Michel Houellebecq: the prophet of Europe’s decay

Whether Michel Houellebecq is a great writer will be debated for as long as his books are read. What few will deny is his status as one of the early 21st century’s most challenging and original artists.

That might not be saying a great deal. After all, the first 25 years of the new millennium – at least in the West – are unlikely to be remembered as a time of great artistic or intellectual originality. Just look at recent winners of the Turner Prize, or read one of Sally Rooney’s novels.

Still, Houellebecq stands out thanks to his willingness to say the things other writers don’t dare to. In an era when artists and authors tend to share the same ‘progressive’ worldview, Houellebecq has consistently refused to bend the knee to fashionable orthodoxies. He remains a critical figure for those who still believe in a writer’s ability to capture the unique ‘spirit’ of the age they live in. Taken together, his works chronicle and explore the creeping sense of decline shared by many in the West.

Born in 1956, Houellebecq’s journey from young dilettante to literary fame was far from orthodox. By all accounts, he enjoyed an unpleasant childhood, taking the surname ‘Houellebecq’ from his paternal grandmother, who raised him in place of his indifferent parents. After school, he studied agronomy at university in Paris, before working as a computer programmer. He published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994, when he was 38, and has had seven more novels published in the roughly three decades since.

While Houellebecq’s literary journey has been unusual, there was one familiar aspect: the repeated rejections he received from French publishers. It is easy to see why. What he was writing simply didn’t chime with the era. It was the 1990s. Sexual liberation and multiculturalism were seen as unequivocally good, and capitalism was viewed as triumphant. Sensible writers accepted all this. Houellebecq did not.

It was not until 1998 that Houellebecq eventually broke through, with the publication of his second novel, Atomised. In the finest French tradition, it provoked disgust and awe in equal measure. According to the New York Times, Atomised was ‘bilious, hysterical and oddly juvenile’. The judges of the Dublin Literary Award, which the novel won in 2002, described it as ‘extraordinary’. A fair-minded reader might find it hard to fault either response.

In Atomised, readers were exposed to material and themes that, in one way or another, Houellebecq has explored ever since. There was graphic sexual excess, a general animosity towards the modern world and an overall sense of societal disintegration. His characters are lonely, desperate creatures who work in middling jobs that they hate. They alleviate their misery through heavy drinking, medication and exploring the most denigrating extremes of their erotic urges.

There was certainly plenty in Atomised to repel respectable critics. There’s the scene in which high-school teacher and unfulfilled libertine, Bruno, masturbates in front of an attractive young student he had asked to stay behind after class – she laughs at the older man and walks out after watching him ejaculate. Or there’s the passage describing a young Bruno’s experience of walking into his mother’s bedroom while she is asleep with one of her young lovers, lifting up the sheets and staring longingly at his mother’s genitalia.

Such gratuitous crassness has become a distinguishing feature of Houellebecq’s writing. Yet as his growing legion of supporters saw it, there has always been a deeper meaning to it. In short, his morally degenerate characters embody their morally degenerate era. The creeping nihilism of his fictions captures the creeping nihilism of the West after the sexual revolution. Indeed, much of Atomised is a merciless mockery of the free-love movement.

At points it becomes difficult to separate the art from the artist, especially when it comes to Houellebecq’s scathing assessment of the legacy of 1960s sexual liberation. Indeed, his portrait of Bruno’s mother, who abandons her children for enlightened hedonism, seemingly mirrors his view of his own mother, who apparently abandoned him in pursuit of sexual fulfillment. He even gives the loveless and self-absorbed mother in Atomised the same name as his own mother – Ceccaldi.

We learnt all of this after an incredibly public dispute broke out between the pair following the publication of Atomised. His mother described him as a ‘liar’ and a ‘complete shit’. Later, in her own 2008 memoir, she called her son a ‘parasite’ and a ‘petite arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame’.

The blurring of Houellebecq’s sex-obsessed fiction with his sex-obsessed life took a bizarre turn in 2023 when he tried and failed to suppress an arty but pornographic film featuring him having sex and justifying prostitution. He argued that he was drunk and on antidepressants when he signed the contract for the film in 2022. It was a humiliation that his many critics revelled in, particularly those who said he was nothing more than one of his novels’ favourite targets: a sex addict masquerading as a prophet.

