The migrant fleet rounds the Cape and enters the Atlantic. A moderate press campaign proposes South Africa as an alternative destination for the migrants. When this triggers a public outcry against apartheid, the South African president responds with an unvarnished press conference, declaring his nation a white state, calling the fleet a symbol of revenge, and confirming that he will fire on it if necessary. His admission that he would do so “with a heavy heart” circles the globe and generates mockery (166).

The South African president’s press conference is the chapter’s ideological centerpiece. The narrator depicts him as the only figure speaking with practical clarity, even while acknowledging his racism. Valorizing authoritarian directness over liberal indecision is characteristic of far-right political discourse, where state violence is naturalized as pragmatism and its critics are dismissed as sentimentalists. The global ridicule directed at his “heavy heart” admission is presented by the narrator not as legitimate moral condemnation of a man who governs by apartheid and threatens to bomb civilian ships, but as evidence of a Western civilization too emotionally debilitated to distinguish sentiment from policy. This is a central expression of Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World, where liberal humanitarianism is consistently coded as the mechanism of civilizational self-destruction.

Meanwhile, Clément Dio writes a song for the elderly Black singer Esther Bacouba. “The Last Chance Ballad,” a religious hymn, becomes an international hit, symbolizing manufactured progressive consensus. The song—in which Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian deities unite to transfer the Christian God’s kingdom to the armada—saturates every register of cultural life, from cathedrals to jukeboxes to truckers’ overnight drives. The narrator presents this saturation as evidence of how media pacifies whole populations, rendering them incapable of resistance.

Days later, the South African navy quietly resupplies the armada. When the migrants throw all the aid into the sea, Western press headlines spin the rejection as supporting their humanitarian narrative. The migrants’ rejection of South African food and water is labeled by the narrator as proof of the “intelligence of the beast” that is the progressive coalition (172). According to the novel, the migrants’ refusal of aid is a cunning and tactically brilliant maneuver by external forces rather than the act of people aboard the ships exercising autonomy.

Fifteen days later, there is a children’s art exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris and a failed. Minister Jean Orelle publicly praises the children’s art while privately registering a visceral dread at the paintings’ depiction of a racially merged humanity (“a black foot, a white one, a black calf, a white one, a black thigh, a white one, and so on and so forth all the way up to its face” [174])—a split between performance and private terror that the novel presents as characteristic of liberal elites.

Meanwhile, as public opinion consolidates around the migrants’ cause, the Rome Commission conceives of orchestrating an airlift in São Tomé, whose coast the fleet will skirt. The intention is to resupply the migrants. A celebrity telethon hosted by entertainer Léo Béon raises funds for the airlift. There is a contest for the chance to witness the airlift; the contest winner, a hairdresser from Saint-Tropez named Poupas Stéphane-Patrice, becomes a minor celebrity. In a flash-forward, the narrator notes that this same man will flee Saint-Tropez on foot on Easter Monday and be struck by cars driven by desperate motorists fleeing the fleet. The narrator uses this structure to preemptively punish humanitarian universalism before the narrative delivers that punishment directly.

The failed São Tomé airlift is a satirical parade of Western humanitarian actors. The Vatican’s white plane arrives first, sent by a pope whose cultivated poverty is framed as a media strategy. The Ecumenical Council of Churches’ plane carries Protestant pastors who have publicly called for the destruction of Western society. An Order of Malta Boeing delivers elderly aristocrats and a princess who wants to kiss the “poor little dears” (177). A British pop group unloads marijuana, erotic books, and fireworks as their contribution. By rendering each humanitarian institution as vain, deluded, or actively treasonous, the narrator positions compassion itself as a symptom of civilizational pathology. The theme of “West” and “East” as Manufactured Identities operates throughout this sequence, with the “West” defined through the satirical demolition of its own humanitarian self-image rather than through any positive content.

The fleet violently rejects all aid. The would-be humanitarians discover a strangled corpse identified as a prominent Catholic intellectual who had converted to Buddhism and boarded the fleet in Calcutta. The Vatican decides to suppress knowledge of the murder, on the grounds that public outrage might turn sentiment against the migrants—a turn the novel depicts as the Church’s ultimate betrayal of truth. Léo Béon’s press-conference quip—“We must win over woe” (183)—is treated with layered contempt: The narrator mocks it as celebrity vapidity; Clément Dio privately calls Béon a fool but then uses the phrase as his next cover story headline. The narrator locates in Marcel and Josiane’s sleepless unease during all of this “the first stirrings of panic” (180), framing their vague dissatisfaction as the first authentic crack in the manufactured consensus surrounding them.

