Remembering Jean Raspail

 From Chronicles:

Like many writers and artists, Jean Raspail eludes easy typecasting. He’s most famous for The Camp of the Saints, a novel that careless readers interpret as a xenophobic screed. Yet he made his reputation as a writer of travel stories, recounting the plights of vanishing aboriginal peoples around the world, in a tenor akin to other postcolonial writers. He was certainly a Catholic traditionalist, but he drew insights from other religions. Because he was never involved in politics and his books aren’t really about politics, it’s hard to classify him as a man of the political right. “I’m a novelist,” he wrote in an earlier preface for The Camp of the Saints. “I don’t have a theory and I don’t have a system or ideology to offer or to defend.” 

Nevertheless, Raspail’s works do evince “metapolitics,” what Joseph de Maistre called the “metaphysics of politics.” They show the intuitions and insights required to grasp deeper realities, or at the very least, identify the ones that are missing from the present. For the first time in a generation, English speakers can discover Raspail’s metapolitics for themselves. His most famous novel, The Camp of the Saints, is now back in print, with a fresh new English translation by Ethan Rundell published by Vauban Books. Read alongside Raspail’s other works, it captures his determination to preserve and pass on the best of Western civilization, especially during moments of catastrophe.

Jean Raspail was born in 1925 in Chemillé-sur-Dême, a town in the Loire Valley. The youngest of four children, he was a solitary child: by the time he was eight, his siblings had married and left the house. His family, bourgeois and Catholic, was well-connected to Parisian commercial and civic life, and so he grew up in the city’s affluent 16^th arrondissement, attending the best Catholic schools. 

Raspail, however, never felt at home in this milieu. A restless student, he found his summer vacations spent outside the city far more formative. They nourished his provincial roots and his imaginative connections to the distant past. Legend had it that the family was descended from Visigoths vanquished by the Frankish armies of Clovis in 507. Tall, blue-eyed, and fair-haired, Raspail seemed to embody that ancient heritage that endured long after defeat.

Scoutisme, the French Scouting movement, played a particularly important role in forming his character. Now best known for teaching leadership and appreciation for the outdoors, Robert Baden-Powell’s scouting movement was, in fact, founded upon Christian virtues and practice. Unlike many other scouting movements, French scouting embraced Baden-Powell’s explicitly spiritual outlook. The Scouts de France was founded in 1920 by the Jesuit priest Fr. Jacques Sevin, who was later beatified. It blended the precepts of scouting, Catholicism, and the nation’s oldest chivalric customs. Properly done, scoutisme was meant to turn fidgety boys into self-disciplined men, whose love of adventure and pursuit of the noble are coupled with a mission to help others discover their roots and origins. Whereas French schooling failed to shape Raspail, scoutisme did. (Read more.)