Renaud Camus: The Man Who Was Wrong To Be Right

Two journalists have just embarked on the exercise of writing a ‘biography,’ or rather a damning pamphlet, against the writer Renaud Camus, on whom they intend to heap all the ignominy of having invented and popularised the phrase ‘the great replacement.'”

But what crime is this when the expression is now swallowed and spat out by everyone, including and especially on the Left, by certain MPs and politicians who today make it a point of pride and a programme?

To feed its fundamental need to feel useful, the Left needs scapegoats. As Le Figaro editorialist Eugénie Bastié points out, Jean-Marie Le Pen is dead, so a ‘replacement’ must be found. Renaud Camus is the ideal candidate for the role.

Olivier Faye and Gaspard Dhellemmes, two journalists from Le Monde, which in itself speaks volumes for those familiar with the ideological background of this so-called leading newspaper, which has long since sold out to the most dishonest left-wing thinking, have set themselves the goal of writing the ‘biography’ of The Man Who Brought the Plague, according to the quasi-mythological title they have given to their latest opus.

Mythological, or rather mythomaniacal. The Renaud Camus of Faye and Dhellemmes is above all a construction of these two men, who polish the figure of their detestation according to their needs and not according to the reality of their model. Renaud Camus does not hide. He hides nothing, revealing himself from top to bottom, with a concern for transparency so complete that it is almost unhealthy. He keeps a diary in which he records his thoughts, actions, joys, and sorrows every day. Reading this diary is like reading his heart. The honourable writer, now in his eighties, spends a considerable amount of time on X—a new source of information for investigators. Camus’s concerns and outbursts of anger are all known and available online. But it is not this reality that interests the journalists at Le Monde, but what they can do with it to fuel their little media spectacle.

From the very first pages of the book, the tone is set, unsurprisingly. The drama opens with a reference to the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed by terrorist Brenton Tarrant. A pamphlet entitled The Great Replacement was later found in his home, in which Camus is not mentioned. This was enough to attribute the mass shooting to Camus, who abhors all forms of violence, perhaps one of the few things he has in common with a certain section of the Left. One would like to see the same media outlets be just as quick to establish murderous connections when a terrorist is found to have a copy of the Koran on his bookshelf.

Faithful to the masters of the philosophy of suspicion, the authors—who are merely their pale avatars of the 21st century—prefer to refute the background of the thinker they are studying by focusing on his childhood and youth, his fears and frustrations, rather than risking arguing on the merits.

Camus grew up in the small Parisian homosexual artistic milieu. He was a member of the Socialist Party but slipped to the ‘wrong side.’ The Left does not allow him to have deserted its ranks without questioning the causes of such a shift—if there was one.

Moving from the Left to the Right, as Marguerite Stern explains in her latest autobiographical essay, Les Rives contraires, is a forbidden crime. Camus is a writer—a real one, with a style that, as we have known since Proust, is “for the writer as much as colour is for the painter, a question not of technique but of vision.”

Before reading his political prose, I discovered him through his delightful Demeures de l’esprit (Dwellings of the Mind), which hint at a man with a rich inner life and a lively mind, just like those masters, politicians, writers, and musicians whose homes he so loves to scrutinise.

Those who castigate him for having developed the concept of the ‘great replacement’ always forget—unsurprisingly—that his thinking is primarily one of decadence and cultural resignation, that is to say, that the ‘small replacement’ always precedes and makes possible the ‘great replacement.’ It is when he describes the multiple collapses of our French and Western civilisation that he truly touches on genius—this is what makes him so demanding, even in the eyes of some of the so-called ‘reactionary’ youth who reduce him to his loudmouth side and politically incorrect icon but are only willing to hear part of his poignant warning message. He alone knows how to put into words the tragedies that the disappearance of formal dress, the ease of language, and the daily choice of material mediocrity bring to the country that so many of these young people imagine they want to save. But the subtlety of this thought is completely lost on Delhemmes and Faye.

Behind The Man Who Brought the Plague lies a surprising paradox. The journalists of Le Monde, imbued with the moral authority of their media pedigree, make Camus the intellectual mentor of hundreds of thousands of people in France and around the world—even though they observe that very few people have read him and still read him.

Should we count among the disciples of the master of Plieux Jean-Luc Mélenchon, president of La France Insoumise, who just a few days ago welcomed the ‘great replacement’ underway in France? Or Carlos Martens Bilongo, an MP from the same party, who proudly explained that black people “have more  kids” than native French people and will therefore inevitably replace them one day?

Mélenchon insists that his use of the expression in his political rhetoric is a deliberate ‘trap,’ a kind of decoy to flush out the ‘far right.’ Nevertheless, in this case, he resembles one of those teachers who, guilty of having betrayed himself by saying something stupid at the blackboard, replies with aplomb to his shocked pupils: ‘I was just testing you to see if you were paying attention.’ Mélenchon knows very well what he is saying, and that the great replacement does indeed exist. 

What makes the concept work so well is not the sprawling moral authority that Camus exercises from behind the thick walls of his Gascon fortress, but simply that he very accurately describes what millions of French people see every day. The hallmark of great writers is to put into carefully chosen words what the vulgum pecus feel only vaguely—but recognise immediately when it is clearly stated.