Controversial French author Jean Raspail, cited by two high-level President Trump advisers as verification of their vociferous anti-immigrant stances, is dead at the age of 94.
Raspail passed away Saturday “peacefully surrounded by his family” after a months-long stay in a Paris hospital, his son Quentin told Agence France-Presse.
The prolific author, who penned dozens of travel books and novels, including “The King’s Game,” “Moon Fishermen” and 1978′s “Redskins Today,” worked continuously for nearly seven decades.
But it was his shocking 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints” that Trump anti-immigration advisors Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller latched onto as cause for the White House’s extreme anti-Muslim policies.
The novel chronicles a dystopian world in which an armada of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians swarm the French Riviera and overrun Europe.
Although never declaring himself a far-right figure — instead referring to himself as “a free man, never subservient to a party” — Raspail did concede that he was an “ultra-reactionary” who opposed “interbreeding.”
“It’s been almost a ‘Camp of the Saints’-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” said Bannon in 2015, referring to a continental influx of nonwhites, as cited by HuffPost.
“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” Bannon noted in 2016. “It is a global issue today — this kind of global ‘Camp of the Saints.’”
White House immigration hardliner Miller — the architect of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy — once referenced the novel in an email.
Southern Poverty Law Center detailed a leaked Miller message that encouraged far-right website Breitbart to promote white supremacist values.
“Someone should point out the parallels of ‘Camp of the Saints,’” wrote Miller, according to a 2019 NPR report.
The work was also lauded on the website Radix, which is sponsored by the white supremacy lobby group National Policy Institute, whose president is alt-right leader Richard Spencer.
“(Raspail’s) narrative, howsoever, exaggerated for effect, was a distillation and condensation of observable reality,” read a 2015 Radix review of “The Camp of the Saints.”
In 1987, he was awarded the Prix du Livre Inter, the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “Who Will Remember the People.”
On Saturday, Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right group National Rally, referred to Raspail’s passing on Twitter as “a huge loss for the national family.”
