The camp of the saints

The Army Camp of the Saints (French 1973: Le Camp des Saints ; German 1985) is the title of a book in which the French writer Jean Raspail describes in fictional form the nonviolent invasion of Europe by the impoverished masses of the Third World . The book is often viewed as a literary anticipation of the refugee crisis in Europe from 2015 onwards . The title of the book is inspired by the Revelation of John (20: 9).

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Summary

An anonymous first-person narrator describes in the retrospective the course of the immigration of a million Indians to France and the reactions of French and international society to it. After the Belgian ambassador to India announced the end of the adoption program for Indian children, with which many of the poorest families are financed, there is a mass rush to sea-going ships in the ports of India. A fleet of 100 ships, packed with the poorest of the poor, headed by a deformed child from the lowest caste set out for the West hoped for as paradise. The plot is portrayed using various people - journalists from left and right newspapers, politicians, the military, church officials, some ordinary middle-class citizens, representatives of immigrants and workers, hippies, NGOs and the military.

The story describes the reactions of French society and the world community to the events in India. The debate about the implication of the fleet divides the narrative into three phases: the odyssey of the "fleet of last hope", the realization that the fleet is about to arrive in Europe and finally the landing of the fleet on the Côte d'Azur in France.

Odyssey of the "fleet of last hope"

During the odyssey of the fleet, the story describes the public and secret political discourse in France and other countries about the phenomenon of the fleet and its importance for the West. Political committees are convened nationally and internationally with the aim of keeping the fleet at sea and supplying it there. Led by churches and activists inspired by the hippie culture, the society is waging a charity debate, during which the incumbent Pope Benedict is selling the treasures of the Catholic Church to fight poverty in Far Asia. The public media debate is mainly conducted around the question of conscience and poor relief, where a forward-looking welcome culture emerges as long as the arrival of the fleet is a theoretical option. Politicians are waiting in the hope that the fleet will dock in a different country - or be removed by a storm.

The fleet initially wanders through the Pacific Ocean, is rejected directly by Australia. Egypt denied the fleet entry into the Suez Canal, knowing full well that if the canal exit into the Mediterranean were blocked, the freight of millions would land in Egypt. The next destination is South Africa - in the novel an apartheid dictatorship of 20 percent white Europeans over 80 percent black population, who has no interest in a shift in skin color relationships. The South African government is threatening the fleet with military action if it approaches the coast. At the same time, the country is seizing the opportunity to improve its image and throwing food and medicines from the air over the ships of the fleet - and wishes the fleet a safe journey. The people of the fleet - who are apparently very aware of Gandhi's resistance method - throw the South African supplies into the sea in a media-effective manner and head north - in the Atlantic.

Insight into the imminent arrival of the fleet in Europe

With the fleet's course now clear, the international bodies are becoming frantic. A small island off the African coast is hurriedly sent by plane with supplies, NGOs, priests and media stars in order to supply the fleet that is about to arrive. The description of the air armada with its fixed sequence of flights - Vatican, World Council of Churches, Maltese, Red Cross, a British pop band with an airplane full of children's toys, followed by national deliveries - as well as the competition between the helpers on the ground is humorously detailed. The fleet refuses to accept any relief supplies and continues north. For the first time there is a trial of strength - the ships of the fleet take no account of the many smaller helper boats that approach them.

The world's helpers are left puzzled. The governments of Europe are panicking. News of mass gatherings of the underprivileged is mounting from different parts of the world: In Eastern Siberia, the Soviet military is noticing a growing concentration of Chinese on the other side of the Amur river. In the metropolises of the western world, the underdogs, outsiders and impoverished immigrants gather in pubs and eagerly follow the course of the fleet.

The French government decides to conduct a loyalty test of its army in the face of the divide moral debate. If ordered, would the soldiers sink the armada of the poor? A warship is sent out to carry out a mock attack. Seeing the wretched figures on the boats, the sailors refuse the order to fire. The ship is returning to France. It is now clear that the fleet will land somewhere in Europe. The French government is hoping for a storm or a landing in Spain.

The landing of the fleet on the Cote d'Azur

The fleet enters the Mediterranean and sets course for France. The story describes the mass exodus of the inhabitants of the southern French coast to northern France, the flight of the French upper class and various ministers to their property in Switzerland, the journalist Dío's journey to the chaotic southern France, where rockers, hippies, escaped prisoners and communist splinter groups meet each proclaim their new company. The French government mobilized the loyal remnants of the military to secure the coast. The social discourse falls silent. The members of the upper class are fleeing, the middle class is beginning to prepare mentally to come to terms with the new multi-ethnic society. The underdogs of French society suspect the possibility of a new world order and gather in the cities and factories in anticipation of the end of the current social order.

