Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings of Renaud Camus, reviewed

Everybody who knows nothing else about the French writer Renaud Camus knows that – as Wikipedia immediately asserts and as therefore is repeated every time he is mentioned in the press – he is ‘the inventor of the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory’.

Until now, actually reading Camus has not been possible in English, so thoroughly has he been shunned by the mainstream media. Here, at last, are some of his core political essays in translation, published by a small press in America, that will make such dishonesty blatant in future. It is in that way, for good or ill, an essential publication, as few can genuinely be said to be.

These are not the writings of Camus that I myself enjoy the most. I first became aware of him through a glancing reference in Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission in 2015. Intrigued, I bought a volume of his journals – he has published a fat book of them every year since the mid-1980s, also putting a new entry online for subscribers every day – and found myself captivated by his irascibility, his aestheticism and his radical honesty about being, in almost every little respect, about as deeply conservative as it is possible for a human being to be.

So in 2016 I went to interview Camus for Spectator Life, in the towering castle in the Gers he bought in 1992 by selling his small flat in Paris. I very much enjoyed meeting him and I’ve been reading his journals ever since.

The only book by Renaud Camus to have been translated into English previously was Tricks, of 1982, introduced by Roland Barthes, a journal explicitly describing 25-odd passing gay encounters. What has continued from that into all his subsequent work – unmanageable quantities of it, since he is a graphomane, his most recent tract La Dépossession running to 827 pages – is his commitment to such clarity, however awkward or unwelcome.