Libération — Houellebecq: In the depths of unease
At 66, the cult author keeps making Islamophobic remarks, defends the idea of the “great replacement” and appears in a porn film. Between a real slide into identity politics, a trashy pose and calculated provocation, an investigation into the world and psyche of a novelist who plays the firebrand in political debate.
By Sophie des Déserts · Libération · 14 February 2023
Always be able to get away when trouble starts. Give yourself the possibility of an island. Escape elsewhere: that is why he has so often insisted on living near an airport, in Ireland, Spain or Paris, in the towers at Porte de Choisy, close to Orly, which have done so much to feed his mythology. In late December, Michel Houellebecq went to Amsterdam for a libertine escapade filmed for an erotic-artistic project he now wants banned, but which at the time made for a memorable Christmas. Then he headed for Guadeloupe to join the shoot of Guillaume Nicloux’s film, in which he again plays himself, alongside Blanche Gardin. “This film comes at just the right time,” the writer told those close to him. “I’m getting away for a bit, the cops are happy, no need to give me protection.” He had that eternally foggy voice, full of silences, his mind apparently sluggish but in reality devilishly quick, and thoroughly mischievous at the thought of having provoked another scandal. Another attack on Muslims, 21 years after declaring that “the stupidest religion is still Islam”, eight years after imagining a France that had fallen into the hands of bearded fundamentalists in his novel Submission, published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Now he was doing it again, in mid-November, in Front populaire, Michel Onfray’s magazine, during a marathon interview in which the philosopher questioned him about France’s collapse, globalisation, euthanasia, Christianity…
Houellebecq began defending the concept of the “great replacement”, launched by his friend Renaud Camus, a once-talented writer spoiled by his antisemitic delusions, before declaring integration impossible: inevitable chaos, a prediction of civil war. “When entire territories are under Islamist control, I think acts of resistance will take place. There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims — Bataclans in reverse, in short. And Muslims will not be content to put out candles and bouquets of flowers. So yes, things could move quite quickly…” This was not the logorrhoea of one of his disenchanted heroes, not a novel; it was him, Houellebecq, unleashed: “Our chance of survival would be for white supremacism to become trendy in the USA.” And again: “I believe what the native French population, as people say, wants is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop robbing and attacking them — in short, for their violence to decrease, for them to respect the law and other people. Or, alternatively, for them to leave.”
Has Houellebecq gone mad? How can he write that — he, the brilliant author of Atomised, the Gainsbarre of literature, translated into 42 languages, a “world star”, as he puts it himself, celebrated throughout Europe and as far afield as America and China, decorated with the Légion d’honneur by Emmanuel Macron in 2018? The feverish poet who never goes out without his little Samsonite backpack full of books, reads Marx, Mann and Schopenhauer in the original and spends his nights chiselling words? Everything in him seems to malfunction when he speaks about Islam. Where does this obsession come from? As so often, should we look to childhood? Nor should we overlook the element of posturing, perhaps of strategy.
A more political turn
Under the Guadeloupe sun, the novelist found it hard to relax. His efforts to stop smoking make him even more melancholic, despite nicotine patches consumed by the dozen. Sometimes the great Michel would curl up like a child, grumbling: “They forgive Depardieu everything. Why do they come down on me?” The hypersensitive man who picks up on everything had certainly sensed the unease following his outburst in Front populaire. His most devoted fans, his friends on the hard right, congratulated him warmly: “You say out loud what people are thinking.” But his longtime companions from the Saint-Germain literary world, his Flammarion publisher Teresa Cremisi, his agent François Samuelson and the writers he admires — Emmanuel Carrère, Frédéric Beigbeder — did not show the same enthusiasm. Some put it to him in their own gentle way, afraid of wounding his extreme sensitivity: “Michel, really… why play with fire like that?” His friend Arielle Dombasle puts it nicely, quoting Cocteau: “Know how far you can go too far.” All urged us to write to him so that he could explain himself. Our emails went unanswered.
Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, a literature professor at Paris-X specialising in Balzac and Flaubert, who has been dissecting Houellebecq’s work for 20 years and often talks with him, is dismayed to see him compared with Céline. “Michel Houellebecq says things that distress me, but he has never written Bagatelles pour un massacre. His work contains no incitement to murder; on the contrary, it is more a plea for pity. Please,” she insists, “don’t forget the literature. Don’t reduce him to ideology.” The academic is nevertheless forced to acknowledge a more political turn: Houellebecq is no longer content to set out his vision in novels, or in interviews promoting them. He clearly intends to influence public debate.
This time, no one dares suggest that his words were distorted or that the interview was too well lubricated. Houellebecq spent a long time preparing this exchange with Onfray, agreed before the summer and conducted on 30 August, without telling his publisher, who would obviously have smoothed over the excesses. It lasted six hours, with bread, cheese and, in his case, a single Budweiser as a stimulant. At home, on one of the three printers working away in his study, Houellebecq printed out the 43-page interview and let it sit for weeks before ultimately deciding to sharpen his attack on Muslims. There is no doubt: the novelist wanted to shock, to occupy the media at the very moment his sworn enemy, the left-wing feminist Annie Ernaux, received the Nobel Prize in Literature he coveted. “I can’t help wondering about the timing,” says his writer friend Marin de Viry, amused. “Even if that isn’t the main point, you have to understand: Michel has a Balzac-like strategy. He wants to press where it hurts, shift the boundaries, provoke reactions.”
A meagre mea culpa
From that perspective, mission accomplished: Front populaire sold more than 70,000 copies, driven by word of mouth and the complaints announced by two Muslim organisations. “Here comes the trouble again,” Houellebecq grumbled. He no longer had the energy to face a trial, as in 2001. He accepted the hand extended by France’s chief rabbi, Haïm Korsia, who proposed a meeting with Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris. Houellebecq feels close to Judaism, enjoys his stays in the Holy Land, where he is due to return in May, and confides in Front populaire his unwavering support for Israel “for moral reasons”. A peace-making coffee was arranged for nine in the morning in early January, at a brasserie near the Trocadéro. Houellebecq arrived early, saying he was “honoured” to meet the rector and sorry: he had not intended to harm the Muslim community and had not grasped the implications of his remarks. He offered to amend them and scribbled a meagre mea culpa. It would be enough to avert a complaint from the Grand Mosque of Paris, but not the one from the Union of Mosques of France, now under investigation. Before leaving, the novelist suggested to the somewhat bewildered men of faith that they should now join forces against the euthanasia bill that outraged him. That would be his next crusade, he promised, with a laconic sigh: “Not suffering means risking no longer living.”
Then Houellebecq returned to his new “home”, a stone’s throw away in the 16th arrondissement, near Porte d’Auteuil: a dead, bourgeois corner, apparently everything he detests. Quite a revolution for a man who has always lived in the 13th arrondissement’s Chinatown — in different homes, since he moves frequently, but always in its towers, praising the merits of the Asian community and the comfort of living anonymously.
“He is a frightened man”
His friends thought he was finally going to spend the millions earned from his novels and buy himself a palace. But no, the flat meets his usual standards: 1960s style, parking and, crucially, a rubbish chute. “Michel has remained the writer of the middle class. Above all, he chooses functional places,” says his architect friend Louis Paillard, who has just produced a superb graphic-novel adaptation of The Map and the Territory for Flammarion.
On the intercom, Houellebecq has put his birth name — Michel Thomas. He says that above all he wants peace. He can spend hours shut away in front of the giant screen, watching BFM, LCI or, most often, CNews. A man who travelled so much to construct his novels, who scoured the roads of France and entered different worlds — those of police officers, artists, farmers — has narrowed his horizons. “We all end up like old ladies with little dogs,” he sometimes remarks, full of self-mockery. At 66, he is a homebody, preoccupied with arranging his library and the gadgets he hunts down on Amazon, capable of fasting for a week before treating himself to gargantuan dinners. His doctors beg him to give up cigarettes and alcohol. If only… The body changes, sight declines, an abyssal sense of vulnerability. He still forces himself to walk around Paris and take the Métro, but less and less, afraid of being recognised. And when friends invite him to working-class neighbourhoods in Paris, he asks: “Isn’t it dangerous?”