The Duke of Uras, an elderly Order of Malta volunteer who commanded the pontifical barge at São Tomé, arrives at Machefer’s office with a stack of morning papers and a firsthand account that contradicts every mainstream report. He describes the armada’s deliberate hostility, the knives and raised fists that the press coverage omitted, and his exchange with the Dominican friar Father Agnellu, who insisted that some facts must be suppressed as a matter of divine will. When the duke later confronted Agnellu about the strangled corpse on the beach, the friar denied all knowledge. Machefer prints 100,000 copies of the duke’s account, pays cash upfront, and runs a headline the following day attributing the beach-side murder to racial hatred. The print shop halts production after 10,000 copies under union orders, citing overtime restrictions. Machefer is effectively silenced again.

The union strike functions as a symbol of institutional power weaponized to suppress dissent. The print-shop foreman’s claim that a labor-rights matter prevented printing more than 10,000 copies of the duke’s testimony is declared a lie disguising a political decision as procedural neutrality. This suggestion of conspiracy without any shred of proof is typical of the novel’s process. The novel paints organized labor as an agent of civilizational censorship, part of a broader rhetorical strategy of casting all of liberal civil society—unions, the progressive press, religious institutions, international bodies—as a coordinated system of suppression. Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent is visible here: Machefer’s attempt to narrate the nation into resistance is blocked by the institutions that regulate access to cultural production.

Father Agnellu’s willingness to lie under oath extends the novel’s portrait of institutional religion as corruption. The chapter closes with the mainstream press discrediting the duke and promoting Agnellu, followed by a proliferating wave of petitions calling for the fleet’s welcome. The narrator bitterly observes that by Easter Saturday, many of these petition signatories will flee the situation they claim to welcome. Humanitarian commitment is cast as a performance that dissolves at the first encounter with material consequence.

The Rome Commission convenes on Palm Sunday in a closed session, having privately abandoned further humanitarian aid after receiving accurate intelligence from its own secret agents—information it deliberately suppressed in favor of public narratives of solidarity and concern. This institutional dishonesty is par for the novel’s course: The narrator points out that one does not advance a career in international organizations by relying on the “truth” the novel puts forth. The novel couches global humanitarianism as a system that sustains comfortable fictions. In keeping with Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World, liberal institutions are depicted as incapable of honest engagement with existential threats.

The British delegate advocates sending the fleet back by force—boarding the ships and firing if necessary. He euphemizes this proposal through an extended metaphor of a schoolmaster boxing the ears of an unruly child. This colonial paternalism positions the migrants as wards requiring physical correction, invoking the governing logic of British imperial administration. Britain then declines to execute the proposal, citing diplomatic relations with India, while Italy defers to the Vatican. The novel thus satirically enacts Western incapacity: Nations articulate the use of force but constitutionally cannot apply it.

France, meanwhile, makes a secret agreement to dispatch the Destroyer Escort 322 on an unspecified top-secret mission. Yet even this decision is hidden from the cabinet, replicating the pattern in which effective action must be concealed from democratic deliberation because national survival requires the suspension of transparent governance. At the commission’s final meeting on Easter Saturday, all pretense of authority dissolves into “every man for himself” (191). The narrator satirizes the fact that the body created to manage the crisis has ceased to function, as Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent reveals itself in the collapse.

The mission of Escort 322 turns out to be delivering its captain, Commander de Poudis, to the port of Dakar, Senegal. He is incognito in civilian clothes; unmarked cars take him to a military plane that delivers him directly to the president at the Elysée Palace in Paris. The elaborate concealment of his transport signals the political stakes of what he carries: evidence of the French military’s psychological incapacity. The narrator is uncertain whether Western soldiers have the psychological disposition to use violence against the migrants.

To determine what the president euphemizes as “the atmosphere,” Poudis undertook his mission in three phases. First, he paraded the escort ship along the full length of the migrants’ fleet with his crew on deck. Witnessing the migrants’ conditions silenced his men. Although his account of the fleet accumulates details of bodies and filth to perform Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology, Poudis also notes unexpected beauty. The moment when a specific woman aboard the Calcutta Star briefly holds his gaze is a surprisingly humanizing passage: Poudis reflects that, given her expression, he “would have preferred a thousand times over that she hadn’t turned round” (196). Poudis thus enacts what the novel considers the problem of individual subjectivity: The recognition of a migrant as a human being destroys Western military resolve, which is why the novel holds up its dehumanizing logic as key.

Poudis’s second and third phases confirm the military’s dysfunction. During simulated combat preparations, gun stations one by one announced refusal to fire, creating “a ship of mutineers” (198). During the boarding operation, a commando unit of 43 men was engulfed by a physically immovable “wall of flesh” (200), and two seamen were trampled to death. The migrants’ passivity was more threatening than armed resistance because it denied soldiers a recognizable adversary and rendered violence against unarmed people morally visible.

Poudis concludes that his ship is now “a body without a soul” (201). France’s only remaining options are capitulation or mass killing followed by death by suicide. On direct questioning, Poudis refuses to confirm that he would carry out a torpedo order. His quietly adds that one of the trampled seamen was his own son. This personal tragedy provides the president with the political license to hand Perret unchecked authority to prepare the army.

