A man cannot be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
—Robert Musil
ON THE MORNING of January 7, 2015, two French Muslim terrorists, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, infiltrated the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and assassinated twelve people. Before escaping they shouted that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad for some insulting cartoons that the paper had published over the years. The next morning a young policewoman was shot dead by a radicalized Muslim accomplice of theirs, Amedy Coulibaly, on a street near a Jewish school just outside the city. On January 9, heavily armed, he then entered a Parisian kosher supermarket and killed four shoppers before taking the rest hostage. Later that afternoon police simultaneously attacked the supermarket and the Kouachis’ hideout northeast of Paris, killing all three terrorists. On Sunday, January 11, demonstrations in honor of the victims were held across France, with more than a million and a half marching in Paris alongside forty-four world leaders.
The killings provoked more horror than surprise. Political Islamism had been at the center of French attention for at least two years. In 2012 a terrorist assassinated three Muslim French soldiers in southwest France, then a teacher and three students in a Jewish school. Throughout 2014 stories emerged of young people across France leaving to wage jihad in Syria: well over a thousand by the end of the year, a large portion of them recent converts and a surprising number of them young girls. By the fall videos surfaced of French jihadists participating in executions carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and in October another video appeared of the beheading of a French mountain guide in Algeria. Then, two weeks before the January attacks, there were three cases of unstable Muslim men trying to kill people while crying allahu akbar, one by attacking three policeman with a knife, the others by driving into crowded outdoor Christmas markets in provincial cities. Given all this, it was not difficult after the January events to convince oneself that “all the signs were there” and that someone must have been culpable for ignoring them.
The controversy that followed was not a total surprise either. Ever since three pious Muslim girls were suspended from a French school in 1989 for refusing to remove their head scarves, a culture war over the place of Islam in French society had been simmering. Every few years an isolated incident—the serving of halal food in a school, riots erupting in a housing project, a mosque or synagogue being attacked, the right-wing National Front winning a local election—would revive the conflict. The Paris massacres did that again, in a major way. The intense public debate that followed was familiar. Journalists and politicians on the left were quick to declare that the attacks had “nothing to do with Islam” and warned against blaming the victims of France’s failed economic and social policies. Critics on the right charged them with ignoring the present danger of political Islamism, immigration, and multiculturalism.
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But then new voices were heard. They came from the right but spoke in resonant prophetic tones about the course of world history, not just about the recent past. To understand the present crisis, they said, one must go much further back—back to the two world wars, back to the rise and fall of the Third Republic, back to Napoleon, back to the French Revolution, even back to the Enlightenment or the Middle Ages. Focusing on this or that government policy, this or that reform, is to remain blind to the scale of the calamity. We no longer control our destiny: that is the truth of the matter. The situation in which we find ourselves is the foreseeable result of disastrous political and culture mistakes that set France, and perhaps the whole of Western civilization, on the path toward a catastrophe long ago. And now the reckoning has come.
Arguments like these have not been heard in France for some time. There once was an important intellectual tradition of cultural despair running back to the French Revolution, which included some of France’s most important writers, from Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand in the nineteenth century down to Maurice Barrès and Céline in the twentieth. But after World War II this stream of thought, now associated with fascism and the Shoah, fell into disgrace. It was still permissible for a French writer to be a conservative but not a reactionary, and certainly not a reactionary with a theory of history that condemned what everyone else considered to be modern progress. Today it is permissible. Over the past quarter-century, French society has undergone changes that almost no one is happy with, and neither left-leaning intellectuals nor centrist politicians seem capable of addressing them satisfactorily. The new reactionaries sensed an opportunity and now they are finding a public that experiences a rush of recognition when reading their books, and liberation from a sense of being misunderstood. It is to two of these writers in particular that tens of thousands of French readers turned to make sense of the dramatic events of January 2015.
