“Without saints, without heroes, without kings, history is unintelligible.”
— Charles Maurras
Sociological rigor is necessary, but it must not lead to erasing the role of embodied figures. Behind the masses and underlying trends, there also stand men of flesh and blood who give language to diffuse anxieties, consciousness to nascent movements, and sometimes direction to historical transformations.
Now, in this first half of the 21st century, two names stand out for anyone seeking to understand this struggle for the reconquest of our continent and our civilization, today called remigration: Renaud Camus and Martin Sellner.
It was in Vienna, on March 5, 2026, that the two men met, at the invitation of The European Conservative and Vauban Books, to discuss remigration and the future of European identity. The choice of this city is far from insignificant. As Renaud Camus would recall, the 1683 siege was “one of those moments when Europe could have disappeared.” Indeed, in September of that year, a vast Ottoman army threatened the Austrian capital, which was saved only by heroic resistance. Yet, by a strange irony to which history holds the secret, the city where Europe defended itself against Turkish expansion today harbors a massive Turkish presence, no longer perceived as a historical or civilizational issue but as an ordinary phenomenon, administratively manageable and morally untouchable.
The Impotence of Words
The most troubling aspect of the present situation is perhaps not the demographic transformation of Europe itself, but the inability of Europeans to name it in the language of their own history. What other generations would have immediately perceived as a question of people, continuity, civilization, or belonging, we no longer know how to apprehend except through the neutral categories of governance, law, and the management of flows. Yet the author of Du sens has ceaselessly shown in his work that the great European crisis is not only political, nor even cultural, but first and foremost semantic. The crisis is above all a crisis of meaning. The decisive words — Europe, people, foreigner, culture, homeland — continue to circulate, but they have gradually been emptied of their thickness and gravity. The dispossession of the European peoples thus begins with a dispossession of language, and perhaps remigration must be understood, at this deeper level, not merely as a political project, but as an attempt to make words and things, names and realities, meaning and history coincide once again.
If the defense of Vienna against the Turks was a founding moment of Austrian history and identity, how could one still speak of “Austrian culture” on the day when it is represented mainly by people of Turkish descent? If Austria and Europe are “pregnant with an Islamic state,” in Martin Sellner’s words, will we still use the same names to designate them once they have given birth to this new reality? That is the whole issue. The crisis is not only in the facts; it lies in the strange linguistic operation that consists in asking words to retain their old historical resonance even as their content is radically altered. The problem Camus points to is therefore not only that there is demographic transformation, but, more fundamentally, that this transformation demands a new linguistic regime in which the old names survive as empty shells while their substance has shifted.
It is against this subversion of words and its practical consequences that Martin Sellner and Renaud Camus stand, determined to restore to the word Europe its true meaning. The meeting took place at Ronald Schwarzer’s, in a setting that seemed chosen to recall by itself what a civilization is when it still takes its own mise-en-scène seriously: an old Viennese residence, lit by candlelight, with a portrait of Metternich on one wall, as if historical and imperial Europe were still watching over the exchanges. In this flickering light, the discussion quickly turned not toward the technical aspects of remigration but toward its presuppositions, its deep causes, its historical and moral background.
What if the issue of our century isn’t managing migration, but reversing it altogether? What if we could replace the Great Replacement with a Great Remigration?
As mass Third World immigration floods Europe and North America, threatening to forever dissolve thousands of years of European heritage, remigration has become one of the central ideas and urgent imperatives on the political agenda. In a Europe that has made permanent immigration a non-negotiable norm, Jean-Yves Le Gallou’s Remigration: For a Europe for Our Children reverses the perspective by reviving a forgotten principle: the right of peoples to remain themselves in their own lands.
In this visionary yet straightforward manifesto, Jean-Yves Le Gallou presents the intellectual roots, historical precedents, and political and legal frameworks for remigration in the 21st century. Identifying the means by which globalist elites have facilitated the Great Replacement through administrative fiat and judicial dictatorship, Le Gallou shows how remigration is not only a matter of saving the lifeblood of European civilization, but is necessary to restore popular sovereignty and security in the public sphere.
