The Camp of the Living Dead

Deplorable Yankee · Mar 2, 2026

The Camp of the Living Dead

The zombie horde of Calcutta comes for the undead husk of the West

Mar 02, 2026
Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is one of those literary works, like Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, that has gained meme status within the online right without actually having been all that widely read. In consequence, most of you will have at least heard of The Camp of the Saints, and will probably have some idea of its significance. For those who are hearing about this book for the first time, it describes the annihilation of the West by a mass movement of migrants from the third world who advance under the banner of their own wretchedness to disarm the West via its own bad conscience. If that sounds like it could have been lifted from the headlines of the last decade, congratulations, you can now see why the work is regarded as prophetic.

One of the reasons that The Camp of the Saints is not actually all that widely read is that the book has been suppressed in the English-speaking world. The book was a bestseller when the first translation was published in 1975, after which there were a few reprintings, but it has been effectively out of print since the mid-90s. This meant that if you wanted to read it, you either had to track down a bootleg pdf (and who wants to read an entire novel in pdf), or pay extortionate prices on Amazon’s secondary market. You’d think that the publisher would see the insane prices used editions were going for and conclude that there was money to be made from unmet demand but, you see, The Camp of the Saints is a xenophobic, racist, sexist diatribe that good people need to protect impressionable minds from reading lest they acquire bad opinions and become bad people. This kind of copyright-squatting is how books are actually de facto banned in the Western world, by the way; those prominent displays of ‘banned books’ assembled by your local libtard bookseller more or less uniformly consist of softcore porn that some school board in the Bible Belt decided were a bit much for the resource library in the elementary school. When the cathedral wants to ban a book, it simply buys up the rights to it, refuses to publish it, and then buries it in obscurity by refusing to talk about it.

Fortunately for all of us, the small publisher Vauban Books has recently released a new translation, which you can pick up in any format of your choice for a very reasonable price. The edition comes with two introductions: a new introduction by Nathan Pinkoski (whose further reflections can be found in his recent essay The Scandal of the Saints), which places the work in its historical context and provides fascinating biographical detail on Raspail’s remarkable and adventurous career, and Raspail’s introduction to the French 2011 edition (which reached bestseller status in France), an essay titled Big Other. The French publisher initially didn’t want to include Raspail’s essay, for fear of being prosecuted for racism.

Long read