In the president’s office in Paris, he and Perret listen to radio bulletins on the evening of Good Friday. The news reports a sharp divergence between the press, which uniformly calls for a humanitarian solution, and the French public, which is fleeing the south in mass panic. Perret notes that in opinion polls, people merely parrot “what they’ve been told they should say” (227), characterizing liberal public opinion as manufactured rather than genuine moral conviction. This rhetorical maneuver dismisses democratic consensus as the product of ideological conditioning. The novel imagines a hidden population whose true instincts are nativist, even as it presents no credible evidence for this claim.

The chapter’s treatment of the Pope, satirized as a Brazilian innovator who orders the sale of Vatican treasures to aid the migrants, exemplifies the novel’s hostility toward institutional Christianity as an agent of civilizational collapse. The pontiff’s serious theological position that “[c]harity […] is total or it does not exist at all” is mocked as fanaticism masquerading as virtue (228). Perret calls himself Catholic but considers the pontiff “an antipope”—an accusation common in far-right Catholic-identifying groups—illustrating how the novel selectively appropriates religious identity as a marker of civilizational loyalty while discarding its ethical content.

Perret provides an extended analysis of military demoralization—arguing that anti-colonial films, progressive media, and campaigns against genocide have caused the army to loathe itself. His argument, which the novel portrays as insider knowledge without proof, is that Western media’s critique of colonial violence has been a form of psychological warfare against French national will. This is presented as an authoritative diagnosis of civilizational decline. Once again, the novel frames historical accountability for colonial atrocity as a weapon deployed against the West rather than as a legitimate moral reckoning. The chapter ends with the president declaring his conscience clear and bidding Perret farewell; his personal resolve is the last ember of national authority.

At midnight on Easter Sunday, the migrants’ ships run aground on the French coast between Nice and Saint-Tropez. The Dalit man’s child lets out what the narrator describes as a triumphant cry; migrants continue their collective, wordless movements throughout the day and into the night. The armada’s grounding is rendered as an apocalyptic event, and the child’s cry—again depicted as an inhuman sound coming from a “monstrous” body—frames the moment as prophecy fulfilled. The novel consistently positions the migrants’ passive presence as an act of aggression. The novel again uses Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology by placing the child at the symbolic head of the migration and dwelling on the boy’s disabilities. The boy and his father are not held up as an admirable example of filial love and care but instead othered to eliminate any possibility of negotiated encounter or human recognition.

The president meets with his assembled cabinet of advisors, which he systematically dissolves. To the generals, he reveals that of 200,000 soldiers sent south, only 20,000 arrived because the rest deserted. As he publicly dismisses prefects, cabinet ministers, and ambassadors, the president is characterized as a man who has seen through all institutional pretense. The president then appoints Dragases as commander-in-chief and strips every other official of authority, consolidating meaningful power in the one figure the novel characterizes as capable of action. In the novel’s politics, legitimate authority is not constitutional but military, residing in those willing to use lethal force rather than in deliberative bodies.

The chapter closes with the image of Calguès, the literature professor from Chapter 1, alone on his patio as he waits for the president’s midnight speech. A counterpoint to institutional chaos, he sits with composure; his glass of rosé and book mark him as representative of an individualist cultural inheritance that persists even as collective structures fail.

The terseness of the radio bulletins is unusual in a society normally characterized by “verbal frenzy”; language becomes a site of crisis, suggesting that the West has talked itself into immobilization, reinforcing the novel’s dismissal of democratic discourse as noise.

The crisis grows outward from France to the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Australia. The governments of these three nations independently conclude that if France capitulates, the entire Western order will collapse in a chain reaction. The armada is thus the first domino in a global racial reorganization, a premise that encodes the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory: Demographic change is coordinated, directional, and existentially threatening to white-majority nations. In an aside, the narrator notes that the three nations’ telegrams urging France to use force would be displayed in a future “Museum of Antiracism” in Hanoi (238). This ostensibly dark foreshadowing frames border defense as retrospectively criminalized, constructing a martyrology of Western nations punished for self-preservation.

In Manchester, tens of thousands of South Asian and Caribbean passengers flood the train station, purchasing tickets through proper channels and behaving with what the narrator repeatedly characterizes as exemplary propriety. White passengers voluntarily leave the station without incident or confrontation. This “seal[s] England’s fate” (239), exemplifying how the novel constructs people of color as a threat through presence alone: The travelers commit no transgression yet are depicted as conducting existential conquest. In the novel’s conspiratorial agenda, the absence of any hostile act is not evidence of peaceful coexistence but proof of a more insidious takeover that Western liberal norms are powerless to name or resist.

