Who is the nation for? Where do the borders of belonging begin and end?
“It is very strange for me to find myself at Lunel.” Camus is speaking in this Hérault town on November 26, 2010. It happened to be “right here” in Lunel, he goes on, “about fifteen years ago, that the phenomenon first struck me.”
Camus shares that peoples of North African heritage were overrunning Hérault when he visited in 1996. He shares this fiction and goes on to argue that race is “less a hypothetical community or biological parentage than a long-shared history, a culture.” He says a nation of “many peoples,” of “many religions, many cultures,” is bound to be “a hellish society.” Camus commends “our kings” for putting “all their care and sometimes their brutality into avoiding” the hell of diversity. The kings “knew by instinct that nothing would come from it but misfortune for individuals and weakness for the state.”
Because “peoples that remain peoples cannot join other peoples,” Camus argues. “They can only conquer them, overcome them, or replace them.”
Camus speaks for more than two hours. He identifies himself to the French crowd in Hérault as a “candidate for president of the Republic.”
Someone records this campaign speech. Camus publishes it as a book in 2011. The title: Le Grand Remplacement, translated as The Great Replacement—his name for this imagined “invasion, colonization, the changing of people.”
When Thomas Jefferson visited southern France in 1787, he studied the Roman ruins. He delighted in seeing the Maison Carrée, an ancient Roman temple in Nîmes, a town due east of the land French revolutionaries would establish as Hérault in 1790. Jefferson described the Roman temple as “the most perfect and precious remain of antiquity.” And he remembered those ancient Roman designs when he began constructing the University of Virginia in 1817. The centerpiece of the campus: the Rotunda, modeled after the Pantheon in ancient Rome.
Two centuries later, on the evening of August 11, 2017, hundreds of White men in khakis held tiki torches as they marched on UVA’s lawn toward the Rotunda. They were marching against Charlottesville’s plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who battled to maintain the enslavement of Black people during the U.S. Civil War.
They chanted, “One people, one nation, end immigration!”
They chanted, “White lives matter!”
They chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”
They chanted, “You will not replace us!”
The last chant echoes all the way to Camus’s castle in southern France. He hears the title of his next book. In 2018, Camus releases You Will Not Replace Us!, a self-published work written in English.