DONALD'S JOHN THE BAPTIST:

In 2000 Renaud Camus, previously best known as a poet and novelist, became notorious for a couple of pages of his diary. A major French publisher had been putting out installments of the diary for many years at that point, at the pace of one volume a year. Then, in 2000 Camus wrote that Jews, with few exceptions, cannot enjoy an organic relation with the French language, culture, and literature. In order to really have an authentic connection with French culture, Camus wrote, one must have been French for several centuries at least. Those few sentences provoked an outrage in the French center-left press. This is the time when, as a Jew and literary scholar, I became interested in Camus, met him, lectured and wrote about him. And so I owe the reader this disclaimer: I was young, relatively, and spellbound by Camus' erudition, love of art and music, and old France manners. It was before he founded his political party, gave up literature, and became a full-fledged ideologue and propagandist.

Renaud Camus' diary proposed a contract of zero censorship with his readers. I say it all the way I think and then I confront my darkest thoughts and nuance them and even berate myself for daring to think such bad thoughts. Granted that the contract was sincere, let us say that the diarist could legitimately be defended, in the name of free speech, of literary license, in the name of that very French belief that literature has the right to say everything, and even in the name of a certain ethic of self-examination and soul searching. After all, we are prey to bad thoughts, and we keep them to ourselves--why not publish those dark thoughts and run the risk of ostracism? Such was the defensive strategy employed by Camus and his defenders including, for a time, me. 

A couple of years later, in 2002, however, Camus confirmed that the statements made in 2000 were not merely soul-searching and that his belief in an organic connection between ethnic origin and literary sensitivity was in fact rooted in a naturalistic conception of culture with clear implications for ideological dogmas. Indeed in the aftermath of the national outrage, Camus, feeling cornered, wrote a voluminous book titled Of Meaning, and in that book he laid out a bizarre theory loosely based on a dialogue by Plato titled Cratylus. 

Plato's Cratylus dialogue, if you remember your classics, bears on the nature of language. The question asked by Plato through his two interlocutors, Cratylus and Hermogenes, is the following: Is language connected organically to the essence of the things it describes, or is it the product of custom and social convention? Cratylus' view that language is natural rather than a form of convention is adopted by Camus who uses it as the conceptual basis for his own belief that culture is the product of a physical connection with the land and with ethnic origins. The analogy was far-fetched but it provided the foundation for an ideological claim: namely, that people (immigrants) who claim to be French just because they have a French passport are fakes even if they were born in France and even if their parents were born in France. They are paper French. Phony French. And so, that was how Renaud Camus started to elaborate his theory of the great replacement, a theory that has far outgrown its origins to attain the level of international influence that we are now witnessing. 

If there is a natural connection between culture, place, and ethnicity, then mass migrations threaten that natural connection. The immigrants from the Maghreb and Africa, like the Jews who inhabited France before them, will never be genuinely French, no matter how deeply they imbibe French literature and culture. There is something essentialist, and certainly romantic, in that conception. Ironically enough, Camus began as a disciple of Roland Barthes, the literary theorist who in fact wrote the foreword to a very early book by Camus, thus helping to launch his literary career. Camus is not only a reactionary, he is also an adept of postmodern theory and in his early career was very fond of experimental and avant-garde writing. 

Camus' evolving conception of meaning was once derived from Barthes' theory of degrees of discourse, or spiral of meaning. Barthes' idea was that an utterance has a meaning that can be entirely reversed, or understood totally differently in a different context. This spiral conception of meaning obviously undermines the essentialist belief in absolute truth. From a postmodern, relativistic conception of truth (one that is dynamic and nonfoundational), which Camus had held along with his left-wing politics through the 1970s and '80s, the author turned in the later part of the '90s toward an essentialist, quasi-romantic conception of culture and identity (one that is static and grounded in a soil). From the spiral of meaning, the Barthes playfulness with language, Camus had turned away, preferring something more "serious" and rigid as a basis of belief. 

This straightening out of the spiral was notable for another reason: It reflected not only the political evolution of the former French progressive now giving intellectual ammunition to the far right, but on his personal identity as well, as Camus was openly gay. He is not the first European ideologue or politician to argue that Islam's homophobia justifies Islamophobia. Think of Pim Fortuyn, one of Camus' heroes. To be sure, Camus did not have to make too much effort to capitalize on a major ambiguity of left-wing identity politics--the sacrifice of gay and women rights on the altar of anti-racism. Journalist and essayist Caroline Fourest has written eloquently on this ambiguity from a secularist feminist perspective--without falling into the trap of racism. 

Camus' essentialist conception of identity is reminiscent of the early 20th-century French literary right wing--the idea that Jews will never be able to relish Racine's poetry in the same way as a "real" Frenchman. This notion was based on the belief held by French monarchist and Catholic Charles Maurras that there is a real country and a legal one. Whereas the legal one is pure convention (Hermogenian), the real one is Cratylian. The legal one is institutional, the real one is a natural fact. Nation is not narration, it is nature.  

Replacement theory appeared as a logical extension of Camus' belief in an "organic" French culture, threatened by the presence of impostors.

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