Thinking Class #110 - Renaud Camus - “The Disaster”: The Great Replacement, Elite Failure, And The Crisis Of The West
Renaud Camus, writer, painter, photographer, was born in 1946. He is now the author of more than one hundred and sixty works. His works are marked by the question of meaning and the fight against the industrialisation of man and the massacre of landscapes.
In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam and essayist Renaud Camus engage in a wide-ranging conversation about what Camus has long described as “the disaster” — the civilisational, cultural, and demographic transformations reshaping France, Britain, and much of the Western world.
Camus is widely known in public debate for his writings on demographic change in Europe, often discussed superficially or polemically as "The Great Replacement". In this conversation, we move beyond caricature to engage his work on its own terms: as an attempt to diagnose what has changed within Western leadership classes, cultural memory, and moral language — and why these changes have proven so destabilising.
Topics discussed include:
- What Camus means by “the disaster” and why he sees it as civilisational rather than conspiratorial
- The role of political, media, and bureaucratic elites — whom Camus calls the “friends of the disaster” — in enabling demographic and cultural rupture
- Responsibility, narrative control, and why discussion of consequences is often displaced by moral abstraction
- Britain and France in comparative perspective, including demographic trends, historical memory, and elite ideology
- The prohibition on speaking of ancestry, roots, and continuity — and what is lost when a people forgets its own past
- Globalism, social engineering, and the moralisation of ideology
- Ecological objections to simplistic “solutions,” including unchecked population growth
- Why Camus rejects violence and insists on lawful, civic, and cultural means of resistance
- His reflections on monarchy, national form, and the endurance of peoples
- Christian hope, recovery, and the possibility that nations can outlast periods of profound disfigurement
The conversation concludes, as always on Thinking Class, with a personal reflection: what Renaud Camus has changed his mind about during the course of his life and what led him to think differently.
About Thinking Class:
Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world.
Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, academics, and independent thinkers.
Thinking Class is concerned with discovering long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes. Expect historically-grounded analysis on matters of national character, institutions, demography, belief, and political legitimacy.
New episodes every week.
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