Alert: Amazon Has Banned Camp of the Saints
Update: Amazon has reversed course
Update: Amazon has restored the Vauban books edition of The Camp of the Saints.
Thank you to everyone who helped publicize this incident! Please continue to support Vauban and other small independent publishers, and to read Jean Raspail, the winner of the 2003 Grand Prix de littérature de l'Académie française.
Original post below:
In an egregious act of censorship, Amazon has removed the new edition of The Camp of the Saints, by the prize-winning French novelist Jean Raspail, from its US site.
Since I wrote the critical introduction for the new edition, this turns me into a banned writer!
The book had been up for months, and had been reviewed by numerous outlets. But it was selling too well for the powers that be.
You can read Vauban Books’ full statement here.
Vauban is a small publication that has published a range of past and contemporary thinkers from across the political spectrum. Amazon controls the publishing market, so losing this revenue stream can strangle an independent publisher. Please support their work however you can. They have an excellent catalogue for such a small and new publication.
And Camp of the Saints can still be purchased directly from the supplier here.
I’ve written about Camp of the Saints in several outlets, including First Things, Chronicles, and the European Conservative, so I won’t repeat what I’ve already said. If you want an introduction to Raspail and to the book, click here..
Instead, I want to share with you a critical review about the new edition from The Atlantic. It’s written by the journalist Idrees Kahloon, who attended the book launch for The Camp of the Saints last December.
Not long ago, a book party like this would have been unthinkable: a Washington celebration of one of the most notorious French novels ever written. But on a frigid December night, some 50 people crammed into Butterworth’s, a Capitol Hill restaurant favored by the MAGA elite, to celebrate the rerelease of The Camp of the Saints, which had gone out of print in English decades ago. The dystopian novel by the French author Jean Raspail depicts the destruction of European civilization by barbaric migrant hordes that arrive, uninvited, by boat.
Kahloon is not a fan of the book. But he is a conscientious, serious liberal, as he shows below.
I do not believe in suppressing books, this one included. The Camp of the Saints is not a good novel, but it is an important one. Dystopian fiction helps structure political myth; political myth helps structure policy. In the same way that The Handmaid’s Tale looms over abortion politics, or The Terminator lurks over artificial intelligence, The Camp of the Saints hangs over immigration politics—for a small but important stratum of right-wing thinkers and politicians. It illuminates much about the worldview of nationalist conservatives who are ascendant in America, France, and many other democracies.
I’m grateful for the sharp criticisms that Kahloon makes of the book. It presupposes a learned public that has access to controversial works and can weigh them in the balance, judging which ones are found wanting. But at a stroke of the algorithm, Amazon threatens to strip that public away.
Hopefully Amazon USA will change course: perhaps when they cease to listen to the American activists who are driving this, and instead talk with their French side. They will discover that at present, Camp of the Saints is available there for purchase in original French, along with the rest of Raspail’s works. In the meantime, enrich your mind, go read a good book, and defy the mediocrities of our time who have nothing to offer but conformity and submission.
Another reason to boycott Amazon. What bunch of jerks.