When the fleet lands, the French President makes a radio address. Contrary to his plan to give the order to shoot the troops on the coast, he declares resistance to be a question of the conscience of each individual soldier.

During the last night before the Million Indians went ashore, most of the army and police deserted. A small group of elite soldiers, conservative monks and aged nationalists remain alone on the coast. At the Amur a single Soviet general is facing the Chinese migrants. In New York, the underdogs are starting to take over the homes of the wealthy, white middle class. The narrator describes looting, rape and anarchy in the world, but a relatively peaceful transfer of power to the new multicultural committees in Paris. References to the French past ("You have taken over Alsace and Lorraine - forever!") And the description of some rapid trials in the spirit of repression after the French Revolution illustrate the transition. Politicians come to terms relatively quickly with a new society in which there should be equality across races and classes. Southern France, however, is an area ruled by anarchy, in which masses of Indians portrayed as faceless zombie hordes plunder and, through their sheer mass, displace the few persevering defenders of the French fatherland. A final group of soldiers, politicians, nobles and an old professor holed up with caviar, liver pate and red wine in a medieval fortified village in the mountains above Nice and shoots every approaching person within range of fire until the new regime in Paris lets them bomb them.

The book ends with rumors that fleets have now set out in Indonesia and South America to travel to Europe.

Some details of the plot

Landing of the immigrants

A famine in India sets off the development of the novel's events. In their distress, the starving people occupy ships and head west . The efforts of the European embassies and the Indian government to prevent the fleet from leaving the country have failed. Australia , Egypt and South Africa are using military means to prevent ships from landing on their coasts - amid criticism from the outraged European press . After a 40-day passage by ship, the “armada of the last chance” - as the star journalist Clément Dio calls it - consisting of a hundred ships, runs aground on an Easter Sunday morning on the southern French coast between Saint-Tropez and Nice . As early as on Good Friday, when the poor fleet passed the entrance to the Mediterranean near Gibraltar without the NATO naval forces intervening, a slight panic had gripped France and the rest of Europe. The next morning, nearly a million people went ashore in southern France. The infrastructure in the departments concerned then collapses. Almost the entire population, with the exception of a few old and sick people, flees to the north of the country. The French Navy - proud of their aircraft carriers Clemenceau , Foch and Jeanne d'Arc - never fired a single shot. The state radio is renamed PVR (Paris People's Radio of the Multiracial Population of Paris).

Bay of Saint-Tropez

One of those who stayed behind is Calguès , a professor emeritus of literature. His house is like an old Roman outpost in an unspecified place above the coast of the Côte d'Azur . The year 1673 is engraved on the dark stained wood of the solid oak door of his house. With a telescope he observed the incredible hustle and bustle down on the coast. He thinks of the Crusaders who marched singing against Jerusalem on the eve of the battle and the people of Israel who marched seven times around the city of Jericho . By the seventh trumpet blast, the walls of Jericho collapsed without a fight. The image of the abundance that his house normally presented - yachts , muscular water skiers, adorable girls, fat bellies - was swept away that day. Fifty yards from the bank lay an aground rusty fleet of ships from the other end of the earth.

The organizer of the Armada should have been on the lead ship, the sixty-year-old mail steamer India Star . Ballan , a French and atheist philosopher , however, was crushed by the crowd as the ship departed. On the day before departure, he had a humanitarian conversation with the consul and the Roman Catholic bishop for the Ganges region at the French consulate in Calcutta .

Government response

On Easter Monday, the French President gathers ministers, the chiefs of staff of the three branches of armed forces, police chiefs and regional prefects in his official residence, the Élysée Palace . Soothing news is broadcast over the radio. On the radio stations, where until now only pop music, simple-minded chatter, advisors for health, heart and sex dominated the field, Mozart's Little Night Music is suddenly playing , as if threatened Europe wanted to keep its glamorous face. The president and commander in chief of the armed forces has, to protect the property who fled northward residents, the laying of four divisions of the army in the region Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur . Many of the approximately 200,000 soldiers mobilized do not show up for service or desert after taking up the service. On the evening of Easter Monday there are about 10,000 soldiers in their assigned positions on the coast.

The supreme command is Colonel Dragasès, originally from the Second Cavalry Regiment Chamborant , a 300 year old traditional regiment of the French army. On his tank is the name Bir Hakeim , which is said to commemorate the Battle of Bir Hakeim in 1942. The regiment had already fought in the battles in Valmy , Austerlitz , Friedland , Isly, Solferino and Flanders . The name Dragasès is said to refer to the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI. remember who fell during the siege of Constantinople in 1453 and sealed the end of the Byzantine Empire . After days of hesitation, Dragasès received an order from the president to use force against the immigrants.

