Renaud Camus lives in a medieval fortress in the Gascony region of southwestern France. The 78-year-old former LGBT activist is a prolific writer of literary travel guides and novels, including his best-selling bookTricks. Published in 1972, Tricks recounts 25 one-night stands Camus has had across the globe and was prefaced by the philosopher Roland Barthes.
Yet, the most influential work by Camus is a 2011 book of an entirely different genre. Titled The Great Replacement, it details Camus’ view on immigration from Africa and the Middle East, which he argues is eroding France’s identity and culture (this written by a man who likes to wear Bavarian blazers). Muslim migrants are part of a “conquest of France,” he continues. “Replacist” elites in Paris, Brussels, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York are promoting a “genocide” of France’s white population.
Camus’ conspiracy theory has unfortunately inspired white supremacist terrorists from Christchurch, New Zealand to Buffalo in the United States.
And at home in France, Camus’ book—and his ideas—continue to gain traction. For Michel Houellebecq, France’s best-selling author, the great replacement “is not a theory, but a fact.” Far-right Rassemblement National’s (RN) Marine Le Pen shouts to the crowd in meetings, “Stand up if you want France to remain French,” as she frets about the country being submerged by immigration. The once center-right Les Républicains (LR) distributes flyers stating “So France remains France.” LR’s Bruno Retailleau, France’s interior minister, says that reducing migration is so important it may necessitate compromising on the rule of law.
Of course, France is not the only country where migration has become a central political theme. In France as in Germany, polls show 70 percent of the population want to tighten migration laws. But France’s migration-related identitarian angst is surprising for three reasons.
The Migration Paradox
First, French migration levels have been relatively modest for a quite a while and on the lower end in Western Europe. From 2004 to 2024, average annual net migration was 1.33 per 1,000 people, compared to 3.4 in Germany. In 2023, the net migration to France was 183,000 persons compared to 663,000 across the Rhine.
Of course, these numbers don’t include illegal immigration. Are there more people living illegally in France than in other European countries? Perhaps. But if the migrant camps in Calais, northern France, are any indication, many illegal migrants would prefer to be subjects of King Charles than to become citoyens in the French Republic.
The bottom line is, France is not experiencing anything close to a migration crisis. France didn’t host a million Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in 2015 and 2022 respectively (that was Germany). France’s asylum centers never experienced such overflows that the government was forced to ask citizens to shelter migrants. Migration flows in past years have been in line with the long-term average. So what’s the problem?
No Woke
Second, France’s migration and identity malaise is also not due to a backlash against progressive policies to make the republican dream of racial equality a reality.
French politicians and thinkers love to spill liters of ink writing columns and books on the danger US-style identity politics poses to the universalist republic. But the “woke” movement remains fringe in the country, where even large parts of the far left rally against it.
And unlike the US, there are few affirmative action policies supporting ethnic minorities that could make France’s majority white population feel disadvantaged. Macron blames academics for advancing a politics of secession and division by “ethnicizing social questions.” That is why Sarah Mazzouz, a sociologist and author of a book entitled Race, says: “It is still difficult to talk about race in France, as everyone wants to put a lid on it.” French constitutional law, which embraces equality as a founding principle, prohibits the state from collecting data about race, ethnicity or religion.
It seems as if, in the mirage of the French elite’s culture war on what remains a peripheral “woke” movement, the much older majoritarian identity politics of the far right is advancing unmasked. It is as if France is experiencing a sort of reactionary counter revolution without having the original cultural revolution in the first place.
A Savage Debate
Third, the extent to which ethnonationalist discourses are being normalized, and accepted, in recent years in France is frightening.
Asked about the raging youngsters, who rioted in the summer of 2023 after the police shot a 17-year-old car jacker, Retailleau, for example, comments: “OK, they’re French, but these are French people in their official identity, and unfortunately for the second and third generations [of immigrants], there is a sort of regression toward their ethnic roots.”
The man overseeing France’s police force openly attributes crime and violence to ethnicity and differentiates between “official” and native French—let that sink in. No word about crime being massively down compared to the 1970s or 2000s when France’s population was less diverse. But Retailleau’s rabble-rousing works. With a 42 percent approval rating, he is among the country’s most popular politicians.