“You understand nothing about Michel Houellebecq unless you understand that he is a frightened man,” observes a literary critic who has known him since his beginnings. Fear, then, is deeply embedded, his aversion to Islam longstanding. As early as Atomised, in 1998, Houellebecq, then in his early forties, observing the ravages of contemporary individualism, which to him heralded the West’s decline, wrote: “Islam is by far the stupidest, falsest and most obscurantist of all religions,” though he then believed it was ultimately “doomed even more certainly than Christianity”. He would become more pessimistic, alarmed by riots in the suburbs and shaped by his apocalyptic reading, especially the essays of Bat Ye’or, the Egyptian-born British sociologist obsessed with “the Islamisation of the West”, who coined the concept of “Eurabia”, popular with the far right in the mid-2000s. “It’s hard to say,” sighs one loyal friend, “but Michel is genuinely Islamophobic.”
How many academics and journalists have naturally sought personal explanations? There is his childhood in Algiers, where Houellebecq grew up until the age of five and about which he almost never speaks. Only a few confidences emerge here and there, delivered with his customary, very Monty Python humour: “When I arrived in France, the other children insulted me and called me a pied-noir. I looked at my feet… they were normal.” And a loathing of General de Gaulle: “For his behaviour towards the harkis. He deserves to be shot,” he declares again in Front populaire. Christian Authier, author of Houellebecq politique, tried to understand, to piece together his childhood memories before independence. Without success. Sébastien Lapaque, a longstanding partner in philosophical ping-pong with Houellebecq, also tried to get him to talk for a book about Algeria. Silence, always, even for those close to him. “There is a knot there, a Rosebud,” observes Frédéric Beigbeder. “You can feel it is raw, but a friend isn’t there to probe wounds.”
Houellebecq hates people bringing up the past. “It doesn’t interest me. I have no memories,” is his usual evasive reply. But he has made sure to throw bones to the curious, to the “hacks” he despises, such as the story of his mother’s conversion to Islam, reported in the press from the late 1990s and repeated today, particularly on Muslim websites. It is false. “Pure Houellebecquian invention,” says Denis Demonpion, amused, in his Biographie d’un phénomène, published by Buchet Chastel. Unable to meet the novelist, he befriended his mother, Janine. “She lived in a shack on Réunion, a dazzling intelligence, often ferocious, nourished by Dostoevsky, passages of whom she recited by heart. She never converted to Islam and wondered why her son, with whom she remained estranged until her death, spread that story.”
Abandoned in Algeria at the age of one
A psychoanalyst would doubtless relish it. Houellebecq assigns his mother the religion he abhors. He identifies Islam with this woman who resembles him and whom he so roundly despises, wounded at having been abandoned in Algeria at the age of one. Janine was then a young doctor, top of her class at the University of Algiers, a Communist activist close to the father of independence, Messali Hadj, deeply committed, to the despair of her parents, settlers of Corsican origin. A wanderer, always on the move: in Paris, where she treated immigrant workers; on Réunion, where she worked as a midwife and gave birth to Michel in 1956, with René Thomas, a former fitter who had become a mountain guide. No time to look after the baby, left with his maternal grandparents in Algiers until the day his father appeared in the middle of the war, in late 1961. Janine had left him; she was expecting a little girl whom she would also abandon into other arms. René wanted to reclaim his son before Algeria changed hands. “He was with two paratroopers,” Demonpion reconstructed. “The maternal grandparents tried to intervene. Little Michel was literally torn away.”
He was five and already knew how to read and write. How could anyone imagine that his psyche had not been marked? Goodbye, Algeria. Exile in the Yonne, then Seine-et-Marne, with his paternal grandmother Henriette Houellebecq, whose name he took and whom he cherishes as a saint, glorified in his novels. His mother, by contrast, embodied the worst, portrayed as a frivolous hippie ruined by the spirit of 1968. In real life he berated her — “Mother,” he writes in a 1992 letter published in Demonpion’s biography, “you have been abject, beneath contempt; the worst thing is that you do not even seem to realise you behaved like a self-centred piece of filth,” before asking for money in compensation — and publicly refused to discuss her, except to let slip that she wore a veil. Even Salman Rushdie mentioned Houellebecq’s mother, “her marriage to a Muslim, her conversion to Islam”, in an opinion piece for Libération published in 2001 defending the novelist, who had been taken to task for his provocation about “the stupidest religion”. Houellebecq had just published Platform, a highly sexual satire of globalisation in which the hero, Michel, heir to a father killed by a Muslim, indulges in exotic pimping before losing the woman he loves in an Islamist attack in Thailand. Flammarion forced him to sign a statement — “I deny being racist; I have never conflated Arabs and Muslims” — sent to AFP six days before the twin towers exploded.
