Renaud Camus on the Origins of the Demographic Disaster

2,734 words

Renaud Camus
Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings
Blowing Rock, N. C.: Vauban Books, 2023

Enemy of the Disaster is the first extensive English-language collection of Renaud Camus’ writings in opposition to what he was the first to name “the Great Replacement” of France’s — and Europe’s — people. The book consists of ten pieces written between 2007 and 2017. Co-translator Louis Betty also provides a useful introduction, though marred by his compulsion to triangulate against shadowy “white supremacists.”

Hitherto, the English reader has been largely dependent on what others say of Camus’ views, usually that he is an “extreme Right-wing conspiracy theorist.” In fact, he has never been a man of the Right. His early associations were with Roland Barthes, Andy Warhol’s circle, and the Communists Louis Aragon and Marguerite Duras. He is also a homosexual whose only previous book translated into English is entitled Tricks. Today, none of this matters, of course: anyone disinclined to celebrate the disappearance of European man as an unqualified good is ipso facto a “Right-wing extremist.”

A real athlete of the éscritoire, Camus spends most of his days writing: an author does not produce over 150 volumes by waiting for inspiration to strike him. The result of this lifelong discipline is a mastery of the French language scarcely to be found in our time. Though the writings in Enemy of the Disaster are polemical, Camus’ prose is everywhere carefully measured. If a few formulations may sound “extreme” to our cowardly and euphemism-addled age, this is merely a reflection of the historically unprecedented crisis now facing European man. When things have been allowed to deteriorate to this point, hints and half-measures simply will not do.

In this spirit, Camus himself has mocked readers scandalized by his occasional use of the expression “genocide by substitution” as an equivalent for his better-known phrase “the Great Replacement.” He formulates their admonition to him as: “Do you want to start a civil war? A solution will eventually present itself. In the meantime, please keep your ideas to yourself!” Pres. Macron himself is one of these timid souls, and actually accused his opponent Marine Le Pen of fomenting civil war during the last election campaign. It is not those responsible for inviting millions of hostile foreigners to settle in France who are endangering the country, he implied, but those who take public notice of the resulting tensions; speech, not objective reality, is the locus of the problem. But no solution can be expected to “present itself” to a mortal threat we are forbidden to speak of, and no quarter should be offered to this cowardly attempt to spirit away unpleasant realities by policing language.

The author begins his reflections in this volume by citing a suggestion of his friend, the French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, that anti-racism might be considered “the Communism of the twenty-first century.” Camus remarks that while Communism never governed France, “antiracism has been in power here for several decades.” He calls it one of the country’s largest employers, doling out honors and sinecures to friends and servants:

Communism had one or two newspapers, a few influential but narrowly distributed journals, two or three never particularly robust publishing houses; antiracism reigns over the whole of journalism without a single honorable exception, over the entire media, over all mainstream publishing.

Essential to its power is its pose as “the exclusive holder of moral authority.” It has no adversaries with whom it might debate, but only enemies it means to destroy. It cannot survive without an endless supply of such enemies, and will invent them where necessary.

Camus admits that a condemnable sense might be attributed to the word racism, e.g.

to conflate individuals with the group to which they belonged by birth, reduce them to this belonging, and commit violence or injustice against them should one believe there was something for which to reproach the group in question.

But anti-racism cannot let it go at that: Its program requires extending the range of things condemned as “racist” continually and indefinitely, “starting with anything that challenges its own power.”

The author also notes how, in tandem with this inflation of the term racism, the old and respectable word race has “suffered a vertiginous contraction of the enormous spectrum of meaning that it had in classical French.” It was “good enough for Malherbe and Racine, useful and honorable enough for de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou,” the latter of whom spoke unselfconsciously of “the character of our race” (i.e., the French race) in a public address as late as 1972. Now the word can hardly be employed outside discussion of Nazi Germany or the eugenics movement of a hundred years ago.

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The point applies equally in English. Camus’ discussion reminded me of a story I recently heard regarding a panic at a Christian-Classical school when it was noticed that a book in the curriculum, Pope’s Iliad, made reference to “the race of Trojans.” The phrase must have conjured up images of men in lab coats running about with calipers to measure the heroes’ heads.

On a similar note, the author remarks the sad decline of discrimination from denoting “the very exercise of intelligence, the quality par excellence of thought” into a cant term for the cardinal sin against anti-racism.