One was the journalist Éric Zemmour. A few months before the Paris attacks Zemmour published a book, Le Suicide français, that offered a grandiose, apocalyptic vision of the decline of France in which French Muslims play a central part.* It became the second-best-selling book of 2014, and the most argued over. Zemmour’s incendiary comments about Islam earned him death threats, and immediately after the massacres the French government placed him under police protection. The other, and more important, figure was Michel Houellebecq, by any measure France’s most significant contemporary writer. His latest novel—which in a bizarre twist of fate was published on the morning of the Charlie Hebdo murders—revolves around an Islamic political party coming to power in France in the near future and contains speculations about how the West’s decline since the Middle Ages prepared this momentous event. Houellebecq gave it the shockingly blunt title Submission.† Though the book appeared in stores only hours before the massacre, the Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls, in his first interview after the attacks, felt obliged to denounce its author, saying that “France is not Michel Houellebecq. It is not intolerance, hate, and fear.” Yet it was Houellebecq who became the object of hate and, like Zemmour, had to be given around-the-clock police protection.
I happened to be living in Paris and working on the present book when the terrorist attacks took place. In the weeks that followed I published several articles on the events in The New York Review of Books, including one on Zemmour and another on Houellebecq. Afterward I was struck by the affinities between these contemporary writers and the figures I discuss here in earlier chapters. I have chosen to include the pieces here in something close to their original form in order to convey some of the intensity of that moment, and as a reminder that the power of historical myths to motivate political action has not diminished in our time.
SUICIDE
Éric Zemmour is less a journalist or thinker than a medium through whom the political passions of the moment pass and take on form. The son of North African Jews, he began his career writing editorials for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, then started appearing on television and radio where he would give intelligent and unpredictable commentary on the issues of the day. Though clearly on the right, he seemed like a fresh, affable voice, an épateur of the Voltairean sort in a new, McLuhan-cool style. By 2014 that Zemmour was no more. He had become an omnipresent Jeremiah who telegraphed the same message, day in and day out, on all available media: France awake! You have been betrayed and your country has been stolen from you. He is not a thuggish populist of the sort the National Front attracts, though. He is well educated, literary, stylish, light on his feet, a happy warrior who never raises his voice even when delivering bad news. And in Le Suicide français there is a lot of it.
It is a steamroller of a book. There are seventy-nine short chapters, each devoted to a date supposedly marking France’s decline. Zemmour does not transform them into a continuous narrative or even try to explain how they are connected. The connections are meant to be felt; he is a master of affect. Revisiting so many Stations of the French Cross sounds unbearable, but it is a testament to his skill as a writer and slyness as a polemicist that the book works.
The list of catastrophes and especially betrayals is long: birth control, abandonment of the gold standard, speech codes, the Common Market, no-fault divorce, poststructuralism, denationalizing important industries, abortion, the euro, Muslim and Jewish communitarianism, gender studies, surrendering to American power in NATO, surrendering to German power in the EU, surrendering to Muslim power in the schools, banning smoking in restaurants, abolishing conscription, aggressive antiracism, laws defending illegal immigrants, and the introduction of halal food in schools. The list of traitors is shorter but just as various: feminists, left-wing journalists and professors, neoliberal businessmen, anti-neoliberal activists, cowardly politicians, the educational establishment, European bureaucrats, and even coaches of professional soccer teams who have lost control of their players.
Some of the chapters are, as the French say, hallucinants—unhinged. The ones on Vichy, where he claims that the collaborationist government was actually trying to save French Jews, make him sound like a mere crank. But in the others he scores enough genuine points that a sympathetically inclined reader will soon be prepared to follow him into more dubious territory. He is not the sort of demagogue who nails his theses to the door and declares, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” He is more fluid, his positions and arguments constantly being refreshed, like a web page, with new facts and fantasies. This creates a trap for his critics, who have obligingly jumped in. Not content to expose his exaggerations and fabrications, their instinct—a deep one on the French left since the days of the Popular Front—is to denounce anything someone on the right says, so as not to give comfort to the enemy. Their thinking is: if it is four o’clock, and Éric Zemmour says it is four o’clock, it is our duty to say it is three o’clock. Which guarantees that twice a day he will be able to look at his sympathizers and say, “You see what I mean?”