However, the scandal Houellebecq has courted over his attitude to sex pales in comparison with what has emerged as the great controversy of his career: namely, his views on religion and especially Islam. We first find traces of his discomfort with Islam in his third novel, Platform, published in 2002.

Platform begins with the murder of the narrator’s father by a Muslim – the brother of the young, unmarried woman his father had been in a relationship with. ‘My family think I’m a whore’, she explains. ‘[My brothers] get blind drunk on pastis and all the while strut around like the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them.’ Later in the book, an Egyptian man tells Platform’s narrator that, since the rise of Islam, ‘we’ve become a country of flea-ridden beggars’. He goes on:

‘The closer a religion comes to a monotheism… the more cruel and inhuman it becomes; and of all the religions, Islam imposes the most radical monotheism. From its beginnings, it has been characterised by an uninterrupted series of invasions and massacres; never, for as long as it exists, will peace reign in the world. Neither, in Muslim countries, will intellect and talent find a home; if there were Arab mathematicians, poets and scientists, it is simply because they lost the faith.’

Michel, Platform’s nihilistic protagonist and narrator, experiences happiness for the first time in his life through his relationship with Valérie, a young travel agent he meets on a Thai sex expedition. They plan on building a life together in Thailand, and setting up a sex-tourism travel agency, only for her to be murdered in an Islamic terror attack on a hotel the pair are staying in.

After the publication of Platform, Houellebecq was quickly accused of Islamophobia, to go alongside the charges of male chauvinism levelled at Atomised. In a 2002 interview, he doubled down, referring to Islam as ‘the most stupid of all religions’. ‘When you read the Koran, you give up’, he said. ‘At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have extraordinary literary talent.’

The comments landed Houellebecq in the French civil courts, where three Muslim organisations and the Paris-based Human Rights League accused him of inciting racial hatred. He was acquitted, but the scandal provided a taste of what was to come a decade later.

On 7 January 2015, Houellebecq was giving an interview on French radio about his latest novel, Submission, set to be released that day. A decade on, the world remembers the date for a very different reason. It was the day two Islamic extremists, armed with Kalashnikovs, murdered 12 journalists at the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, for publishing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. Houellebecq, who was featured on the front cover of that week’s edition of Charlie, was sent to an anonymous location and given police protection. In response to the attacks, then French prime minister Manuel Valls, doubtlessly reflecting the mood of the nation’s cultural elites, declared, ‘France isn’t Michel Houellebecq. It isn’t intolerance, hate, fear.’

Set in 2022, in the lead up to a French presidential election, Submission charts France’s decline from secular democracy to a form of limp Islamic dictatorship. The gradual Islamisation of French society has led to violence and the unravelling of the social order. Fertile grounds, in other words, for a populist revolt against mass immigration. Yet as Houellebecq describes it, France’s political elites do everything in their power to thwart what appears to be a certain victory for the National Front (as the National Rally was still called when the novel was released). And so they unite behind the Muslim Fraternity, a sectarian political movement representing France’s Muslim population. After the Fraternity’s victory, a diluted form of Sharia law is imposed on the country. The novel’s narrator, an academic in French literature at the Sorbonne, contemplates converting to Islam in order to advance his career prospects.

Few novels have created a bigger stir on publication in recent decades than Submission. In an age in which fiction had long been relegated to the lower tiers of the arts, the public reaction was more like the release of a new Tarantino movie. It sold more than 650,000 copies in France before its English translation was even released. Depending on your political orientation, it either made Houellebecq a prophet or confirmed his and France’s bigotry. From that moment on, Houellebecq joined the company of Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a writer in need of police protection for insulting Islam – a testament to his fame and his willingness to speak his mind.

The threat evoked by Submission is different to that evoked by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the late 1940s, when Orwell was writing, the sheer totalitarian hell of the Soviet Union, and its steady annihilation of truth and individuality, was a lived reality for millions. France in the mid-2010s was not remotely close to an Islamic takeover, and the hard-right National Rally now sits on top of most polls.

