Une anticipation dans laquelle un parti musulman remporte la présidentielle contre le Front national. Le Front national de Marine Le Pen, qui a déjà perdu le scrutin de 2017, subit la loi d?une alliance UMP, UDI, PS, associée à la Fraternité musulmane, parti inventé par l?auteur. Son leader, Mohammed Ben Abbes, finit par être élu et choisit François Bayrou comme premier ministre.
It’s 2022. Francois is bored. He’s a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne and an expert on J.K. Huysmans, the famous nineteenth-century Decadent author. But Francois’s own decadence is considerably smaller in scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, rereads Huysmans, watches YouPorn. Meanwhile, it’s election season. And although Francois feels “about as political as a bath towel,” things are getting pretty interesting. In an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power. Islamic law comes into force. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and Francois is offered an irresistible academic advancement—on condition that he convert to Islam. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of Submission that Michael Houellebecq is “not merely a satirist but—more unusually—a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind.” Houellebecq’s new book may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious, a comic masterpiece by one of France’s great novelists.