Court Proceedings against Michel Houellebecq: An Attack on Freedom of Thought

The following text originally appeared in Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, and is published here in English translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.

In 1793, the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte discovered what the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris does not know today, if one can judge by the complaint that he filed against the author Michel Houellebecq, i.e., that freedom of thought is divine. Let us listen to Fichte: “It is both a human and divine truth that man has inalienable rights and that freedom of thought is one of these rights.” What does that mean? It means that denouncing and opposing freedom of thought is blasphemous; that this sort of anger simultaneously offends the divine part of humanity and, indirectly, God himself; and that this sort of attack is dehumanizing because it attempts to tear out of the human conscience what God himself gave it.

Through its legal action, the Grand Mosque of Paris poses two risks, for the writer and our country: the risk of forcing the writer, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, to live under close police protection or, in other words, to become a sort of prisoner of conscience in his own country, and the risk of inciting a fanatic ready to spill the blood of the man targeted as an “Islamophobe.” Let us recall that since Islam is not the state religion of France, one has the right to speculate, perhaps erroneously, that it is wrong and alien to the soul of French civilization. One similarly has the right to discuss this idea, as long as one stays at the level of general ideas and refrains from defamations or direct calls for violence.

What did Houellebecq say exactly? It is important to stay precise and to provide his accusers with a close explication of the text. “When entire territories come under Islamic control, I believe that acts of resistance will take place. . . . There will be assassinations and shootings in the mosques, in coffee houses frequented by Muslims, in short the Bataclan [November 13, 2015] in reverse.” And the writer continues, “The native French population is not wishing for Muslims to assimilate but that they stop stealing and attacking them. Or, a different solution, that they go away.” For the Mosque’s complaint to be intellectually acceptable, Houellebecq’s words would have to be prescriptive.

Yet in the first of these sentences, he offers predictions of bloody events, which no one can preclude. Everyone can note how the dominant ideology diffused by the media and most of the political parties seems to want to be able to mobilize the population against the dangers of the extreme right. The thunderous reactions of some who cry out, almost in relief, “We told you so . . . the far right is going to act,” after the anti-Kurdish attach in the rue d’Enghien [December 23, 2022], exemplifies this ambiguity. The dominant ideology thunders victory as it condemns the murders: the far right is the enemy, that’s clear! But our writer is not calling anyone to “shootings.” He acts as a seer; the tool of his clairvoyance is neither a crystal ball nor a set of tarot cards but rather his writing. Let us therefore analyze his vision as a sort of enlightened catastrophism, as understood by Jean-Pierre Dupuy: describing the intolerable that is approaching, as if the catastrophe had taken place, in order to find a chance to prevent it.

The second sentence is no more condemnable than the second. If in the former, Houellebecq appears as a clairvoyant, in the second he is disguised by ventriloquy. It is not he who is speaking but, through him, the great majority of the French population, whose hostility to Islam has not ceased to grow, according to all the public opinion polls. He is channeling the voice of that France that is silenced, the “native French population,” as he carefully specifies. We insist: this attribution clearly indicates that the subject of the statement in this sentence is not Michel Houellebecq but “the native French population” [la population française de souche]. To be sure, the generalization—”the Muslims” rather than “some Muslims”—is as abusive as it is immoral. However, one need only go out into the streets, to listen to the conversations in the supermarkets and the bars, to hear it like a kind of haunting background music, no matter how disturbing it may be for the majority of honest Muslims hoping for successful integration.

Ventriloquized, Houellebecq’s voice reproduces exactly this background sound. These two metamorphoses—Houellebecq turning into a clairvoyant and then ventriloquized—shows the reader the writer at work. The words underpinning them, misunderstood by those who do not yet know how to read and by those, like the leftist journalists attacking him, who no longer know how to read, bear the mark of the rights of the writer. Like those of Flaubert and Baudelaire, who similarly faced criminal charges for having exercised their rights during times (1857) we thought long gone, until the Grand Mosque of Paris decided to revive them, having grown accustomed to intimidation ever since it filed a complaint in 2006 against Philippe Val and Charlie Hebdo. The parallel with Flaubert is stunning: his accusers incriminated the novelist for encouraging immorality, when his book Madame Bovary only described it.

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche advances his program to end Christianity. He complains that “everything judaizes or christianizes or becomes visibly plebeian.” Christianity has injected a poison into life. In The Antichrist, this philosopher, one of the greatest, attributes to Saint Paul the “cynical logic of a rabbi,” before asserting that “the Christian is only a Jew with a more liberal faith.” No charges were filed against Gallimard for having published these works. What’s more: they are studied in schools in philosophy classes. When I was teaching, I used to assign them to my classes to read and interpret. Let us imagine Houellebecq as Borges, mixing false and true erudition: he would take entire pages from Nietzsche that high school seniors read, and then he would substitute “Islam” for “Christianity” and “Judaism,” and put “Imam” in the place of “priest” and rabbi,” just as Mohammed could replace Jesus, of whom he writes worse than hanging him. Would the Grand Mosque of Paris file charges? Would it try to ban the book from schools? Probably. Samuel Paty died for having shown Charlie Hebdo in class.

The Grand Mosque of Paris will lose in court, and it knows it. There are daily attacks on teachers in the schools, who face constant intimidation. The Mosque knows that as well. The judicial charges it is pursuing against Houellebecq—in addition to the attack on the freedom of thought and the pressure to self-censorship that they express, in addition to the desire to institute a policing of thought and the disrespect for culture that they demonstrate—are inciting precisely the climate of violence that provokes these crimes, just as they amplify the rejection of Islam by the great majority of French. It will lose in court, and it will lose in the court of public opinion.

The Grand Mosque of Paris will then only have succeeded in turning Michel Houllebecq into a scapegoat.

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