The parliamentary channel (LCP) offers, Monday, April 4, a good exercise in public safety: where does this hazy theory of the “great replacement” come from, which is gradually imposing itself in the political space? The documentary on this “story of a deadly idea”chilling and very well done, patiently demonstrates how two words of an old slogan carry death within them, like a storm cloud.
Its origin dates back to the end of the 19the century, when the West, through its colonies, dominated the world. “There is then the idea that there is a hierarchy of racesexplains historian Pascal Blanchard, and that mixing races would be dangerous. » A book, published in 1894, crystallizes this deaf fear of interbreeding: The black invasion, of a certain Captain Danrit. It is the story of an army of Africans, maneuvered by Muslims, which invades Europe – the book has sold several million copies.
With the First World War, a million men from the colonies came to fight for France, and the man of color, until then quite exotic, became physically visible in France: the first conspiracy theories emerged. There would be traitors in the Western community, who will use this immigration: the left, the Freemasons or the Jews, who are looking for allies to take power.
A very mobilizing slogan
The idea took hold during the Second World War. “Some radical groups say there is a secret Jewish power that is trying to destroy the white race by importing Africans and Asians, to end up installing the world Jewish dictatorship”summarizes Nicolas Lebourg, historian specializing in the far right and author of the film.
But eighty years later The Black Invasionit’s a novel that will anchor the fear of the “great replacement”: Camp of the Saintsby Jean Raspail (Robert Laffont, 1973), who already evokes the “great migration”. Raspail is moreover the author, in 1985, of a famous file of the Figaro Magazinewith a veiled Marianne on the cover, entitled, “Will we still be French in thirty years? » Even if the demographer Hervé Le Bras has no trouble proving in the LCP documentary that France was still French in 2015 and that the statistics demonstrate the absurdity of these projections, Current values headlined again the same year: “Jean Raspail, the prophet”.
It is a writer, relatively confidential, who will light the fuse in 2011: Renaud Camus publishes The Great Replacement (ed. Chez l’auteur), written in his superb castle in the Gers. He had the idea when he saw a veiled woman in a medieval village, and is the inventor of the formula. He still believes that “Europe is today much more colonized than it colonized itself”. The extreme right finds a very mobilizing slogan there: “It is a very useful political tool, insists the political scientist Marion Vaillant, author of a thesis on the small group Identity Generation. The “great replacement” is an observation, the “remigration”, the program that goes with it. »
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