Zemmour’s views are simply too eclectic to be labeled and dismissed tout court. And they can be surprising. Like everyone on the French right, he is a self-declared patriot nostalgic for national grandeur, and his prose turns purple whenever he quotes from de Gaulle’s speeches or recounts the triumphs of Napoleon. But high on his list of national traitors is the French business class. He scolds CEOs who have outsourced jobs or planted box stores in exurban areas, effectively killing commerce in small towns and villages, whose streets have emptied, leaving only juvenile delinquents. He charges bankers and financiers with betraying workers and the nation by pushing for full European integration and abandoning the French franc. He makes much of the fact that, as others have noted, the images on the euro currency lack any historical or geographical references. One sees only bridges that connect nowhere with nowhere, and architectural elements that float in vacant space—apt metaphors for what has happened to the nation-state in Europe. The Revolution, which freed France to determine its own collective destiny, has finally been reversed by Brussels. “The aristocratic Europe of the past and the technocratic oligarchy of today have finally gotten their revenge on the incorrigible French.”
Arguments like these can also be found in the left-wing antiglobalization pamphlets that fill the tables of French bookstores today. But Zemmour tosses them into a mix with more nativist right-wing arguments, like his attacks on the Sixties generation for promoting radical feminism and immigration, which he sees as connected. Ever since their loss in the Franco-Prussian War, which was ascribed to cultural and physical weakness, the French have been obsessed with their birthrate. Today it is relatively high by European standards, but appears—the government refuses to collect statistics on ethnicity—to be sustained by higher rates among families of North and Central African immigrant “stock.” This has become a major obsession on the radical right, whose literature is full of predictions of an imminent grand remplacement that will silently turn France into a Muslim country through demographic inertia. Zemmour never mentions this theory but is clearly sympathetic to it. Due to feminism, he implies, the wombs of white women have shriveled up. And due to multiculturalism, the flood of fertile immigrants is allowed to continue. This is one more reason why French Muslims should be considered, as he has taken to saying, “un peuple dans le peuple”—a classic motif of European anti-Semitism that he has readapted to meet the present danger.
The French term for multiculturalism is antiracisme, and its history is wrapped up with the development—and decline—of the left. Former ’68ers like Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut have long argued that left-wing activists made a disastrous mistake in the 1970s by abandoning the traditional working class and turning toward identity politics. Deserted, the workers turned to the National Front and adopted its xenophobia; in response, the left formed organizations that defended immigrants and fended off any criticism of their mainly Muslim culture. The classic picture of a France that could and should turn peasants and immigrants into equal citizens was replaced by the picture of a racist nation that after repressing its colonial subjects abroad consigned them to an underclass at home. By now, so the argument goes, this antiracism is the central dogma of mainstream politics, and has stifled the will to integrate Muslims from immigrant backgrounds into French society, with disastrous results—first and foremost for Muslim youth.
But Zemmour does not give a damn about his Muslim fellow citizens, as becomes clear the deeper one gets into Le Suicide français. He has contempt for them—and wants his readers to as well. It is one thing to say that the antiracist rhetoric of victimization has blinded the French to the real threat of fundamentalist Islam brewing in the poor urban areas. It is quite another to dismiss out of hand, as Zemmour does, the enormous independent effects of poverty, segregation, and unemployment in making people in those areas feel hopeless, cut off, angry, and contemptuous of republican pieties. The list of policies that contribute to these conditions—and, if changed, might help to ease them—is long. And France could change them while at the same time policing the streets, maintaining authority in the classrooms, and teaching the republican values of laicity, democracy, and public duty—which one would think Zemmour would favor. But for a demagogue like him it is important to convince readers that the rot is too deep, the traitors too numerous, the Muslims too hopeless for a patchwork of measures to have any effect. To follow his suicide metaphor, it would be like devising an exercise regimen for a patient on life support. On the book’s last page we read that “France is dying, France is dead.” There is no final chapter on what is to be done to revive it. He leaves that to his readers’ no doubt vivid imaginations.