Would-be migrants in Africa mass at the Limpopo River, and a fleet forms in Jakarta, Indonesia, as the novel catastrophizes a global insurgency to fuel readers’ Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World. Meanwhile, Marcel and Josiane see their neighbors’ “big eyes full of envy, shining with hope” (241), suggesting that the threat has already contaminated white homes. This imagery recapitulates the novel’s metaphor of the sovereign body of the nation-state as a biological organism that can be infiltrated.

Dio is in the locked bathroom of the Hotel Préjoly, where he has been confined for several hours while his lover Iris Nan-Chan is raped by escaped prisoners below. When they first arrived at the hotel, Dio was initially celebrated by the inmates as an advocate who had humanized prison conditions, but once the men became drunk, the politics of solidarity collapsed into predatory violence. One prisoner frames the assault explicitly as class revenge, accusing Dio of profiting from prisoners’ suffering while performing solidarity—a charge that the novel considers simultaneously cynical and not entirely wrong.

The gang rape of Iris is the novel’s punishment of collaborationists, continuing its pattern of depicting sexual violence as a racial threat to white women and a fitting fate for women of color. Iris’s biracial heritage is misogynistically portrayed as bifurcating into these deserving and violated identities: “[H]er Western half c[a]n’t take any more” (219), but her Asian side looks on. Women’s bodies in the novel function as the medium through which ideological arguments about civilizational weakness are settled. Iris has no interiority in this sequence; she exists entirely as the site of consequence. Meanwhile, Dio, the progressive intellectual who championed open borders and prison reform, is made to endure Iris’s torture at the hands of the very men he defended. The novel gleefully imagines liberal advocacy producing chaos that victimizes its architects.

Dio finds Iris unconscious in the bar, naked, having taken a bottle of sleeping pills to die by suicide. The radio announces the president’s address. The juxtaposition is structurally significant: The nation’s leader prepares to speak while the most prominent voice of progressive media sits in the wreckage, his stated values reduced to their material consequences. The novel positions this tragedy as ironic justice, working to preclude readers from empathizing with images of human suffering.

At midnight, as the president begins to speak, the narrator sweeps a figurative spotlight across France and the world. The narrator considers the nature of an “anti-epic,” in which the loser takes all. The novel thus metafictionally defines itself as an epic of defeat, subverting a form that has historically celebrated conquest. Raspail frames civilizational decline as inherently mythic and therefore inevitable, naturalizing the outcome he is simultaneously presenting as a catastrophe.

Albert Durfort, who spent weeks broadcasting about humanitarian solidarity, is robbed and killed on the side of the road while fleeing to Switzerland. The novel presents this as cosmic irony: The man who performed compassion on air dies in the disorder that his rhetoric helped enable. The text repeatedly shows progressive figures consumed by the forces they champion, a form of narrative retribution that is endorsed without question. Durfort’s companion, a woman of color from Martinique, is raped—a plot point that again positions sexual assault of a woman’s body as deserved ideological consequence.

The narrator assembles the novel’s major characters in suspended panoramic anticipation. Dragases is on the shore with 10,000 men, Perret is managing a collapsing state, Orelle holds an old revolver, Josiane counts her furniture, and Hamadura loads hunting rifles into his car. This array sorts characters according to their capacity for decisive action and implicitly ranks them according to the novel’s values. The One-Eyed Cadi counseling patience from an Arab bar in Paris and African workers chanting in cellars are presented as a homogenous, coordinated, unindividuated force in another example of how the novel consistently renders collective action by people of color as a menace, reinforcing the theme of “West” and “East” as Manufactured Identities.

Chapter 37 is the president’s midnight address, rendered almost entirely as direct speech. The speech is divided into two distinct sections by a 30-second silence. In the first section, the president speaks in a “solemn and forceful” voice (252), acknowledging the migrants’ tragic circumstances while arguing that “cowardice in the face of weakness” (253)—i.e., pitying the migrants’ condition or sympathizing with them—is itself a lethal form of cowardice. He formally orders the army to resist the landing. This passage confirms the novel’s thesis that the liberal-humanitarian response of compassion to mass migration is a moral failure that guarantees civilizational destruction. The president here is presented as the one figure capable of showing political courage via authoritarian violence.