Written as both diagnosis and rallying cry, Remigration puts forth a radical yet sensible alternative for today’s world and for generations to come.
Harrison Pitt, who moderated the exchange, immediately posed the decisive question:
Why does Europe seem singularly more exposed than other civilizational ensembles to demographic substitution?
For Camus, the answer lies first in the traumas endured by our continent in the last century. Europe, he explained, emerged from the 20th century with a profoundly altered relationship to itself. The continent that had dominated the world began to look at itself almost exclusively through the prism of its faults, its crimes, and its catastrophes. The examination of conscience, so characteristic of the European spirit, gradually turned into self-suspicion. By constantly interrogating its past, Europe came to doubt the very legitimacy of its own continuity.
Agreeing with this diagnosis, Sellner emphasized that the threat does not reside in external pressure on Europe but rather in the loss of any instinct of self-defense. “It is an autoimmune disease,” an internal disorder, as if the protection system had turned against itself. Europeans have become their own adversaries by erecting a mental system that forbids them from wanting to persevere in their being.
Camus, however, does not content himself with invoking European guilt. He also seeks to think through the impersonal logic of modernity that makes the change of people possible. The “Great Replacement” is not, in fact, an isolated phenomenon. It is intelligible only within a much vaster process of deculturation, then decivilization. Demographic substitution is neither primary nor self-sufficient; it is the most visible symptom of a prior transformation affecting Europe’s relationship to transmission, hierarchy, heritage, language, and even reality itself. He thus recalled that while the “Great Replacement is not a concept but an observable fact,” the global replacement is indeed a concept of his own making. Replacement does not designate only the replacement of peoples; it refers more deeply to a world where everything becomes substitutable. And this world is that of triumphant egalitarianism or, as he names it in his books, hyperdemocracy — that is, not democracy in the classical and political sense, but its indefinite extension to all domains of existence.
From Equality to Deracination
Equality, legitimate in the order of law, has become in Europe a total reflex, a passion that no longer tolerates precedence, authority, model, or heritage. Nothing must any longer stand higher than anything else; nothing must impose itself by antiquity, by excellence, or by transmission. Yet for Camus, it is precisely from this point that a civilization begins to unlearn what it is. For culture is never a mere stock of works or museum decor. It presupposes an order, preferences, fidelities, works judged more central than others, a more upheld language, a denser memory — in short, a hierarchy.
“Culture is entirely hierarchy,” he has even written. A culture lives only on the condition that it knows what it places higher, what it transmits, what it venerates, what it asks each person to join. A civilization that no longer believes in hierarchy, in heritage, or in the centrality of its own forms becomes fatally incapable of resisting the reign of general equivalence. If all cultures are absolutely equal in value, if all populations are regarded as functionally interchangeable, if the past no longer carries authority, then the replacement of peoples itself ceases to appear as a tragic rupture. It becomes, too, a mere rearrangement, a variation in the great game of modern substitutions.
The observation is implacable and severe. Yet in this Viennese room, they did not linger long in the melancholy of diagnosis alone. For if the French writer has brought to light the European wound, the meeting with Martin Sellner aimed to signify that the latter in no way implies discouragement. What is the point of recognizing that words no longer coincide with things if one does not simultaneously seek the concrete conditions of their recoincidence?
Remigration presents itself as the effort to restore to Europe the frameworks without which no people can durably remain itself: namely, a majority conscious of itself, a culture sure enough of itself to impose itself without hatred, and a belonging that is not merely civic or bureaucratic. While Camus has long worked to restore to Europe the words of its own intelligibility, Martin Sellner for several years now has sought to give this wounded intelligibility an operative form. If a people still intends to endure as a historical subject, what institutions, what laws, what norms of citizenship must correspond to this will?
Nevertheless, the two men agreed that if remigration is to become a political reality, it must cease to be presented as a simple operation of constraint and must first be thought of as a moral project. This is doubtless the most delicate point of the whole affair. For the European right, Sellner remarked in substance, has often known how to name the danger, sometimes even to illustrate it forcefully, but far less often to oppose it with a language of legitimacy. It has denounced, sounded the alarm, protested; it has, on the other hand, struggled to say why remigration would be not only possible but just.
