The cognitive dissonance of Jean Raspail

The reasons for the popularity of Le Camp des saints are easy enough to decode. Here's the novel's synopsis from the usual place:

The story begins in Bombay, India, where the Dutch government has announced a policy that Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is reversed when the Dutch consulate is inundated with parents eager to give up their infant children as it would be one less mouth to feed. An Indian "wise man" then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.

In short, it's the OYPA -- the old yellow peril alarm -- all over again.

THE OYPA seems a weird beast to me since I have spent all my life being bored with the familiar and seeking out out the exotic as its antidote. I welcome Asian immigration on several grounds: first, the wonderfully zany Indians seem a million times more interesting to me than the predictable familiar boring French, whom I have no reason to love anyway; certainly, on average, Pakistani women are prettier than the English; the food they bring is more tasty; etc.

I therefore cannot fit into my head: why would not everyone else feel the same way?

Yet, years of interacting with human beings have taught me that most appear to have their heads screwed on the other way round which means that they ceaselessly seek the safety of the familiar, prefering boredom over excitement any time of day. I continue not to empathize with this odd mental condition, but have learned to accept for a fact that they do.

(But here is an interesting thought: how comes it that the Kaiser (the author of the OYPA) should function as a philosophical authority for the same Polish and French intellectuals whose sympathies are otherwise pro-Entente and anti-German? Hate the Germans, but love their xenophobia? How weird can you get?)

What is more interesting about Jean Raspail's brain is that it appears to be internally split: while writing his Dantean yellow perilist visions about foreigners flooding (and destroying) good old France, he simultaneously writes other books of scathing criticism of the very same modern France as a rotten perversion of its former self. He is a monarchist to the core and writes movingly about the spark of divinity which resides in the person of the king; his inviolability and irreplaceability; the dire consequences of regicide; the lack of proper legitimacy in the person of a merely elected President; lack of authority; lack of respect for authority; etc. This is not merely a political fantasy: Jean Raspail senses that there is something deeply and fundamentally rotten about modern French (and, more generally, European) culture (about which he is probably right) and seeks its causes in the abolition of the monarchy two hundred years ago (I withhold my opinion).

But then he defends that very same rotten France against subversion by foreigners. Why? If France is rotten, then, heck, why not let it sink?

This is known to psychologists as cognitive dissonance.

Let me take this argument further: had Jean Raspail bothered to read anything about Indians he would have discovered how attached they are to their ancient traditions; how underacined they therefore are; and how much more deserving of his love and admiration they are on these grounds than the modern-day French. Indians are a traditional, conservative, feudal people; they respect tradition, religion, authority, primogeniture, kingship, family values; Jean Raspail should pray that they take over France soonest so that he can finally live among his kind of people at last.