In Raspail’s novel the specific catalyst for the mass migration is an announcement from the Belgian government that it will admit some young children from the third world who are in need. Soon mothers are thrusting their young through the consul general’s gates in Calcutta. Belgium tries to reverse the policy but by then it is too late. A crowd storms the consulate, trampling the consul general to death. From the crowd a hideously deformed leader emerges who calls for the people of the third world to advance on Europe: ‘The nations are rising from the four corners of the earth and their number is like the sand of the sea,’ he says. ‘They will march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city …’17 The last is a quote from the Apocalypse of St John the Divine – a quotation that also finds its way into the novel’s epigraph. It is an apt quotation, for the novel is indeed apocalyptic.

It is also deeply unpleasant. The messianic figure who leads the third world onto the great armada that takes them to Europe is a ‘turd-eater’, monstrously deformed and monstrously depicted. Elsewhere the great sea of humanity is almost uniformly equally grotesque, its poverty unforgivable and its uncleanliness endemic. It is not hard to see why Raspail’s novel was swiftly and almost unanimously dismissed by the critics as a racist tract. But its uncomfortable precision, not least its depiction of the failure of European society once the migration begins, saves it from being only that.

In the wake of the threat to the French Republic every arm of the state – like its European neighbours – buckles. When it is clear that the armada is on the way and that France will be overwhelmed not by force but by people simply landing peaceably on their beaches, everybody fails in their own particular way. The politicians dither, incapable of working out what their attitude should be and flipping wildly between attempts to accept the armada and their ideas of how to scupper it. When some of the French military are ordered to torpedo the boats, they refuse to obey orders. Meantime the leaders of the Church, weighed down by the guilt of their own worldly wealth, urge that the doors of France be opened. And all the time celebrities and media stars polish and preen their reputations in front of the media by depicting this moment only as a wonderful opportunity. Perhaps aware that any other ending would have made his novel even more unacceptable, in the end Raspail allows the armada to land. France does not repel them.