THE ESSENTIAL FRENCHNESS OF TRUMPISM:

Such racially driven, anti-immigrant thinking is hardly new, but in name at least, the Great Replacement Theory has a more recent history. And it's not an American concept. It's an import to this country -- from France.

In 2011, the French philosopher Renaud Camus published a book in which he claimed that native white Europeans were being "replaced" in their countries by nonwhite immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. White Europeans, he wrote, were "being reverse colonized by Black and Brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event."

He called his book "Le Grand Remplacement" -- French for "The Great Replacement."

Camus had been influenced by another French author, Jean Raspail, whose 1973 novel, "The Camp of the Saints," described the demise of white, Western society at the hands of mass migration from other parts of the world.

Later, Camus spoke publicly about "remigration" -- a word that carries the same meaning in English and French, and refers to the idea that the much-feared "replacement" could be avoided by returning migrants to their countries of origin. Camus became an influential member of the European New Right party and an icon of its youth wing, Generation Identity. The latter was founded in 2003 in southern France as a white nativist group that stands for an ethnically pure population in Europe.

"The theory had existed in other forms," Josh Lipowsky, senior research analyst for the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, told Grid, "but [Camus' book] really brought it to the forefront, and we saw several groups latching on to it."

Today, Camus' theory is central to several far-right parties on the continent, and his general idea -- that an invasion of nonwhites risks existential damage to white-majority nations -- has captured the imagination of politicians and the media in the U.S. as well. [...]

Technically, Camus can claim authorship of the term, but the "great replacement" is just a modern phrase for a strain of racism that has existed for centuries. Fears of racial mixing, fear of new arrivals -- none of it is new. Adolf Hitler and other leaders of the Third Reich predicated their actions on fears that Jewish people were a danger to the Aryan nation that they craved. One might say National Socialism was an ideology built, in a sense, on the Nazis' own "replacement theory."

Tweet   @brothersjudd