In the United States, Beirich said the book stood alongside “ The Turner Diaries,” a race war novel by William Pierce, former head of the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance, as the top fictional references for white supremacists. Its leader, Marine Le Pen, said “The Camp of the Saints,” which she read at 18, “left a great mark on her,” and urged French people to read it to understand what she described as the country’s “migratory submersion.” Steve Bannon claimed that European countries had been confronted with an “invasion” similar to the one described in “The Camp of the Saints.” Iowa Representative Steve King argued that the book’s story “should be imprinted into everyone’s brain.” The center leaked emails earlier this month in which the Trump adviser Stephen Miller touted the book to Breitbart staffers as a work with strong parallels to recent waves of migration. But the racist novel that resulted from that episode, “The Camp of the Saints,” would become his most famous, most controversial and, surprisingly, most influential work.įor some 30 years, “‘Camp of the Saints’ has been one of the top two books in white supremacist circles,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

To reject them would destroy them.”Īt the time Raspail was a respected writer best known for his travelogues. “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. 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.

The camp of the saints by jean raspail