Successful ideologies follow a certain trajectory. They are first developed in narrow sects whose adherents share obsessions and principles, and see themselves as voices in the wilderness. To have any political effect, though, these groups must learn to work together. That’s difficult for obsessive, principled people, which is why at the political fringes one always finds little factions squabbling futilely with each other. But for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it. The French right, with Éric Zemmour’s help, is advancing on this trajectory today. Le Suicide français gives readers a common set of enemies; it provides a calendar of their crimes; it confirms a suspicion that there must be some connection among those crimes; and it stirs in them an outraged hopelessness—which in contemporary politics is much more powerful than hope. All this at a time when the country is trying to wrap its collective mind around one of the great tragedies and challenges in its recent history.
Yes, the publication of Le Suicide français was well timed, at least for its author. For France, not so much.
SUBMISSION
Michel Houellebecq’s Submission met an unfortunate fate. Éric Zemmour’s succès de scandale in the fall of 2014 ensured that his novel would be subjected to intense scrutiny. So was the fact that in previous novels and in public comments Houellebecq had made highly critical remarks about Islam, one of which provoked a court case. But the astonishing, almost unimaginable, fact that the book appeared the very day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre has meant that for now Submission is being read through the prism of current events. It will take some time for the French to appreciate Submission for the strange and surprising thing that it is.
Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale. Submission is not the story some expected of an armed coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. At one level it is simply about a man who through suffering and indifference finds himself slouching toward Mecca. At another level, though, it is about a civilization that after centuries of a steady, almost imperceptible sapping of inner conviction finds itself doing the same thing. The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemmour’s Le Suicide français is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever.
François, the main character of Submission, is a mid-level literature professor at the Sorbonne who specializes in the work of the Symbolist novelist J. K. Huysmans. He is, like all Houellebecq’s protagonists, what the French call un pauvre type, a loser. He lives alone in a modern apartment tower, teaches his courses but has no friends at the university, and returns home to frozen dinners, television, and porn. Most years he manages to pick up a student and start a relationship, which ends when the girl breaks it off over summer vacation with a laconic letter that always begins, “I’ve met someone.” He is clueless about his times. He doesn’t understand why his students are so eager to get rich, or why journalists and politicians are so hollow, or why everyone, like him, is so alone. He believes that “only literature can give you that sensation of contact with another human spirit,” but no one else cares about it. His sometime girlfriend Myriam genuinely loves him but he can’t respond, and when she leaves to join her parents, who have emigrated to Israel because they feel unsafe in France, all he can think to say is: “There is no Israel for me.” Prostitutes, even when the sex is great, only deepen the hole he is in.
We are in 2022 and a presidential election is about to take place. All the smart money is on the National Front’s Marine Le Pen winning the primary, forcing the other parties to form a coalition to stop her. The wild card in all this is a new, moderate Muslim party called the Muslim Brotherhood that by now attracts about a fifth of the electorate, about as many as the Socialists do. The party’s founder and president, Mohammed Ben Abbes, is a genial man who gets along well with Catholic and Jewish community leaders who share his conservative social views, and also with business types who like his advocacy of economic growth. Foreign heads of state, beginning with the pope, have given him their blessing. Given that Muslims make up at most 6 to 8 percent of the French population, it strains credibility to imagine such a party carrying any weight in ten years’ time. But Houellebecq’s thought experiment is based on a genuine insight: since the far right wants to deport Muslims, conservative politicians look down on them, and the Socialists, who embrace them, want to force them to accept gay marriage, no one party clearly represents their interests.
François only slowly becomes aware of the drama swirling around him. He hears rumors of armed clashes between radical right-wing nativist groups (which exist in France) and armed radical Islamists, but newspapers worried about rocking the multicultural boat have ceased reporting such things. At a cocktail party he hears gunfire in the distance, but people pretend not to notice and find excuses to leave, so he does too. As expected, Le Pen wins the presidential primary but the Socialists and the conservatives don’t have enough votes between them to defeat her. So they decide to back Ben Abbes in the runoff, and by a small margin France elects its first Muslim president. Ben Abbes decides to let the other parties divide up the ministries, reserving for the Muslim Brotherhood only the education portfolio. He, unlike his coalition partners, still understands that a nation can be transformed by what happens in classrooms.