Everything went mad that autumn of 2001: Houellebecq was worshipped and threatened. His publisher immediately sent him back to Ireland, to Bere Island, where he lived with his wife at the time, Marie-Pierre, who remembers: “I was really frightened. So was Michel. A police car was waiting for him when he got off the boat.” He took refuge nearby with the writer Michel Déon and would decide to move to Shannon in western Ireland, near the airport. The attacks that struck Bali in October completed his transformation into a “prophet”. A rotten period: not long afterwards, a haemorrhage carried off Clément, the dog who, to Houellebecq, was worth many a human being. He was repatriated to France in a coffin thanks to Bruno Le Maire, a young chief of staff at Matignon who had become a friend. At least sales of Platform were soaring: 600,000 copies.
That is how it is: Islam sells. Houellebecq knew how to put religion aside, write wonderful things and finally win the Goncourt, in 2008, with The Map and the Territory. But alongside that he pursued his obsession, read the Quran, became fascinated by the history of the Reconquista during his Andalusian years, then took an interest in young people leaving to join jihadist groups. “Michel has a gift for spotting weak signals,” praises his close police-officer friend, who requests anonymity because of his senior position. It was while discussing university life at Censier with one of his student groupies that the novelist had the idea of describing Islam’s offensive at university, the starting point for Submission. Houellebecq knew perfectly well he was handling nitroglycerine as he wrote this fiction of a France governed by a moderate Muslim party — in which everyone ultimately settles comfortably — a parable, in his eyes, of the elites’ abdication. He insisted on calling it Soumission as a tribute to the daring short film about women in the Quran, Submission, for which its Dutch maker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by an Islamist in 2004. “Dangerous,” his publisher Teresa Cremisi trembled. His German translator panicked and refused to work on the book; he would never be forgiven. Houellebecq raged: what cowardice, when it is the artist taking all the risks? Often, after a few glasses of white wine, he makes no secret of his ambitions: to “take over” French literature, open the eyes of the people, of the world. At such moments he seems possessed, murmuring with a martyr’s eyes: “If I die tomorrow, it doesn’t matter.”
“In 2022, I’m observing Ramadan”
He nevertheless agreed to have Submission read by an Islam specialist whose books he admired, Gilles Kepel. “There were few errors,” recalls the professor at the École normale supérieure. “Nothing was offensive to the sacred texts or the image of the Prophet.” The manuscript was also entrusted to his police-officer friend, who was won over but warned: “You’re going to need security.” And reality, once again, outstripped fiction.
Submission came out on the day the Kouachi brothers drenched Charlie Hebdo in blood. The weekly had just put Houellebecq on its cover, caricatured as a toothless sorcerer saying: “In 2022, I’m observing Ramadan.” The novelist heard the terrible news at home, where he had been asleep. His publisher told him not to move, on orders from the police prefecture. He asked for news of Bernard Maris, that delightful Charlie journalist who had written an essay about him, Houellebecq économiste, before inviting him to dinner a few weeks earlier. He was dead.
On the day of the funeral in a chapel in Haute-Garonne, Maris’s partner was surprised to see Houellebecq arrive in a gendarmerie car. “He was devastated.” He sat apart on a bench, in tears, reciting prayers. His friend Jean-Louis Aubert took him in in the countryside. They watched Louis de Funès films on a loop, easing the anxiety a little. Houellebecq lived for a year with two police officers, “my nannies”, as he called them, delighted to be pampered, escorted to the supermarket, driven everywhere and often brought home dead drunk. Their departure in 2016 was heartbreaking.
