Some writers are unjustly known for one book, no matter how many excellent works they may have written. Such has been the case—in the Anglosphere at least—for the prolific French novelist, travel writer, and explorer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) who had a fifty-year literary career, producing about forty books. That said, five of Raspail’s books have been translated into English over the past sixty years, which is probably a better average than most contemporary French writers.
The one book for which Raspail is known is, of course, his 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, which first appeared in English in 1975 and which has become a kind of ideological sounding board (an appreciation by Robin Harris of Camp of the Saints and Raspail appeared in the Winter 2024 print edition of The European Conservative). There is talk of a new edition of this novel, featuring a fresh English translation, appearing in the near future. Usually falsely derided as a racist work, Saints great fault today seems to be that it was eerily prescient, not only that mass, uncontrolled migration would come to the West from the Global South—not much of a prediction there—but that the powers that be in the West would either welcome this invasion or that they would prove to be morally, technically, and politically incapable of stopping this from happening. Nevertheless, Raspail’s most notorious book is but a small part of his legacy.
Admirers of Raspail’s work are now fortunate indeed to have a new translation of his 1979 novel Septentrion. Published by the quirky and delightful Sunny Lou Publishing Company (“publishing resplendent and stercoraceous books”) of Portland, Oregon, and translated by poet Richard Robinson, it is an important work, giving the English reader access, at last, to additional elements of the much-misunderstood Frenchman’s world view. Sunny Lou Publishing is producing an amazing catalogue of original and translated works, mostly from French, including much of the previously unavailable work of the astonishing Léon Bloy. Robinson’s translations of Bloy led to the translation of this Raspail novel, when one reviewer compared the two writers as both being protean literary figures who very much swam against the current.
Septentrion is, like Camp of the Saints, a kind of futuristic dystopian novel. But it is a strange, beautiful, and elusive nightmare of a dystopia coupled with a bravura exercise in mythic world building, a world something like ours yet skewed, set in a lovely, lost northern version of an eternal, seemingly pre-war Mitteleuropa. The novel purports to be a found document, an old manuscript of past, forgotten events discovered in the future—in 2041—of a world that no longer exists. Although it is a standalone novel, Septentrion shares an obvious connection with three later (still untranslated) major Raspail novels, Sept cavaliers (1993), Hurrah Zara! (1998), and Les Royaumes de Borée (2003). One might call them the Pikkendorf quartet, after an obscure, old Germanic family—ruined, royalists, reactionaries—spread across Europe, whose members appear in one guise or another, sometimes merely in passing, in much of the author’s work. Raspail’s official website has a delightfully detailed, fake prosopography of the imaginary Pikkendorfs, including their Prussian, French, English, and Baltic branches.
If Saints is about invasion from outside, Septentrion is about invasion from within, where “everything changed in a vague and hazy way.” Saint-Basile, the capital of the region of Septentrion, begins to be cut off from the outside world, and it is clear something is happening. Communications fail, and phone calls with distant friends are somehow off: empty, shallow, emotionless. It is both a type of revolution and an empty, greying, and uniforming sameness of the world that progresses with an inexorable creeping: “We understood barely that a sort of different eternity was advancing rapidly.” This change, for many, leads to paralysis or complacency. Only a handful of individuals are aware and alert enough to fight the creeping paralysis. One French critic compared the work to Stephen King’s novella The Langoliers (1990), but there are echoes here of earlier, classic works of speculative fiction: Jack Finney’s Body Snatchers (1954) or Heinlein’s Puppet Masters (1951). Yet this is not science fiction but fantasy, where a quiet catastrophe has taken place: “Thus had perished, from one nation to another, the taste for singularity, the thirst for fundamental difference.” This contagion is both found outside and within individuals and society, and few can even resist.
A heterogenous group of survivors makes up a last armoured train escaping the falling city, an aristocracy of the soul rather than of blood: some hussars and dragoons, a mad priest, a writer, some young women, and a handful of children—one child an heir to the old princely family—all are of European descent except for a couple of Mongol retainers. The train is “Pacific 231 … the yellow and gold train of the elect.” They are a “crusade on wheels,” carrying with them “memories of a dead world.” They are “a sort of Graal.”