Yet, Sellner insisted, as long as remigration remains confined to an exclusively punitive or police imaginary, it will remain vulnerable to all caricatures. Its adversaries will then only have to present it as cold brutality, an ethnic cleansing program, or a pure policy of expulsion. To break this circle, he argues, it is necessary to show that it can be thought otherwise: not only as legitimate for the European peoples who intend to remain historical, but also as humane for the societies of origin themselves. It is not only a matter of protecting threatened European identities, but also of breaking with a world disorder that uproots men, empties countries of their vital forces, and subjects everything to indefinite circulation.
This is why Camus proposed shifting the vocabulary. Perhaps the term “remigration” is not equal to the situation we are living through. What we are experiencing is not a somewhat strong immigration; we are living through a veritable colonization. If we must recover the justness of words, we must recognize that colonization calls for decolonization. If colonization historically consisted in transporting populations, imposing new presences, and durably modifying the human and symbolic composition of a territory, then the great contemporary demographic transformations can, at least analogically, be reread in this light:
“all the more so since Europe is a thousand times more colonized today than it ever colonized.”
Once this framework is accepted, reversing the process no longer belongs to a monstrous exception but to a gesture comprehensible within modern history itself.
“If colonization is bad, then decolonization is necessarily good.”
The meaning of words is once again capital. Europeans are the natives of Europe. They therefore have the moral right to preserve their nations and their cultures. Moreover, remigration is not a project carrying violence, as its detractors accuse it; it is, once again, the exact opposite: remigration constitutes the last chance to avoid otherwise harsher confrontations. If current trends continue, Sellner explained, Europe will not head toward a peaceful and pluralist stabilization but toward an increase in disorder, communitarian fragmentation, and perhaps, in the end, open forms of ethno-religious conflict.
Far from being a fantasy of bloodthirsty extremists, remigration is the moderate and wise solution that remains before the peaceful paths close. According to all likelihood, we have a horizon of ten to fifteen years — depending on the country — before this window of reversibility closes definitively. Past a certain demographic, political, and mental threshold, the ongoing transformations will become much more difficult to halt, if not irreversible. “Civilizations are mortal,” we have grown accustomed to repeating since Paul Valéry. We will soon have the privilege of seeing one breathe its last if we do nothing.
Horizon of Reversibility
Once taboo, discussing remigration is no longer confined to the margins. Everywhere in Europe, the subject of demographic transformation is entering the public space decisively, and it is a safe bet that debates on this subject will only intensify in the years to come.
“Where the peril grows, that which saves also grows,” according to Hölderlin’s much-cited aphorism.
With demographic replacement also grows the consciousness of a civilizational struggle. If the “Little Replacement” of culture and the loss of the meaning of words have inexorably led to the “Great Replacement” demographically, it is possible that, inversely, it is through the struggle for remigration that Europeans will recover the sense of their being and their civilization. And that is perhaps what this meeting in Vienna showed: not just another conversation on immigration, but a moment when a diffuse anxiety took the form of a thought, then that of a project, and finally of a reconquest of the meaning of being European.
Originally published in Éléments no. 220, June-July 2026
Translated by Alexander Raynor
READ MORE from Antoine Dresse, brought to you by Arktos and the Institut Iliade:
Since time immemorial, man has sought to subordinate what is to what ought to be. This is why moralists, clergy, idealists, and technocrats are often tempted to subject the ‘art of the possible’ — that is, politics — to their own laws.
Yet politics remains a perpetual source of disappointment for them, as it never conforms to their expectations. Obeying only its own laws, politics resists being ensnared in the net of ideals. It is from the recognition of the heterogeneity of ends between morality and politics that political realism emerges. This realism is not, strictly speaking, a unified doctrine or school of thought but rather a kind of habitus — a disposition of mind aimed at shedding light on the rules that politics follows.
Drawing on the key insights of Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt, Antoine Dresse’s aim in Political Realism is not to impose dogmatically any particular political doctrine. Rather, it is to illuminate the presuppositions without which political thought is impossible, and to offer an approach that enables one to discern the stakes that are proper to it.
