The landing itself takes roughly five minutes. The chapter skips over any images of people but lingers on the stench rising from the fleet that forces Panama Ranger’s followers to retreat in panic. The excrement motif again frames the migrants’ arrival as a biological event—a sensory assault that the text weaponizes rhetorically in its consistent use of Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology. This is consistent with what critical theorist Achille Mbembe identified as necropolitics, the sovereign logic that renders entire populations as biological threats to be managed or eliminated rather than human beings with political claims. Dragases gives his men the order to machine-gun the migrants who land first. Since these are people with disabilities or physical differences, he declares them too abhorrent to be tolerated and describes the killing as a symbolic act. The gunner completes the order but then dies by suicide. Dragases dismisses him as a corrupted, last-minute traitor who let empathy override his duty.

The Fontgembar monks rush to the dying migrants and perform emergency baptisms before being trampled to death by the advancing crowd. The narrator collapses the migrants into a force with no awareness outside of itself, arguing that the crowd’s indifference to the monks’ deaths was not hostility but an absolute absence of awareness that the West exists at all: “It was the one and only race; it could conceive of no other” (300). Dom Melchior and Chassal are swept away and eventually killed, which the narrator describes with contemptuous pity.

The Dalit man leading the fleet strangles Clément Dio on the beach. This is the only deliberate murder committed by the migrants. The narrator interprets the act as the migrants’ refusal to share victory with collaborators. Even here, the novel refuses to allow any of the migrants individuality; despite committing an individual act of violence, the Dalit man, defined throughout the novel by his association with excrement and physical difference, becomes only an instrument of ideological purification. The West’s progressive advocates are ironically killed by the civilization they championed, completing the novel’s argument that humanitarian solidarity is always self-defeating and unwanted by those it claims to serve.

Immediately after the last migrant reaches shore, a violent but localized storm descends on the coastal strip. The rain drives the crowd to break into every available building for shelter, and this act of forced entry transforms what had been impulsive movement into territorial possession. The narrator notes that official textbooks will later celebrate this moment as a model of collective organization while omitting any mention of the storm’s decisive role. The motif of future historical falsification runs throughout the novel: The new order, the text insists, will always suppress the accidental and the squalid in favor of a legitimizing myth.

When the storm passes, migrants emerge onto balconies and rooftops, survey the rich French countryside before them, and discover a conquering confidence. More than three-quarters set out northward, an event that future historians will term “The Conquest of the North” (309). The novel’s use of conquest vocabulary is ideologically deliberate. Throughout, the fleet has functioned as a symbol of the far-right fantasy that migration is military aggression, and here, that symbolism is explicitly confirmed. The migrants’ wonder at France’s prosperity is not rendered with any empathy. Their response to a country incomprehensibly wealthier than anything they have known is not treated as the reaction of people who survived extreme poverty and a brutal sea crossing, but as evidence of their alien relationship to a land they are now occupying.

Against the migrants’ “epic” of conquest, the narrator places the “anti-epic” of the fleeing French population. This description, which dignifies the migrants’ occupation while condemning the native population’s non-violent withdrawal, confirms the novel’s moral stance: A society that refuses to kill in its own defense is morally bankrupt. This claim is structurally identical to the premises underlying “Great Replacement” discourse, which claims that demographic change requires violent resistance to reverse. Sociologists and demographers broadly reject this as stemming from Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World.

As the storm dismantles the grounded fleet, the Catholic bishop—who spent the voyage in a comfortable haze under a smokestack—awakens alone on the Calcutta Star. Just then, the ship breaks apart beneath him, and he drowns. His death is rendered with the novel’s characteristic sardonic detachment: He calls for his “little ones,” finds no one, and is welcomed into heaven by a voice invoking the invented saints from the monks’ midnight procession, Baptian and Podiatron. The absurdist touch deflates any conventional religious pathos, reducing his death to a cosmic joke. His fate encapsulates the novel’s treatment of the progressive Church: He is not martyred for his beliefs but simply forgotten.

Two aircraft loaded with clergy arriving to welcome the migrants arrive at the Côte d’Azur airport: a white Vatican plane and a gray plane from the Ecumenical Council of Protestant Churches. They are there to symbolically surrender the keys of the West, and both crash in the storm with no survivors. The narrator sees this as divine accounting, observing that while God withheld a few minutes of grace from the fleet’s victims, he took his due all the same. This is political polemic barely dressed as fiction: Institutional religious bodies that endorse the West’s transformation are, in Raspail’s construction, obliterated at the very moment of their symbolic triumph. The novel’s consistent portrayal of the Catholic Church as a traitorous institution—a central thread in the theme of Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World—reaches its terminal expression here.

