Septentrion by Jean Raspail is a dystopian novel set in the year 2041. It’s a story of beauty and sadness, a story of the ugly things that happen in the world, and the courage of an elect few who happen, against all odds, to hold a line, to preserve a culture, a civilization, a way of life that they love and embody, but which is on the verge of extinction, assaulted. The enemy: the demos, the grey masses, today’s people. Unwilling to compromise, and unlikely to succeed, they flee - north, the only place left to escape to - on a train, through the dark forests and the snow-clad steppes of Septentrion.

The signs were accumulating, all across the north of the country, far from the capital and its golden steeples, without our noticing their exact consequences. Vaguely we understood how, without really knowing why. Everything happened so quickly… We understood barely that a sort of different eternity was advancing rapidly, in an inform and inexorable way. Nothing would be the same, nothing would ever change again, once it happened.

One cannot be a man, fully, from the moment one admits that others exist. For one is no more than a copy, a vague facsimile drawn from a billion examples. One mustn’t know anything about others, or at least by ruthless choice, unless it is how to invent oneself on one’s own, - everything has been so repeated.