The younger generation reacts to the first part of the speech with the inspired sense that they have “never heard anything like it” (252). However, their newfound self-awareness comes too late. The narrator’s parenthetical hope that God might “restore whites to their proper place on the day of the Last Judgment” is a moment of naked racism (252). The narrator’s intrusion clarifies that the text’s perspective is not satirical but sincere.

After a 30-second silence, the president resumes; during the improvised second section of his speech, his voice is “weaker,” and he tells every soldier to “weigh this dreadful mission for themselves, and to feel free to accept or refuse it” (254). The narrator characterizes this as the moment when the president’s conscience overrides his political will. Within the novel’s ideology, this exemplifies Western self-destruction: The nation-state voluntarily dissolves its monopoly on violence by individualizing what should be collective military duty. The novel treats this abdication of sovereignty as the definitive symptom of a civilization that has lost the will to reproduce itself politically and militarily.

In the hours between the president’s speech and approaching dawn, Jean Orelle dies in Paris, and Colonel Dragases completes France’s last military actions on the coast.

Orelle, a Nobel laureate and career-long spokesman for progressive causes, recognizes that the president’s will has broken. He requests that Mozart’s Requiem be played on the radio and dies by suicide with an old Soviet revolver. He leaves a note that reads, “Might as well water them myself” (256)—an allusion to the French revolutionary song and national anthem “La Marseillaise” that his biographers fail to decode. The narrator ironizes this as the final, self-aware gesture of a man who understands that his life’s work has contributed to the nation’s dissolution. Playing into Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent, Orelle symbolizes the voluntary self-erasure of the ideological type that the novel holds most responsible for France’s predicament: the well-intentioned progressive intellectual.

The narrator compares the political temperament of the left versus the right, arguing that the right “is not serious” and embraces tradition as self-aware theater, while the left is “deadly earnest” and incapable of humor (258). This is ideological polemic disguised as cultural observation, casting reactionary nationalism as a kind of gallant, ironic performance and progressive politics as humorless authoritarianism. It also functions to insulate Dragases and his men from critique: Because they embrace their situation with dark humor, they are positioned as morally sophisticated.

On the beach, Dragases’s small force faces the pacifist Panama Ranger and his crew, as well as the more distant migrants; even before any military action, Dragases keeps losing men who defect to Ranger’s men and otherwise desert. Then, Ranger’s group destroys five tanks in a battle that culminates in Commander de Poudis’s death. The fight is narrated as an honorable duel between worthy opponents—the only moment in the novel where a figure from the opposing side is granted a degree of individual dignity. This exception has ideological logic: Panama Ranger’s gang earns narrative respect because their confrontation approximates a recognizable combat tradition. The migrants, by contrast, remain an undifferentiated mass throughout, denied the novel’s only path to individual recognition—martial valor.

There are spontaneous uprisings in French factories in the hours before dawn—workplace killings illustrating the domestic eruption of the global crisis. In the chapter’s most extreme sequence, at the Olo pork-packing plant, three African workers kill a white assistant manager and process his body on the production line. The novel frames this as paradigmatic of the new order; the absurd worker-priest who prays, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do” (266), underscores the moral bankruptcy of progressive Christianity. The novel often depicts the use of liturgical language to sanction or neutralize violence against white people. It is critical to recognize that this ostensible satire serves the novel’s frequent Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology: The killers, people of color, are rendered as a biological social force, not as individuals with comprehensible motivations shaped by historical exploitation.

At the Billancourt auto plants, a timekeeper is crushed in an industrial press in a ritual described as quasi-liturgical sacrifice, extending the novel’s framework of “necropolitics”—the idea, developed by scholar Achille Mbembe, that sovereignty is ultimately expressed through the power to decide who lives and who dies. In the novel, workers of color emerge as newly empowered agents of death, but the narrative denies them genuine political subjectivity: They act through an unreasoned “unconscious drive” framed as a biological inevitability.

In Saint-Germain, Black students occupy the boulevard, and educated African elites manipulate frightened white bourgeois Parisians into sharing their apartments, an episode narrated with satirical relish.

The chapter closes with an extended digression on school busing in the United States, which the narrator treats as the root of a global policy of racial reorganization. This rhetorical move—tracing contemporary social policy back to a single origin point and presenting it as the coordinated destruction of Western civilization—is characteristic of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy framework, here embedded within what presents itself as historical narrative.