlaug was bringing the Green Revolution to India, thereby making Ehrlich wrong. While I’ve always admired Borlaug’s work, I’ve lately been reflecting on the fact that this very work enabled the massive population growth in the Third World that has resulted in the mass migration and looming crisis Raspail foresaw. In that sense, Borlaug sowed the seeds of our destruction.
Yuh. And I read years ago that our well- intentioned introduction of infant foods like Plumpy-nut ,a peanut based formula, drastically reduced infant mortality resulting in a local overpopulation situation in Africa.
But note: the FP article says in the end it wasn’t Malthusian government intervention, ‘dirigisme”, like Ehrlich advocated which alleviated global over-population ( now swinging to the other extreme); it was kindness. When you make life more secure, and when more infants live, people, apparently, are more willing to plan their families, maybe defer reproduction to accomplish other goals.
I reckon there’s always a Golden Mean in human affairs, where the balance is perfect, but, it IS a balance, a scale, and we never stay at the moment of equilibrium.
Grokipedia:
Raised on a modest Iowa farm near Cresco in a Norwegian immigrant family, Borlaug internalized a pragmatic ethos emphasizing hard labor, adaptation to environmental challenges, and measurable outcomes over theoretical purity, which informed his lifelong commitment to scalable solutions grounded in observable results rather than unattainable ideals.
Agreed. That book/translation is almost elegaic. At times, it reads more like poetry than text.
Mr. Raspail writing half a century ago really nailed the West’s functional treatment of Civilization as a suicide pact. He dramatized the situation by imagining a Third World fleet rolling onto the French coastline – but he was exactly right about the response of most Westerners … run!
In the novel, the French residents of the wealthy Mediterranean coastline ran away even before the migrants landed. But is that not an acceleration of what happened to most Western cities, where the productive Middle Classes abandoned the once-dominant city centers to uncouth invaders? Since we collectively refuse to stand our ground and protect what we once had … then we no longer have it.