Tag Archives: pessimism

RIP Jean Raspail (1925 – 2020)

Jean Raspail was a French author best known for his novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), which is about mass third-world immigration to Europe.


Samuel Huntington in Clash of Civilizations (1996) described the novel as “searing” which was translated into Dutch as “ophitsend” which translates as ‘inciting’. He classified it as a product of “demographic pessimism”.

RIP Jean Rustin

(gallery, click for images)

Jean Rustin (1928– 2013) was a French painter, and an important figurative artist.

Beginning in the early 1970s, he created a bizarre world of human figures, where an existential dead-end is transformed into frightdarkness abhorrence, without much pity nor relief.

In his own words:

“I realize that behind my artistic creation, behind the fascination for the naked body, there are twenty centuries of painting, primarily religious, twenty centuries of dead Christstortured martyrsgory revolutions, massacres and shattered dreams […] I realize that history and maybe art history are engraved on the body and flesh of men.” (‘Jean Rustin : A corps perdu’[1], collected in Vanités contemporaines)

See also: 20th-century French art,  art horrorbleak.