Renaud Camus

Renaud Camus (born Jean Renaud Gabriel Camus on 10 August 1946) is a French novelist, conspiracy theorist, and white nationalist writer.

He is the inventor of the "Great Replacement", a far-right conspiracy theory that claims that a "global elite" is colluding against the white population of Europe to replace them with non-European peoples.

Camus's "Great Replacement" theory has been translated on far-right websites and adopted by far-right groups to reinforce the white genocide conspiracy theory.

Camus has repeatedly condemned and publicly disavowed violent acts which have been perpetrated by far-right terrorists stemming from his theories.

Jean Renaud Gabriel Camus was born on 10 August 1946 in Chamalières, Auvergne, a rural town in central France.

Raised in a bourgeois family, he is the son of Léon Camus, an entrepreneur, and Catherine Gourdiat, a lawyer.

His parents removed him from their will after he revealed his homosexuality.

Camus earned a baccalauréat in philosophy in Clermont-Ferrand, Auvergne, in 1963.

He then spent a year at a non-university college, St Clare's, Oxford (1965–1966).

At 21, then a socialist, he participated in pro-LGBT marches during the May 1968 events in Paris.

He earned a bachelor in French literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris (1969), a master in philosophy at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (1970), and two Master of Advanced Studies (DES) in political science (1970) and history of law (1971) at the University Panthéon-Assas.

He was also a professional reader and literature advisor at French book publisher Denoël from 1970 to 1976.

Camus was a member of the Socialist Party during the 1970s and 1980s, and he voted for François Mitterrand in 1981, winner of the French presidential election.

He taught French literature at the Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas from 1971 to 1972, then was redactor in political science for the encyclopedia publisher Grolier from 1972 to 1976.

Camus also built on the earlier work of Jean Raspail, who published the dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints in 1973, a fictional story about immigration and the destruction of Western civilization.

After settling back in Paris in 1978, Camus quickly began to circulate among writers and artists the likes of Roland Barthes, Andy Warhol, and Gilbert & George.

Called retrospectively by some English-language media an "edgy gay writer", Camus published in 1979 Tricks, a "chronicle" consisting of descriptions of homosexual encounters in France and elsewhere, with a preface by philosopher Roland Barthes; it remains Camus's most translated work.

Tricks and Buena Vista Park, published in 1980, were deemed influential in the LGBT community at that time.

Camus was also a columnist for the French gay magazine Gai Pied.

This period of Camus's life has led American magazine The Nation to label him a "gay icon" who "became the ideologue of white supremacy," although Camus had rejected the concept of "homosexual writer" by 1982.

Known exclusively as a novelist and poet until the late 1990s, Camus received the Prix Fénéon in 1977 for his novel Échange, and in 1996 the Prix Amic from the Académie Française for his previous novels and elegies.

In 1992, at the age of 46, using the money from the sale of his Paris apartment, Camus bought and began to restore a 14th-century castle in Plieux, a village in Occitanie.

In 1996, he had the epiphany which he said led to the concept of the "Great Replacement".

Camus supported for a time the left-wing souverainist politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then voted for the ecologist candidate Noël Mamère in the 2002 presidential election.

He also declared that a key to understanding his "Great Replacement" theory can be found in a book about aesthetics he published in 2002, titled Du Sens ("Of Meaning").

In the latter, inspired by a dialog between Plato and Cratylus, he wrote that the words "France" and "French" equal a natural and physical reality, not a legal one; it is a form of cratylism similar to Charles Maurras' distinction between the "legal country" and the "real country."

Because he received government funds to assist in the restoration of the castle – which included the rebuilding of a 10-story tower removed in the 17th century – Camus is required to open it to the public for a part of the year.

Thirty-one years later, during the 2012 presidential campaign, he dismissed the party with the following remark: "The Socialist Party has published a political program titled Pour changer de civilisation ("To change civilization"). We are among those who, to the contrary, refuse to change civilization."

The same year, he founded his own racialist political party, the Parti de l'In-nocence ("Party of No-harm"), although it was not publicly launched until the 2012 presidential election.

The party advocates remigration, i.e. sending all immigrants and their families back to the country of their origin, and a complete cessation of future immigration.

He was a candidate in the 2012 French presidential election, with a program ranging from "serious proposals, such as the repatriation of foreign-born criminals", to unusual themes in French politics, such as "the right to silence, abolishing wind-farms, banning roadside ads, making sanctuaries of remaining unspoiled places, stopping the production of cars that can go faster than the speed limit, and recognising Israel, Palestine and a Greater Lebanon for Christians in the Middle East."

He nonetheless failed to gain enough elected representatives presentations to be able to run for president, and eventually decided to support Marine Le Pen.

In 2015 Camus headed an initiative to launch Pegida France alongside Pierre Cassen of Riposte Laïque, Jean-Luc Addor of the Swiss People's Party, Pierre Renversez of the Belgian "No to Islam" and Melanie Dittmer of the German Pegida.

Camus stated in a 2016 interview with British magazine The Spectator that he began to develop his theory in 1996, while editing a guidebook about the department of Hérault.

He claimed that he "suddenly realised that in very old villages ... the population had totally changed" and added, "this is when I began to write like that."

In December 2017, he declared: "The presidential election that took place [in 2017] was the last chance for a political solution. I don't believe in a political solution ... because in 2022, this time, it will be the occupants, the invaders [i.e. the immigrants] who will vote, who will be the masters of the elections, so anyway the solution is no longer political".

As of 2019, Camus still lives in the castle.

In May 2019, Camus ran, along with Karim Ouchikh, for the European parliament elections: "we shall not leave Europe, we shall make Africa leave Europe," they wrote to define their agenda.

During the campaign, a photograph of a candidate on his ballot kneeling before a giant swastika drawn on a beach re-emerged on social media.

Camus decided to withdraw from the election, claiming that the swastika was "the opposite of everything [he had] fought for [his] whole life."