Jean Raspail

French author, traveler and explorer. Jean Raspail was born the son of factory manager Octave Raspail and Marguerite Chaix. He attended private Catholic colleges at Saint-Jean-de-Passy in Paris, the Institution Sainte-Marie d'Antony and the Ecole des Roches in Verneuil-sur-Avre.

During the first twenty years of his career, he traveled the world to discover populations threatened by the confrontation with modernity. In 1950–52, he led the Tierra del Fuego–Alaska car trek and in 1954, the French research expedition to the land of the Incas. In 1981, his novel, Moi, Antoine de Tounens, roi de Patagonie ('I, Antoine of Tounens, King of Patagonia'), won the Grand Prix du Roman (award for a novel) of the Académie française.

His traditional Catholicism serves as an inspiration for many of his utopian works, in which the ideologies of Communism and Liberalism are shown to fail, and a Catholic monarchy is restored. In the novel Sire, a French king is crowned in Reims in February 1999, the 18-year-old Philippe Pharamond de Bourbon, a direct descendant of the last French kings.

Raspail's seminal work is The Camp of the Saints (1973). In it, he predicted the overwhelming collapse of Western civilization in a 'tidal wave' of Third World immigration. Today, the book is popular among immigration reductionists, and has been reprinted by John Tanton's The Social Contract Press. After Camp of the Saints, Raspail wrote many successful novels, including North, Sire and The Fisher's Ring. He fits into the family of novelists like Roger Nimier, Dino Buzzati and Michel Déon.

An article which he wrote in Le Figaro on 17 June 2004, entitled "The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic", in which he criticized the French immigration policy, was sued by International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism on the grounds of "incitement to racial hatred", but the action was turned down by the court on 28 October.