The works of Renaud Camus have caused controversy among the European establishment and the progressive Left for years. But as the realities of sexual grooming and harassment, and anti-Christian and antisemitic incidents spread across Europe, we think what he and others like Jean Raspail have written about the challenges and potential threats of mass migration (especially from non-Western countries) deserve another look. Below is the second of our specially commissioned essays and commentary on the works of Camus.
—THE EDITORS
At the height of Rome’s power, Emperor Augustus (63 BC-14 AD) discovered that Roman families were no longer having children. The Pax Romana had led to a drastic drop in the Roman birth rate. Despite the Emperor’s efforts, this decline in the birth rate could not be halted. This period was the first of three phases in the fall of Rome.
As a result of this decline in the birth rate, the fields were gradually emptied and the leading figures of the Empire were short of both servants and slaves. The second phase was a direct consequence of the first: the great migrations. For both economic and humanitarian reasons, the emperors brought hundreds of thousands of Germanic barbarians into the Empire. They were then sent to work, usually in agriculture or in the army. The third phase in the fall of Rome followed from the two previous phases, yet this time it was characterised by violence. The Goths, initially welcomed, plundered Rome and then brought millions of other barbarians into the Empire. They came from the farthest reaches of the known world and ravaged the Roman world for several centuries.
The present day seems to demonstrate that Judeo-Christian Europe is following the same trajectory as its ancient ancestor. After 40 years of a low birth rate, and as the ‘Great Replacement’ accelerates, our continent is slowly entering the third phase: a clear increase in physical violence—what can be called the ‘Great Turmoil.’
‘The Great Replacement’: cause of all our woes?
A prolific author with an established literary reputation, including a Grand Prix from the Académie Française, Renaud Camus is now known outside literary circles for coining the concept of the Great Replacement. According to this thesis, over the last 50 years, Europe has seen its native population gradually decline and its immigrant population increase. The author, true to his literary spirit, does not marshal scientific data to assess this phenomenon, but holds it to be self-evident: to quote him, this “great replacement” is “as staggering to the eye as it is to the heart.”
This theory is dismissed out of hand by its opponents, who condemn it as ‘fringe,’ ‘conspiratorial,’ ‘extremist,’ or some variation of all three. Yet, belief in the phenomenon has largely become mainstream. According to a survey conducted in October 2021, 67% of French people are worried by the Great Replacement, a concept introduced into the public debate by presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.
But this concept, the brainchild of a French writer, is now also gaining ground in the rest of the West. A survey published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London estimates that 32% of British people believe that the Great Replacement is already happening. The same is true in the United States, where a 2022 poll found that between 28% and 32% of Americans believe in the reality of the “Great Replacement.”
A demographic trend like Europe has never seen before
From a numerical point of view, it is now widely accepted that the birth rate in Europe is at half-mast. In recent years, despite immigration, the populations of several European countries have declined, including Italy, which has lost 0.4% of its population between 2011 and 2021. The same is true of Greece, which is less populous today than it was in 2001, and Spain, which has long been Catholic and conservative yet has seen fewer births than deaths since 2015. Not to mention Germany, where the natural balance has been negative every year since 1972.
Immigration, on the other hand, has risen sharply over the last 50 years. How else can we explain the fact that Germany, which has had a cumulative negative natural balance of 6.4 million since 1972, is set to reach its historic population peak in 2022? Among other available data, we can cite the Pew Research Center, which states that in 2016 Europe had a Muslim population of 4.9%, or 25 million people. While not all Muslims are non-European, the overwhelming majority of them come from outside Europe and a large majority of these Muslims in Europe are therefore recent immigrants.
While it is not certain that this process will continue indefinitely in its current form, it is objectively undeniable that the European population is decreasing while the immigrant population is increasing, and has been for several decades now, with one gradually ‘replacing’ the other. Technically, we are talking about a replacement.
If the trend is not reversed, it will have numerous consequences: cultural, ethnic, religious and economic. If the most profound and dramatic is the change in European ethno-cultural identity, the most concrete, immediate and undeniable consequence is the rise in violence and crime.
The ‘Great Turmoil’ of crime
All immigration, wherever it comes from and wherever it goes, poses a problem in terms of cultural norms and attitudes to violence.
The record of history is clear. In the Middle Ages, Europeans had a profoundly different attitude to violence than they do today. When violence was commonplace, if only because of the harsher living conditions (think of infant mortality rates, for example), the law was itself much tougher on criminals.
