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.