Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La République islamique de France? A Review Essay

2016; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1728-4457.2016.00130.x

1728-4457

Landis MacKellar,

Political and Social Issues

The most pressing global population issue today is Europe's demographic future. For that reason, readers of this journal should take note of the French novel of the year for 2015: Michel Houellebecq's Soumission, published in February and released in English translation in September. The meaning of Islam in Arabic is submission. Set against the background of the refugee crisis, anti-immigrant backlash, implosion of the European Union, and rise of European nativism, this account of the Islamicization of France would have been viewed as a provocation regardless of Houellebecq's already sulfurous reputation. But being released on the eve of the Charlie Hebdo attack, and with Houellebecq having just been salaciously caricatured on that publication's cover, it became an international sensation. The Paris events of November 13 and Cologne events of December 31 fueled sales further, and one can only assume that the Brussels attacks of March 22 this year will provide further leverage. This review provides a summary of the plot, then describes the author and his political significance, and closes with a perspective on how the novel might—or might not—inform thoughts on France's, indeed Europe's, demographic future. The story is extravagant. In 2022, after a disastrous second term for François Hollande, the French two-stage electoral process results in a predicament. The far-right National Front handily wins the first round and the Socialists and center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, which was renamed Les Républicains in May 2015) do not have enough votes between them to build a Red–Black coalition. Instead, they join forces in the second round to back a small, moderate Islamist party (modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood) that just nudged out the Socialists, et voilà!—France has its first Muslim president, Mohammed Ben Abbas. He is a tough but affable politician, educated at the elite Ecole National de l'Adminstration: a pragmatic Tariq Ramadan comes to mind. He has no desire to run the Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Defense, and the like. These can be dealt out to the mainstream parties because there is no real debate on such issues these days (shades of Francis Fukuyama). He wants a harder line on Israel and the Palestinians, but that has long been an easy sell. All he insists on is the Ministry of Education: the ability to mold values. The Catholic hierarchy and Jewish Consistoire are charmed by his conservatism, rejection of multiculturalism, and respect for standards in education. In short, the deal is done; the Islamic Republic is formed. And it works like a house afire. Men discover the comforts of stable polygamous marriage: one for the kitchen, one for the salon, and one or two for the bed; young ones, at that. Women discover the peace and dignity of baggy trousers and the headscarf, or can go the whole nine yards if they wish. Unemployment plummets as women abandon the workplace for the foyer—welfare state spending has been shifted to increase family allowances for couples with children when the mother stays at home—and previously no-account males take up the jobs freed. Nervous Jews decamp for Israel, but that is only an acceleration of what has been happening for years. The University of Paris, beneficiary of a staggering infusion of funds from the Gulf oil states, becomes an Islamic institution. The veiled female students who once slunk along the walls now giggle down the corridors three abreast. Identitaires and disaffected Arab youth from the banlieues who have been fighting street battles make peace.1 The post-colonial guilt overhang of the haute bourgeoisie is absolved in a trice. With Augustan vision, Ben Abbas establishes France as again the linchpin of Europe, puts the countries of the Maghreb on the path to European Union accession, and works toward transfer of EU headquarters to Rome. To conclude, the only people left unhappy are the Salafists, who disdain the Islam-lite doled out by his government. The protagonist and narrator is the likeable forty-something François, an expert on the late-nineteenth-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. He subsists on microwave cuisine and has a deep personal commitment to alcohol and screwing students; but after all, he is a middle-aged academic bachelor. He is more Maître de conferences than Directeur d’études and likely to stay that way. His new employers force François to separate from the university, but pension him off handsomely. Endowed with a surfeit of leisure and his material needs provided for, he struggles to escape his ennui. Hyper-Catholicism à la late-life Huysmans? Tries it, doesn't work. Sodomizing Arab escort girls? Tries it, doesn't work. What prevents the novel from descending into a long suicide note is a meeting with the new Rector of the Sorbonne, an identitaire in recovery who, after converting to Islam, made his reputation by penning a Dummies’ Guide to the faith. The university needs to maintain quality. If François will return, a full professor with the salary of a prince, he will be offered the opportunity to edit the Pléiade edition of Huysmans's collected works. The only price? A quiet conversion, not to be taken too seriously. An appropriate set of wives will be arranged to spare him the aggravation of first dates and the like. That works, and the novel ends on an upbeat. If Houellebecq were caterwauling in the cultural back alleys, it would be one thing. But he is not. He is the bestselling, arguably the best, and certainly the most translated French novelist: winner of the prix Goncourt of 2010 and a bit of a poet, filmmaker, and musician, as well. He is often associated in the public mind with the media-savvy néo-réactionnaire school of commentators, whose best-known members are Alain Finkielkraut, Éric Zemmour, and Michel Onfray; moving to the fringe, Renaud Camus and, going from tan to brown, Alain Soral. They