Jean Raspail is not only a French author, but also a traveler and explorer. Many of his books are about historical figures, exploration and indigenous peoples. He is a recipient of the prestigious French literary awards Grand Prix du Roman and Grand Prix de littérature by the Académie française.
Notably, his seminal work The Camp of the Saints [Le Camp des Saints] is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel depicting the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the West. Almost forty years after its initial publication, the novel returned to the bestseller list in 2011.
In the US and Britain is has been denounced as “racist and xenophobic”, especially due to its anti-immigration themes. The Southern Poverty Law Center has attributed its popularity to “the white genocide conspiracy theory”.
In these confused times of Brexit, Raspail has judged that it would not be inappropriate to reaffirm Patagonian sovereignty over the Minquiers archipelago. This group of rocky islands, located south of the Channel Islands and administratively attached to Jersey, and thus formally dependent on the British Crown, was indeed claimed since the 1980s by the Kingdom of Patagonia.
The consul general no is other than the French writer, author among others of Me, Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, king of Patagonia, in which he related the adventure of a Frenchman from the Perigord who was crowned in 1860 king of the Indian tribes of Araucania and Patagonia at the southern tip of South America.
Almost a century and a half after Orélie-Antoine de Tounens assumed the title of King of Araucania-Patagonia, his descendants still lay claim to the throne. Formally part of the British-ruled Channel Islands, it has been proclaimed to be la Patagonie septentrionale [Northern Patagonia].
The royal family has not relinquished its claim to the throne, but the pretender – Antoine the Fourth of Araucania, a veteran of the French war in Algeria and a retired educator, passed away in 2017.
Jean Raspail and some of his readers have been working to maintain the posterity of the kingdom, seeing that it is, according to the words of the writer, “a second homeland, the homeland refuge of those who believe in transcendence, the need to enhance one’s thoughts” .
Thus in 1984 and then several times after that, the Patagonian flag was hoisted on the Minquiers. The operation was renewed on October 22 this week, when the Patagonian flag floated in the wind for 48 hours on the main island of Minquiers, and the doors of the toilets (on which a sign noted that they were “the most northern of the kingdom”) were repainted in Patagonian colors.
At the end of the operation, the Consulate General of Patagonia issued the following communique: “In the current context of Brexit, the government of His Majesty Orélie-Antoine 1er, King of Patagonia, has appointed the Consul General of Patagonia Jean Raspail to organise a military operation to recall the sovereignty Patagonian on the island and the archipelago of Minquiers, formerly British, off the Cotentin.
“On October 22, a commando of 5 Patagonian volunteer marines landed on the Island of the Minquiers. The green, white and blue Patagonian flag was hoisted and floated on the island for 48 hours. The bathroom door, the island’s iconic building, was painted in national colours and had a plaque attached to it.
“This operation is part of a long series of actions led by the Patagonian commandos at Les Minquiers in 1984, 1998, 2012, 2014, 2016 … ”
The government of Boris Johnson, entangled in the difficult implementation of Brexit, had not yet found time to react to the news.
