LAST month the French philosopher Renaud Camus was banned from entering Britain because his presence, as the Labour-run Home Office put it, is ‘not considered to be conducive to the public good’.
Like Wikipedia, they cast him as a dangerous conspiracy theorist. In fact he was once lauded as a liberal progressive, ‘an edgy gay’ writer who was a member of France’s socialist party. Not your normal conspiracy theorist. So what was the crime that resulted in Sir Keir Starmer banning him from Britain?
He began observing the changing face of France, as he recounted in a Spectator interview in 2016, prompted by the final publication of some of his core political essays in English. The label ‘the inventor of the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory’ was stuck on hm before anyone had read his work.
Yes, that is his crime: to look at demographics, culture and change and report it. The notion of ‘the Great Replacement’ – and it is a notion, not a theory – came to him around 1996, he told David Sexton in the Spectator interview, when writing a survey of the department of Hérault. In the medieval villages there, he found: ‘There almost exclusively appeared a population never before seen in these parts, which by its dress, demeanour and even language seemed not to belong there but rather to another people, another culture, another history.’
Camus considered the change of population he witnessed to be an unprecedented disaster, and it is one that has been borne out by the statistics. It is not a theory. What the progressive left find offensive is his drawing attention to it and his view that it is not a blessing but a curse.
Following Camus’s banning another hardy Brit, Harrison Pitt, set out to interview him on behalf of The European Conservative. Tracking him down to his French chateau, Pitt explored the accusations against him, his concerns and ideas, including his observation that Europe is more colonised by the Third World than it ever colonised the Third World.
You watch this fascinating interview here.