Clément Dio and Iris Na-Chan

Clément Dio and his Eurasian friend Iris Na-Chan are also making their way south. Dio's real name is Ben Souad and is the editor of a weekly newspaper with 600,000 readers. He is of North African descent and descended from an Arab harem slave . Among his family documents he found a sales contract according to which she had been sold to a French officers' brothel.

In Saint-Vallier, they meet escaped prisoners in a café. They recognize Dio and initially celebrate him as one of them who, in his editorials, pleaded for a radical humanization of prisons. But at some point the mood changes. "We don't give a damn about everything. Off with the blah . We want to have fun." The moderates among the prisoners are in the minority. He hears Iris Na-chan groan, cry softly and then laugh strangely. Dio is locked in the toilet on the third floor. The hotel smells of wine, tobacco and cold vomit. Most of the window panes are broken the next day. The next day Dio finds his wife in front of the bar. She sleeps completely naked on a bench. Someone had vomited on her chest. A napkin covers her abdomen. She sleeps so deeply as if she has emptied the whole bottle of barbituric acid that lies at her feet.

After the immigrants have taken over from the Ganges to the south of France, brothels with a residual stock of women in the white immigrant neighborhoods skin color set that can visit the male immigrants from the Ganges for free. The Swiss Confederation is the last European country to officially open its national borders at midnight, after they have not been guarded for days.

Behavior of the church

In the book published in 1973, the incumbent Pope is called "Benedict XVI". Not only did he like Paul VI. gives away the papal crown , but also after the “III. Vatican Council “sold the entire property of the Roman Catholic Church . Not even the agricultural budget of Pakistan can be offset from the sales proceeds for one year. Then he moves into a shabby apartment near the Vatican. The new “religion of ecumenism and good faith” predominates in Europe. Shortly after the migrant ships landed, French church leaders began a hunger strike for the migrants in an abbey. The abbot returned from a Buddhist congress in Kyoto for this very purpose . The next day the cardinal and archbishop of Paris decreed that thirty churches be donated to the Muslim community of Paris. On this day, two planes crashed into the landing approach at the airfield of the Côte d'Azur, which were loaded with aids for the people of the Ganges. A thick black storm cloud had enveloped them and caused the failure of all on-board instruments. The white plane wore the colors of the Vatican and the gray-painted plane those of the Ecumenical Council of the Protestant Church.

Biasing Big Other new edition

For the French new edition of the book in 2011, Raspail wrote an essay as the opening credits, which he gave the title Big Other . It is missing in the German edition, but appeared separately in 2014 in a collection of small texts by Raspail in German.

In this essay Raspail goes into the genesis and reception history of the book. Two legal experts had certified that this book, "if it were published for the first time today, would no longer be publishable." This shows "how much freedom of expression, especially on this topic, has been restricted since then". Nevertheless, the book was widely read, including by those politicians who helped to create the legal basis for it - Raspail names a number of prominent names, starting with François Mitterrand . He sent them a copy dedicated to them and received replies throughout, "kept in a tone that has nothing in common with the defamation of the four [anti-discrimination] laws." These letters are his parachute, so to speak.

Big Other is Raspail's cipher for the all-pervasive and dominant ideology in France, which Matthias Matussek described in his review of the book as the “desire to wipe out one's own culture”. Raspail describes Big Other using a number of examples. The question remains open for him, which "plunges him into the abyss of a desperate and furious bewilderment: Why the forewarned French are so blindly, methodically, even cynically involved in the sacrifice of a certain France ... on the altar of an exaggerated humanism."

reception

The landing of the ships marks a turning point in world history in the novel. Raspail describes the end of the Christian culture of the West with its secular foothills after two thousand years. He sees the main causes for this as the population development in the materially poor countries of the south and the extinct will of people and institutions in Europe to assert themselves. According to the Catholic monarchist Raspail, the French Republic of the Enlightenment had betrayed the French fatherland . When it first appeared in 1973, the book “did not spark a scandal, not even a debate. Five years after May 1968 , left-wing intellectuals were Maoists and worshiped Castro, Ho Chi Minh, or even Pol Pot. The revolution was on the program, and it would also be made for the immigrants from the third world. "

Lorenz Jäger wrote in the FAZ in 2005 : “Raspail's novel is grotesque-apocalyptic to the point of obscenity, he revels in the ugly, the cruel, and perhaps this was the price for the visionary power. The author, like Orwell in the negative utopia '1984', lengthened the lines of his present. ”The left-wing political weekly Jungle World has described the book as“ right-wing extremist ”. Ulrich Ladurner ( Die Zeit ) sees the book as a “bad work” that uses the fears of Europeans to justify a vision of doom.

