A novelist visited southern France during one of the final years of the twentieth century. He arrived in Hérault, to be exact. Long ago, this coastal area enchanted the second U.S. minister to France, Thomas Jefferson. Mountains in the north. Beaches in the south. Vineyards and villages in between. The novelist saw something wholly unexpected in Hérault in 1996. What he saw troubled him to his very core. He foresaw a state of emergency, a crisis of epic proportions, based on an old conspiracy theory that, after every generation, turned out to be pure fiction. An old theory without a name. He named it. The novelist was born on August 10, 1946, fifty-seven days after the birth of one Donald J. Trump. Renaud Camus (pronounced “ka-moo”) studied French literature at university. He protested in Paris in 1968. He trailblazed literary space for gay novelists and poets, most famously in his autobiographical novel *Tricks* (1979). He supported France’s Socialist Party, until he did not.…