We carry it within ourselves, to the north, over and beyond the steppes, the forests and all that adorns this planet. Who knows whether, one century or another in the future, someone will go off in search of it? Perceval, Galahad are dead without descendants.
They take the last bell of an old church with them. One of those that remain behind gives the narrator a book, Peter Fleming’s The Fate of Admiral Kolchak, about the commander in the anti-Bolshevik White Russian army. It is July and August, and yet the days grow darker and shorter as they head north in increasingly desolate and abandoned landscapes. Here are echoes of the real life ‘Great Siberian Ice March’ during the Russian Civil War of 1919-1920, as Admiral Kolchak and his battered, bleeding, and freezing troops retreated two thousand kilometres in mid-winter across the length of Russia, from Omsk to Chita, trying to escape from the advancing Reds.
The Septentrion survivors are being pursued, and there is a real, deadly threat both inside and out: war, nature, the cold, themselves, and the threat of forgetting who they are. They may have potential allies in the elusive “Djungar, Khan of the Oumiates,” an echo of the historic real life Dzungar or Junggar people, the westernmost of the Mongols who ranged into Siberia and Central Asia. Unsurprisingly for someone like Raspail, who has written so powerfully about surviving and perishing indigenous cultures (including European ones), there are beautiful passages recalling the stand of native peoples on the island of Hispaniola and Patagonia, the latter a favourite venue in Raspail’s writing for decades.
It is a fight for survival; but most of all, this is a time for fleeing: “The time of last-ditch efforts and gallant stands is passed … the only thing left is to keep running.” In this fever dream or midwinter madness of a journey, Raspail shows modern, western man at war with himself—we who have destroyed and submerged ourselves and forgotten who are. In Saints, the critics all too often focused on the antagonist—the millions pouring in—rather than the protagonists, the small, doughty platoon that remain faithful, like the last Roman legionnaires. Here too in Septentrion, there is in the end only a small and forlorn band, assuredly heroic and determined, their future unsure and probably grim. All others have forgotten: they have been submerged and become part of the grey and uniform mass, the herd. One recalls Evola’s old lines of that “man of the resistance, of the man standing up among the ruins.” It is perhaps not surprising that, in contrast, post-modern intellectual Yuval Noah Harari—a grey man of the future if there ever were one—says that the most important quality to survive in the 21st century is to forget, “to let go.”
I agree with Raspail scholar Philippe Hemsen that much of Raspail’s work (although I have not read all of it) represents a certain “attitude,” a spirit of resistance, of a strong backbone, a determined face set against the spirit of the age, against ever “letting go.” This is a vision to be expected in a man who was as fearless in his writing as he was in his taste for adventure in distant regions—a gentle, courtly figure, yet one with deep principles. As both royalist and traditional Catholic, a proud reactionary of the first water, he lived in the flesh the courage of his convictions in a world often marked by craven cowardice.
In an interview with The European Conservative, translator Richard Robinson noted that, unlike the fiery Bloy, the real-life Raspail was an elegant, gentle, and soft-spoken figure—but he had something he really needed to say.
One of the main themes of the entirety of Raspail’s work is that peoples and cultures disappear, he’s seen it, he saw in South America. He knows that many people and cultures have disappeared in Europe, the Celts. And he regrets that, lots of people regret this but he sees the writing on the wall for French culture, he’s a little bit like Diogenes trying to wake people up, saying, look, if we’re not careful, France will be one of these disappearing people and cultures. That’s his point, he’s willing to stick up for it and say what he has to say … Raspail loves his country, he loves tradition, he loves Catholicism, nobody else is standing up for it. He probably doesn’t want to put himself in these situations, but he’s fighting for what he feels he has to do.
One hopes to see more of Jean Raspail make it into English through the assured and accomplished translations of Richard Robinson. Whether taken as fantasy, social commentary, or metaphysical mystery, Septentrion is a haunting, epic book of real power.
This review appears in the Fall/Autumn 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 32:102-104.
