The Man Behind ‘the Great Replacement’

Renaud Camus was once known as a man of the left. After being cut out of his parents’ will for revealing his homosexuality, he marched in the May 1968 protests in support of gay rights. In the 1970s, he ran in the most avant-garde circles in France. Roland Barthes wrote the preface to Camus’s quasi-autobiographical 1981 novel, Tricks, which recounted homosexual encounters in several countries. Camus coined new terms to describe the gay lifestyle. Even now, at age 75, he in many ways remains an exemplary liberal. He praises Nelson Mandela as a liberator of his people from a foreign oppressor. He mocks the “Putinolatry” of some on the European right. He deplores Jean-Marie Le Pen and denounces anti-Semitism.