Belatedly, the age’s new sensibility began to seep into Houellebecq’s oeuvre. In subsequent years, there were to be fewer books about fraudulent artists and hermits and more about enraged activists and farmers. In 2015, the protagonist in his novel Submission — Houellebecq’s detached account of an Islamist takeover of France, complete with polygamous marriage offers to professors and vice squads patrolling Parisian boulevards — looked back on a world in which “the elections could not have been less interesting” and “the mediocrity of the ‘political offerings’ was almost surprising.” In 2019, Houellebecq’s novel Serotonin depicted a group of rebel agriculturists assaulting police forces on the French highway and characters loudly contemplating their nation’s exit from the European Union. In his latest work, Annihilation, a far-right sister to the main character dips in and out of the page with lamentations about France’s lost native roots. On the writer’s seismograph, the shuttering of a historical era had been registered; populism had become a historical force to be reckoned with.

Time passes quickly in the 2020s, however. Five years after Serotonin, the protest wave of the 2010s has receded. The left populism that Hessel helped midwife also appears a spent force, while his desired “age of anger” has mostly found an electoral or extraparliamentary outlet on the far right or has harmlessly settled across social media feeds. In the meantime, the West’s class gradient has not tilted, and geopolitical tension is heightening.

Nominally, in this new environment, Houellebecq has been cast as a fellow traveler of a nationalist international of far-right parties, providing a literary rationale, with visions of an impending civilizational collapse, for the nativist reconquest of Europe. While he has never called for a vote for Marine Le Pen — although he seemed close to doing so in 2013, according to his friend and English translator Gavin Bowd — his novels have always found welcome reception in far-right circles.

Recent public pronouncements have only fed skepticism. In a recent interview discussing French politics, Houellebecq presaged “a revolt of the people against elites,” but he remains disillusioned about the contemporary far right’s prospects for power. For Houellebecq, the Right’s millennial darling Jordan Bardella is so “obsessed with the idea of not saying anything that could be perceived badly that he simply says nothing at all,” while Marine Le Pen is “neither very intelligent nor very competent.” Yet he has also expressed unhappiness with the republican bloc that beat out the Rassemblement National in July’s runoff elections, stating that “it would be better if the conflict had broken out now.”

In his private life, Houellebecq has had to endure wholly different anxieties. In the winter of 2022, the novelist was contacted by KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics), a Dutch art collective with a penchant for shock exposés in the cultural sector. They established their reputation with documentaries ridiculing dealers, critics, and occasional trespassers in the visual and performing arts scene. Their standing as professional provocateurs was secured with the 2021 movie Honey Pot, in which they mastermind a ritual humiliation of Sid Lukkassen, a prominent member of the Dutch far-right circuit. Lukkassen responds to a query by a young left-wing philosophy student seeking to reconcile her country’s political tensions by sleeping across the divide — Left meets Right in the boudoir. Lukkassen was unable to deliver on his prowess as a suitor, only to be shamed for this failure live on camera, and he was sent into temporary hiding before the movie’s launch. Lukkassen, it turns out, had also celebrated Houellebecq’s novels as visionary manifestos for a Europe on the verge of racial suicide.

Houellebecq’s own engagement with KIRAC proved no less disastrous. After publishing what he claims will be his final novel, Houellebecq was asked to participate in a controlled sexual experiment with the student who first roped in Lukkassen as well as Houellebecq’s wife and another volunteer. Houellebecq agreed but claims he was unaware of the director’s plans to publicize the resulting material. His trial of endurance has now been registered in a short memoir, A Few Months in My Life.

The book stands out as one of Houellebecq’s most durable contributions, driven by a naive frankness and an earnest sense of tragedy absent from his later writings, particularly regarding his traumatic initiation in contemporary sexual mores. “Contrary to expectation,” he notes, “OnlyFans was not a free website.” The women who led him into a state of “near-perfect debility” in KIRAC’s scheme are given Aesopic titles such as “The Trout” and “The Hen.” A profound disaffection from the contemporary public sphere is also evident in the memoir, not unrelated to Houellebecq’s misgivings about the Left’s republican front. Disgusted by the behavior on the KIRAC set, Houellebecq drones against the perversions of pornography, the moral decline of the West, and the fecklessness of Europe’s elites.

Luckily for Houellebecq, he’s won a lawsuit against KIRAC, granting him inspection rights before the movie’s final publication. Houellebecq has simply interpreted the entire episode as further proof of the corrosive free-market decadence that has animated his oeuvre since the early 1990s, and that has often placed him in the uneasy company of Marxist critics.

This company often elicits an equally unseemly question. Could Houellebecq be not just a literary patron saint of the far right but also the greatest Marxist novelist alive today? At face value, the question sounds preposterous, and more compelling comparisons have been made with his own avowed inspirations: the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, the French symbolist Karl Huysmans, the pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, and the nineteenth-century prophet of positivism Auguste Comte, whose thoughts on religion Houellebecq has often referred to in his more melancholic moments. Already in 1998, he claimed that “sexual needs seem to me far more urgent today than spiritual needs; but assuming that they are satisfied, and that spiritual needs arise in consequence, it will be in our interest, when the time comes, to dive back into Comte, whose real subject, his major subject, is religion.” A unifying theme is clear: all of these writers who grappled with the passing of religion in modernity make for probable references for Houellebecq’s writing.

