Writers of the Great Replacement: How Right-wing Dystopias Circulate

• In Event: Anti-democratic Metapolitics? Right-wing Appropriations of Cultural Productions

Abstract

Drawing on global intellectual history, the history of ideas and political sociology, the paper analyzes the international career of two literary texts – a novel and an essay – written by two French novelists: Jean Raspail’s The Camp the Saints and Renaud Camus’ The Great Replacement, initially published, respectively, in 1973 and 2011, which have recently been reedited in several languages and have become a cult reference among right-wing theorists and activists well beyond French borders – notably, in Germany and the USA.
Although the term “great replacement”, coined by Renaud Camus in 2010, does not appear in Raspail’s novel, both texts are pervaded by a similar, dystopian imaginary. Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints, as a fiction, describes the arrival, on French southern shores, of large crowds of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, who conquer the country with the help of naïve, liberal elites driven by what Rapail calls “the ideology of the big Other”, in reference to George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia. In his 2011 essay, the novelist Renaud Camus describes a scenario which is allegedly already taking place and where “native”, white populations in France are progressively being marginalized by non-European immigrants (especially Muslims) who, with the help of liberal elites, impose their own norms and beliefs on the “host” society. As “native” French are being progressively replaced by a different people, an “ethnic and civilizational substitution” is taking place according to Camus, leading to the destruction of French culture and local landscapes, even to the disappearance of “Western” understandings of human rights.
The paper intends to explain why and how these two literary texts – and the dystopias they describe – have been circulating, beyond French borders, in different domestic contexts, in which they have being appropriated by local right-wing theorists and activists. The paper focuses on two countries especially: the USA and Germany, where theorists associated with the US “Alt-Right” (Stephen Bannon, a reader and admirer of Raspail, Richard Spencer or the white nationalist publisher John Morgan) and with the German “Neue Rechte” (Götz Kübitschek, an editor and writer close to the AfD party or theorists of the German “Identitarian” movement) are referring to these migratory dystopias in order to construct demographic change as a threat, mobilize against liberal democracy (by accusing political elites of “substituting” native, conservative voters with non-native, liberal voters) and oppose economic globalization (the massive “import” of a non-native, cheap workforce being, in their views, in line with the interests of big corporations)..
Above all, the paper seeks to analyze why the import of French novelists especially might represent an added value for their American and German importers in the context of a wider “cultural hegemony strategy”. Although both writers have been politically involved with different segments of the French radical Right (Raspail as a member of the catholic, fundamentalist Action française, Camus as a supporter of the leader of the Rassemblement national, Marine Le Pen), their past literary credentials, as well as their association with the intellectuals of the Nouvelle Droite, allow their American and German importers to distinguish themselves from violent neo-Nazism and right-wing terrorism (although the “great replacement” motto has recently been appropriated by several right-wing terrorists worldwide, as in the cases of the Christchurch and El Paso terrorist attacks). Indeed, the two authors come from the French literary field, where they used to enjoy some degree of recognition (while Renaud Camus is a former disciple of Roland Barthes who, like other intellectuals grouped under the “French theory” label, enjoyed considerable influence in US literature departments in the 1970s and 1980, Jean Raspail is a former laureate of the Académie française novel prize). They use selective references to classical culture to convey their ideas (for instance, Camus refers to Plato’s Cratylus in order to argue for a consubstantial link between race and culture). Besides, Renaud Camus’ work especially is being “imported” via preexisting intellectual networks gathering right-wingers in the US and Germany and French thinkers of the Nouvelle Droite (such as Alain de Benoist), who have constantly tried to blur the lines between Right and Left, between progressivism and “illiberalism” – as does Camus himself, when he (mis-)uses Frankfurt school theorists and their criticism of modernity and consumerism in order to disparage those liberal elites whom he accuses of “importing” migrants to Western countries, without any consideration for cultural differences.

Authors

• Cecile Leconte, Sciences Po Lille

• Cédric Passard, Sciiences Po Lille