French author Michel Houellebecq in November 2016
Wikimedia Commons
French novelist Michel Houellebecq has been charged in a court in Paris, France, for ‘complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence against a group of people on account of their origin or their belonging or not belonging to a particular ethnicity, nation, race or religion’. The news was originally broken by the French news site Le Figaro on Tuesday, 10 November.
Houellebecq gave an interview to the right-wing magazine Front Populaire in November 2022. In it, he made several controversial statements about Muslim immigration.
For example, he told the magazine, ‘The wish of the population with French roots, as the phrase goes, is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop stealing from and assaulting them, in short, for the violence to decrease, for them to respect the law and people. Or, another good solution, for them to leave.’
The writer also stated that he is surprised that the ‘great replacement theory’—the idea that elites are importing immigrants to Europe to replace the native European population on purpose—is called a ‘theory’, since he believes ‘it’s not a theory, it’s a fact’. The most prominent proponent of the great replacement theory is another French author, Renaud Camus.
However, the statements that most likely caused the most trouble for Houellebecq were the ones he made about violence against Muslim immigrants. He said in the interview with Front Populaire that, ‘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, Bataclan in reverse.’
Here, he is referencing the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015 by radical Islamist terrorists.
The Movement against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples (MRAP) and the Union of Mosques of France are the ‘civil parties’ aiding the French state in the prosecution of Houellebecq.
Free speech rights are protected in the preamble to the current Constitution of the Fifth Republic of France, giving full constitutional force to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. However, despite this, the French criminal code includes strong hate speech laws.
Houellebecq’s two attorneys have released a joint statement, declaring that ‘The incriminated remarks have no dimension of incitement, not even implicitly, and therefore fall within the bounds of freedom of opinion and expression’ and that their client’s ‘place is not in a courtroom’.
Categories: European Union, France, Islamophobia, Racism