Renaud Camus' Great Replacement

From gay atheist socialist to "far-right" icon, Camus’ writings on immigration and deculturation stir global controversy

French writer Renaud Camus was back in the news this week when the UK barred him from traveling to the country to give a talk.

Camus is an interesting character. He’s a gay atheist who used to be in the Socialist Party. In his younger days he was known for his fiction and poetry, for which he won major prizes in the 1970s. His best known and most translated book is Tricks (1979), an autofictional gay travelogue. He’s apparently pushed a ~500 page book of his personal journals every single year since sometime in the 1980s. All together, he’s the author of over 100 books.

He’s become infamous in France for his idea of le grand remplacement - the Great Replacement. If you’ve ever heard this term, it originated with him. The basic idea of the Great Replacement is that immigration is replacing the native population in their own country. He relates this to Bertolt Brecht’s famous line that, “Would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?” His criticism of this has triggered the by now familiar litany of denunciations: far right, racist, etc.

Given the current discussion of Camus, I recently read a short collection of his writing translated into English called Enemy of the Disaster.

Given Camus’ prolific written output, I was somewhat surprised to see that these seemed to be mostly speeches, not essays. His speech on the Great Replacement is not the work in which he coined the term, but a much later talk.

To be honest, I thought Camus sounded something like a bitter old man, which he might actually be at this point. In fairness, we might be too if we’d been subjected to the same vilification and marginalization he has. But this was not the artistically or rhetorically powerful critique of modern society provided by, for example, his countryman Michel Houellebecq.

It’s also the case that little of this is especially interesting or new to anyone who has been paying attention to US political discussions. Now, Camus was writing and talking about these issues long before people in America. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem especially revelatory reading it today.

Camus links a demographic Great Replacement to a broader neoliberal program of “replacism.” He writes:

A specter is haunting Europe and the world. It is replacism, the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized, interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers, culture by leisure activities and entertainment, knowledge by diplomas, the countryside and city by the universal suburb, the native by the non-native, Europe by Africa, men by women, men and women by robots, peoples by other peoples, humanity by a savage, undifferentiated, standardized, infinitely interchangeable posthumanity. Of all genetic manipulations, the Great Replacement, a sort of surrogacy implemented at the scale of the whole planet, is the worst.

You can get a sense from this why Camus is so controversial. But also how these ideas appeal to people on both the right and left that feel something has gone wrong in the world. And that, despite what I wrote above, he is capable in some cases of summoning powerful rhetoric.

Given the immensity of his output, no one will ever provide a full overview of Camus’ thought, but I’ll share a few examples from this book for you.