In 1973 a strange novel appeared in France that swiftly became a best-seller. The author of Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints) was already known as a travel writer and novelist. Well-travelled, cultured and curious, his vision for this most notorious work came to him one morning in his home on the shores of the Mediterranean. In his own words, that morning in 1972 he saw a vision of ‘A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West. I literally saw them, saw the major problem they presented, a problem absolutely insoluble by our present moral standards. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.’15

The novel that Jean Raspail spent the next eighteen months writing was set at some point in the coming decades and depicted a France – and Europe – in the process of being swamped by mass migration from the third world. The general catalyst for the migration is the growing disparity between the numbers of poverty-stricken people in the third world and the diminishing percentage of the world’s population living in the comparative paradise of Europe. With modern communications media, word of this disparity is no longer possible to hide and the third world turns to Europe. One million people set sail in a fleet of boats, but all the time untold millions are watching and waiting to get on boats themselves. Everything depends on the reaction of Europe to this first million. For strategic political reasons (as he later explained) Raspail chose to make the migration come not from North Africa but from Calcutta, and head from there towards the French Riviera.

The novel’s memorable opening presents an elderly, cultured professor sitting in his house on the south coast of France, listening to Mozart as the armada is landing. He thinks he is alone, as the ensuing anarchy has already caused the local population to flee. However, a young hippy-ish man invades his study. He is glorying in the ‘new’ country that is going to emerge, a country that will be ‘born all over’. And the young man instructs the professor that he is ‘through. Dried up. You keep thinking and talking, but there’s no more time for that. It’s over. So beat it!’ For his part the professor accepts that the young man may be right: ‘My world won’t live past morning, more than likely, and I fully intend to enjoy its final moments.’ And so he shoots the young man.16