Houellebecq had just turned 60. A health problem required major surgery. “If I survive, I’ll get married,” he had announced, always a gambler. And one day in 2018, Frédéric Beigbeder and Marin de Viry were treated to a typically Houellebecquian announcement: “Well, basically, I had three possibilities. I took the one who accepted my conditions.” Meaning: no constraints on his freedom, especially his sexual freedom. No living together, no fuss when he says, feverish before beginning to write: “I shut myself away like a fox in its den to have cubs.” In Houellebecq’s world, the woman is necessarily submissive. Love, an impossible grail. The chosen one, Qianyum Lysis Li, is a Chinese woman born in 1990, the daughter of a Communist Party official, a former dancer he met in a bar and, supposedly, the author of a dissertation on the novelist of which it is hard to find any trace. Unverifiable rumours say she attracted the attention of the DGSE. In any case, she tends devotedly to the creator, believes in alternative medicine and is efficient at arranging practical life — tying a tie, booking one of the Michelin-starred restaurants he has developed a taste for. Once she has mastered French, she will even become active on Instagram: readings of Michel’s poems, a video of him reciting Baudelaire, photographs of their weekends, #MimiInOurHearts.
Blue overalls, cigarette dangling
Michel Gaudin, a retired prefect, now Nicolas Sarkozy’s chief of staff, was asked to help secure the proper paperwork. The wedding took place on 22 December 2018: Houellebecq in a bowler hat, moved, almost shy, then more relaxed upstairs at the Lapérouse restaurant, singing Tous les garçons et les filles at karaoke and giving his wife’s girlfriends naughty kisses. Around him were the faithful, the writers, the Sarkozys, a few companions from Les Inrocks who had returned despite political disagreements, and the new gang from Valeurs actuelles. Its editor, Geoffroy Lejeune, had won the novelist over with a few admiring emails and an invitation to dinner at La Rotonde with one of his spirited female journalists. “Ah, it’s nice to meet young reactionary Catholics,” the star exclaimed, dressed that evening in blue workman’s overalls, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Always tend the image, renew the fan club. On the menu: plenty of Islam and religion, Renaud Camus, whom the writer is trying to get published by a major house, and then oysters, scallops, champagne and Meursault until four in the morning.
“An exceptional evening,” recalls the head of Valeurs actuelles. He has become a friend, almost a son to Houellebecq, who no longer sees his own, born in 1981: another tortured genius, another taboo subject. With Lejeune, the novelist agreed to everything: long interviews, an anti-Europe debate at the Cirque d’Hiver, Mass with the family, explorations of royalist circles. In those years he intensified his contact with politicians, beyond his longstanding ties to Bruno Le Maire and Nicolas Sarkozy. He was the one who emailed Laurent Wauquiez, the strongly right-wing president of the Auvergne regional council, after reading a scathing profile of him in Le Monde: “With an article like that, you can’t be fundamentally bad…” The beginning of a friendship, from emails to surreal dinners. “I put Houellebecq on a level with Céline. I love him when he’s been drinking, when he stammers, when he’s unbearable. He’s tender, funny, he writes magnificently, he has a precious freedom of tone,” enthuses Laurent Wauquiez, refusing to dwell on his “little lapses”. With Éric Zemmour, the chemistry was weaker, despite a promising start. “He only talks about himself,” Houellebecq decided at their second lunch: “a little herald of the bourgeois right”.
He cannot stand Marion Maréchal. Marine Le Pen enjoyed his favour for a time, according to his English translator, who revealed that during a drunken evening he had wanted to vote for her. Donald Trump received impassioned declarations. As for Macron, Houellebecq cheerfully tears him apart, after having been susceptible to his attentions: a lunch at Bercy in 2016, during which the writer fell asleep, then a Légion d’honneur, suggested by Geoffroy Lejeune and presented at the Élysée on 28 April 2018. What a moment: Madame Houellebecq on the steps in an almost transparent dress, kneeling before the presidential dog; he, so smart, his hair combed like a boy at First Communion, solemn and then roguish, offering Macron his plan to leave Europe. Sometimes he seems to imagine himself as president, arguing in the people’s name for Swiss-style direct democracy, more intervention in the economy, less in matters of personal conduct, vehemently opposed to the end-of-life law but still “reserved” about the abolition of the death penalty…
Punk again?
And literature in all this? Annihilation came out in January 2022. It is his most elegant novel, with its textured board cover, his longest and most consensual. An admirable minister as hero, a double of Bruno Le Maire; power, old age, care homes, little sex, grace, not a drop of Islam. Not the slightest controversy. And sales of 270,000 copies… a long way from Submission’s 800,000.
