Submission

François teaches Huysmans at the Sorbonne, a novelist whose own life moved from the perfumed decadence of À rebours to a genuine religious conversion, and Houellebecq structures the whole novel as François unconsciously reenacting that arc, without ever noticing the parallel he has spent his career studying in someone else. His marriages of convenience, his affairs with students that fade without much feeling on either side, his general exhaustion with a secular, liberal France that no longer seems to be defending anything, all read as decadence waiting for a conversion it does not yet have a name for.

The 2022 election that structures the plot, a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned party led by the moderate, coalition-savvy Mohammed Ben Abbes defeating the National Front in a runoff built entirely on establishment panic, is less a prediction than a satire of how little the French political class is actually willing to defend when the alternative looks worse. Houellebecq's target is not Islam so much as the exhaustion of everyone else, an establishment, a professoriate, a whole secular culture that submits to whatever seems most convenient once conviction has quietly gone missing.

François makes a pilgrimage partway through the novel to Ligugé, the Benedictine abbey where Huysmans himself lived for a time after his conversion, hoping to find in the real place some version of the certainty his subject found there. He does not find it, at least not yet, and the failed pilgrimage functions as a kind of dry run for the ending: Houellebecq is showing exactly the move François will eventually make, submission to an institution as relief from the burden of belief, before letting him make a very different, much more expedient version of it.

Submission went on sale in France on the seventh of January 2015, the same morning gunmen attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose cover that week had featured a caricature of Houellebecq himself. The coincidence made an already provocative novel instantly radioactive, Houellebecq canceled his publicity tour, and the book's satire of French capitulation got read, for a long stretch afterward, as prophecy rather than as the joke about establishment exhaustion it was more carefully aimed at being.