Renaud Camus is perhaps the most controversial living French writer. To read most media coverage about this gay socialist is to be told that he is a far-right racist. He has been given these labels because he is the progenitor of Le Grand Remplacement, the claim that native populations of Western nations are being replaced. What labels one ought to use when discussing this figure we leave to our readers to decide, but we believe it is better to present Camus’ thought in his own words than to rely entirely on hearsay. In this conversation, Camus elucidates his most (in)famous idea and argues that it is not a conspiracy theory, but a simple fact of post-modernity.
English-speaking readers of Enemy of the Disaster (Vauban Books, 2023), the recently published anthology of your political writings, will be surprised to discover that the Great Replacement as you formulate it is not at all what they’ve been told—that is, a far-right conspiracy theory. What should people know about the Great Replacement and why have you been so misrepresented, nay, slandered?
That the Great Replacement is not a far-right conspiracy is indeed the least one can say. Each of these terms is false. The Great Replacement is not a theory, it is a chrononym, like the Great War or the Great Depression—a name for an era on the basis of its most significant phenomenon, namely the change of people and of civilization, or “genocide by substitution” (as the black poet and long-serving communist mayor of Fort-de-France, Aimé Césaire, called it). In my book of the same name, Le Grand Remplacement, the idea of a conspiracy never arises, for that would be a totally ridiculous way of describing the enormity of the industrial, financial, cybernetic, ontological, and even metaphysical mechanisms that have led to this disaster, the replaceable man, interchangeable at will. Since the Great Replacement is not a theory but a fact, a crime, the crime against humanity of the twenty-first century, it cannot be a conspiracy theory or a theory of the far right.
However, I do indeed have a theory, yes: global davocratic replacism, a theory of the managerial administration of the human park by Davos, cybernetics, banks, hedge funds, pension funds, Big Tech, etc. I have presented this theory in various books, Le Grand Remplacement being merely the most factual of them. They include Du sens, De l’in-nocence, Le Petit Remplacement, La Dépossession, and La Destruction des Européens d’Europe. However colossal it may be, the Great Replacement is only a small part of what I call global replacism, an interpretive framework of the world born of the observation that replacement, the action of replacing, is the principal activity of modern and contemporary societies. Global replacism is a totalitarian and holistic ideology that, in my view, clearly originated in the English-speaking world and the United States in particular, since it drew its inspiration from both the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. Frederic Winslow Taylor is its god or, if you prefer, its Karl Marx (Taylor is to replacism what Marx is to Marxism: “In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first”). Henry Ford is its prophet.
The adjectives “misrepresented” and “slandered” are nice understatements. I have almost never been read, at least not by those who attack me, and I have been dragged through the mud, defamed, wokipediafied, blamed for all the sins of the world, dropped by all my publishers, refused passage everywhere in the media, summoned before all the courts, heavily fined, and even sentenced to prison (a sentence subsequently suspended, it is true). The reason for this could not be simpler: since the Great Replacement is by far the most important phenomenon of contemporary Western societies, and also the most obvious, it is precisely that which one must under no circumstances name. Those who venture to do so must be silenced by any means necessary.
In France, the National Rally [Rassemblement National], a political party often (wrongly) described as ‘far right,’ won many fewer parliamentary seats on July 7th than the pollsters had predicted. What explains this disappointing performance?
There are many possible explanations: the mediocrity of some of [the party’s] candidates, the somewhat misplaced impatience of its president, who already took himself for prime minister even though this runs totally contrary to the French Constitution, the post of prime minister being at the discretion of the President of the Republic. But one of the main reasons for this partial failure, in my view, is that these supposedly ‘democratic’ elections were an absolute farce. In the mainstream audiovisual media, democratic parity was more or less respected, albeit reluctantly, with the parties each day allotted fifteen minutes at the time of the official news. But the rest of the time, the fix was in: nearly every broadcast was devoted to smearing Marine Le Pen’s party, which was implicitly likened to Nazism or the First Collaboration, that of the Vichy years. One heard about nothing but Hitler’s rise to power, the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht, Marshal Pétain, the death camps, and so on. The National Rally couldn’t even object, for to do so would be to acknowledge that it indeed felt targeted by this talk (and thus, in some sense, invited it). What business was it of theirs if people were talking about elections in Germany in 1933? What did that have to do with them? The manipulation of minds, already well advanced by the educational system, the university system, and the entertainment and stupefaction industries, did not for a single moment let up. In such conditions, who could possibly take the results seriously?
