Jean Raspail (, 5 July 1925 – 13 June 2020) was a French author, traveler, and explorer. Many of his books are about historical figures, exploration and indigenous peoples. He was a recipient of the prestigious French literary awards Grand Prix du Roman and Grand Prix de littérature by the Académie française. The French government honoured him in 2003 by appointing him to the Legion of Honor, with the grade of Officer. Internationally, he is best known for his controversial 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which is about mass third-world immigration to Europe. Life and career Born on 5 July 1925 in Chemillé-sur-Dême, Indre-et-Loire, Raspail was the son of factory manager Octave Raspail and Marguerite Chaix. He attended private Catholic school at Saint-Jean de Passy in Paris, the Institution Sainte-Marie d'Antony and the École des Roches in Verneuil-sur-Avre. During the first twenty years of his career Raspail traveled the world. He led a Tierra del Fuego–Alaska car trek in 1950–52 and, in 1954, a French research expedition to the land of the Incas. Raspail served as Consul General of the Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia. 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 his 1990 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. In his best known work, The Camp of the Saints (1973), Raspail predicts the collapse of Western civilization from an overwhelming "tidal wave" of Third World immigration. The "hordes" of the world rise and, in the words of playwright Ian Allen, "destroy the white race." The book has been translated into English, German, Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans, Czech, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian and Portuguese, and as of 2006 it had sold over 500,000 copies. After The Camp of the Saints Raspail wrote other novels, including North, Sire, and The Fisher's Ring. Raspail reiterated these views in a co-written 1985 article ("Will France Still Be French in 2015?") for Le Figaro magazine, where he stated "the proportion of France's non-European immigrant population will grow