Summary
- French writer Michel Houellebecq was placed under formal investigation in France on Nov. 10, 2026, over comments about Muslims published in 2022.
- The Union of Mosques of France filed a complaint in 2023 over Michel Houellebecq’s interview with Front Populaire.
- Anti-speech laws are being weaponized against dissenters.
In past weeks, France has been rocked by protests by anarchist leftists who seek to tear the country apart and unassimilated Muslim agitators looking to loot and pillage a country they have no investment in.
So now the French government is cracking down.
Oh, not on the rioters (or “students,” as we’ve been told to believe).
No, they’ve cracked down on those who’ve dared to question the country’s immigration system. And that attempt to criminalize criticism of Islam escalated this week. An author accused of “hate speech,” who has had the audacity to imagine a future his country is oh so close to, but its rulers refuse to admit, is now being dragged into court.
“Controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq was placed under formal investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred, or violence,” French news agency Agence France-Presse reported Tuesday.
Here’s the line that got Houellebecq in trouble.
“Most French people are not demanding that French Muslims assimilate,” he said in a 2022 interview with Front Populaire. “They just want them to stop raping, robbing and destroying things. Or, failing that, to leave our country.”
One of the groups that drove the investigation is the Union of Mosques of France, which filed a complaint against Houellebecq and Front Populaire in 2023. This group is known to have close relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in Egypt that aims to establish sharia law. Some of its chapters have been officially declared terrorist organizations by governments around the world.
This makes me think about the work of French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who spoke at The Heritage Foundation event, The Forum, on Thursday.
She argued in a recent Daily Signal piece that the Muslim Brotherhood has engaged in a “century-long project to ‘Islamify’ modern countries through gradual, lawful, multisector action.”
Hastening that process by prosecuting a critic of Muslim influence in France through “hate speech” laws is a clear indication that they are getting their way.
This really is a shameful attack on free speech, a sign of how truth and basic God-given rights will be absolutely squashed to sustain the brittle, postnational consensus of borderless, “secular,” multicultural, Western-in-name-only societies.
What’s happening to Houellebecq is, in effect, the enforcement of a blasphemy law via a speech code created to enforce the dogmas of globalist multiculturalism.
It’s illiberalism in the name of liberalism.
No surprise, the other organization that drove the legal attack on Houellebecq is the leftist, “anti-racist” nongovernmental organization Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples.
And here you can really see why the so-called red-green alliance between leftists and Muslims is becoming such a powerful, intrinsically bound political force.
On one side you have those on the Left who demand limitless immigration, believe that some “oppressed” groups deserve special rights to make them “equal,” and think that free speech needs to be limited in the name of tolerance.
On the other, you have Islamic groups that rely on limitless immigration (and the sweet benefits of Western economic prosperity combined with a generous welfare state), believe that their religion should be ascendant wherever it may be and insist that free speech must be limited to suppress any criticism of it.
Both sides feed off each other. They both hold antipathy to the West, for premodern and postmodern reasons. They rely on the same aggressive laws to enforce their dogmas even if those dogmas seem worlds apart.
Obviously, there is philosophical tension between these groups, but as a political movement, it is a potent combination likely to grow rather than diminish in strength.
That they are using the legal system to squash a well-known, if controversial, writer should be a wake-up call. And for some, maybe it will be.
There are some liberals who are rightly disturbed by what’s happening to Houellebecq. Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in The Atlantic that the police investigation is a “horrible mistake” and warned that an “assault on free speech is unfolding in France.” He concluded that “France is creating conditions in which only outright extremists will dare say what many privately believe to be true.”
That’s correct, but I think well-meaning liberals mostly concerned with preserving speech for the sake of speech are missing something here.
The kind of multicultural societies that much of Europe is now experimenting with simply can’t sustain themselves as such without draconian speech policies. They now include unassimilated groups that on one end demand laws that curtail speech and on the other are quick to engage in violence if they don’t.
The old model of nations built on equality of rights, the consent of the governed, and patriotic devotion to fellow citizens disintegrates if there is no common culture, set of values, or widely accepted moral foundation supporting it.
So European regimes are forced to do what Muslim empires of old did to keep the peace back in the times when they tolerated more Christians and Jews. They created harmony by suppressing liberty. They established tiered societies, where one group, the Muslim one, had more rights than others. A legal hierarchy was established, thereby keeping minority religions and cultures in a state of inferiority, but relative safety.
And this is more or less the direction Houellebecq predicted for France in his book “Submission,” which originally put him on the Left’s naughty list. His novel painted a picture of France under a “moderate” Islamist regime that rose to power through the aid of socialists.
Maybe that’s still a way off. Hopefully it will never happen. But considering what’s going on in the country now, and the political establishment’s response, does that reality sound far-fetched anymore?
While France gets rocked by protests, driven by recent Muslim arrivals and leftist radicals, the political establishment decided to come down hard on a writer instead of dealing with the violent hooligans and people looking to incinerate the French cultural and historical heritage.
Maybe they could escape the tyrannical spiral they are falling into by acknowledging the truth, or by at least accepting that something is going terribly wrong. Instead, I fear that they will keep doubling down until any claim to being a free “republic” will be nothing but a farce.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
