Michel Houellebecq is what you might call an odd duck. He is acclaimed as “France’s most successful living writer” and he looks like a caricature of a French guy, angular face, homely as hell, overly long and unkempt hair. His writing style is a bit off-putting and often pretentious. My disdain for the cheese eating surrender monkeys in France is legendary. In short, Michel Houellebecq isn’t an author I would likely choose to read. But I did, and for the second time. I read his novel Submission previously and thought it was odd but I read it again this week, finding it still odd but also thought provoking.
Submission tells the story of a French academic named François who is a specialist in the 19th century French writer Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans. No, I have never heard of the guy outside this book, that is kind of the point. François is a guy who can’t really think of a good reason to keep living, who eats microwave meals or delivery ethnic chow alone, drinks and smokes and laments his sex life. That is all backdrop for the real story of the novel, a (mostly) peaceful political take-over of France by Islam.
It isn’t a particularly realistic novel, nor is it supposed to be. The novel really comes down to a stark view of the future of France and Europe in general as cultural Christianity rapidly fades into irrelevance and the choice comes down to a further decline into the cesspool of liberal secular humanism or a different monotheistic moral system. Is life better for people like François in a continent wide suicidal funk or in a brave new world under political Islam?
Submission was written in 2015 and 9 years later in 2024 Islam is not in any sort of position to take political power in France. Nor would French women blithely agree to start wearing veils. That isn’t the point of the book, it is a biting satirical work not a work of realism. It seems to me to be a warning.
While France is theoretically a Catholic country, the percentage of French who claim to be Catholic is under 50% and Mass attendance is down to around 5%. If you are “Catholic” but don’t attend Mass, you just simply aren’t Catholic. Meanwhile Islam claims at least 4% of people living in France, although again I would guess that a significant percentage of those Muslims are not observant at all. About 15 years ago I was managing a bank just south of Dearborn, Michigan so I had a fair number of Muslim customers but most of them were little more observant than cultural Catholics that never attended Mass. In other words, France is not about to elect a Muslim Brotherhood government anytime in the near future, even though Islam is rapidly growing in France and Catholicism is pretty much dead. Muslims still can’t even get along in their own nations at present.
What it does raise is an important question, not just for France but here in the U.S. as well where Christian religious adherence is not as far gone as in Europe but heading in the same direction at a rapid pace. What replaces cultural Christianity? I am sorry to point this out to my Christian Nationalist brothers but a Christian Nationalist government even at the level of dog catcher isn’t going to happen. Like libertarianism, Christian nationalism is an amusing topic to argue about especially because it will never become reality. Nor will a revised paganism sweep the land, no matter how many dudes dress up like characters from Viking TV shows.
The quandary that the rapidly dwindling population of Christians will face, along with non-Christians who hold to values like traditional sex roles for men and women, will be what to do as Islam grows and cultural Christianity fades. Could we see a time when Trad Catholics, Trad Orthodox and non-dispensationalist conservative Protestants willingly join forces with Islam? Could it be that life as second-class Dhimmī under Sharia law would be preferably to the alleged freedoms enjoyed by Christians in a society gone bonkers with faggotry and transvestitism? Christians are tolerated, for now, in America thanks to the First Amendment and lingering cultural religious affiliation, but that tolerance is on life support with Republicans cheering on passage of bills that make the New Testament’s teaching about Jews illegal.
Maybe paying the Jizya tax is a small price to pay for living in a society where the gays get stoned and drag queens tossed off buildings instead of gyrating their genitals in front of small children? When you consider the alternative, you can see where Houellebecq was going with his novel. The protaganist ends up converting to Islam in order to get rehired at the university where he could write academic papers and as an added bonus would be assigned multiple wives like his Islamic-convert mentor Robert Rediger who has at least two wives, his first wife who is now in her 40s and cooks and cleans and a second wife that is said to have just turned 15 who serves an obviously different role in the polygamous marriage.
While some on the dissident right consider Islam based for being patriarchal and anti-degeneracy, the problems are obvious. First, Islam is full of low IQ non-Whites and a religion that requires me to pretend that a Somali Muslim is my brother and equal is obviously false. Second, for all of their yammering about a strict moral code Muslims are full of degeneracy: pedophilia, bestiality, incest of all sorts as well as being vicious toward non-believers in practice.
Submission raises some uncomfortable questions that aren’t easily answered. The book is kind of weird, written by a weird French degenerate, but still we should be thinking about these issues.
For a less sanguine view of the future, have a look at Tom Kratman’s Caliphate. Europe after a very hard fall to Islam.
I like the Interludes the best.
In the last, when this leftwing loony woman is told she is diseased and has infected her child with the leftwing crazyness too, thats like a sledgehammer to the face.
