On the Laughable Origins of the Far Right’s Beloved “Great Replacement Theory”

A novelist visited southern France during one of the final years of the twentieth century. He arrived in Hérault, to be exact. Long ago, this coastal area enchanted the second U.S. minister to France, Thomas Jefferson. Mountains in the north. Beaches in the south. Vineyards and villages in between.

The novelist saw something wholly unexpected in Hérault in 1996. What he saw troubled him to his very core. He foresaw a state of emergency, a crisis of epic proportions, based on an old conspiracy theory that, after every generation, turned out to be pure fiction. An old theory without a name. He named it.

The novelist was born on August 10, 1946, fifty-seven days after the birth of one Donald J. Trump. Renaud Camus (pronounced “ka-moo”) studied French literature at university. He protested in Paris in 1968. He trailblazed literary space for gay novelists and poets, most famously in his autobiographical novel Tricks (1979). He supported France’s Socialist Party, until he did not. He won the Académie Française’s Amic Prize, a French literary award.

Apparently, Camus saw, in White people, those who belong in France—who France is for. Apparently, Camus saw, in Black and Brown peoples, those who do not belong in France—who France is not for.

In 1996, Camus had been restoring a fourteenth-century castle in Plieux when the government commissioned him to compose a travel book about Hérault in France’s Languedoc-Roussillon region. Travelers have long been attracted to Hérault’s relaxing way of life, cheaper lodging, Mediterranean climate, and brief, mild winters. By the end of the twentieth century, Hérault had become the Florida of France, with nearly a quarter of its population of retirement age. Its population had nearly doubled since the 1960s, making it one of the fastest-growing areas in France, due primarily to this domestic migration.

Immigration contributed to Hérault’s population growth. White European immigrants came to the region from Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands—and retired there. Immigrants came, too, from North Africa, namely Algeria, Tunisia, and especially Morocco. But these Brown and Black immigrants were usually segregated into dilapidated apartments in the region’s oldest housing stock.

When Camus took notes for his travel book in 1996, nearly half of all immigrants in Hérault were from Europe and about 40 percent were from Africa. These African immigrants were still relatively rare in Hérault, no more than 4 percent of the total population. And yet, these facts did not square with Camus’s claims.

Camus ventured into one of “the old villages of Hérault, those large old round fortified villages, with narrow streets and houses leaning crookedly into one another, many of which already had a solid experience of the world by the year 1000.” He claimed that he noticed people of North African descent “nearly exclusively at the windows and thresholds of these very old houses and the lengths of the old streets.” Camus expressed that he got the “impression of having changed worlds without having left the old one.” It seemed as if “during our lifetime, and even less, France was in the process of changing people: we see one, we take a nap, then there is another, or many others.”

At the time, Muslims of Algerian descent in Hérault had been living in France longer than Camus’s lifetime. A 1954 census counted nearly 6,000 people of Algerian descent in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. Despite religious and phenotypic differences, people around the western Mediterranean Sea have been interacting, trading, warring, migrating, and reproducing together for centuries. They have been sharing cultures and histories since at least the ancient Roman Empire, which encompassed what is now France and North Africa. Together, this diversity of peoples formed Mediterranean culture. Tourists can now dine on Mediterranean cuisine at restaurants in Southern Europe and North Africa. But Camus’s tale in Hérault positioned people from North Africa as “entirely new to those parts, and who by their costume, their attitude, even by their language, seemed not to belong to it but to come from another people, another culture, another history.”

To be racist is to see peoples of color as eternal immigrants. In 2019, President Trump told four congresswomen of color—three of whom were born in the United States—to “go back” to the “corrupt” and “crime-infested” countries they “originally came from.” Trump’s own paternal grandfather, Friedrich, originally came from Germany in 1885. He traveled back home in 1901 and met his wife, Elisabeth. They moved to the United States together in 1902 and returned to Germany in 1904. They came back to the U.S. for good in 1905—Elisabeth pregnant with Trump’s father, Fred. Trump’s mother, Mary Anne, immigrated from Scotland in 1930. Trump, a son of immigrants. To be racist is to see White people as eternal natives.

What other population could Camus have seen as new to Hérault in 1996, speaking another language, belonging to another culture, another history? White European immigrants. However, Camus melted the differences of these White European immigrants into the pot of White identity. He did not lament their presence in very old houses, walking down very old streets, speaking Spanish or Portuguese or Dutch or English.

Apparently, White immigrants do not signify that the country is changing. Apparently, Camus saw, in White people, those who belong in France—who France is for. Apparently, Camus saw, in Black and Brown peoples, those who do not belong in France—who France is not for. In this division, Camus implicitly answered the political questions defining our authoritarian age:

Who is the nation for? Where do the borders of belonging begin and end?

“It is very strange for me to find myself at Lunel.” Camus is speaking in this Hérault town on November 26, 2010. It happened to be “right here” in Lunel, he goes on, “about fifteen years ago, that the phenomenon first struck me.”

Camus shares that peoples of North African heritage were overrunning Hérault when he visited in 1996. He shares this fiction and goes on to argue that race is “less a hypothetical community or biological parentage than a long-shared history, a culture.” He says a nation of “many peoples,” of “many religions, many cultures,” is bound to be “a hellish society.” Camus commends “our kings” for putting “all their care and sometimes their brutality into avoiding” the hell of diversity. The kings “knew by instinct that nothing would come from it but misfortune for individuals and weakness for the state.”

Because “peoples that remain peoples cannot join other peoples,” Camus argues. “They can only conquer them, overcome them, or replace them.”