Or when Houellebecq proclaims, “The native French do not want the Muslims to assimilate, but to stop stealing from them and attacking them. Or that they leave!” and is still courted by the Parisian elite. The chronicler of the hardships of aging men in the West warns that soon “entire territories of France will be under Islamist control” and the increasingly powerful conservative media are debating such statements void of any factual basis in earnest.
Vincent Bolloré, an industry tycoon who has made much of his money by buying port infrastructure in former French colonies in Africa, has within a few years bought up a 24-hour news channel (Cnews), a radio station (Europe1), a high gloss lifestyle magazine (ParisMatch), and the main Sunday paper (Le Journal de Dimanche, or JDD). Across these mainstream outlets, the image of a France succumbing to a loss of state authority and rising crime due to migration is promoted from dusk till dawn.
France’s Racism Problem
Few migrants, no “woke,” yet a migration debate turning savage. How come?
When discussing this article, a friend, whose parents moved to a Parisian suburb from Ghana, graduated from a top university, and works as a corporate tax lawyer, tells me: “When Le Pen rants against migrants, in reality she means people like me.”
That may be the key to understanding France’s current migration debate. It is in fact not about migration at all. Right-wing politicians rallying against migration feels to many French like a way to mobilize voters by playing to racist reflexes toward France’s non-white population.
After all, when Le Pen or LR politicians talk about “France remaining France” they make reference to a famous private letter former President Charles de Gaulle wrote to a friend in 1959: “It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They prove that France is open to all races and that she has a universal mission. But on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion.”
It is no coincidence that the RN’s party’s program shows photos of happy white people in its sections on schools and hospitals, but only non-white people in the ones on crime and migration.
That signaling works in a society where racist reflexes remain deeply ingrained and there is a long tradition of politicians and thinkers paying lip service to the republic’s universalism, but deep down thinking of their “true” countrymen as a people of a certain ethnicity and culture. Persons with names suggesting a non-European ethnic origin have a 40 percent lower chance of getting a job interview than those with a traditional French name, studies show. The number of racist and antisemitic crimes and offenses recorded by law enforcement agencies has been steadily increasing over the years. The heated 2024 legislative election campaign in particular showed that with the growth in voter support for RN, regular French and media personalities are becoming more comfortable using xenophobic and antisemitic language in public.
At the same time, the French ombudsman and administrative courts have long recognized the problem of systemic racism in the police force. This is, after all, the same police force whose main trade union called banlieue rioters in the summer 2023 “vermin” in a press release, after having stayed silent when the Yellow Vest protestors turned to violence five years earlier.
This Is Paris
It is not that France isn’t doing anything about these issues. Macron has massively boosted investments in education in the banlieues for instance. The French republic, which excels at the politics of symbolism, put on a fantastic show at the Olympics opening ceremony hammering home the message that the nation still has some non-conformist energy and stands for all forms of diversity.
But the reflection of this in daily, political, and even cultural life is still lacking.
There are still very few non-white politicians, and practically none on the right. The Netflix political satire Represent, about a Black banlieue social worker becoming France’s president, is also considered so comical precisely because it seems so far removed from becoming reality anytime soon.
It is also still striking that in most brasseries, service staff are white, with all the diversity hidden in the kitchen. In his brilliant book This is London published in 2016, Ben Judah (now an adviser to British Foreign Secretary David Lammy) shows that the British capital runs on the work of migrant workers and their children. Paris, the city at the center of so, so many novels and films, is still waiting for a similar best-selling book, that captures, say, the story of the Bangladeshi men who find a way to keep beer ice cold in the middle of July for tourists on the steps of the Sacré Coeur.
Currently, it feels as if the country is stuck between discussing migration as a ploy at populism and majoritarian identity politics and advancing policies that address social inequalities, without addressing the issue of racism directly. France needs to get better at talking about racism in the midst of its society, its institutions, and recognizing its structural nature. Because these issues don’t just concern the lives of minorities, they are a key part of France’s worsening political and social climate that only benefits Le Pen.
Joseph de Weck is INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY’s Paris columnist and author of Emmanuel Macron. The revolutionary president.