A sledgehammer that needs to be applied to all who say that Islam is peace, freedom and all this other gobbledidok.
My disdain for the cheese eating surrender monkeys in France is legendary.
Theirs is an off-breed of “White” people who think Jerry Lewis is funny, and for whom The Prince is the most popular and re-published work of fiction in their literary canon. Lewis was a quite UN-funny joosh clown, who irritated me, even in my youth. And The Prince is the most insipid work of middle school garbage I was ever subjected to (required reading in Lit 101, for reasons beyond my comprehension).
I find it very amusing that young females of White AND black race agree that anything “french” is ‘sophisticated’. Really, Becky? LaToya? You think that we call them ‘frogs’ because we like the way that they croak?
The LITTLE Prince.
Sheesh. I was so put off by that wretched excuse for a novella that I can’t even get the title right.
/Spluttering rage.
I was a bit concerned about that for a moment .
An earlier type of Christian Nationalism is what stopped Islam at Tours, Lepanto and Vienna. That Christianity was muscular and virile and proud to be so. Unfortunately, Christianity has been pussified in the last 70 years. It was never meant to be so and Christianity, properly understood and practiced, could again save civilization from the Muslims of the east and the degenerate perverts of the west. What I don’t see is the catalyst to jump start that. I don’t see any type of viable alliance with Islam even for cultural reasons, but they are the lesser threat. The greater threat now are our home grown degenerates. They have gone down the very predictable path of asking for tolerance early on to demanding to be celebrated now. They are an easy enemy to defeat with a modicum of will and zero tolerance. They need to be beaten so far back into metaphorical and physical closets that they cannot reappear. This would also have the secondary effect of giving notice to Muslims that perhaps we are not an easy target for conquest. If it is going to survive, the West , and by implication, White civilization, must coalesce around something that provides strength, fortitude and meaning.
On the surface it might seem like a good deal, but you wouldn’t be paying the jizya for long (chop, off with your head).
This guy is an unapologetic end timer, but he has a lot of good points.
https://www.answeringislam.org/Authors/JR/Future/index.htm
I think the mostly peaceful takeover of France in the novel was not, as you say, meant to be entirely realistic, but I do think it was meant to depict the way in which Muslim populations in western countries will learn to exert influence–not through violence, but through existing institutions.
And who do you think they will have learned that One Weird Trick from? To answer my own question, from Gramscian leftists/Jews; this sure has been a winning strategy for them, n’est pas?
Il a, en effet. Sadly.
Arthur, have you read The Camp of the Saints? I’m glad I purchased a copy when I first heard about it, because the paperback I bought for $15 or $16 is now only available used, starting at around $175 on Amazon and $140 on Theiftbooks, which is down from $250 some months back.
Apparently, whoever owns the rights to the English language translation will not allow it to be published, so the only copies available are used ones, and the book is in enough demand that people are asking exhorbitant prices for beat-up paperbacks. (Someone is actually trying to get over $2500 for a hardcover copy, on Amazon.)
I would understand a library not loaning it out now, since it likely would be “lost,” but our library has never carried it, given that their personnel, from the top down, are hardcore Democrats, predictably proud of their “anti-racist” bona fides.
Camp of the Saints is available online, I found a copy of it last Year, but off the top of my head I can’t remember the Website that had it. I did find it Interesting, yet a bit Unrealistic; an Immivasion of hundreds of Ships all at once would be logistically un-possible, and such an Obvious Threat that even the ‘government’ might be forced to ‘Deal with it’, somehow.
What we are actually experiencing (both in the FUSSA and Europe, is an (((organized))) (((deliberate))) ‘stealth Invasion’, in plain sight, using the very ‘government’ agencies meant to Prevent it. IMO, what is happening at the Mexican Border is not just Treason, but a vivid illustration of how the neo-nah-zees pointed out we are Ruled by a “Zionist Occupation Government”.
https://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDFs/Camp_of_the_Saints_2col%20.pdf
Jeffrey Zoar, thank you for this website. I guess it is just physical copies of the book in English that are so expensive now, since no new ones are being printed.
I don’t think Raspail intended for the invasion in the story to be realistic. (I believe, for one example, that he knew full well that the coming influx of foreigners to France would come from Africa, but he chose to make the migrants Indian, to blunt the accusations of racism he knew would be coming).
His point was always about ‘us,’ meaning the West and the French, in particular, and its sense that its own way of life is not worth defending and preserving (which is also the main point of “Submission”) rather than about ‘them’ or how the invasion was literally going to come about.
For anyone interested, there is a very good analysis of the novel at firstthings.com. Title of article is Spiritual Death of the West.
Trends continue until they can’t anymore, and lowered IQ will be self-limiting.