The author of over 150 books in various genres, the French writer Renaud Camus is perhaps best known as the man who coined the "Great Replacement," his phrase to describe the sweeping demographic changes now transforming Europe and its diasporas throughout the world. In The Deep Murmur, Camus explores one source of our societies' heedless embrace of a post-European future: the prohibition on the word "race" and all that it has connoted over its long and storied history, now seen as irrevocably tainted by the experience of Nazism. Without the word, the thing ceases to exist. Thus gradually recedes, in the words of Bernanos, "that deep murmur in which the race cradles its own" - and, with it, the very possibility of transmission, of a place in the world that is nothing other than a place in time.

The volume opens with Camus' "Elegy for Enoch Powell," written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Powell's (in)famous "Rivers of Blood" speech. Powell foretold our present; Camus is its chronicler.