There is a rumor that Pope Benedict XVI was aboard the Vatican plane and died in the crash, which the narrator finds “really quite delightful” (314). This gleeful satisfaction positions Christian compassion as an enemy whose destruction can be aesthetically enjoyed. The sole witness to the crash is Calguès, watching through his telescope from the Village, which is now the last, tiny, self-congratulatory remnant of the defensible West.

While driving away from the beach toward the Village, Dragases and his 12 surviving soldiers remove their improvised face coverings and begin singing Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.” The colonel explains the song’s origin: It was sung by 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). The reference situates Dragases and his men within a specific lineage of far-right French militarism: the tradition of the Organisation Armée Secrète and its sympathizers, who regarded decolonization as betrayal and fought violently to prevent Algerian independence. The novel’s last Western defenders are thus heirs to a reactionary colonial military tradition, deepening the theme of Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent: The survivors self-consciously align with a defeated, minoritarian identity rooted in colonial violence.

On the road, the group picks up Luc Notaras, who escaped from prison when his guards deserted. Perret mockingly names him minister of the navy—a title without a navy, fleet, or sea. The comedy of this hollow appointment establishes the governing tone for the Village. When the group arrives, Calguès receives them from his balcony in his canvas jacket, having prepared an elaborate buffet while watching the events below through his telescope. The pyramids of sandwiches, cured meats, olives, and cognac ostentatiously perform Western cultural identity, asserting aesthetic domesticity. When the body of the young man Calguès shot the previous night (in Chapter 1) is discovered behind the tablecloth, Dragases agrees to dispose of it without ceremony. The conversation moves immediately to a toast. This casual handling of the corpse signals how thoroughly the group has rationalized the violence required to sustain their small sovereign space, establishing the logic that will govern the Village’s subsequent operations and consolidating the profile of Calguès as the novel’s aesthete of civilizational loss.

France’s fall triggers worldwide consequences. A few sentences provide updates on New York, London, South Africa, and ports across the Global South: Manhattan is overrun, London peacefully transferred to the Non-European Commonwealth Committee, South Africa has been erased as a white nation, and new fleets are departing for Australia and New Zealand. New York symbolizes Western intellectual culture in terminal stasis: As migrants climb his building, Dr. Norman Haller calculates the floors remaining between past and future; while the mayor chats helplessly on the phone, a Harlem child plays with his unloaded gun. The rapid vignettes globalize the novel’s racist invasion fantasy as a universal white catastrophe.

Several anecdotal episodes follow. The crew of the French liner Normandie welcomes 5,000 Filipino migrants who immediately ransack the ship, which is presented as proof that humanitarian sentiment is always destroyed by its recipients. With colonial paternalism, the migrants’ behavior is never imagined as the response of people encountering extreme abundance after extreme deprivation but always insistently seen as a natural expression of biological incompatibility. Marcel and Josiane voluntary surrender their apartment to their Arab neighbor, prompted by a radio announcement; for the narrator, this completes the ordinary French citizen’s arc from initial skepticism to final passivity at the hands of media manipulation.

The Multiracial People’s Assembly that convenes in Paris is described in the novel’s most explicitly satirical political register. A few white officials provide a semblance of legitimacy, but real authority belongs to the non-European delegates, whose collective disapproval directs all proceedings. The narrator describes these delegates in terms that repeat the novel’s Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology: They are undifferentiated, numerically overwhelming, and animal in their collective expression. White women in interracial marriages are singled out as speaking “in the name of death” (326), a phrase invoking the reproductive anxiety central to “Great Replacement” ideology. This pseudoscientific demographic panic is presented by the novel as a simple, observable fact.

The Village formalizes itself as a micro-state defined entirely by its capacity for organized killing. Four daily patrols cover a 10-kilometer perimeter, shooting any migrant or white person siding with the new order on sight. The kill tally replaces old town-hall notices of a firemen’s ball and marriage banns. Calguès, the Village’s minister of culture, files away these displaced documents as “a pious inventory of the past” (328). This gesture crystallizes Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent: The nation only exists as a set of records maintained by those who maintain a killing perimeter around its remnant.

Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics applies directly to the Village’s operations. Necropolitics describes the sovereign power to determine who may live and who must die, treating certain populations as threatening presences requiring physical elimination rather than as human beings with political claims. The Village enacts this logic with bureaucratic precision: The tally is posted publicly, updated daily, and categorized by type. The casual language of “hunting” and “game preserve” normalizes murder as pest control (328), a rhetorical normalization inseparable from the novel’s broader dehumanizing project throughout.

The arrival of Jules Machefer, the Duke d’Uras, Crillon, and Romégas from Fontgembar is staged as a comedy of appointments. Crillon and Romégas are designated “the people” and granted a mock right to form rival unions and carry protest signs. This farcical parody of democratic governance is comic relief as ideological argument—liberal democracy’s foundational concepts are presented as theatrical fictions that dissolve the instant genuine sovereign power is required. Calguès observes that the names Crillon, Romégas, and Dragases echo heroes of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, a Christian naval victory against the Ottoman fleet. By naming its characters in this way, the novel attempts to consecrate the Village’s murderous operations within a tradition of Western resistance—an example of how the novel constructs nationalist identity through historical mythologization.

Two new arrivals—Hamadura, the French radio caller from the former colony of Puducherry, and Sollacaro, a Corsican brothel owner—reach the Village after fighting their way through the surrounding population. Dragases interrogates a wounded gendarme who confirms that orders to suppress the Village come directly from General Fosse, now the provisional government’s interior minister. Dragases executes him, framing the killing as rational: Men who might have empathy for the enemy are more dangerous to the Village than the enemy itself. The execution illustrates how the project of Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent requires external violence and ideological purification.

Machefer recognizes Hamadura from a radio broadcast in which he warned against the fleet in explicitly denigrating terms. Hamadura now declares that “being white is not a question of skin color. It’s a state of mind” (336), allowing the novel to position allegiance to the Village as cultural rather than racial. This is a standard far-right rhetorical strategy: the inclusion of a token person of color to reframe an explicitly racially organized project as a matter of civilization or values, thereby deflecting charges of racism. The novel offers no critical examination of this move; Hamadura is made to endorse an ideology whose existence is built around the daily hunt tally, which remains entirely organized around racial categories. His character is thus what scholars of race identify as the ideologically useful exception trope, whose presence exempts a project from the scrutiny its logic would otherwise demand.

Perret drafts a decree retroactively suspending France’s 1973 anti-discrimination law to legalize the group’s murders. The colonel notes, accurately, that the suspension cuts both ways. Perret’s acidly sarcastic retort, “Before this past Sunday, I never would have guessed” (339), is offered as dark comedy. The exchange shows that the Village’s identity is a revolutionary act requiring the active destruction of existing legal and moral frameworks. This is the clearest demonstration of Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent—an identity built on the explicit repeal of the laws that once constrained it.

On the Thursday after Easter, a French jet strafes the Village’s town hall. Eighteen more appear in attack formation, followed by two additional squadrons. The surrounding countryside fills with crowds cutting off any escape. Dragases flatly presents the group’s options: an impossible breakout into the hostile mass or being destroyed by their own planes. The group chooses the latter without hesitation, as it is the conclusion they anticipated from the beginning. Perret turns to Sollacaro, the brothel owner appointed chaplain, for a prayer. The bombs fall before the prayer is completed, destroying the Village entirely and killing all 20 inhabitants.

Formal choices construct these deaths as martyrology: The group’s composed acceptance, their preference for a clean end at the hands of the French state over a chaotic one at the hands of migrants, and Dragases’ description of it as “a fitting conclusion” all serve to aestheticize and dignify their fate (340). The novel’s polemic reaches its endpoint here: The provisional French government, now wholly an instrument of the new order, turns its military against the last defenders of the old one. The state destroys the men its military tradition produced, completing the novel’s indictment of liberal governance as a self-destructive system that cannot protect even those who most faithfully serve it.

When gendarmes survey the ruins, the only intact object is the kill-tally board: 312 migrants and 66 white collaborators killed. The board’s survival amid total destruction is symbolic, presenting the bureaucratic record of mass murder as the Village’s sole and appropriate legacy. The in-memoriam list that closes the chapter names all 20 dead with full titles in a formal act of commemoration, elevating individuals who organized systematic killings into a roster of honored martyrs. By closing the Village narrative in this way, the novel consecrates violence as heroic sacrifice, embedding it within a structure of remembrance that forecloses criminal accountability.