The narrator aligns the armada’s arrival at the European threshold with the Christian liturgical calendar. At three o’clock in the afternoon on Good Friday, the canonical hour of the Crucifixion in Catholic tradition, the fleet passes through the Strait of Gibraltar and enters the Mediterranean. The migrants respond with a collective physical display: Thousands of arms rise simultaneously, and a sustained chant begins that the narrator states will not cease until Easter Monday, the moment of the landing. Linking the armada’s progress with the arc of Christian Holy Week is a structural choice that deliberately sets the migrants’ approach up as an inversion of Christian redemptive narrative—a dark liturgy mirroring and corrupting the Passion.

Simultaneously, the child leading the ships has a violent spasm and appears to go lifeless. The narrator claims that this is somehow visible to the entire fleet, triggering a triumphal chant across every deck. The child functions throughout the novel as a non-verbal oracle whose body registers the fleet’s collective spiritual condition. His apparent death at the hour of the Passion turns him into a sinister inversion of the crucified Christ: a figure whose suffering energizes those who witness it. This inversion is central to Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology: By substituting the “monstrous” for the sacred, the text frames the migrants’ movement as a desecration of Western civilization’s spiritual foundation. The narrator then flashes forward to the child’s cry at the eventual landing—a temporal distortion that makes the novel into a prophetic countdown rather than a realistic narrative.

News of the fleet’s passage through Gibraltar reverberates across Spain on Good Friday. Raspail uses Spain’s reception of this news for a broad cultural argument. Secular Good Friday processions—described as having turned into folkloric tourist spectacles—briefly recover what the narrator calls their “old spirit”: Genuflecting crowds suddenly sing hymns with apparent conviction. However, the processions are soon replaced by the mass evacuation of Spain’s Mediterranean coast as highways fill with cars heading inland. Fleeing the fleet is seen as confirmation that withdrawal is Europe’s sole response to civilizational threat, with resistance as a vanishing exception.

Approximately 20 strangled corpses are discovered on a beach near Gata, Croatia. The victims are white Europeans, three Chinese men, and a biracial American. The narrator interprets this as the migrants purging non-Indian collaborators before reaching Europe, presenting the fleet “in the diamantine purity of its race” (205). This racial essentialism is an overt projection of white-nationalist ideology onto a non-Western collective. By constructing the migrants as practitioners of racial exclusion, the novel rhetorically legitimates the stance it advocates for Western nations, presenting racial purity as a universal instinct rather than a historically specific far-right ideology.

The chapter ends by juxtaposing two broadcasters. Albert Durfort flees to Switzerland with gold and his mistress, with Iris Nan-Chan in tow; since he has so far symbolized humanitarian rhetoric, this nakedly self-interested move confirms the narrator’s claim that humanitarian impulses are an inauthentic pose. His replacement, Pierre Senconac, broadcasts an urgent call for the French to close their doors and “be hard, be tough” (206), with the narrator’s approval. Underscoring the new message, working-class Marcel and Josiane worry about an Arab family on their apartment-building floor; their emerging racism is presented as the suppressed common sense of ordinary French citizens. The novel thus offers exclusionary nativism as the only remaining form of honesty.

The final three days of the fleet’s voyage are grim. The death rate rises sharply after the ships cross the Strait of Gibraltar between the European and African continents. The narrator attributes this partly to the deliberate withholding of food and water from the weakest passengers—“the old, the infirm, the abnormal children” (207)—so that the strongest survive to make landfall. The narrator endorses this reasoning, framing it as sound and invoking the claim that the hardiest populations are those in which natural selection “still swings freely” (208). This social Darwinist logic can be read through French philosopher Michel Foucault’s framework of biopolitics, or the management of populations through the control of life itself. Here, the power to determine who lives and who dies becomes a core mechanism of governance. The novel attributes this calculus to the migrants, implicitly critiquing the West’s failure to perform the same reckoning at its own borders. The effect is to present mass death as rational optimization, stripping the dying of any claim to moral consideration.

The only white man remaining on the fleet is a Catholic bishop. Having gradually become mentally unwell, he spends his days issuing blessings to a crowd that laughs at him. At night, elderly women on the ship sexually stimulate him, which the narrator portrays as emblematic of traditional practice: “India is generous with these kinds of pleasure” (209). The bishop’s phallus becomes an object of collective veneration. This episode functions as an Orientalist fantasy as defined by American scholar Edward Said: The non-Western world is rendered as a space beyond Western moral categories, simultaneously hypersexualized and used to stage the degradation of European spiritual authority. The bishop’s dissolution—his Christian ecclesiastical identity replaced by a new, sexually defined holiness—enacts Western civilization’s absorption and subordination by a world delineating “West” and “East” as Manufactured Identities. The serene horror of the scene dehumanizes both the bishop and the migrants.