Apart from the schools, very little seems to happen at first. But over the next months François starts to notice small things, beginning with how women dress. Though the government has established no dress code, he sees fewer skirts and dresses on the street, and more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body’s contours. It seems that non-Muslim women have spontaneously adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq describes so chillingly in his other novels. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women begin to leave the workforce, taking advantage of new family subsidies to care for their children. François thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, inspired by a religion he knows little about, and which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned. They are always surrounded by their children, who have lots of siblings and feel loved by their parents, who never divorce. François, who lives alone and has lost contact with his parents, is impressed. His fantasy (and perhaps Houellebecq’s) is not really the colonial one of the erotic harem. It is closer to what psychologists call the “family romance.”
The university is a different story. After the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, François, along with all other non-Islamic teachers, is prematurely retired with a full pension. Satisfied with the money, indifferent, or afraid, the faculty does not protest. A golden crescent is placed atop the Sorbonne gate and pictures of the Kaaba line the walls of the once-grim university offices, now restored with the money of Gulf sheikhs. The Sorbonne, François muses, has reverted to its medieval roots, back to the time of Abélard and Heloïse. The new university president, who replaced the female professor of gender studies who had presided over the Sorbonne, tries to woo him back with a better job at triple the pay, if he is willing to go through a pro forma conversion. François is polite but has no intention of doing so.
His mind is elsewhere. Since Myriam’s departure he has sunk to a level of despair unknown even to him. After passing yet another New Year’s alone he starts sobbing one night, seemingly without reason, and can’t stop. Soon after, ostensibly for research purposes, he decides to spend some time in the Benedictine abbey in southern France where his hero Huysmans spent his last years after having abandoned his dissolute life in Paris and converted to mystical Catholicism. Houellebecq has said that originally the novel was to concern a man’s struggle, loosely based on Huysmans’s own, to embrace Catholicism after exhausting all the modern world had to offer. It was to be called La Conversion and Islam did not enter in. But he just could not make Catholicism work for him, and François’s experience in the abbey sounds like Houellebecq’s own as a writer, in a comic register. He only lasts two days there because he finds the sermons puerile, sex is taboo, and they won’t let him smoke.
And so he heads off to the town of Rocamadour in southwest France, the impressive “citadel of faith” where medieval pilgrims once came to worship before the basilica’s statue of the Black Madonna. François is taken with the statue and keeps returning, not sure quite why, until:
I felt my individuality dissolve. . . . I was in a strange state. It seemed the Virgin was rising from her base and growing larger in the sky. The baby Jesus seemed ready to detach himself from her, and I felt that all he had to do was raise his right arm and the pagans and idolaters would be destroyed, and the keys of the world restored to him.
But when it is over he chalks the experience up to hypoglycemia and heads back to his hotel for confit de canard and a good night’s sleep. The next day he can’t repeat what happened. After half an hour of sitting he gets cold and heads back to his car to drive home. When he arrives he finds a letter informing him that in his absence his estranged mother had died alone and been buried in a pauper’s grave.
It’s in this state that François happens to run into the university president, Robert Rediger, and finally accepts an invitation to talk. Rediger is a marvelous creation—part Mephisto, part Grand Inquisitor, part shoe salesman. His speeches are psychologically brilliant and yet wholly transparent. The name is a macabre joke: it refers to Robert Redeker, a French philosophy teacher who received credible death threats after publishing an article in Le Figaro in 2006 calling Islam a religion of hate, violence, and obscurantism—and who has been living ever since under constant police protection. President Rediger is his exact opposite: a smoothie who writes sophistical books defending Islamic doctrine, and has risen in the academic ranks through flattery and influence-peddling. It is his cynicism that, in the end, makes it possible for François to convert.
