The Decline and Fall of Liberal Democracy: Michel Houellebecq’s Submission as Satire

ABSTRACT

Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission imagines a future in which a Muslim party wins the 2022 election and begins to turn France into an Islamic country. This story initially led critics to accuse Houellebecq of reproducing a far-right narrative about Muslim immigration. More recently, however, other critics have argued that the novel does not denigrate Islam but depicts the new regime as a viable refuge from Western liberalism, leading to the accusation that Houellebecq glorifies patriarchal society. This article addresses both charges by arguing that Submission is not primarily concerned with Islam at all; rather, it is a satire of Western liberal democracy, which uses Islam as a satirical device to illustrate the shortcomings of Western conceptions of freedom and democracy. It is therefore no coincidence that Submission revolves around a farcical democratic election, and that the French people embraces their new illiberal system. Importantly, although the novel’s protagonist compares political Islam favorably with Western liberal democracy, there are numerous signs in the novel that Houellebecq does not champion the return of the patriarchy. Finally, drawing on political science, the article argues that Houellebecq’s satire correctly pinpoints some major problems with liberal democracy as it is presently exercised throughout the West.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, Bernard Maris’s Houellebecq économiste, Douglas Murray‘s The Strange Death of Europe (p. 276–280), Gilles Kepel Terreur dans l’héxagone (p. 288–291) and Jonathan Rosenthal “Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’: Islam and France’s Malaise” in World Affairs.

2. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11348416/Michel-Houellebecqs-Soumission-More-prescient-than-provocative.html.

3. The statement, which I have translated here, was made in an interview with the French radio channel RTL on January, 8, 2015. The full interview is available at: https://www.rtl.fr/actu/politique/charlie-hebdo-manuel-valls-sur-rtl-ces-individus-etaient-suivis-mais-il-n-y-a-pas-de-risque-zero-suivez-notre-direct-7776137196.

4. To be sure, Houellebecq was charged with inciting racial hatred shortly after the publication of Plateforme, but as Rosenthal notes: “It was only as a result of an interview published in the magazine Lire shortly after Plateforme’s release that Houellebecq would be exposed to the charge of Islamophobia. In it, Houellebecq famously described Islam as ‘the dumbest religion’ and ‘dangerous’ to boot.” (Rosenthal 77).

5. See Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today, p. 20–23.

6. It is worth noting that the story of a soon-to-come Islamization of Europe is not supported by demographic evidence. In 2017, Pew Research Center published a demographic study about the growth of Europe’s Muslim population with three different projections. According to the high migration scenario, in which the flow of refugees into Europe during the 2015 migrant crisis would “continue indefinitely into the future with the same religious composition … Muslims could make up 14% of Europe’s population by 2050”, see https://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/. In addition to being extremely unlikely, that scenario is far from a “great replacement.”

7. This remark was made by Camus in an interview in The New Yorker, November 2017. The full interview is available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/the-french-origins-of-you-will-not-replace-us.

8. Due to the inaccuracy of the English translation of Submission, all translations are my own. The page numbers refer to the French edition.

9. Similarly, Benjamin Boysen writes: “[Houellebecq’s] vehement critique of the sexual liberation of the sixties as well as of Western individualism and liberalism are well-known and well-documented.” (Boysen 464).

10. Several hadiths say that Aisha was nine or ten years old when she was married to Mohammed. However, Sahih al-Bukhari’s hadith states that “the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old.” See, Sahih al-Bukhari’s hadith at: https://sunnah.com/bukhari/67/69.

11. Here it is clearly part of the novel’s parodic conversion narrative that Rediger compares the Koran to the erotic novel Histoire d’O. Strategically, it is a way for Rediger to entice François to convert to Islam, but it is also another brilliant satirical stroke on Houellebecq’s part.

12. The interview can be found in its entirety at: https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/le-7-9/le-7-9-07-janvier-2015.

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Leander Møller Gøttcke

Leander Møller Gøttcke is a PhD student at the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. Apart from holding a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern Denmark, he has studied French literature at the Université Paris Nanterre in 2012, and he has been a visiting research student at the University of Melbourne from 2018 to 2019.