Given the present composition of the National Assembly, how do you think French politics will evolve over the next few years (or months)?
I am not a politician and will not hazard any predictions. One can only hope for such total political gridlock that it gives rise to a new awareness, an awakening, a last-minute interruption of the appalling change of people now underway.
A few days before the election, Édouard Philippe, Emmanuel Macron’s Prime Minister between 2017 and 2020, announced that he would vote for the Communist Party in his district to stand in the way of the National Rally. Are centrist political figures who join forces with far-left parties traitors?
They are not traitors, they are in perfect conformity with what I call “the Genocidal Bloc”: that is, the unshakeable alliance of right-wing interests and left-wing ideals, of globalized davocratic hyper-capitalism and antiracist egalitarianism, which both desire a deracinated, denationalized, declassified, deculturated, de-historicized humanity, dispossessed of everything that might hamper general interchangeability. Both favor what was brilliantly anticipated and described by Zygmunt Bauman: the liquefaction of the species, the necessary condition of its total interchangeability (and prelude to its liquidation—but that’s me talking). Everything that might prevent this is successively eliminated: first it was distinct peoples now it is the sexes. Undifferentiated Human Matter (UHM) must be perfectly fluid.
What will be the main legacy of Emmanuel Macron after he leaves office in 2027?
Oh, he came in handy, at least for men like me: the absolutely ideal—one might even say paradigmatic—representative of davocratic global replacism. He is its purest product, nearly a caricature, and he long demonstrated its omnipotence. He is even the perfect illustration of what could be called direct davocracy. The Machine—what Heidegger called the Machination or the Framework, which refers more to a logic, or to pure industrial and financial mechanisms, than to an intentionality—presently considers itself strong enough to dispense with all intermediate structures and directly take in hand the affairs of nations. Macron destroyed the great traditional political parties, he destroyed, by taking away their financing, the territorial collectivities, regions, departments, and town councils, and now seems to be in the process of destroying the regime itself, even though it is one of the sturdiest France has known in a long time. If one were to ask me to describe in one word what I mean by davocracy, I might respond: Macron.
Marine Le Pen has in the past stated that the values of the French Republic and those of Islam are not incompatible, a declaration with which one imagines you must profoundly disagree. In making such statements, is Le Pen being honest or opportunistic?
I fear that she is being honest, and that this is indeed what she believes. Her declaration is truly the worst that can be said of the Republic and its values. And it is indeed true that the so-called values of the Republic have, for thirty or forty years, invariably supplied the road map or user’s manual for the genocide by Great Replacement, its rules and regulations. That said, it would no doubt be wrong to especially blame the Republic: the neighboring monarchies, Belgium and Great Britain, without looking farther afield, have been the scenes of an even more drastic change of people than France, if such a thing can be conceived. It is not the Republic that is bringing about the destruction of the Europeans of Europe and the genocide by Great Replacement: it is egalitarian antisexist antiracism, in the service of davocratic global replacism and the Machination, of the machine-becoming of the human race, of the (consumer) product-becoming of individuals.
How do you account for the growing power of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party, La France Insoumise [France Unbowed]? Are we witnessing the birth of political Islam in France?
Now this is the easiest of your questions. The Great Replacement has three protagonists: the replacists, the replacers, and the replacees. Naturally, the replacists are the allies of the replacers, who provide the base of their political power and constitute their pampered clients. The more replacers there are—and there are more every day—the greater the success of the replacists. But being the closest, they are also the most exposed, and will be the first to be eaten. Increasingly, the replacers already judge that they can do without the replacists—a bit like davocracy increasingly judges that it can do without the political caste. Though each believes itself to be using the other to achieve its goals, these two totalitarian rivals, global replacism and Islam, are heading towards an inevitable confrontation.
What do you think of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who, with his Fidesz Party—and to the great displeasure of Brussels—has refused to authorize mass migration into Hungary?
I was long one of his great admirers, precisely because he refused mass immigration, and thereby established himself as one of the most representative figures of anti-replacism. Unfortunately, I must acknowledge that I increasingly disagree with him. On the one hand, he is a fervent pro-natalist, whereas I am persuaded that demographic growth is a disaster everywhere it is to be found. Europeans ‘naturally’ have a perfectly reasonable demography, and it would be absurd for them to resist the colonial invaders that have been imposed upon them by adopting the latter’s totally out-of-control demography (which they entirely subsidize) with the result that, in France, for example, but probably also Great Britain, they are paying for their own migratory submersion. What is needed is not to have more children but to prevent the occupier from having them in our countries (and, if possible, encourage him to have fewer in his own).
