Great Replacement conspiracy theory
The Great Replacement, also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory coined by French author Renaud Camus. Camus's theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations are deliberately being replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. A consensus of academic scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview.
While similar themes have characterized various far-right theories since the late 19th century, the particular term was popularized by Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement. The book associates the presence of Muslims in France with danger and destruction of French culture and civilization. Camus and other conspiracy theorists attribute recent demographic changes in Europe to intentional policies advanced by global and liberal elites from within the Government of France, the European Union, or the United Nations; they describe it as a "genocide by substitution".
The conspiracy theory found support in Europe, and has also grown popular among anti-migrant and white nationalist movements from other parts of the West; many of their adherents maintain that "immigrants flocking to predominantly white countries for the precise purpose of rendering the white population a minority within their own land or even causing the extinction of the native population". It aligns with the larger white genocide conspiracy theory except in the substitution of antisemitic tropes with Islamophobia. This substitution, along with a use of simple catch-all slogans, has been cited as one of the reasons for its broader appeal in a pan-European context, although the concept remains rooted in antisemitism in many white nationalist movements, especially in the United States.
Although Camus has publicly condemned white nationalist violence, scholars have argued that calls to violence are implicit in his depiction of non-white migrants as an existential threat to white populations. Several far-right terrorists, including the perpetrators of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, the 2019 El Paso shooting, the 2022 Buffalo shooting and the 2023 Jacksonville shooting, have made reference to the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. American conservative media personalities, including Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, have espoused ideas of a replacement.
Background
Renaud Camus developed his conspiracy theory in two books published in 2010 and 2011, in the context of an increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric in public discourse during the previous decade. Europe also experienced an escalation in Islamic terrorist attacks during the 2000s–2010s, and a migrant crisis in the years 2015–2016, which exacerbated tensions and prepared public opinion for the reception of Camus's conspiracy theory. As the latter depicts a population replacement said to occur in a short time lapse of one or two generations, the migrant crisis was particularly conducive to the spread of Camus's ideas while the terrorist attacks accelerated the construction of immigrants as an existential threat among those who shared such a worldview.Camus's theme of a future demise of European culture and civilization also parallels a "cultural pessimistic" and anti-Islam trend among European intellectuals of the period, illustrated in several best-selling and straightforwardly titled books released during the 2010s: Thilo Sarrazin's Germany Abolishes Itself, Éric Zemmour's The French Suicide or Michel Houellebecq's Submission.
Concept of Renaud Camus
The "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory was developed by French author Renaud Camus, initially in a 2010 book titled L'Abécédaire de l'in-nocence, and the following year in an eponymous book, Le Grand Remplacement . Camus has claimed that the name Grand Remplacement "came to , almost by chance, perhaps in a more or less unconscious reference to the Grand Dérangement of the Acadians in the 18th century." As an epigraph to the later book, Camus chose Bertolt Brecht's quip from the satirical poem Die Lösung that the easiest thing to do for a government which had lost the confidence of its people would be to choose new people.According to Camus, the "Great Replacement" has been nourished by "industrialisation", "despiritualisation" and "deculturation"; the materialistic society and globalism having created a "replaceable human, without any national, ethnic, or cultural specificity", what he labels "global replacism". Camus claims that "the great replacement does not need a definition," as the term is not, in his views, a "concept" but rather a "phenomenon".
In Camus's theory, the indigenous French people is described as being demographically replaced by non-white populations —mainly coming from Africa or the Middle East—in a process of "peopling immigration" encouraged by a "replacist power".
Camus frequently uses terms and concepts related to the period of Nazi-occupied France. He for instance labels "colonizers" or "Occupiers" people of non-European descent who reside in Europe, and dismisses what he calls the "replacist elites" as "collaborationist". In 2017 Camus founded an organization named the National Council of European Resistance, in a self-evident reference to the World War II National Council of the Resistance. This analogy to the French Resistance against Nazism has been described as an implicit call to hatred, direct action or even violence against what Camus labels the "Occupiers; i.e. the immigrants". Camus has also compared the Great Replacement and the so-called "genocide by substitution" of the European peoples to the Holocaust.
Claimed influences
Camus cites two influential figures in the epilogue of his 2011 book The Great Replacement: British politician Enoch Powell's apocalyptic vision of future race relations—expressed in his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech—and French author Jean Raspail's depiction of the collapse of the West from an overwhelming "tidal wave" of Third World immigration, featured in his 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.Camus also declared to The Spectator magazine in 2016 that a key to understanding the "Great Replacement" can be found in his 2002 book Du Sens. In the latter he wrote that the words "France" and "French" equal a natural and physical reality rather than a legal one, in a cratylism similar to Charles Maurras's distinction between the "legal" and the "real country". During the same interview, Camus mentioned that he began to imagine his conspiracy theory back in 1996, while editing a guidebook on the department of Hérault, in the South of France: "I suddenly realized that in very old villages the population had totally changed too this is when I began to write like that."
Similar themes
White genocide conspiracy theory
Despite its own singularities and concepts, the "Great Replacement" is encompassed in a larger and older "white genocide" conspiracy theory, popularized in the US by neo-Nazi David Lane in his 1995 White Genocide Manifesto, where he asserted that governments in Western countries were intending to turn white people into "extinct species". Scholars generally agree that, although he did not father the theme, Camus indeed coined the term "Great Replacement" as a slogan and concept, and eventually led it to its fame in the 2010s.The idea of "replacement" under the guidance of a hostile elite can be further traced back to pre-WWII antisemitic conspiracy theories which posited the existence of a Jewish plot to destroy Europe through miscegenation, especially in Édouard Drumont's antisemitic bestseller La France juive. Commenting on this resemblance, historian Nicolas Lebourg and political scientist Jean-Yves Camus suggest that Renaud Camus's contribution was to replace the antisemitic elements with a clash of civilizations between Muslims and Europeans. Also in the late 19th century, imperialist politicians invoked the Péril jaune in their negative comparisons of France's low birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries. From that claim arose an artificial, cultural fear that immigrant-worker Asians soon would "flood" France. This danger supposedly could be successfully countered only by increased fecundity of French women. Then, France would possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual flood of immigrants from Asia. Maurice Barrès's nationalist writings of that period have also been noted in the ideological genealogy of the "Great Replacement", Barrès contending both in 1889 and in 1900 that a replacement of the native population under the combined effect of immigration and a decline in the birth rate was happening in France.
Scholars also highlight a modern similarity to European neo-fascist and neo-Nazi thinkers from the immediate post-war, especially Maurice Bardèche, René Binet and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, and to concepts advanced from the 1960s onward by the French Nouvelle Droite. The associated and more recent conspiracy theory of "Eurabia", published by British author Bat Ye'or in her 2005 eponymous book, is often cited as a probable inspiration for Camus's "Great Replacement". Eurabia theory likewise involves globalist entities, that are led by both French and Arab powers, conspiring to Islamize Europe, with Muslims submerging the continent through immigration and higher birth rates. Eurabia depicts immigrants as invaders or as a fifth column, invited to the continent by a corrupt political elite.