Camus’ essay “The Second Career of Adolf Hitler” invites comparison with Peter Brimelow’s characterization of American immigration policy as “Hitler’s Posthumous Revenge.” Post-war politics has proceeded

as if Europe, and of course, France, having suffered from the Hitlerian cancer, had been and continued to be operated on over and over again by surgeons so fiercely resolved to eradicate the evil that they did not refrain from removing vital organs indispensable to the patient’s survival as soon as they were suspected of contamination.

The thinking seemed to go that since Hitler was the summum malum of human history, the inversion of everything he believed must provide us with a formula for constructing utopia, even where those beliefs simply expressed the consensus of the ages: the objective reality of races and nations, or of the states which are their political expression. Henceforth, Europeans were assured that

the ethnic distinctions and hereditary dimensions of civilization did not count, that origins were nothing, that native forms of belongings had no importance and that even if, by some mischance, these things had real existence and actual influence on the affairs of men, one must act as if this were not the case, ignore them in speech and action, deny them any relevance and forbid that reference be made to them. Any sort of we with the least claim to historical consistency was angrily prohibited. . . . Antiracism got involved in prohibiting all reference to ethnicities, peoples, civilizations, diverse cultures, origins in general, and nations in their temporal aspect, that is, their heritage, transmission, and survival.

The author sees the attack on the transmission of culture as a necessary precondition for the demographic revolution that followed:

A people who knows its language, who knows its literature, who remembers its civilization, and who preserves in its midst a cultivated class, elites, such a people does not let itself be led to the scaffold without a fight, nor meekly let itself be told that it is not a people, that it never was one.

Culture, writes Camus, “is first and foremost the voice of the dead, their creative presence.” Because it is essentially a matter of conveying a patrimony from ancestors to descendants, culture is a matter of race in the full sense of this now unfairly maligned word. In the case of France even more than most countries, the national culture was admittedly the product of a feudal society grounded in hereditary privilege. But the bourgeoisie which succeeded to this patrimony following the Revolution took its intrinsic value for granted, nor did it dispute natural inequality in talent and intellect or the hierarchy of taste and accomplishment. In the days when they ruled France, the bourgeois program to “democratize” cultural transmission involved “small-scale assimilation to the cultured class by dint of study, merit, intelligence, and willpower.” For such a patrimony cannot be transmitted as effortlessly as a feudal estate. The culture of a highly cultivated man

is the result of work, exercise, and the slow convergence of favorable circumstances, of a long exertion of will within himself and by countless others, those who willed and built schools, raised libraries, and organized their shelves. Because it is so dependent on time and is perpetually besieged by competing desires, hostile interests, active negligence, and pedagogical error, such labor is no more inexhaustible than is water, natural gas, or petroleum — and neither is culture.

Indeed, it was “the serene conviction of nearly all earlier centuries and most civilization” that “it takes two or three generations to produce an individual of thoroughly accomplished culture.”

Furthermore, the entire process is inherently inegalitarian: “to become cultivated is to raise oneself up, to learn to see things and the world from a higher vantage point.” This can be painful, and necessarily involves conveying to the talented young student from outside the ranks of the hereditary cultivated class, “without telling him explicitly, that his parents express themselves poorly, that they reason poorly, that they are interested in the wrong kinds of things.” Yet, however many talented individuals can be assumed into the cultured class, its core remains hereditary. Without a self-confident core operating principally by transmission within families, “culture is helpless; it no longer has the authority or the strength and prestige needed to impose itself as something to join.”

The bourgeois elite of the nineteenth century has now vanished as completely as the feudal aristocracy, and the cultural elite associated with it — eroded by taxes, mandatory public schooling, and television — is on life support. The limited democratization of cultural transmission endorsed by the old bourgeoisie does not begin to satisfy the ideologues of what Camus calls today’s “hyperdemocracy,” a way of thinking closely related to anti-racism in its refusal to recognize the most patent natural inequalities. Hyperdemocracy deals with discussion of such unpleasant realities “by establishing it as an axiom that such ideas are false, refuse to examine them, refuse to hear them, and declare that those who dare support these ideas or submit them for discussion are despicable, indeed criminal.” In this resentful way of thinking, nothing can be recognized as valuable if it cannot be distributed universally. It is not simply that Corneille and Racine “have nothing valuable to communicate to today’s students, but that they are tools for dominating, oppressing, intimidating them, tools that must be combatted and rejected as such”:

The movement is always the same, whether we are talking about teaching or art, music, scholarship, science, or cultural life: on the pretext of equality, hyperdemocracy, structurally incapable of raising the middling and inferior cultural levels, only wins democratic victories by lowering the higher level.