But the development of civility and civilisation has changed the way we deal with violence. Over the course of several centuries, society became calmer and the justice system gentler. This can easily be measured, as criminologist Maurice Cusson has done. According to him, in England, the homicide rate has slowly fallen from 20 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in the 13th century to around 1.5 today. The reduction is spectacular, but it is nonetheless very slow.
This attitude to violence and its judicial consequences is therefore an eminently cultural and civilisational phenomenon.
Rapid and massive immigration, particularly when moving from more violent to less violent societies, disrupts this softening. As a result of immigration, we now find individuals who have grown up in violent societies, and where justice is harsh in calmer European societies. Logically, this mixture generates crime, where the victims and perpetrators are almost always the same.
Unfortunately, this theory is perfectly borne out by the empirical data.
Several European countries publish statistics on the perpetrators of crime. Almost all of them make it possible to differentiate between foreign and national offenders, and some even more precise statistics make it possible to assess the delinquency and criminality of second-generation immigrants.
The statistics are clear: in all European countries and for almost all offences, immigrants from Africa and the Middle East are more likely to commit crimes than nationals.
Take homicide, for example:
- In France, a foreigner is 3 times more likely to be the perpetrator of a murder than a French person, and an African is 4 times more likely to be one than a French citizen.
- In Germany, a foreigner is 4 times more likely to commit a murder than a German, a figure that rises to 7 times more for Africans.
- In Italy, a foreigner commits 3 times more murders, on average, and an African 4 times more.
- Finally, in Spain, a foreigner commits 4 times more murders and an African 7 times more.
These huge figures are more or less the same for homicides, sexual violence, and assaults.
The Danish statistics, which are very extensive, also allow us to measure the over-representation of the descendants of immigrants. In general, an immigrant is 60% more likely to be charged with a crime than a Dane, while a descendant of an immigrant is a whopping 110% more likely to be charged than a Dane.
Sociological studies confirm this reality: the University of Lund in Sweden, for example, has shown that 59% of perpetrators of rape in Sweden between 2000 and 2010 were either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Similar results were found in Norway, Switzerland, and Finland.
These consistent figures for all offences and for all European countries are indisputable. The more the European population is replaced by a foreign population, mainly from Africa or the Middle East, the more crime will increase.
What is to be done?
The obvious answer to the question ‘what to do?’ is to halt and even reverse migratory flows. This is the policy preference, also popularised by Renaud Camus, that goes by the name ‘remigration.’ But while the solution may seem obvious, it is far from simple: how, for example, can we distinguish between non-Europeans who should be remigrated and those who should not? Many have settled in Europe and some of them have integrated well.
In reality, for remigration to have any real meaning, it must first be based on facts that cannot be disputed: for example, the commission of a crime or misdemeanour. The expulsion of foreign criminals and delinquents must therefore be the rule throughout Europe. Unfortunately, for the time being, only the very democratic Switzerland has put in place such a mechanism.
Another answer to the question of “what to do” lies in the depths of history. Faced with unsustainable migratory flows, the Roman Empire gradually differentiated the legal status of its own citizens: between rich and poor, the criminal law was not the same. This principle, shocking to the modern European belief in universalism, is already in place in Europe. In Denmark, for instance, the inhabitants of certain areas are exposed to greater criminal penalties than others.
Here are the words Saint Jerome wrote to a friend at the time of the fall of Rome:
For 20 years now, blood has been shed daily between Constantinople and the Alps. The Goths, the Sarmatians and the Huns are devastating them with deportations and pillaging. Bishops were taken captive, priests and clerics murdered. Mourning, wailing and the image of death are everywhere. The Roman world is crumbling.
If Europe does not take its demographic future into its own hands now, these words, which still seem alarmist today, will one day be written by my descendants and yours. It is time to act, for we owe it to our very own children.
The above essay is the second in a series of essays and commentary especially commissioned by us to explore the ideas of Renaud Camus. The first was Anthony Daniel’s commentary published here. We previously also published Rod Dreher’s own birthday tribute to Camus here. We hope these various articles will reinvigorate discussion over immigration and its challenges today. We hope to help raise awareness of his works, nearly all written in French, in the lead-up to the worldwide premier of the publication of the first English-language collection of essays by Camus, Enemy of the Disaster, released on October 15th in the United States and to be released on October 17th in Europe and the rest of the world.