To set the trap Rediger begins with a confession. It turns out that as a student he began on the radical Catholic right, though he spent his time reading Nietzsche rather than the Church Fathers. Secular humanistic Europe disgusted him. In the 1950s it had given up its colonies out of weakness of will and in the 1960s generated a decadent culture that told people to follow their bliss as free individuals, rather than do their duty, which is to have large, churchgoing families. Unable to reproduce, Europe then opened the gates to large-scale immigration from Muslim countries, Arab and black, and now the streets of French provincial towns look like souks. Integrating such people was never in the cards; Islam does not dissolve in water, let alone in atheistic republican schools. If Europe was ever to recover its place in the world, he thought, it would have to drive out these infidels and return to the true Catholic faith.
But Rediger took this kind of thinking a step further than Catholic xenophobes do. At a certain point he couldn’t ignore how much the Islamists’ message overlapped with his own. They, too, idealized the life of simple, unquestioning piety and despised modern culture and the Enlightenment that spawned it. They believed in hierarchy within the family, with wives and children there to serve the father. They, like he, hated diversity—especially diversity of opinion—and saw homogeneity and high birthrates as vital signs of civilizational health. And they quivered with the eros of violence. All that separated him from them was that they prayed on rugs and he prayed at an altar. But the more Rediger reflected, the more he had to admit that in truth European and Islamic civilizations were no longer comparable. By all the measures that really mattered, post-Christian Europe was dying and Islam was flourishing. If Europe was to have a future, it would have to be an Islamic one.
So Rediger changed to the winning side. And the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood proved that he was right to. As a former Islam specialist for the secret services also tells François, Ben Abbes is no radical Islamist dreaming of restoring a backward caliphate in the sands of the Levant. He is a modern European without the faults of one, which is why he is successful. His ambition is equal to that of the emperor Augustus: to unify the great continent again and expand into North Africa, creating a formidable cultural and economic force. After Charlemagne and Napoleon (and Hitler), Ben Abbes would be written into European history as its first peaceful conqueror. The Roman Empire lasted centuries, the Christian one a millennium and a half. In the distant future, historians will see that European modernity was just an insignificant, two-century-long deviation from the eternal ebb and flow of religiously grounded civilizations.
This impressive Spenglerian prophecy leaves François untouched; his concerns are all prosaic, like whether he can choose his wives. Still, something keeps him from submitting. As for Rediger, between sips of a fine Meursault and while his “Hello Kitty”–clad fifteen-year-old wife (one of three) brings in snacks, he goes in for the kill. As forbidden music plays in the background, he defends the Quran by appealing—in a brilliant Houellebecqian touch—to Dominique Aury’s sadomasochistic novel Story of O. The lesson of O, he tells François, is exactly the same as that of the Holy Book: that “the summit of human happiness is to be found in absolute submission,” of children to parents, women to men, and men to God. And in return, one receives life back in all its splendor. Because Islam, unlike Christianity, does not see human beings as pilgrims in an alien, fallen world, it does not see any need to escape it or remake it. The Quran is an immense mystical poem in praise of the God who created the perfect world we find ourselves in, and teaches us how to achieve happiness in it through obedience. Freedom is just another word for wretchedness.
And so François decides to convert, in what he imagines will be a short, modest ceremony at the Grande Mosquée de Paris. He does so without joy or sadness. He feels relief, just as he imagines his beloved Huysmans did when he converted to Catholicism. Things would change. He would get his wives and no longer have to worry about sex or love; he would finally be mothered. Children would be an adjustment but he would learn to love them, and they would naturally love their father. Giving up drinking would be more difficult but at least he would get to smoke and screw. So why not? His life is exhausted, and so is Europe’s. It’s time for a new one—any one.