Houellebecq is disappointed. The Nobel Prize in Literature still eludes him. And writing has never been such an ordeal. Isn’t it time to become punk again? Recover some breath, some brimstone. Get out of the 16th arrondissement, put the flat up for sale — which he has just done — and find a new nest on the outskirts of Paris, so he can escape quickly and hurtle down country roads as before. In early November he let loose against Muslims in Onfray’s magazine, then went to his studio in the 13th, where he usually writes, to exhibit himself in bed with a sylph before the camera of an underground Dutch director.
The rest was filmed on Christmas Day in an Amsterdam hotel, with other young women and under his wife’s gaze. Lysis joined in the revels before discovering, horrified, excerpts of the film circulating on social media as far away as China: shame, fury, despair, a threat to leave everything. Houellebecq agreed to call his lawyer, Angélique Bérès, to have the film banned, while knowing she would have a hard time. He signed a contract and gave it his all like an actor. The release was announced for 11 March. A few months ago, Houellebecq confided to someone close to him: “I’m thinking about the best way to discredit myself.”
Appearing in an “arty” porn film, the writer loses his appetite for X-rated cinema
After agreeing to appear in Stefan Ruitenbeek’s Kirac 27, Michel Houellebecq wants to prevent its release, scheduled for 11 March, alleging a “breach of trust”.
Could Houellebecq, the king of manipulation, have been caught at his own game? Through his lawyer and friend Angélique Bérès, he now alleges a “breach of trust” as he tries to have the pornographic film Kirac 27, in which he stars, banned. The excerpts released in mid-January — he bare-chested, dishevelled, in good company; Lysis, his young wife, devoted to his desires — went around the world.
Ahead of its announced release on platforms on 11 March, Angélique Bérès is examining every possible legal remedy. “It’s a race against time,” she explains. “We are reserving the first details of our actions for the courts.” At this stage, no complaint has been filed. There is little room for manoeuvre because, whatever Houellebecq may now say, he was not tricked.
“Threats”
It all began with an email from a fan, Stefan Ruitenbeek, an odd character describing himself as a libertarian artist, who sometimes interviews leaders of the Dutch identitarian right and wanted to invite Houellebecq to a festival in Amsterdam. Coffee was arranged in Paris on 1 November; Lysis was the one who appeared. “She told me: ‘Michel is depressed. We were supposed to go to Morocco. I’d organised everything, arranged girls for him, and the trip was cancelled because of Islamist threats,’” Ruitenbeek remembers. It is true: Houellebecq was expected at a literary café in Casablanca, but his police-officer friend warned him: “Careful, it could end like Salman Rushdie,” before Bruno Le Maire himself called to dissuade him from going.
The Dutchman let Lysis know that he “knows lots of girls who would like to sleep with Houellebecq, provided they are filmed”, and returned to Paris in mid-November with a pretty actress. They met at the writer’s Paris studio in the 13th arrondissement. “Houellebecq was really down,” the director recounts. “Then I saw him wake up, come back to life. He talked and made love for three hours in front of my camera. It was brilliant. I suggested we carry on filming in Amsterdam.” Lysis also wanted to appear; she has already shown herself naked in numerous erotic photographs, exhibited in a gallery and posted freely on her website. The enthusiastic Houellebecqs were not asking for money.
Letter
A contract was signed without specifying the artistic object being prepared. They met again at Christmas, on 24 and 25 December. “We organised a group session with other girls. One of them took Houellebecq to Mass,” Ruitenbeek says, amused. “He started talking to me about his fear of the ‘great replacement’, his fear of being killed in the street. I told him: ‘If I were you, I’d stop doing politics and make love all day.’”
In mid-January, the director sent the writer his film’s trailer before posting it on social media. Houellebecq responded a fortnight later with a letter from his lawyer, followed by a letter published on his website on Friday, in which he attacks Ruitenbeek and his methods of “gutter journalism”: “Your trailer irreparably damages my private life and my honour, but above all, more seriously still, my wife, who is devastated by the lies you are spreading about her. I formally object to the use in your films of shots in which I appear, as well as those in which she is mentioned or shown.” The director says he is unmoved by the pressure: “Michel values his freedom as an artist; he should respect mine. This film is a work of art. It will be released.”
S.D.D.