To focus on Houellebecq’s treatment of the rise of Islam in Submission is to miss the point. He is more concerned, at a deeper level, with the creeping racial and religious disintegration and violent animus of French society, and the determination of a political class to deny this reality and punish those drawing attention to it. It is a prescient, powerfully original novel. Indeed, the cordon sanitaire drawn around the National Front that propels the Muslim Fraternity to power and Mohammed Ben Abbas to the Élysée in Submission has eerie parallels in current French and European politics, where there are similar attempts to isolate and demonise the populist threat to the status quo.

Houellebecq’s most recent and likely final novel, Annihilation, was published in 2022 – a translation was released in the UK last year. Here again, the protagonist is yet another jaundiced, middle-aged civil servant immersed in the French political establishment. Although he is distinctly less virile than earlier Houellebecq protagonists, he does manage to mistakenly have sex with his niece, who unbeknown to him has been working as a prostitute to pay for her studies in Paris.

Annihilation is full of playful swipes at an incompetent and unrepresentative political establishment. And like Submission, Annihilation is set five years in the future, at the time of the 2027 presidential elections. In Houellebecq’s fictional future, the ‘centrist’ French political elite has done little to alleviate long-term economic stagnation. ‘The president had abandoned the fantasies of a start-up nation that had had him elected the first time’, he writes, ‘but had objectively led to the creation of some precarious and underpaid jobs, on the edge of slavery, within uncontrollable multinationals’. And at the same time, France’s middle class has been hollowed out, economically and culturally.

The most sympathetic figure in Annihilation is Paul’s devout Catholic sister, Cécile, who along with her husband is an ardent supporter of Marine Le Pen: ‘In fact, [Paul] didn’t hold [their support for Le Pen] against them at all. If he had lived in Arras, he would have voted for Le Pen, too.’ Cécile has no qualifications but is, of all the characters, a ray of moral decency. She is an emblem of what the country has lost, or deliberately discarded in recent generations. Cécile would once have prospered, or at least lived comfortably. But she is now cooking for wealthy families just to get by. We already know what her daughter is doing.

The critique of modern France becomes more pointed after Paul and Cécile’s father suffers a stroke. The healthcare they would have once expected the state to provide has vanished, and there’s a growing sense among the public that the elderly aren’t worth saving – they are too burdensome and have lost their economic value. The father’s hospice reduces his baths, his wheelchair outings and speech rehabilitation. Maryse, the father’s carer, resigns in disgust at the old man’s treatment – ‘indignant and startled that such things could exist in France, that old people could, in their twilight years, be subject to such humiliation’.

The themes in Annihilation are similar to those in Submission, but embedded in a less dramatic setting. The moral order of society, which was fraying in Submission, is now being torn apart. Houellebecq portrays a France of the near future in which ‘civilised’ human beings accept the euthanisation of the elderly; and a France in which second-rate, cynical politicians continue to cling to power while the nation they rule sinks slowly into the mire. It is a sunken, culturally decaying world, marked by deep economic inequality. The central protagonist, the cynical civil-servant Paul has an apartment overlooking central Paris, while his sister’s provincial family looks into a future of irredeemable poverty. Paul, though, in typical Houellebecq fashion, dies of mouth cancer just as he begins to rediscover hope and meaning in his personal life.

Here we see the enduring appeal of Houellebecq. In an era in which so-called literary novels have tended to serve the ‘progressive’ establishment worldview, his work has interrogated modern life and asked questions few others even contemplate. Where his literary contemporaries see the moral arc of history bending towards progress, Houellebecq sees decline and decadence. Sexual liberation, multiculturalism and the demise of religion are seen as nihilistic forces, rather than sources of cohesion. It is a dark vision that has resonated with millions of readers.

Is Houellebecq a great writer? Fellow novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard thinks he is stylistically lacking. And it’s true Houellebecq seems to take little interest in dialogue, preferring instead to express ideas purely through the internal world of his characters. Moreover, beyond his fiction, his essays are often simultaneously impenetrable and pedestrian. His piece in Harper’s, ‘Donald Trump is a good president’, is one of the most uninsightful pieces you are likely to read on US politics.

Yet there is still a greatness to Houellebecq’s work. He may lack a certain technical finesse, but he possesses a singularity of vision his contemporaries lack. He seems to see further and more clearly than others. Houellebecq’s collection of essays and interviews, Interventions 2020 features a quote from 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: ‘The first – and practically the only – condition of good style is having something to say.’ And Houellebecq, for all his faults, has always had something to say.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.