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The word culture is refitted to designate entertainment, and the disciplines which nourished the identity of Frenchmen and Europeans — respect for form, social hierarchy, and manners; familiarity with a canon of classics — are barely tolerated in the guise of private preferences.

We note in passing that Camus’ emphasis on the crisis in cultural transmission is sufficient refutation of the silly charge that he is a “conspiracy theorist.” In fact, he repeatedly emphasizes that so broad a sea change within our civilization cannot have been the result of any mere conspiracy on the part of a few bad actors. It is the result of a general process of decline.

Some may agree about this educational crisis’ seriousness and importance, but find themselves asking what it has to do with race, immigration, and “the Great Replacement.” In Camus’ telling, almost everything:

One can never insist too much on the coincidence between the democratic crisis of French culture and what might be called its ethnic crisis, linked to its indisputable status as the hereditary culture of a given ethnic group.

Stripping the French of their historical memory and neutering them of any sense of belonging is precisely what reduces them to an abstract “administrative substance” that can be replaced without apparent loss.

Anti-racists both French and foreign accuse French culture of “being an instrument for subjugating immigrants (most of whom have brought their own values and their own culture with them) to a dominant ethnicity.” Barbaric though such sentiments may sound upon first hearing, it is hard to deny that they contain a measure of truth. As the author notes, the preconditions for the transmission of any culture such as time, effort, and ability are all finite quantities. What is granted to French culture is necessarily taken away from pupils’ native tradition as shaped by their race’s own nature and historical experiences. For Muslim pupils, such tradition is thought to be both of divine origin and their own unique possession. How can they not resent being schooled in the ways of infidels?

Also of obvious relevance here, although not directly discussed by Camus, is the sheer low intelligence of most of France’s immigrant “communities.” Islam is far better adapted to the needs of simple souls than Corneille and Racine.

So education in the proper sense — the social reproduction of a national culture — has been replaced by “the exhausting need to keep ignorance occupied, amusing it, channeling it, and satisfying it for reasons of social peace, safety and profit.” Whereas available time is always among the most severe constraints to which genuine education is subject, Camus observes that time appears to weigh heavily upon immigrant youth, with schools existing simply to occupy it, keeping their charges off the streets and away from criminal activity for as long as possible.

The author notes, however, that much of the criminal activity for which immigrant “communities” are responsible is more than mere hooliganism:

These hooligans are an army, the military wing of the conquest. Little matter if they are aware of this or not, and I believe they are much more aware of it than one gives them credit for.

Noise, destruction, theft, burglary, and drug-dealing all serve to expand the territory subjugated by the new colonizers. As a result, the French live amid daily insecurity, see their available living space shrink, and cry out for more police. The regime is happy to oblige, but without admitting the source of the need. Soon, writes Camus, the native population “will learn that they, not the immigrants, are the object of the police’s attention.”

The title of the collection under review, Enemy of the Disaster, is a play on Camus’ term “friends of the disaster” for the replacist regime’s spokesmen and defenders. Besides politicians and journalists, this includes a whole class of official sociologists, “the regime’s golden boys,” whose function is to explain to the French public that what they see with their own eyes is not real, that things in fact are getting better, and that what is really needed is “more of the same but better, with more resources this time.” Camus masterfully satirizes their incoherent babble without having to exaggerate by much:

Violence is abating, immigration is diminishing, in any case there was never very much of it to begin with, it has been declining for years, now that it is here the question is no longer whether it is a good or bad thing but rather how to adapt to it and learn to love it, France has always been a country of immigration, more is needed. In general, we need more of what seems not to have worked, more immigration, more pedagogy, more suburban planning, more multiculturalism and ethnic plurality, more disaster in short, for if it is a disaster it is because we have not gone far enough, have not sufficiently believed in what we were doing, because we have spoiled everything for lack of faith, nostalgia, attachment to outdated values, idealization of the past and, of course, racism.

The author remarks on the absurdity of an ideology so dependent upon lies and misrepresentation presuming to monopolize the moral high ground, “as if truth were not among the preeminent requirements of morality.”

The disaster of which Camus is so distinguished an enemy is, as he remarks, the greatest in France’s history, far more dangerous than the Hundred Years War, the Great Revolution, or the German occupation, none of which seriously threatened the existence of the nation itself. And virtually every point he makes is equally applicable to Western civilization as a whole.