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Cultural pessimism is as old as human culture and has a long history in Europe. Hesiod thought that he was living in the Age of Iron; Cato the Elder blamed Greek philosophy for corrupting the young; Saint Augustine exposed the pagan decadence responsible for Rome’s collapse; the Protestant reformers felt themselves to be living in the Great Tribulation; French royalists blamed Rousseau and Voltaire for the Revolution; and just about everyone blamed Nietzsche for the two world wars. Submission is a classic novel in this European tradition and deserves a small place in whatever category we put books like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. The parallels are enlightening. The protagonists in all three works witness the collapse of a civilization they are indifferent to, and whose degradation leaves them unmoored. Trapped by history, Mann’s Hans Castorp and Musil’s Ulrich have no means of escape except through transcendence. After listening to unresolvable debates over freedom and submission in his Swiss sanatorium, Hans falls in love with a tubercular Beatrice and has a mystical experience while lost in the snow. Ulrich is a cynical observer of sclerotic Hapsburg Vienna until his estranged sister reenters his life and he begins having intimations of an equally mystical “other condition” for humanity. Houellebecq blocks this vertical escape route for François, whose experiences at Rocamadour read like a parody of Hans’s and Ulrich’s epiphanies, a tragicomic failure to launch. All that’s left is submission to the blind force that history is.
There is no doubt that Houellebecq wants us to see the collapse of modern Europe and the rise of a Muslim one as a tragedy. “It means the end,” he told an interviewer, “of what is, after all, an ancient civilization.” But that does not make Islam, in the novel at least, an evil religion, just a realistic one. It is not the imaginary Islam of non-Muslim intellectuals who think of it on analogy with the Catholic Church (as happens in France) or with the inward-looking faiths of Protestantism (as happens in northern Europe and the United States). Islam here is an alien and inherently expansive social force, an empire in nuce. It can be peaceful, but it has no interest in compromise or in extending the realm of human liberty. It wants to shape better human beings, not freer ones.
Houellebecq’s critics have seen the novel as anti-Muslim because they assume that individual freedom is the highest human value—and have convinced themselves that the Islamic tradition agrees with them. It does not, and neither does Houellebecq. Whatever Houellebecq thinks of it, Islam is not the target of Submission. It serves as a device to express a recurring European worry that the single-minded pursuit of freedom—freedom from tradition and authority, freedom to pursue one’s own ends—must inevitably lead to disaster.
His breakout novel, The Elementary Particles, concerned two brothers who suffered unbearable psychic wounds after being abandoned by narcissistic hippie parents who epitomized the Sixties. But with each new novel it has become clearer that Houellebecq thinks that the crucial historical turning point was much earlier. Our troubles, he now thinks, began with the Enlightenment attack on the organic wholeness of medieval society and the blind pursuit of technological advance. The qualities that Houellebecq projects onto Islam are no different from those that the religious right ever since the French Revolution has attributed to premodern Christendom: strong families, moral education, social order, a sense of place, a meaningful death, and, above all, the will to persist as a culture. And he shows a real understanding of people—from the radical nativist on the far right to radical Islamists—who despise the present and dream of stepping back in history to recover what they imagine was lost. All Houellebecq’s characters seek escape, usually in sex, now in religion. His fourth novel, The Possibility of an Island, was set in a very distant future where biotechnology has made it possible to commit suicide once life becomes unbearable, and then to be refabricated as a clone with no recollection of our earlier states. That, it seems for Houellebecq, would be the best of all possible worlds: immortality without memory. Europe in 2022 has to find another way to escape the present, and “Islam” just happens to be the name of the next clone.
Michel Houellebecq is not angry. He does not have a program, and he is not shaking his fist at the nation’s traitors as Éric Zemmour is. For all his knowingness about contemporary culture—the way we love, the way we work, the way we die—the focus in Houellebecq’s novels is always on the historical longue durée. He appears genuinely to believe that France has, regrettably and irretrievably, lost its sense of self, but not because of feminism or immigration or the European Union or globalization. Those are just symptoms of a crisis that was set off two centuries ago when Europeans made a wager on history: that the more they extended human freedom, the happier they would be. For him, that wager has been lost. And so the continent is adrift and susceptible to a much older temptation, to submit to those claiming to speak for God. Who remains as remote and as silent as ever.