Jean Raspail

Jean Raspail

Jean Raspail (born 5 July 1925 at Chemillé-sur-Dême, Indre-et-Loire) is a French author, traveler and explorer.

Life and career

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 most widely known work is The Camp of the Saints (1973). In it, he predicted the collapse of Western civilization due to an overwhelming 'tidal wave' of Third World immigration. The book has been translated to English, Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans,Czech, Dutch, Polish, and Portuguese, and as of 2006 had sold over 500,000 copies.[1] Today, the book is popular among anti-immigration activists, 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.

Raspail was a candidate for the Académie française in 2000 and received the most votes[2] but without obtaining the majority required for election to the vacant seat of Jean Guitton.

An article which he wrote in Le Figaro on 17 June 2004, entitled "The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic",[3] 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.

In 1970 the Académie française awarded Raspail its Jean Walter Prize for the whole of his work. In 2007 he was awarded the Grande Médaille d’Or des Explorations et Voyages de Découverte by the Société de géographie of France for the whole of his work.[4] In 2009, the Editions of Methuselah rewarded him the Wartburg Literary Award for the whole of his work.

He lives in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris.

Works

Adaptations

References

  1. ↑ http://edicionesaltera.com/portfolio/el-desembarco/
  2. ↑ Release Académie française.
  3. ↑ La patrie trahie par la république Le Figaro, 17 June 2004
  4. ↑ "GRANDE MÉDAILLE D'OR DES EXPLORATIONS ET VOYAGES DE DÉCOUVERTE (in French)". Société de géographie. Retrieved 1 December 2014.
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