In a 1985 reprint of his most famous book Raspail reiterated that he both understood and felt the central contradiction that would lead to his prophecy in The Camp of the Saints coming true. Faced with the choice of opening the door or slamming it in the face of the disadvantaged of the world: ‘What’s to be done, since no one would wish to renounce his own human dignity by acquiescing to racism? What’s to be done since, simultaneously, all persons and all nations have the sacred right to preserve their differences and identities, in the name of their own future and their own past?’23

In 2001 a boat packed with Kurdish refugees from Iraq came aground on a beach in the south of France at 4 o’clock one morning. Among the 1,500 people on the boat some walked ashore and began to knock on the houses of locals. As chance would have it, the boat landed only 50 metres from the house on the Riviera from which Raspail had written his novel almost three decades earlier. Another ten years later and mainstream media were conceding a certain prophetic strain to The Camp of the Saints. On the occasion of yet another republication of the novel the then 86-year-old author appeared on the television programme Ce Soir (ou jamais!) on France 3 in a strikingly lenient interview in which the author suggested that perhaps some of the broad outlines of the book were no longer as controversial as they had once been. Reminded of the 2001 landing he referred to it as ‘a sign’. The sole thing he conceded that he had got wrong in his vision of the boat people coming across was the numbers. It is true, he conceded, ‘Currently there is no fleet with a million people.’ This was in February 2011.

Long before 2015 the controversial and denounced vision of Jean Raspail was one that people across Europe had intuited. Even before the media started showing daily footage of the boats coming in and phalanxes of young men from the third world trudging up, through and across the continent by foot, he had tapped into a fear that already existed. And if this particular fear – this ‘dark specialism’ – seemed to have arisen most seriously in France, it was not confined there. Politicians and cultural figures at the time, and for decades afterwards, seemed certain about how to control this. Any and all such fears could be responded to by a simultaneous dismissal and pandering. So at the same time that French politicians derided the vision of Raspail as racist and without foundation, they competed with each other to be tougher in their rhetoric on how they would limit the flow of migrants and increase repatriations. For years even – perhaps especially – the country’s socialist politicians participated in this game.