The most dangerous idea in Europe

This race-driven conspiracy theory claims that a liberal elite is plotting the destruction of White European and American civilisations by encouraging African and Asian immigrants who replace European culture with their own. 

Renaud Camus was an activist from the time of his majority. In 1968, at the age of 21, he came out of the closet to form a gay brigade for the Paris student riots. For his efforts Camus was disowned by his entrepreneurial parents. He was unfazed and went on to acquire a string of degrees in history, literature, philosophy and law, and secured teaching positions at French and American universities. 

For the next 20-odd years Camus established himself as one of the intellectual driving forces of France’s emerging gay community. He was a columnist for leading gay publications and an award-winning author. 

In 1992 Camus sold his Paris apartment and moved to the partially-ruined hilltop Chateau de Pilieux in southwest France. While taking a break from castle restoration work to edit a local guidebook, Camus noticed that the demography of France’s villages had “totally changed,” and, in his view, not for the better. 

He called this realisation his “epiphany” and it quickly morphed into “The Great Replacement Theory”, which found written expression in two French language books: Abedarium of No Harm and The Grand Replacement. In 2017 he wrote an English language text for his international audience: You Will Not Replace Us.

Renaud Camus asserts that the Great Replacement Theory is not a theory. It is a fact. It is a demographic and political fact which has been occurring since the 1970s. 

Central to Renaud Camus’s thinking is that ethnicity plays a defining role in a country’s identity. Being French or British is as much a physical attribute as a cultural one. “Immigrants,” he warns, “are flocking to predominantly white countries for the precise purpose of rendering the white population a minority within their own land or even causing the extinction of their own populations.”

The immigrants (also referred to as “the invaders”), however, are not working alone, says Renaud Camus. They are supported by governments and a wealthy liberal elite (also referred to as “the collaborationists”). Some of them actively encourage immigration as a form of cheap labour. Others are complicit in their refusal to acknowledge the threat. Renaud Camus’s liberal elite also suffer from a guilt complex tied to their imperial past. 

The solution to the alleged dilemma is both simple and complex. The simple part involves the immigrants: stop all migration and send back the immigrants – and those descended from immigrants – to their country of origin. Then white women must be encouraged to produce more babies to replace the immigrant workforce. Finally, Camus would like to turn back the clock to a pre-industrial bucolic era when people were less materialistic, closer to the soil and the church, and less concerned about other countries. 

To those who argue that remigration is a political and logistical impossibility, Camus, points to the example of the Algerian government which forced an estimated 800,000 “pied noirs” to return to France. 

Renaud Camus did not stop at writing. In 2002 he formed the inappropriately named Parti de l’in-nocence (The Party of No Harm). This became the political vehicle for a failed bid for the presidency in 2012 and for a seat in the European Parliament shortly afterwards, an attempt that also failed. In 2015 he headed an initiative to launch a French version of the anti-immigrant German movement PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West). Recently he has said that the immigration problem has gone beyond a political solution because too many immigrants can vote

Meanwhile his writings have been read, digested, tweaked and passed through the cyber portals of social media to influence millions of far-right activists. They have also joined forces with other more extreme race-hate philosophies such as the White Genocide Theory and White Extinction, both of which have strong anti-Semitic overtones. Among the prominent individuals who support Renaud Camus is Marine Le Pen. Even further to the right in French politics, Renaud Camus has become the guru of Eric Zemmour. 

Outside his home country, Renaud Camus’s chief supporter is Hungary’s Viktor Orban. He has made the Great Replacement a key policy of his ruling Fidesz Party. Other adherents are the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. There are echoes of Renaud Camus at Donald Trump’s rallies. His former adviser Steve Bannon is a follower as is Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Then, of course, Renaud Camus’s cry has been taken up and further exaggerated by the ultimate conspiracy theorists, who follow the Qanon theory. 

Renaud Camus claims to be opposed to violence while at the same expressing “understanding” of those who march with guns, throw Molotov cocktails and murder Blacks and Asians. There is no doubt, however, that White terrorists have adopted Camus’ theory, attached it to violence and taken to the streets. 

Brent Harrison Tarrant, cited The Great Replacement Theory in the video that attempted to rationalise his attack which killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was also mentioned by Patrick Crusius who killed 23 Latinos in El Paso and Peyton Gendron who murdered ten people in Buffalo, New York. In recent weeks the theories of a far-right pseudo-intellectual Frenchman have been used by British white supremacists to justify race riots across the country. 

Camus has been very careful to say that his writings are not a call to violence. They are a “cultural critique” and he refuses credit for how others might apply his writings. But there is no doubt that the likes of Tommy Robinson see them as an intellectual justification for violence. Meanwhile, Renaud Camus remains peacefully holed up in his 14^th century castle.

Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and the author of The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War and America Made in Britain.