are a specifically French phenomenon—simultaneously anti-socialism, anti-liberalism, anti-communitarianism, anti-individualism, anti-gay, anti-feminist—and above all anti-everything associated with 1968, the year in which the French Left grounds its wasting legitimacy. However, despite being identified as a néo-réac, Houellebecq is at heart a mere satirist throwing intellectual spitballs, not a politically engaged talking head. Like all the canonical Western satirists from Juvenal forward, he is driven not by political conviction but by despair regarding the perfectibility of man. Coluche best summed it up from the French perspective: Capitalisme, c'est l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme. Socialisme, c'est le revers. There is more William S. Burroughs than William F. Buckley in Houellebecq; more Mort Sahl than Norman Podhoretz. The French take their sex seriously. As a result, Houellebecq's gravest offense has been to argue that the liberations of ‘68 resulted in only the vulgarization, commodification, and marketization of sex. Markets have winners, losers, and those who are excluded full stop. In today's West, access to sex outside the dull reproductive bed depends on money and looks.2 The neurotic misery of sexual deprivation, Houellebecq argues, is to be found not in the Islamic world with its universal marriage and irrepressible traditions of prostitution and pederasty, but in the supposedly emancipated, progressive West.3 Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounced Soumission as Islamophobic so quickly after publication that he cannot possibly have read it. The charge is unwarranted. Houellebecq was once taken to court accused of having insulted Islam, but the ludicrously common French charge of incitement to hatred is a bit like rape in Anglo-American jurisprudence: easy to bring but correspondingly difficult to prove. In Houellebecq's case, the accusation derived from a statement that Islam was “la religion la plus con.” But, as all responsible critics of the novel have discerned, Houellebecq's view of Islam is more attenuated than that pungent adjective would convey. “Are you an Islamophobe?” he was once asked, and hedged his bets: “Probablement, oui.” That is not the response of a bigot. Houellebecq believes that no people can exist as such without religious belief. His position, however, is that you cannot re-create what is past. While he is filled with admiration for the triumphs of Catholic belief—the architecture, the liturgy, the intellectual and spiritual edifices—it is bled out; any reanimation would produce mere anachronism (or worse, one may speculate, bring Emmanuel Todd's zombie Catholics back to life). Europe requires something to take its place. It could be Raëlism, the UFO religion that has fascinated Houellebecq. Because he has a scientific bent (a bit of Burroughs again), it could be Comte's Religion of Humanity, another faith that has intrigued him. In this book, it is not one of the new, rapidly expanding but still marginal religions like, say, Mormonism or Scientology, but Islam—established, yet with novelty appeal in the West and bursting with newfound vigor—that fills the European spiritual void. Comparisons have been made between Soumission and Jean Raspail's Le Camp des Saints (Editions Robert Laffont, 1973), in which France is overrun with immigrants from India fleeing the desperate conditions at home. Time has been kind to Raspail, since the current refugee crisis in Europe bears similarity to the scenario described in Camp. But the two books could not be more different. Where Raspail evokes the stinking mass of crazed Asiatic humanity spewing from the refugee ships, Houellebecq lovingly chronicles the savor of Arab cuisine, the nobility of Arab culture, and the charm of Arab girls. Houellebecq offers not a dystopia but a utopia, albeit a satiric one. The Islamophobia angle has also led to comparisons with Céline, but the reference again fails. Céline revolutionized the French novel; Houellebecq is a competent draughtsman but no more (that is why his books translate so well into English and other languages, which has reduced his literary reputation in France). Seat-of-the-pants anti-Semitism will always be as French as tarte aux pommes, but Céline was an obsessive hater who baited Vichy to get on with the job of eradicating Jews from French life. Houellebecq queries whether Jews exist per se but is commensal with Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. As to baiting politicians, he takes lunch with the Sarkozys. The story that Soumission tells is a fast-forward, time-compressed version of Le Grand Remplacement, in its present incarnation most often associated with Renaud Camus. This is the gradual displacement of the European native population (les français de souche, to use the phrase that has infiltrated mainstream French political dialogue) by immigrants and the children of immigrants—essentially African and maghrébin and overwhelmingly Muslim.4 In Soumission, it is the French political and intellectual elite that facilitates the takeover; in Le Grand Remplacement it is a cabal of Eurocrats, financiers, globalizers, corporations, media tycoons, und, und, und.… Ironic in view of its roots in nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, Le Grand Remplacement bears strong resemblance to the “Eurabia” theory propounded by Bat Ye'Or, who adds the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to the list of co-conspirators, takes out (most of) the Jews, and puts the de-legitimation of Israel at the center of the plot. She also blends in the protected but second-class status conferred on the dhimmi or non-believers in the Ottoman Empire, suggesting that European elites are easily seduced by the prospect of a comfortable “dhimmitude” (a term of her invention). It is not permitted, in France, to systematically collect statistics by race, ethnicity, or religion. Michèle Tribalat of the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED) has argued that the restriction forces policymakers to proceed with eyes wide shut, but Hervé Le Bras of the École d'Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) counters that