Despite being a best-seller in France, a cordon sanitaire was imposed around the novel by French critics, and so The Camp of the Saints sank in plain sight. In the ensuing decades a number of translations of the novel appeared but these tended to be issued by small publishing wings of anti-immigration organisations. Yet in spite of its nearly unreadable luridness, something about the book stuck in the subterranean portion of the European conversation. Whatever its critical or publishing fate, Raspail’s dystopian vision of the European future – described by two writers at The Atlantic in 1994 as ‘one of the most disturbing novels of the late twentieth century’18 – had an uncomfortable habit of bobbing back to the surface, and occasionally breaking above it.

In 1985 Raspail made a rare return to a theme of his novel in an article for Le Figaro Magazine. The front-page article, co-authored with the respected demographer Gérard François Dumont, asked ‘Will France still be French in 2015?’19 The cover image was of Marianne, France’s national symbol, covered with a Muslim veil. The article itself argued, with reference to demographic projections, that ongoing immigration and the disproportionate population growth among the existing immigrant communities meant that France’s non-European population would soon grow to endanger the survival of the country’s culture and values.

The piece was leaped upon with relish. Government ministers queued up to publicly denounce the article. Georgina Dufoix, the Minister of Social Affairs, called the article ‘reminiscent of the wildest Nazi theories’. The Culture Minister, Jack Lang, called Le Figaro Magazine ‘an organ of racist propaganda’ and said the article was ‘grotesque and ridiculous’, while Prime Minister Laurent Fabius told the French Parliament, ‘Immigrants have contributed in large part to the richness of France. Those who have been manipulating immigration statistics are going counter to our country’s genuine national interest.’20 Dufoix’s ministry released its own figures to try to counter those of the article. Among other things they claimed that Raspail and Dumont had exaggerated the possible future demographics because they had assumed that immigrant birth rates would continue to be high and that native birth rates would continue to be low. Raspail and Dumont’s projection interestingly assumed an ongoing annual net migration into France of 59,000 people. In fact, according to the official French figures,21 by 1989 the number of asylum-seekers alone had reached 62,000 (a threefold increase from the start of that decade). By 2006 annual net migration into France had reached 193,000. By 2013 that figure had risen to 235,000 (assisting a population rise of 2.6 million in just eight years).22 Perhaps most controversially the authors of the Figaro piece predicted that by 2015 Islam would be the most important religion in France.