This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The date for the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s sixth novel was 7 January 2015. The book’s title was Soumission (Submission), and rarely had pre-publication reviews for a book been so vitriolic. The French literary scene loathed the novel, which was set against the backdrop of the 2022 presidential election in which Marine Le Pen was forecast to triumph before centrist parties formed a coalition with an Islamist party, resulting in France’s first Muslim head of state. President Mohammed Ben Abbes immediately set about transforming the French Republic into an Islamic one.

Libération described Soumission as “Islamophobic” and a “low-budget political-fiction novel” that legitimised the far right. A literary review magazine called Houellebecq “irresponsible” and “opportunistic” and said it was hard to take the novel seriously.

The most contemptuous review was published by the left-wing Mediapart. Written by Sylvain Bourmeau, who had just been elevated by the then Socialist president François Hollande to a prestigious academic post, the review was headlined “Un suicide littéraire français”.

It tore the author and the novel to bits: a “rancid, explosive zeitgeist … a deliberately skewed representation of the country we live in … Soumission rings false from start to finish”.

At 11.30 on the morning that Soumission was published, two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. Since it had reproduced a series of Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet in 2006 — one of the very few Western publications that had dared — the satirical magazine had received numerous death threats from Islamists. The brothers opened fire with assault rifles, shooting dead 12 people.

One of the few who survived was Sigolène Vinson. “I’m not killing you because you are a woman,” said one of the brothers, who then advised her to convert to Islam and wear a veil. As the pair fled the building, killing a policeman on the street, they were heard to cry “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad”. Two days later an Islamist terrorist, an associate of the Kouachis, shot four dead shoppers in a Jewish kosher store in Paris.

Soumission sold 120,000 copies in five days in France, a figure that by the end of the year had risen to 650,000. It was published around the world and became an instant bestseller in Germany. Literary suicide it was not.

Not everyone had condemned Soumission in the days before its publication. In an article for Le Monde, the writer Emmanuel Carrère called the book “sublime” and bracketed it with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for its prophecy.

Marine Le Pen, one of the novel’s protagonists, looked at the book with a politician’s perspective and found it “very interesting”. She particularly appreciated the way Houellebecq depicted the connivance of the centre-right and centre-left with the Islamists, thereby allowing Mohammed Ben Abbes to win the election. “That could one day become reality,” she predicted.

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It is almost ten years since the publication of Soumission, and in that time much of what Houellebecq depicted has become reality. The Charlie Hebdo massacre was the prelude to a wave of Islamist terror attacks across Western Europe — Paris, Nice, London, Brussels, Stockholm, Manchester, Berlin and Barcelona — that left hundreds dead, but it is not that which threatens Europe. Rather, it is the emergence of political Islam. This soft power has spread rapidly in the ecosystem of left-wing identity politics.

Most obviously, this manifested itself in the launch of the Free Palestine Party, an alliance of European Muslim groups that contested the European elections in June this year. They didn’t win a seat.

In France, however, life is imitating Houellebecq’s art alarmingly. Stéphane Charbonnier, “Charb” to his friends, was amongst the Charlie Hebdo journalists murdered in 2015. One of those friends was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran left-wing politician, who spoke eloquently at his funeral: “Charb, you have been murdered as you knew you would be by our oldest, cruellest, most constant and most narrow-minded enemies: the religious fanatics.”

Yet, Mélenchon now courts those same fanatics. His ideological (and moral) transition began in 2017. That year he contested the presidential election, and in the first round he received seven million votes, only 600,000 fewer than Marine Le Pen, who finished second and then lost to Emmanuel Macron in the second-round run-off.

Mélenchon scrutinised the demographic breakdown of the first-round vote. Just over one in three French Muslims (37 per cent) out of an estimated population of six million had voted for him, whilst 17 per cent had cast their ballot for the Socialist Party candidate and 24 per cent for Macron.

Mélenchon saw the Muslim vote as key in future elections. The white working class had abandoned the left for Le Pen, so he set out to attract this new demographic, regarding it as the oppressed of the 21st century.

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In November 2019, a month after an Islamist had murdered four policemen in Paris, Mélenchon and many of those in his party, La France Insoumise (LFI), participated in an “anti-Islamophobia” march organised by the CCIF (Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France), a group that was subsequently proscribed by the French government because of its proximity to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Soumission, the Islamist party that seizes power is the “Muslim Fraternity”; it is not difficult to understand who Houellebecq had in mind.

Associating with nebulous groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood did not bother Mélenchon. Nor did the criticism in the French press of his presence on the march, or accusations of “betraying” the memory of Charb and the other journalists who had been slain by the religious fanatics.

Mélenchon knew his strategy was working. In the 2022 presidential election he received 7.7 million votes, an increase of 700,000 on the 2017 contest. He was now 400,000 shy of Le Pen. This time his share of the Muslim vote was 69 per cent, nearly double that of 2017. In the parliamentary elections that followed, LFI increased their seats from 17 to 61.

A subsequent investigation from the French intelligence services reported that Islamists had “clearly tried to influence the campaign” by encouraging Muslims to vote for Mélenchon. However, concluded the report, “the Brotherhood influencers will not move towards a lasting alliance with LFI, which will always remain too Republican in their eyes”.

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That was before Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023. Within days Mélenchon’s party had described the Palestinian terrorist organisation as a “resistance movement”, and their support has only strengthened in the months since.

LFI MPs have waved Palestinian flags in parliament; one MP called a Jewish MP “a pig”, and two of its leading figures have been questioned by police over possible apology for terrorism for statements made about Hamas and Israel.

To mark the first anniversary of Hamas’ massacre of Israelis, Mélenchon called on students across France to brandish the Palestine flag, as well as the Lebanese one. “Hezbollah is a component of the Lebanese people, and it is not up to us to decide who is a good component and who is a bad one,” he said.

The party’s pro-Palestinian stance was appreciated by the majority of French Muslims

It is not a surprise that 92 per cent of France’s Jewish population believe Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise are tainted by anti-Semitism.

But the party’s pro-Palestinian stance was appreciated by the majority of French Muslims, 62 per cent of whom voted for LFI in the European Parliament elections. It was the crushing defeat of Macron’s party in those elections that prompted the president to call a snap general election for “clarification”.

Marine Le Pen’s party had come top by a considerable distance, but Macron believed this support would ebb away in the parliamentary election. It didn’t. As in the European poll, one third of the electorate voted for Le Pen’s party in the first round of the National Assembly election. She was on the brink of forming a government.

So what did Macron and his centrists do? They did what the centrists did in Soumission and formed an alliance with Mélenchon’s left-wing coalition of socialists, communists, Greens and the far-left France Insoumise. They ignored the anti-Semitism and the fraternisation with Islamists and told voters it was their “moral duty” to stop Le Pen’s party coming to power.

As a result, although Le Pen’s party took the largest share of the popular vote with 37 per cent, the left won most seats in parliament, and Mélenchon declared with some justification that they should form the government.

Macron thwarted that ambition by appointing the centre-right Michel Barnier as his prime minister, but the events of this summer will have convinced Mélenchon more than ever that he can prevail at the 2027 presidential election.

The constitution precludes Macron from standing for a third consecutive term, and Mélenchon believes that if he can reach the second round against Le Pen, he will be elected president with the support of Muslims, Marxists and many of the metropolitan bourgeois.

Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission is a brilliant book with only one flaw: its prediction might be five years premature.