On the other hand, I am also uncomfortable with what seems to be Orbán’s failure to distance himself from Vladimir Putin. I am passionately European. I think that Europe should return to History, which she exited after the Second World War out of shame and despair, fear and greed, and that she should once again think of herself as a power, that is, a great power. She must equip herself with the ability to resist all the invasions to which she is subjected: demographic invasion—the worst—by Africa and Asia; cultural invasion by America and now Africa (America having smuggled in Africa, particularly by way of music and dance); economic invasion by China; military invasion by Russia. It is true that Russia is a special case, for, in cultural and geographical terms, it is very much part of Europe, almost to the same degree as Great Britain. It is not Russia in itself that we must resist, but the Russia of Vladimir Putin and the ancient practices of Eastern despotism: invasions, coups d’état, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and assassination.
The media of Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States describe many parties of the right in Europe as far right, extremists, and so on. The fact that, far from being at the extremes, the National Rally is now the largest party in France reveals the absurdity of this tactic. How are we to understand, if only superficially, this idea of political extremity?
The idea is not so absurd since it has wonderfully succeeded. It falls under what I have called The Second Career of Adolf Hitler (the title of one of my books): his inverted career, of which the recent election campaign in France has just provided yet another striking example, with the Führer appearing on air around the clock. But it is true that this very effective tactic is fundamentally absurd, all the more so as, from a purely geometric point of view, what the mainstream media calls the ‘far right’ covers nearly 40% of the political spectrum and thus starts slightly to the right of center. The far left, by contrast, occupies hardly 1% of the same spectrum: the extreme extremity of its left extremity. There is obviously nothing extreme about anti-replacism, the refusal to regard man as a replaceable and interchangeable consumer product, the resistance to invasion, the rejection of colonization. Our models are those who have stood for the right of peoples to self-determination in the nineteenth century: Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy, Ireland, etc.; the resistance to Nazism (which after all invented the Great Replacement, Umvolkung, for the lands it briefly conquered in the East); anti-Soviet dissidence; and, of course, anti-colonialism. Europeans must not forget that, in Europe, it is they who are the indigenous population, and that the colonists are all the peoples who have been imposed upon them against their will by davocratic global replacism.
You dedicated your book, Le Grand Remplacement, to the twin prophets of our era, Jean Raspail and Enoch Powell. To this tragic pantheon, some might be inclined to add the name of Michel Houellebecq. Why have none of their warnings been heard or, when they were, acted upon?
If I did not include Michel Houellebecq alongside my two prophets, it is because he does not belong to the same generation, and that his is nearly the same as mine: our books are contemporaneous, I was even writing before him. That said, I’ve always thought and always said that, with very rare exceptions, there is more truth about our situation and about our future to be found in the least of his books than in all of sociology. It is the dazzling revenge of literature against the so-called ‘human sciences.’ If Houellebecq’s warnings have had no more effect than mine, even though he has a thousand times more readers, nor those of Raspail and Powell, it is for the reasons I presented above: the industries of man want undifferentiated human matter, and anything that opposes them is smothered, defamed, crushed, reduced to silence and social death.
You are a man of the Left, atheist and homosexual, and yet many of your admirers and supporters belong to the political right or are religious people and moral traditionalists. Does having such allies bother you? How would you characterize the alliance between the enemies of the disaster of the Great Replacement, who otherwise have so little in common?
Unfortunately, up till now, these have not been especially solid alliances, nor perhaps even especially real. Yet they are the ones that have always presented themselves, over the course of history, when the most important things were at stake, that is, the very survival of nations and of civilizations. Though they hated one another, Athens and Sparta were allied at the time of the Persian wars; in London, Jews allied with the antisemitic patriots of Action Française around General de Gaulle; and, for a time, Hindus even allied with Muslims in favor of the independence of India. As I am—or at least desire to be—in-nocent, non-nocent, non-harmful, non-violent, Gandhi is naturally one of my masters, to say nothing of General de Gaulle, of Leonidas at Thermopylae (although I certainly do not have his courage).
It seems that Europe, and even the West, have entered a dark and chaotic era. What gives you hope in these times?
Despair.