such statistics simply objectify and dignify racist prejudices. Both views have some validity. Whichever way you feel, a consequence of our ignorance is that the specter of Le Grand Remplacement haunts French politics—even the mainstream where (with apologies to William Stanley Jevons), it comes and goes unthought of while the visible and dense policy problems remain behind. Stripped of its more lurid aspects, the same ghost, impalpable yet invincible, haunted such greats of twentieth-century French demography as Adolphe Landry, Alfred Sauvy, and Georges Mauco.5 The Little Man finds in Le Grand Remplacement a gripping yarn. But it does not stand up to demographic scrutiny. To give generous confidence bounds, with 5–10 percent of the French population Muslim (and fewer than that observant), the statistical chances of a demographic remplacement from below are slim. Baby-counting in the Paris metro will support the replacement hypothesis (“Just look around you! It is happening before your eyes!” hiss the believers in your ear). But metro baby-counting is innocent of completed fertility, cohort fertility, tempo and timing effects, parity progression ratios, and similar niceties of formal demography. The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life, in collaboration with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, estimated that the Muslim share of the French population will grow from 7.5 to 10 percent between 2010 and 2030 (http://www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population/). That estimate is pre–refugee crisis, but France has made it clear that it will refuse to be the repository of significant numbers of asylum seekers. Perhaps Pew and IIASA are part of the cosmopolitan conspiracy and their estimates should be distrusted. But there are more fundamental problems with Le Grand Remplacement. One is that the alleged villains could not conspire their way out of a brown paper bag, but that is not a subject for this journal to explore. Worse, Le Grand Remplacement when extrapolated slams into the ineluctable one-drop-of-blood fallacy—that third- and fourth-generation “immigrants” are somehow not French.6 A glance only at mixed marriages and language spoken in the home demolishes this. Worst, Le Grand Remplacement is a narrative of averages, and it is not the average immigrant who is of concern. The rise of Islam as a fount of social and political identity in France is not to be found across the nation as a whole or among French Muslims as a population. It is to be found among young people in the policy-constructed ghettos of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil in Seine-Saint-Denis that were studied by Gilles Kepel and his colleagues in 2010 and in their equivalents across France. As to jihadism, the overwhelming evidence is that the main breeding grounds are the failed education, justice, and prison systems.7 Along the way to “becoming French,” these socially marginalized and spatially concentrated populations drawn from immigration are, to be frank, a civic nuisance. They may not even aspire to “feeling at home in France” or “feeling French.” Integration and assimilation in these neighborhoods are openly recognized to have failed, multiculturalism has become an unfunny policy joke, and no human mind could invent labor market and education policies better designed to result in long-term youth unemployment and exclusion. The contrast with the fundamentally optimistic view of immigrant integration in America just expressed by the US National Academy of Sciences is stark. “No-go zones” were a crass Fox News concoction, but there are neighborhoods where the hijab and beard are all but compulsory; where secular republican education is systematically undermined, including from within the schools; where peer pressure discourages the speaking of French; and where it is impossible to find a place to eat lunch during Ramadan. Olivier Roy has argued that it is secular youth rebellion, not extreme religion, which is to blame for the current mess. But the brisk public debate between Roy and Kepel, while it makes for good intellectual spectacle as did the Edward Said–Bernard Lewis punch-up a few years back, is jejune in practical terms. Policy cannot address extreme Islam without addressing marginalization, but neither can it tackle marginalization without appreciating the appeal of radical Islam. If the idea of the population-wide Islamicization of France is easily discredited, why has this book gotten on Gallic nerves? One reason has been given: pesky Muslim sub-populations, scandalously immune to republican blandishments, concentrated in or near major urban centers. But that is not what this book is about. Nor is it about lopsided population growth and demographic crowding-out. Its core theme is the failure of elites to defend European culture, beliefs, and values when it is inconvenient to do so. Houellebecq's pen skewers not Islam or Muslims, but the pusillanimous French, and by extension European, ruling class. Years ago Henry Kissinger, the father of all Euro-skeptics, asked rhetorically of Europe, “Whom do I telephone?” Not long ago, the answer would have been simple: Angela Merkel. But as the German Chancellor has multiplied her visits to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan bearing gifts of aid, visa-free travel, and accelerated EU accession; as she in April trashed German freedom of expression to sooth his easily bruised feelings, one increasingly perceives that it is not immigration per se but weak leadership and limp republican pride that present the real challenge to Europe's demographic future. The English translation of Soumission by Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, is more than acceptable, but in this Age of Amazon no reader with even fading memory of Sixth Form French has an excuse to avoid the novel in the original. Houellebecq's French is limpid and the brevity of the chapters can be considered as reparations for his war on the paragraph. The Flammarion octavo softcover printed on high-quality paper is easy on the eye and stands up well to being repeatedly bent back for reading in trains, planes, taxis, bars, and cafés.