France Wants To Jail Its Greatest Novelist Because He Told The Truth About Islam

The median American read only two books in 2025, and 40% of us read not a single book all year. The French are more literary; they read an average of 18 books a year. They venerate authors – the more intellectual, controversial, and impenetrable the better.

But that doesn’t mean authors are beyond criticism in France. The work of Michel Houellebecq, for example, has long been controversial. In 2002, he was charged with inciting racism for calling Islam “the stupidest religion.” Mosques in Paris and Lyon joined with the World Islamic League to bring the charges against him. Paris judges found him not guilty.

In response, the head of the Mosque of Lyon said, “Islam now can be insulted freely. The permission to insult Islam has now been given.”

Well, yes. That’s how free speech works. Insulting a person, institution, or religion may be unfair, unkind, or even unwise, but in these United States at least, it is not illegal. That’s why we tolerate the views of podcast harpy Jennifer Welch and chief “Groyper” Nick Fuentes, among others.

But France, like Britain and Germany, has no First Amendment. In all three countries, people are routinely arrested for speech that in the United States would be legal.

Houellebecq’s book “Submission” was published in January 2015, on the same day Islamist terrorists murdered 12 journalists and staff at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for having republished cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed.

“Submission” invokes an imaginary future (2022!) where a Muslim party has won national elections and governs according to Sharia law — among other things, legalizing polygamy. The protagonist, a middle-aged man, eventually decides to convert to Islam so he can have more wives.

Houellebecq took a lot of criticism for the book but was not formally charged. He was raised as a young child in Algeria at the end of its French rule, which ended in a bloody terrorist campaign and war. That experience may have shaped his bleak view of France’s future.

Houellebecq is back under investigation by a judge, this time for comments made in 2022 in an interview with the outlet Front Populaire. The investigation was instigated by a complaint from the Grand Mosque of Paris in 2023 and may result in criminal charges.

Here’s some of what he said. (Translation by The Critic. It sounds better in French):

The wish of the native French population is not that Muslims assimilate but that they stop robbing and assaulting them. Or, another solution, that they leave. … When entire territories come under Islamist 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.

The “great replacement” theory “[is] not a theory, it’s a fact. It’s statistical evidence.”

The first two statements are his opinion. The second is unsavory, especially given the reportedly racially motivated October murder in Paris of a black French national. But it is his prediction, not an incitement to violence.

The third statement, as Houellebecq says, is fact. European populations across the West are shrinking, while foreign peoples immigrate in large numbers. One thus replaces the other. We can discuss whether this is good or bad, or why it happens, but not the undeniable fact that it is occurring.

But whether he is right or wrong is not the issue. The protesters taking to the streets every week in France are motivated by various causes from teacher shortages to pensions to Gaza, not an interview in Front Populaire they never read. I doubt any of the young men in Marseille looting luxury stores for sneakers and bags have read a book, let alone one by Michel Houellebecq.

In a recent interview with Ben Shapiro, comedian and writer Rob Schneider said:

When the truth becomes a right-wing concept, then I think you have to stand up for it…It’s going to cost you to speak your opinion. It’s going to cost you jobs, it’s going to cost you money, but it’s going to cost you more if you don’t speak up and you lose this incredible experiment in freedom that we have.

America was founded on free speech, which is the only way to get to the truth. If we lose that, we lose all. France’s revolution followed ours by 13 years. But whereas ours was against an occupying overseas power, theirs was internal and devolved into a purge for ideological purity. Free speech was the very basis of our revolution, but it was an early casualty in theirs.

I was U.S. Consul in Slovakia for three years. Everyone my age there remembered life under communism. The system survived partly because of the Soviet Union’s threat of military force, which they used in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to suppress popular uprisings. But Czechoslovakia and the other Soviet satellite states also had repressive police, informers, and political prisons to keep people down.

People shared bitter jokes, such as “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” about socialist economics. They listened to jazz, which was subversive without words. They listened to Voice of America and read books in secret. But they knew better than to speak out freely against the communist system unless they were prepared for the gulag or death. That’s why it lasted almost 50 years.

If convicted, Houellebecq could face up to a year in prison and heavy fines. But behind bars with him would go France’s freedom of speech. We watch from America as our oldest ally – along with Britain, Germany, and others – goes down this well-worn path to authoritarian censorship. Whatever happens there, we need to hold fast to our principles here:

“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…”

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Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center and author of “The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey)” from Academica Books.