How the 'great replacement' theory went global

By some lights, our current political predicament comes down to a single powerful idea, which was born 30 years ago in the south of France.

- SAM ADLER-BELL

In 1996, the French novelist Renaud Camus took a break from restoring his 14th-century castle in Plieux to write a travel book — commissioned by the French government — about Hérault, a department on France's Mediterranean coast. According to Camus, he was horrified to find Hérault’s “old round fortified villages” overrun by migrants from North Africa who had arrived from former colonies seeking economic opportunity.

In 2011, Camus published Le Grand Remplacement, a manifesto elaborating his epiphany in Hérault: Liberal elites were conspiring to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. As the historian Ibram X. Kendi writes in Chain of Ideas, his wideranging survey of modern xenophobia, great replacement theory has since become “the most dominant political theory of our time.”

Kendi, the author of lauded accounts of American bigotry like How to Bean Antiracist (2019) and the National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning (2016), is careful to note that Camus merely provided a new name for “an old conspiracy theory,” one that has animated many generations of ethnonationalists. He begins his story with Camus, but he eventually reaches as far back as the reign of King Leopold Il in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the 20th century.