Jean Raspail published The Camp of the Saints in 1973, barely a decade after the collapse of France’s colonial empire. The novel’s vision of mass migration is inseparable from this history of imperial retreat. France’s defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 ended its control of Indochina, and independence movements intensified across its African and Caribbean territories. However, it was the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) that inflicted the deepest wound on French national identity.

Unlike other French colonies, Algeria was a legally integrated part of metropolitan France, organized into départements ostensibly identical to those of the mainland. In practice, this integration primarily served the European settler population: Algeria’s Muslim majority lived for decades under the apartheid Code de l'Indigénat, a separate legal regime that denied them basic civil rights; even after reforms, they voted in a segregated electoral college with drastically less representation. More than 1 million European settlers known as pieds-noirs nevertheless regarded Algeria as home, and their forced exodus in 1962 became a defining moment for the French right. Raspail cites it in the Preface as a precedent for the displacement he imagines. The novel transposes this historical moment onto a civilizational scale, envisioning a France overwhelmed by the arrival of the formerly colonized on its own shores.

The intellectual landscape of postcolonial France was profoundly shaped by thinkers from its former colonies, primarily the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), composed during the Algerian War, argues that decolonization necessarily entails violence because colonial domination itself rests on violence. Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface goes further, contending that justice demands Europe’s punitive subjugation by its former subjects. The Camp of the Saints engages with these ideas directly but reductively, framing its plot as a dramatization of Western guilt over colonialism taken to its logical extreme. Characters who advocate solidarity with the Global South are presented as agents of civilizational surrender, driven by what the Belgian consul calls bearing “witness against yourselves, like the jaded Westerners you are” (75). This framing collapses a complex anticolonial tradition, grounded in the material realities of exploitation across the Francophone world, into a simplistic narrative of self-destruction driven by guilt.

The novel also draws on the legacy of France’s far-right movements, which violently opposed decolonization. In 1961, a group of French generals launched a failed coup to prevent Algerian independence, and the Organisation Armée Secrète waged a terrorist campaign against Algerian nationalists and the French state. Raspail explicitly situates his fictional defenders within this lineage. Colonel Dragases and his men adopt a song linked to the paratroopers of the First Foreign Legion regiment “at Camp Zéralda as their unit was disbanded following the failed 1961 generals’ putsch against de Gaulle’s Algerian settlement” (315), framing Dragases and his armed resistance as the continuation of military opposition to decolonization. The founding of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in 1972, one year before publication, further anchors the text in this milieu. Le Pen, a veteran of both Indochina and Algeria, built his party on the resentments of pieds-noirs and former colonial soldiers, the same constituency whose worldview the novel dramatizes. The novel thus channels the anxieties of post-imperial France, recasting the loss of empire as demographic catastrophe and transforming the metropole into the contested frontier.