From the left, however, a different reading is possible: Houellebecq not as an exponent of Comte’s positivism or Lovecraft’s racist gothic but as a contemporary Honoré de Balzac, the realist writer renowned for his portraits of the high bourgeois society of the first half of the nineteenth century, author of the Comédie humaine and other classics. As it stands, the first to officially make the comparison was Houellebecq’s own friend Bernard Maris, erstwhile economist and a victim of the Salafi raid at Charlie Hebdo in 2015. In his book Houellebecq économiste, Maris states that “just as Balzac was the chronicler of the conquering bourgeoisie and an early capitalism triumphant, Houellebecq is the great novelist of the market’s iron hand and a capitalism increasingly in its death throes,” while author Ryan Napier sees Houellebecq as writing, “in the age of [capitalism’s] total dominance,” a “fictional vision [that] could not begin until the end of history.”

While Balzac chronicled the rise of the bourgeoisie after the revolution of 1789, Houellebecq has canvassed the social void created by the so-called second revolution of 1989, where a newly global capitalism achieved its uneasy triumph worldwide. As literary critic Peter Brooks noted in 1999 about the “monarchist Marxists could love,” Balzac also “had the advantage of living in an age of revolution, which made the passing of the old order starkly perceptible.” Both were vitriolic critics of the new society with unending fondness for the old one. For Balzac, it was the ancient aristocracy and kings; for Houellebecq, the communist parties, country priests, and Gaullist politicians. “It’s true that the Communist Party isn’t what it used to be,” the latter could still claim in 1994, even though “a country whose population is becoming impoverished, senses that it’s going to become more and more impoverished, and is also convinced that all its misfortunes come from international economic competition” deserved better. Both were also from relatively modest backgrounds — the aristocratic particle “de” was Balzac’s own confection, while Houellebecq prides himself on not sharing the credentials of the Parisian citadel he now inhabits.

The analogies hardly end there. In the 1830s and ’40s, when Balzac wrote, the dominant repertoire of social action was the petition, the riot, and the street march, in a left-wing political culture not yet organized around unions, parties, or large membership organizations, as Daniel Zamora has noted. Confusion and fear of place characterize his novels through and through, with a breakdown of social order and frenzied groping for status. Yet for Balzac at least, the world was suffused with a sense of sociological color; this was a world of individuals as members of classes, not the isolated “elementary particles” of Houellebecq’s early novels.

There are precedents for a Marxist evaluation of a literary reactionary. As Friedrich Engels said in a letter to an English friend, Balzac was “a far greater master of realism than all the Zolas passés, présents et à venir,” going so far as to claim that he had learned more from Balzac “than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together” — even if he “was politically a Legitimist” in favor of restoring the Bourbon dynasty after its fall in 1830. To Engels, Balzac’s “great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction” as “people deserving no better fate.” As he concluded:

That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found — that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

A similar artistic fatalism characterizes Houellebecq’s own writings, as Maris has noted. Yet his lucidity of vision is hard to disentangle from his reactionary politics, as some left-wing proponents of his novels have so desperately tried. Precisely because Balzac was a relative stranger to the new world after 1789 and an opponent of its liberal politics, he was able to discern its contours much more clearly. Yet like Balzac, Houellebecq also lacks the political tools to resolve this crisis. He mourns the passing of the old world, unable to force into existence a new one. In this, too, he mirrors Balzac’s helpless royalism in the 1830s and ’40s: the hope that the old dynasty would renovate itself, that the ancien régime would succeed in building a popular coalition capable of accomplishing this. As Balzac exhorts fellow royalists in a pamphlet from 1842, reminiscent of Houellebecq’s critiques of Le Pen, “Today, the only weapons that royalists have to take up are those that our century has made: the press and the tribune,” forced to accept an irreversible rupture between past and present.

Houellebecq’s oeuvre thereby offers clues beyond our era and about the modern far right itself. There is no rival program for government, ethical renaissance, or deglobalization on offer. Growing sections of the Western working class, who have lent their votes to parties on the extreme right, are willing to bet on these rhetorical alternatives to liberalism. Unlike in the 1920s and ’30s, the contemporary far right’s rise is largely a function of liberalism’s failure, not a signal of the Left’s strength — Nazism and Fascism, in the end, are only properly conceived as failed revolutions. As they squashed labor movements, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini promised their respective national elites equivalents of the colonial empires that their French and British competitors had long ago acquired — the idea was to break walls, not erect them. Rather than expand outward, today’s far right wants to shield Europe from the rest of the world, admitting that the continent will no longer be a protagonist in the twenty-first century and that the best one can hope for is protection from the hordes. In Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a manual for the far right often seen as a low-quality precedent to Houellebecq’s own books, the aim is not to conquer Africa but simply to keep its inhabitants south of the Mediterranean.

This tyranny of low ambitions defines the Right’s international approach, starting with the European Union itself. For decades, its parties focused their ire on the bloc’s undemocratic constraints, even championing an exit from the union — a defiance that has now died away. While Hitler tried to break an Anglo-American order and make a daring bid for world leadership, Europe’s new authoritarians are happy to occupy a niche within the existing power structure — the goal is to adapt to decline, not reverse it. In the latter sense, the new European right looks ever more like the Latin American one: intensely pro–United States and hostage to the same volatile party systems in which loyal voters and solid institutions are hard to come by. This also holds on the cultural front: while it wails about imported US culture wars, Europe’s new far right is more American than ever in its tirades against wokeness and “trans ideology,” just as Houellebecq himself is an awkward participant in the porn-saturated world that America made. Both as a writer and an ideologue, the lesson of his oeuvre remains that there are no easy routes out of our twenty-first-century disenchantment; neither radical Islamism, rabid cultural Catholicism, nor far-right protectionism offers easy solace in the new century.

Yet the fact that liberalism has run out of answers in no way implies its rivals are even asking the right questions. The old might indeed be dying, as we are so tirelessly reminded today. In the case of Houellebecq, however, nothing is even struggling to be born, and the future reeks of stubborn decomposition rather than sudden rebirth. As Balzac notes in his first published work, the tragedy Cromwell, once a king has lost his head, there is no putting the body back together.