A Parisian reader sends this provocative interview with the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who exists to provoke. In it, Houellebecq (pron. “well-beck”) discusses his new novel Soumission (Submission), set in the year 2022 — and what it says about France at the present moment.

The novelist says he has abandoned his atheism and is an uncertain agnostic, but he cannot bring himself to embrace Catholicism, his ancestral religion. He says he remains “in many ways, a Comtean” who believes that society cannot survive without religion. I wish the interviewer had asked him to elaborate on that point! Comte believed in a “religion of humanity,” but Houellebecq seems far too intelligent, or at least too cynical, to fall for that.

His book begins with the election of the Erdogan-like modern Islamist head of the Muslim Brotherhood party as president of France, an event that sets off a cascading Islamization of France. Excerpt:

Where did you get the idea for a presidential election, in 2022, that came down to Marine Le Pen and the leader of a Muslim party?

Well, Marine Le Pen strikes me as a realistic candidate for 2022—even for 2017 … The Muslim party is more … That’s the heart of the matter, really. I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that, in reality, they are in a totally schizophrenic situation. Because overall Muslims aren’t interested in economic issues, their big issues are what we nowadays call societal issues. On these issues, obviously, they are very far from the left and even further from the Green Party. Just think of gay marriage and you’ll see what I mean, but the same is true across the board. And one doesn’t really see why they’d vote for the right, much less for the extreme right, which utterly rejects them. So if a Muslim wants to vote, what’s he supposed to do? The truth is, he’s in an impossible situation. He has no representation whatsoever. It would be wrong to say that this religion has no political consequences—it does. So does Catholicism, for that matter, even if the Catholics have been more or less marginalized. For those reasons, it seems to me, a Muslim party makes a lot of sense.

More:

I don’t think we are witnessing a French suicide. I think we are seeing practically the opposite. Europe is committing suicide and, in the middle of Europe, France is struggling desperately to survive. It is almost the only country that is fighting to survive, the only country whose demographics allow it to survive. Suicide is a matter of demographics, it’s the best and most effective way to commit suicide. That’s why France is not committing suicide at all. What’s more, for people to convert is a sign of hope, not a threat. It means they aspire to a new kind of society. That said, I don’t think people convert for social reasons, their reasons for converting are deeper—even if my book contradicts me slightly, Huysmans being the classic case of a man who converts for reasons that are purely aesthetic. Really, the questions that worry Pascal leave Huysmans cold. He never mentions them. I almost have trouble imagining such an aesthete. For him, beauty was the proof. The beauty of rhyme, of paintings, of music proved the existence of God.

This brings us back to the question of suicide, since Baudelaire said of Huysmans that the only choice he could make was between suicide or conversion …

No, it was Barbey d’Aurevilly who made that remark, which is fair enough, especially after reading À rebours. I reread it closely and, in the end, it really is Christian. It’s astonishing.

One more:

It’s not necessarily racial, it can be religious. In this case, your book describes the replacement of the Catholic religion by Islam.

No. My book describes the destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone, or to very few people. Catholicism, by contrast, is doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible. We’ve seen it happen before, it could happen again.

You who have become an agnostic, you can look on cheerfully and watch the destruction of Enlightenment philosophy?

Yes. It has to happen sometime and it might as well be now. In this sense, too, I am a Comtean. We are in what he calls the metaphysical stage, which began in the Middle Ages and whose whole point was to destroy the phase that preceded it. In itself, it can produce nothing, just emptiness and unhappiness. So yes, I am hostile to Enlightenment philosophy, I need to make that perfectly clear.

You need to read the whole thing. Houellebecq is preparing to make an accommodation with a future France’s conversion to Islam. He says, “I feel, rather, that we can make arrangements. The feminists will not be able to, if we’re being completely honest. But I and lots of other people will.”

A decade or so ago, Houellebecq caused outrage by calling Islam “the stupidest of all religions.” I don’t know his work, so I don’t know how seriously to take this new position. I see that Soumission is already being denounced as a far-right work, but from the Paris Review interview, it seems that that is unfair; Houellebecq seems to see in Islam a certain vitality that France needs.

But again, I’m just guessing from this one interview. Thoughts, anybody? Also, for French readers and observers of French politics: why would Islam as a new religion for France be more plausible than a return to Catholicism? Is Houellebecq on to something, or is he simply being provocative?

UPDATE: Reader Samn! writes:

The thing about (non-immigrant) Catholicism in France is that in most places, it’s almost completely tied in the popular imagination to the upper middle, wealthy and formerly aristocratic classes and is closely associated with those classes’ historical reactionary politics. I’ve been living in France for a little over a year now, and when I first moved here, I took a job teaching English to –very– wealthy children. Almost all of them seemed to be actively practicing Catholics, while I pretty rarely meet practicing Catholics of other backgrounds.

The French hierarchy is caught in the trap of wanting to free itself from that legacy while also trying to keep the only people they have in the pews coming to church, but more often than not they seem to mostly just alienate everyone. It doesn’t help that they perceive (not incorrectly, unfortunately) traditional forms of piety as a political statement.

It’s likely that French Catholicism was much too tied to monarchist politics to have much of a chance of survival.