Raspail's The Camp of the Saints: Suicidal Empathy is Not Christian
...true charity demands wisdom, and wisdom sometimes requires confronting uncomfortable truths.
Jean Raspail's 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints offers precisely that confrontation, at a time when we need to hear it. For believers grappling with the influx of millions into the European first world... Raspail's work illuminates how a Christianity reduced to boundless empathy can lead to disaster and spiritual betrayal. It warns that mass migration, when met with unchecked sentiment, exposes fractures in a gospel misinterpreted as pure self-abnegation, turning the virtues of mercy and hospitality into instruments of self-destruction.
The Camp of the Saints is not a book one soon forgets. It steels the consciences of Western Christians and Europeans who find themselves, in this existential moment, at genuine risk of cultural and demographic submersion. It fortifies resolve... it delivers a mental and emotional cleansing of extraordinary potency against the pervasive, autoimmune-deficient sentimentalisms of the 1960s "John Lennon Christianities" and the equally untenable secular humanitarianisms with which we have been relentlessly bombarded since childhood. For precisely this reason, despite its harshness, the book is excellent...
Raspail... recognised the fragility of cultures, including his own. In The Camp of the Saints, he channels this insight into a narrative that is prophetic and prescient, pushing the West's post-colonial guilt and humanitarian impulses to their breaking point...
The tale opens in the quiet opulence of a Riviera villa, where an ageing intellectual, Professor Calguès, stoically observes a fleet run aground on a beach in southern France through his telescope. What he sees is the arrival of a million desperate souls from India's Ganges region, who months earlier had clambered aboard a ragtag flotilla of ageing vessels, symbolically the discarded remnants of the British Empire, and charted a course to Europe, lured by visions of paradise and plenty...
For Catholic readers, the novel's power lies in its theological critique of a Christianity misunderstood as little more than sentimentality, and in its interpretation of events as the unfolding of end-times prophecy. The title invokes Revelation 20...
Catholicism has always taught that virtues are interdependent. Mercy tempers justice, but justice anchors mercy, which becomes lawless without it...
Raspail's lesson for Catholics is stark: recover the integrated virtues. Mercy must at times submit to justice... Suicidal empathy, he shows, must be abandoned before Christendom, and our homes, are forfeited.
Related
The Camp of the Saints, by Paul Craig Roberts, 16 November 2022.
Book: The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, by Douglas Murray, 2018.
The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail, The Social Contract, Volume 4, Number 2 (Winter 1993-1994).
The Camp of the Saints Revisited, by John Tanton, The Social Contract, Volume 5, Number 2 (Winter 1994-1995).
The Emergence of a 'Classic', by Wayne Lutton, The Social Contract, Volume 5, Number 2 (Winter 1994-1995).
The Traditionalism of Jean Raspail, The Social Contract, Volume 5, Number 2 (Winter 1994-1995).
Book Review of 'The Camp of the Saints' by Jean Raspail, by Carol Joyal, The Social Contract, Volume 10, Number 4 (Summer 2000).
Jean Raspail on the Friendly Responses He Has Received From the Powerful - An excerpt from the new introduction of the latest French edition, by Jean Raspail, The Social Contract, Volume 25, Number 3 (Spring 2015).
'The Camp of the Saints' Revisited - Modern critics have justified the message of a 1973 novel on mass immigration, by K.C. McAlpin, The Social Contract, Volume 27, Number 4 (Summer 2017).
On John Tanton and The Camp of the Saints, by Michelle Malkin, The Social Contract, Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2019).
Parable or Reality - Thirty Years after 'The Camp of the Saints', by Jean-Paul Gourevitch, The Social Contract, Volume 14, Number 2 (Winter 2003-2004).
Raspail's The Camp of the Saints: Suicidal empathy is not Christian, by Thomas Colsy, 21 January 2026.
Speakers:
Dominic Green – Wall Street Journal
Nathan Pinkoski – Center for Renewing America
Colin Redemern – Director of Education, American Reformer
Rusty Reno – First Things
Amy Wax – Carey Law School, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Ethan Rundell – Vauban Books
Read The Camp of the Saints
The Camp of the Saints: A New English Edition - A momentous literary event: Jean Raspail's novel is now available, by Nathan Pinkoski, 3 July 2025.
The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail, 1973 edition, Archive.org.
Camp Of The Saints Audio, Archive.org.
Download and read The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail, 1973 edition, Archive.org.
Download and read The Camp of the Saints in PDF format, Vibdoc.com, 1973.
Download The Camp of the Saints, Anna's Archive, 1994.
The Camp of the Saints, Scribd.
The Camp of the Saints, Open Library.
As of March 2023, Amazon offers The Camp of the Saints Kindle Edition.
