“Submission”: a retrospective

Next month marks ten years since the English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was published. It’s difficult to pinpoint the rise of Western populism to a single moment — UKIP’s breakthrough in the European elections came a year earlier — but Submission, first released with bleak serendipity on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, struck an unmistakable cultural nerve. The novel imagines a France that slips under Islamic governance, not through war or conquest, but through quiet, voluntary surrender. 

Contrary to later mythologising, the book was not universally condemned as Islamophobic or reactionary. In fact, some reviewers, like The Guardian, saw it as a surprisingly nuanced work.

“Rather than being a dark vision of a world ruled by mad mullahs,” the review observed, “it presents the moderate Muslims who take over France as a force of spiritual integrity and revolutionary verve … The real targets of the book are France’s bloated institutions, its venal politicians, its sclerotic literary scene.”

This was a time before the Brexit vote — when the establishment didn’t yet feel under siege and could indulge in such moments of Glasnost, without being dragged before the Star Chamber of public opinion for giving cover to nativist dark forces.

Nor was Houellebecq treated as a dissident. Atomised (1998), his earlier, equally scathing dissection of the sexual revolution, had already established him as the misanthropic diagnostician of Western liberalism’s long decline and was published to rapturous acclaim. In 2019, he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. Taken together, Submission merely extended the prognosis: a culture that cannot defend itself, won’t.

Narrated by François, a self-insert of a 44-year-old Sorbonne professor and Huysmans specialist, Submission follows a man who drifts through life completing his academic work between idle meditations on food, drink, and sex. Naturally, he has a 22-year-old Jewish undergraduate girlfriend, Myriam, who “must have made a ravishing little goth as a teenager.” Every aspect of his existence: romantic, intellectual, spiritual, is empty, convenient, and disposable. He serves as the perfect blank canvas upon which the slow collapse of the Fifth Republic’s moral and institutional scaffolding follows.

Set during the fictional 2022 elections, Submission depicts a France where both the Socialists and the Conservatives are on the way out. The real contest is between the nativists, led by Marine Le Pen, and a rising Muslim party headed by the shrewd and calculating (fictional) Mohammed Ben Abbes.

As unauthorised mass rallies erupt on both sides and the legacy parties collapse, France teeters on the edge of civil war. On election day, outbreaks of violence, at polling stations and in the banlieues, create a fog of war, leaving the true outcome of the vote unclear.

Despite living in Paris’s Chinatown and being largely insulated from the unrest by the surrounding Chinese enclave, François flees the capital via eerily deserted roads. After failing to find fuel at a petrol station strewn with corpses, he eventually arrives in Martel, the famous town with a shrine dedicated to his literary idol, Huysmans. There, by chance, he encounters Marie-Françoise Tanneur, a former colleague from the (now closed) Sorbonne.

She invites François to dinner at her home, where he meets her husband, Alan, a DGSI officer. Over the meal, François is given a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes statecraft that facilitated the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. I won’t spoil the rest of the book — it’s a superb read and an excellent translation — but it’s in this section that much of the novel’s political commentary is laid bare (albeit thinly veiled as exposition).

An accommodation is brokered between the Socialists and the Muslim party, a calculated move to spike the guns of the National Front and shut out the nativist insurgency. In return for stability and continued relevance, the old guard surrenders the republic. A soft form of Sharia is ushered in almost overnight: women are barred from academic posts; men must convert to Islam to keep their university positions. The Muslim Brotherhood seizes control of the state’s machinery almost by invitation.

During the height of the Islamic State insurgency in the latter half of the 2010s, the scenario imagined in Submission didn’t seem particularly far-fetched. On the contrary, it felt eerily plausible. The novel’s portrayal of France on the brink, a nation paralysed by political fragmentation, demographic anxiety, and recurring spasms of terrorist violence, resonated with a disturbed public — especially after such outrages like Nice and the Bataclan.

By that point, media coverage of attacks had already adopted the agentless, euphemistic language that Houellebecq so effectively mimics: bombs “go off,” assailants are “known to authorities,” and events are “not being treated as terrorism at this time.” It’s as if the violence simply happens, a kind of climatological phenomenon rather than an ideological act.

It’s little wonder that Submission was seized upon by counter-jihadists and identitarians as a grim prophetic text, a vision of civilisational surrender cloaked in administrative prose.

More of a prophecy than satire then, but how prescient was it really?

While no serious Muslim political party exists in French electoral life — certainly nothing resembling the Brotherhood in Submission — Houellebecq’s depiction of elite manoeuvring to preserve the status quo has proven remarkably prescient.

Following a surge in support for Bardella’s National Rally (the successor of Le Pen’s Front Nationale), the establishment parties, despite their ideological differences, coalesced around a familiar strategy: the cordon sanitaire. Socialist, centrist, and even conservative factions entered into an uneasy electoral pact, strategically standing down in key seats to block the RN’s advance. The result was a fragmented parliament, but mission accomplished, the populists were, once again, denied the reins of state.

So far, so European Union. But Submission took on renewed relevance in Britain following the October 7th attacks and the massive demonstrations that erupted across London in response to Israel’s subsequent punitive expedition in Gaza. The protests, largely driven by diaspora communities, shocked many on the centre-right who had previously been indifferent to London’s shifting demographics.

Is Betz onto something? Should we start stockpiling beans and inquiring about firearms licences?

Figures who had once scoffed at talk of demographic change became near-apocalyptic. Military academic David Betz warned bluntly that “civil war comes to the West.” Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick condemned the marches as “hate marches” and called for the state to use any means necessary to suppress them, going so far as to suggest that those chanting “Allahu Akbar” should be arrested on the spot.

Is Betz onto something? Should we start stockpiling beans and inquiring about firearms licences? Probably not.

Yes, there has been a growth in Muslim-aligned political vehicles, Gaza independents, Corbynite offshoots, but outside of the Israel-Palestine question, these parties are largely inert. There’s no serious talk of a grand Ummah, capturing the education system and judiciary with quiet, surgical precision. Broadly speaking, Muslim voters in physical constituencies want to be left alone in their own enclaves — the Palestine Question aside.

Britain will face serious civil unrest in the coming years, but it’s more likely to be aimed at the increasingly brittle Blairite state than launched in the name of Islam. Most recent flashpoints have involved migrant hotels, where the Islamic angle has been tenuous at best, often cynically exploited by grifters like Tommy Robinson. The locus has been the state’s staggering naïveté in housing unvetted military-age men next to girls’ schools, and its total incapacity to junk the asylum system altogether.

“Jenrickian Apocalypticism”, if we may coin a phrase, is a natural psychological spasm, the moment when the scales fall from the eyes. But it’s not grounded in objective reality, or at least not yet. Attributing the rise of powerful new forces to End Times moralising is often just a coping mechanism — particularly common on the right around 2020, with all the talk of an all-consuming “successor ideology.” The asylum system and Islamic demographic change are two distinct issues, and the only people who benefit from conflating them are the ones running the state.