In July 2015, a new German translation by Martin Lichtmesz was published by neurechte Verlag Antaios , which, in contrast to the first translation from Hohenrain Verlag from 1985, includes the full text in a translation authorized by Raspail . In the first translation, more than a quarter of the text had been erased in a distorting manner. Lorenz Jäger from the FAZ also discussed the new version. In view of the current situation, he certifies that the book has “prophetic or nightmarish qualities” and concludes: “The army camp of the saints should become a cult book.” Matthias Matussek reviewed the book in detail on four pages of the Swiss World Week and remarks that it was “a shame that no large publisher has taken the risk with this old, highly topical novel. ” Michael Klonovsky gives a concise summary of the work in Focus and calls it“ the book on the refugee crisis, a mixture of doom report, pamphlet and black satire. If there were a Nobel Prize for literary prophecy, the 90-year-old would have to get it straight away. ”Christian Schröder from Tagesspiegel summed up with a reply to Raspail's prophecy“ The coming times will be cruel ”:“ This obscene literature that turns into bloody is cruel End-time conflicts wallowing ", and appropriately titled his slate as a" reading warning ". In the Swiss WOZ, Hans Stutz agrees with this criticism and writes: "Raspail, pinched like a blasé land manager, is serious about his message. It reads: The West belongs to" the white race ", and the defenders of Europe are allowed, yes, must walk over corpses. No serious publisher can do such a work. "

Since then, the extreme right-wing milieu in particular has been happy to refer to the book: not only Marine Le Pen in France, but also Stephen Bannon , Donald Trump's chief political strategist until August 2017 , frequently cites the book.

Dramatization

The Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen opened in 2019 with a stage version of the novel staged by Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer .

literature

• Georg Alois Oblinger: The conservative utopias of Jean Raspail. In: Vobiscum (June 2006), pp. 46-47.

Web links

• Biographical and bibliographical information on Jean Raspail

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. S21 , LUT .
2. ^ Jean Raspail: Das Heerlager der Heiligen , Hohenrain-Verlag, Tübingen / Zurich / Paris 1985, p. 77.
3. ^ Raspail: same p. 249.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Raspail: ditto p. 13.
5. ^ Raspail: same p. 33.
6. ↑ Raspail: same as p. 16.
7. ↑ Raspail: same p. 153.
8. ^ Raspail: same p. 184.
9. ^ Raspail: same p. 57.
10. ^ Raspail: same p. 174.
11. ↑ Raspail: same p. 176.
12. ^ Raspail: same p. 231.
13. ^ Raspail: same as p. 270.
14. ^ Raspail: same p. 24.
15. ^ Raspail: same as p. 254.
16. ^ Raspail: same p. 238.
17. ^ Jean Raspail: Big Other. In: ders .: The last French. Verlag Antaios, Schnellroda 2014, pp. 27-64
18. ^ Raspail, Big Other, p. 39
19. ^ Raspail, Big Other, p. 38
20. ^ Matthias Matussek: Desire to wipe out one's own culture . In: Weltwoche, No. 40.15, October 1, 2015, pp. 62–65
21. ^ Raspail, Big Other, pp. 46f
22. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: We can buy a bad conscience . FAZ of October 12, 2005, accessed on July 23, 2010.
23. ↑ Jürg Altwegg: The End of the European World , FAZ from February 25, 2011, accessed on January 11, 2015.
24. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: We can buy a bad conscience , FAZ October 12, 2005, accessed on May 17, 2015.
25. ↑ Titus Lenk: Right book food: When reading stupid , Jungle World from October 4, 2006, accessed on July 24, 2010.
26. ↑ Zeit-blog: Our view of the sea from April 29, 2015, accessed on July 25, 2015
27. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: Apocalypse rather later, FAZ from September 23, 2015
28. ^ Matthias Matussek: Desire to wipe out one's own culture . In: Weltwoche, No. 40.15, October 1, 2015, pp. 62–65
29. ↑ Michael Klonovsky: The Apocalypse after Jean. In: Focus, No. 48, November 21, 2015
30. ↑ Christian Schröder: The cult book of the new right - a warning to read. Tagesspiegel, October 27, 2015
31. ↑ Hans Stutz: [1] WOZ, October 22, 2015
32. ↑ Huffington Post: This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World , March 4, 2017, accessed March 5, 2017.
33. ↑ Slate: Stephen Bannon et Marine Le Pen aiment le même roman décrivant une “apocalypse migratoire” , March 5, 2017, accessed on March 5, 2017 (French)
34. ↑ Stefan Keim: "Heerlager der Heiligen" in Recklinghausen - How right-wing radical ideas arise , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, broadcast on May 4, 2019, accessed on May 5, 2019.