A French judge on Tuesday placed Michel Houellebecq, one of Europe’s best-known living novelists, under formal investigation — mis en examen — for alleged complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred, or violence, over a November 2022 Front populaire interview with the philosopher Michel Onfray.
Houellebecq, 70, is a French novelist, poet, and essayist whose books have won major literary awards and repeatedly provoked political controversy. His 1998 novel Les Particules élémentaires—published as Atomised in Britain and The Elementary Particles in the United States—won the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He received the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and the Territory.
His 2015 novel Submission imagines a Muslim party coming to power in France in 2022. It was published on January 7, 2015, when Charlie Hebdo featured Houellebecq on its cover—the same day gunmen attacked the magazine’s Paris offices.
Houellebecq’s comments stem from a 2022 interview during which he said: “The wish of the native French population, as they say, is not that Muslims assimilate but that they stop robbing and attacking them. Or else, another solution, that they leave.”
He predicted: “When entire territories are under Islamic control, I think acts of resistance will take place. There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims — in short, Bataclans in reverse.” That is a reference to the November 13, 2015, jihadist killings at the Bataclan in Paris. According to L’Obs, he said of the great replacement: “It’s not a theory, it’s a fact. It’s a statistical certainty.”
In a statement, Houellebecq’s lawyers said: “Michel Houellebecq contests the criminal offence he is accused of. The remarks in question contain no element of exhortation, even implicit, and therefore fall within freedom of opinion and expression.”
“A prophet of doom does not wish for misfortune, quite the contrary. His place is not in a courtroom.”
They added: “Michel Houellebecq can only deplore the growing judicialisation of intellectual debate, and that this controversy did not find its conclusion after the calm meeting with the rector of the Paris mosque, Chems-Eddine Hafiz.”
In A Few Months in My Life: October 2022–March 2023, Houellebecq revisited his remarks, describing some as clumsy. He blamed his own stupidity and naivety, but also accused others of exploiting his fame for profit.
The Union of Mosques of France filed a complaint in January 2023 naming Houellebecq, Onfray, and Front populaire director Stéphane Simon. The Grand Mosque of Paris, which had also filed a complaint, subsequently dropped it. The union’s lawyer, Najwa El Haïté, said: “Freedom of expression is fundamental but it cannot justify everything.”
