The apocalyptic novel written in 1971 that foresaw the migrant crisis so precisely the author believed it must have been dictated by a higher power: Now CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reveals the shocking details - and ending we should all fear

At a sprawling holiday villa half way between Cannes and Saint-Tropez, the writer and explorer Jean Raspail experienced an apocalyptic vision.

Staring out across the sparkling blue waters of the French Riviera, he imagined an invasion – an armada of small boats crammed with immigrants, packed so tightly that many were already dead, a million hungry, desperate people swarming onto the shore.

‘And what if they came?’ he asked aloud. This was 1971, decades before the mass migration crisis began and the question triggered a surge of manic creativity. Over the next few weeks, Raspail wrote frantically.

‘I had no plan and not the least idea of how things would go, nor of the characters who would populate my story,’ he said. ‘To my great surprise, my pencil raced unhindered across the paper. If ever I was inspired while writing a book, it was this one.’

The novel that unfolded took its title from a verse in the Book Of Revelation, a prophecy that when the world is about to end, Satan will gather armies from the four quarters of the earth, and send out invaders, ‘the number of whom is as the sand of the sea’. These armies will surround ‘the camp of the saints’ – the last bastions of civilisation.

The Camp Of The Saints, published this month in Britain for the first time (more than half a century after it was written), is an extraordinary novel. Not all of it has come true, of course – far from it. Its wilder excesses, plotlines and ending stretch the limits of credulity.

It reads instead like a war reporter’s despatch from the mouth of Hell. Its plot is a meaningless cascade of murders, breakdowns and atrocities. Its characters are stickmen. But Raspail writes with such energy, like a man possessed, that the book’s 300 pages rush by.

If you have ever found yourself ‘doom-scrolling’ on your phone, rolling up an endless blur of grim headlines, reading The Camp Of The Saints is not dissimilar.

It’s a brutal, frequently sickening read. French literature often prides itself on how shocking it can be, but even by those standards Raspail is exceptional. His descriptions of the filth, degradation, sexual degeneracy and violence among the refugees is stomach-churning – and at times, shockingly racist.

When the novel first appeared in 1973, even the Right-wing Le Figaro – the newspaper for which Raspail wrote – panned The Camp Of The Saints. Left-wing papers refused to review it. The first print run failed to sell. In the US, when an English translation appeared, it was dismissed as a rant.

But the novel is prescient in two remarkable ways. Firstly, there’s the image of that tragic flotilla, running aground on an idyllic coastline.

Every day for the past ten years or more, this terrible picture has been a sad reality on the news.

His nightmare vision also accurately predicted how the West would react: tormented by liberal guilt and fashionable self-loathing, the Europeans turn on each other.

The migrants, ‘inspire immense pity,’ he writes. ‘They are weak. They are unarmed. They have the power of numbers. They are the object of our remorse and of the wet-blanket humanitarianism of our consciences. And now that they are here, are we going to receive them in our home, at the risk of encouraging other flotillas of unfortunates?’

An indecisive French government has no idea how to respond. It doesn’t know how to round them up and send them back. It dare not intern them in refugee camps. And the idea of sending the navy to sink their boats is barbaric.

Instead, it blames the ordinary French people for failing to welcome the immigrants.

As demonstrations and violence break out between locals and the new arrivals, the authorities issue an edict: ‘Anyone found to have incited discrimination, hatred, or violence against an individual or group of individuals on account of their origin or membership of a given ethnic group, nation, race, or religion shall be punished with one month to one year’s imprisonment and a fine ranging from 2,000 to 300,000 francs.’

This law applies to all printed matter. To make a comment in writing that might be construed as a threat is to commit a hate crime. Arguing against this rule is to invite public condemnation: ‘There are some types of unanimity that it is not wise to challenge.’

For Raspail to have thought of that, decades before the dawn of social media, is uncanny. He also predicts the politics of reparations, as the Vatican donates all its treasures to developing countries, a gesture that does not the slightest bit of good to anyone.

No wonder, in later life, the novelist wondered whether some unseen power had dictated the story to him as he wrote.

The novel begins with an elderly professor at his 300-year-old family home on a hill overlooking the tourist village where Raspail was holidaying. He has a telescope, and usually he likes to watch the water-skiers and sunbathing girls.

But today he can’t take his eyes off ‘the unbelievable rusty fleet... the holds and decks piled high in layers of human flesh... the dead floating around the hull, their white rags trailing on the surface of the water, corpses thrown overboard by the living’.

As he watches, a young man ‘with long, dirty blond hair’ sidles up to him and crows: ‘Isn’t it great?’ Giggling with excitement, the youth describes how his parents and sisters locked up their shop and fled the town this morning, afraid of being raped and murdered, ‘out of their wits with fear’. His farewell to his father, he brags, was to spit in his face.

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The young man has spent the morning looting empty houses and stuffing his face with food. ‘Tomorrow, we won’t recognise this country any more. It’s going to be reborn,’ he says.

‘My real family is all the people coming off those boats. Now I have a million brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. A million wives. I’ll have a child with the first one I see.’

Then he turns on the professor, promising to bring a legion of immigrants to live in his house. ‘They know nothing about what you are. Your world means nothing to them. They won’t try to understand.

‘They’ll be tired. They’ll be cold. They’ll build a fire with your lovely oak door. They’ll sh*t all over your terrace and wipe their hands on the books in your library. They’ll spit out your wine. Sitting on their haunches, they’ll watch as your armchairs go up in flames. What’s beautiful won’t be beautiful any more. Nothing will have any real value.’

The old man’s response is to take his shotgun and kill the youth with one blast to the chest. His bloody corpse lies there until the end of the book.

By then, the whole of France has descended into civil war, with many Europeans fighting on the side of the immigrants.

The West’s ‘resisters’ hole up in Switzerland but are eventually overrun. As the conflict becomes global, Israel collapses.

The Camp Of the Saints has been an underground success for half a century. Raspail met a Parisian taxi driver who told all his fares about the book, offering to find them a copy. He reckoned he sold about ten a day, splitting the proceeds with a book dealer who sent the novel out in a box tied in a ribbon.

Raspail, who died in 2020 aged 94, lived long enough to see his hideous prophecy come true – literally.

In February 2001, a cargo ship with no name and no flag ran aground on the French coast. On board were 1,000 Kurdish refugees. Just as the book described, the boat beached halfway between Cannes and Saint-Tropez... 60 yards from Jean Raspail’s villa, where he first looked out to sea and imagined the immigrant invasion.

The Camp Of The Saints by Jean Raspail is published by Vauban Books.