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I first came across French writer Jean Raspail’s infamous novel The Camp of the Saints while I was reading Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe back in 2017. Raspail’s novel imagines the invasion of Europe by large groups of unsanitary and ravenous migrants from the Global South led by a coprophage (“shit-eater”). Despite his own firmly anti-immigration views, Murray declines to defend the book’s inflammatory contents, but he is nonetheless struck by Raspail’s descriptions of Western passivity in the face of an unsustainable wave of immigration. The book’s overt racism notwithstanding, it has attracted some attention in recent years for this apparent prescience.
Even so, getting hold of a copy can be difficult, as I discovered after my interest was piqued. “Despite being a best-seller in France,” Murray remarks, “a cordon sanitaire was imposed around the novel by French critics, and so The Camp of the Saints sank in plain sight. … Yet in spite of its nearly unreadable luridness, something about the book stuck in the subterranean portion of the European conversation.” Without that cordon sanitaire, I would probably have discovered it sooner. But the “undeniable power” that the New York Times’ critic reluctantly attributed to it upon its publication in English in 1975, and the fact that its reputation is so at odds with its unavailability, lent the novel an air of irresistible mystique—and so I tried to find a copy. The English translation was long out of print, and the second-hand copies circulating online were being listed for eye-watering prices. In the end, I decided it would be cheaper and more character-building to just purchase a copy in its original language and learn French.
The Camp of the Saints is sometimes mentioned when the topic of literary censorship arises. But the book has never, strictly speaking, been banned. No government to my knowledge has forbidden the sale of the novel, which was published seven years after the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum was abolished. No school library has taken it off the shelves in a fit of righteous indignation (if only because they never stocked it in the first place). The reluctance of mainstream publishers to reissue it is not the same as a ban. Nor was Amazon’s decision to delist the latest English language edition of the novel for “offensive content” earlier this year.
According to the American Library Association, “A book is banned when it is entirely removed from a collection in response to a formal or informal challenge.” The trouble with this definition is that it is generously inclusive; all it takes for a book to be classified a victim of institutional censorship—and for pundits across the world to raise a chorus of condemnation—is for it to be removed from one school library, as we saw in the case of a secondary school in Manchester late last year. The ALA definition does not include texts that booksellers refuse to stock, or the publication of which has been halted or made impossible by social pressures. Nor does it account for all the bold, daring, “unborn books” that will never see the light of day owing to the risk-averse—if not outright censorious—nature of modern publishing. In reality, book-banning in schools is generally an (ill-judged) attempt at safeguarding, not dissimilar to age-gating films, video games, or social media. That is very different to making a book unavailable to adults and children alike. By shifting the blame on to governments and educational authorities, publishers and bookshops are deflecting from their own role in narrowing the range of “acceptable” literature.
Dua Lipa’s latest project, the Manifesto Library, appears to perpetuate a similar misunderstanding of “banned books.” The collection is a partnership between Service95, Lipa’s online book club, and Livraria Lello, the bookshop in Porto where a hundred selected books will be displayed and sold. The Manifesto Library is described as:
