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Jamie Sarkonak: I read 'The Camp of the Saints.' Here's why it's relevant

The novel, which was temporarily removed from Amazon this week, has long been condemned for its harsh critiques of mass migration

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Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973) is easily one of the most suppressed books of the 20th century. That’s because it’s a dystopian novel about mass third-world migration, a topic still considered taboo to many. While The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four have become regular headliners of “banned book” campaigns and subjects of novel studies in school curriculums, English translations of Raspail’s magnum opus have been so hard to find that used hard copies sold for prices ranging into the hundreds. Until just last year, that is.

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In 2025, the indie heterodox translator-publisher Vauban Books came out with a new, better translation of The Camp of the Saints. Paperbacks were priced at roughly US$25, hardcovers US$40, and, miraculously, they were available on Amazon. All was going well until April 20, when the retailer mysteriously removed physical copies of the book from its American and Canadian storefronts for allegedly violating the company’s “offensive content” policy (though the audiobook remained buyable). Vauban Books raised hell, and a day later, the ability to buy print copies was restored. Amazon attributed the removal to an error.

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The controversy has had the opposite effect of whatever the censorious Amazon employee intended: since the controversy, Vauban’s edition of The Camp of the Saints has skyrocketed up Amazon’s bestseller list: by lunchtime Wednesday, it was already no. 10 in Canada. Copies have since sold out, and the publisher is printing more.

But, all that said, it wasn’t lost on me how underdiscussed and unavailable this book still is.

It’s so forbidden that many libraries and booksellers don’t stock it; “banned book” campaigns don’t include it; and Margaret Atwood, Canadian author and elite book-ban fighter, doesn’t appear to have ever mentioned it…. Nor has the Globe and Mail, nor has Alberta’s writers’ guild, both of which were quick to take up the cause of an illustrated novel, Gender Queer, that depicted children engaging in oral sex, when it was restricted by law from Albertan school libraries.

Nor is The Camp of the Saints available (in English) in print from Indigo, or in the catalogue of my city’s public library, or my old school library at the University of Alberta — though the latter stocks commentaries that refer to the controversial novel, such as “White Pride and the Next Holocaust: The Camp of the Saints” and “In the Camp of the Saints: Right-Wing Populism in Twenty-First-Century France.”

It’s as if most of the book’s harshest critics haven’t even read it. I have, and I can assure you that it is not a neo-Holocaust instruction manual. And while there is sexual content in the book that should render it off-limits for kids, it certainly isn’t worthy of repression any more than the next 20th-century work of dystopic fiction.

The introduction to the 2025 edition, which you should read if you manage to eventually get your own copy, notes that Raspail was moved by empathy to write about the destruction of his own society by way of a demographic tsunami. This came from his travels in South America, where he observed that native culture had largely been obliterated or irreversibly blended with that of the colonizer. He mused about “How would this go if Europe were flooded with foreigners beyond recognition?” to the point where he simply up and wrote a book about it.

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But most of the book isn’t about what happens during an invasion. It’s about what happens beforehand, when a tide of humans is slowly headed in your direction. What does the media do? What do members of the media do — on the right and left? What do governments do? How do these figures operate when their cultural self-esteem has been crushed into oblivion, when the thought of saying “no” to third-world migrants has been stigmatized to the point where it’s impossible to utter? The book was written in the 1970s, but it is truly relevant today, now that western countries are actually dealing with mass migration, some “irregular” and some perfectly legitimate, all the while being unable to have an open conversation about it.

As the invading masses in The Camp of the Saints are from India — they board a ramshackle fleet of boats and barges and make their way up to the coast of France, with many casualties — it’s generally considered a racist book towards Indians in particular. It’s a valid critique; all but one Indian character in the book is depicted poorly (a fellow descended from the French subjects in Pondicherry is the novel’s Cassandra stand-in — which has some parallels to real life today, as some of the fiercest antagonists to high amounts of low-standard immigration are recent immigrants who came to the West to escape the low-trust, corrupt nature of their home countries).

The book should make every reader feel shame and discomfort, however. It is, by a long shot, more critical of cowardly westerners who have abandoned their sense of self-preservation for fear of being called racist. It mocks the leftist who foolishly welcomes hordes of disordered behaviour into his homeland; the feminist who naïvely assumes that her new compatriots won’t rape her; the conservative politicians and commentators who don’t object until it’s too late; the military which has crumbled into a state of uselessness; the government that punishes early resistors; the Catholic church for welcoming people who would destroy it if they had the chance; the wealthy progressives who advocate for migration while fleeing all places where migrants concentrate. Every westerner in the book is pathetic in a different way. The migrants, at least, have ambition.

I speed-read The Camp of the Saints in just a few days because it was so miserable that I wanted to be done with it as soon as possible. But it was an essential read in the canon of dystopian fiction, one that is highly relevant today in light of Canada’s own situation, having welcomed an untrackable number of outsiders that we struggle to remove, even when they kill and rape. The same can be said elsewhere in the West: just look to the British grooming gangs.

But where The Camp of the Saints is cynical, I am not. If the West were actually as feeble as Raspail portrayed it, the book’s de-listing on Amazon would have been permanent and we may not have even heard about it because even X conversations about the debacle would have been suppressed. Instead, Amazon has suffered much public beration and Vauban Books has careened in popularity. So if you do manage to get yourself a copy when new editions become available, don’t let it get you down.

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