Camus speaks for more than two hours. He identifies himself to the French crowd in Hérault as a “candidate for president of the Republic.”

Someone records this campaign speech. Camus publishes it as a book in 2011. The title: Le Grand Remplacement, translated as The Great Replacement—his name for this imagined “invasion, colonization, the changing of people.”

When Thomas Jefferson visited southern France in 1787, he studied the Roman ruins. He delighted in seeing the Maison Carrée, an ancient Roman temple in Nîmes, a town due east of the land French revolutionaries would establish as Hérault in 1790. Jefferson described the Roman temple as “the most perfect and precious remain of antiquity.” And he remembered those ancient Roman designs when he began constructing the University of Virginia in 1817. The centerpiece of the campus: the Rotunda, modeled after the Pantheon in ancient Rome.

Two centuries later, on the evening of August 11, 2017, hundreds of White men in khakis held tiki torches as they marched on UVA’s lawn toward the Rotunda. They were marching against Charlottesville’s plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who battled to maintain the enslavement of Black people during the U.S. Civil War.

They chanted, “One people, one nation, end immigration!”

They chanted, “White lives matter!”

They chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”

They chanted, “You will not replace us!”

The last chant echoes all the way to Camus’s castle in southern France. He hears the title of his next book. In 2018, Camus releases You Will Not Replace Us!, a self-published work written in English.

In the book, Camus positions “the Great Replacement, ethnic substitution, the change of people and civilisation” as not only “an established fact” but “by far the biggest and most urgent problem Western countries have to face.” He warns that “there can be no other way to solve this problem than remigration,” by which he means the mass deportation of citizens and immigrants of color from majority-White countries. On June 15, 2025, Trump announced his administration’s “very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” German Nazis and their collaborators executed one of the single largest mass deportation programs in history when they forcibly remigrated millions of European Jews to concentration camps outside of their home countries.

Demographic change has been a constant across much of the world for centuries. But great replacement theorists wildly exaggerate demographic changes involving migrants of color in order to present them as a mushrooming threat to White people. In You Will Not Replace Us! Camus presents immigrants as “invaders” who take and steal and destroy, when, in fact, migrants generally boost economic and cultural activity in the countries and neighborhoods they enter. Camus presents France as overrun with immigrants, when, actually, about 90 percent of French residents are not immigrants. Camus presents Europe as overloaded with immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, when about 91 percent of the European Union’s population hails from the European Union. Camus presents the United States, with the world’s largest foreign-born population, as overburdened with immigrants, when about 86 percent of U.S. residents are not immigrants. How could Camus still categorize the Great Replacement as “an established fact”? “So long as statistics demonstrate that there is no such thing as a Great Replacement,” he writes, “it is not the Great Replacement which becomes laughing stock, it is statistics.”

Great replacement theory has spurred many everyday White people into supporting antidemocratic political parties that harm most White people—and the rest of us.

Camus creates “three protagonists” in You Will Not Replace Us!

The “replacers,” who are citizens and immigrants “mostly from Africa, and very often Muslims.”

The “replacees,” the White “indigenous” population being replaced.

The “replacists,” elites “who want the change of people and civilization.”

To Camus, “industrialists” and “High Finance” are the principal “replacists,” intentionally engineering demographic change. Their aim: maintain “a cheap workforce” and “check the increases in wages demanded by native workers and unions,” as well as import “by the millions” new “consumers.” These new consumers “have no money but that is not a problem,” Camus writes. The immigrants “will steal it from” White people and take their government benefits. Incidentally, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels cast Jewish people as “the World Enemy” for their supposed total sway over “international high finance.”

While framing this ruling class of “replacists” as excluding White workers from economic opportunity, Camus characterizes “the nature of Global Replacism” as striving to “include everything and everybody instead of excluding them, like all the previous ruling classes had done.” He seems most incensed at people who are redistributing their immense wealth and philanthropically supporting organizations and leaders struggling for antiracist democracy. One philanthropist Camus names as playing “an essential part in Global Replacism” is George Soros, a Jewish American billionaire who survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II.

When Camus first imagined great replacement theory in Hérault on the eve of the twenty-first century, his conspiracy theory staggered around the fringes of global politics. But after the semi-retirement of the Communist boogeyman when the Cold War ended in 1991, after the terror attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, after reports surfaced of White populations losing their majority status in some countries, after anxiety spread over White birth rates and migrations of peoples of color, then Camus’s fringe theory reached the borders of mainstream political thought. When he published The Great Replacement in 2011, politicians had already started using the theory on voters in multiple countries. By the time Camus turned the chant “You will not replace us!” into a book seven years later, the theory had invaded nations across the world. And now, at the quarter-century mark of the twenty-first century, it has taken over global politics.

Camus’s conspiracy that a cabal of powerful elites is plotting a great replacement to ensure the exploitation and domination of low- and middle-income White people is nothing short of a grand distraction. Low- and middle-income White people are facing supercharged efforts to exploit and dominate them at the hands of the very economic and political elites conjuring up fictional tales of the great replacement. This book shows how great replacement theory has spurred many everyday White people into supporting antidemocratic political parties that harm most White people—and the rest of us—in the name of protecting White people from, well, the rest of us. The actual protagonists in this story are the great replacement financiers, politicians, theorists, and soldiers. They are striving to bring into being the actual great replacement humans should fear in the twenty-first century: the replacement of democracy with dictatorship.

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From Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi. Copyright © 2026. Available from One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.