The West’s Search for a Foreign Savior

An aspiring 21st-century literary sophisticate must do two things. He must read and praise Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. And he must certainly not read—and be ready to denounce—Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. Read together, however, the two novels offer complementary diagnoses of the West’s sickness, each focusing on different temptations that have led Westerners toward civilizational suicide.

Submission and The Camp of the Saints are dystopian novels. In both, glimmers of hope are rare and disappear almost as soon as they appear. Both novels use mass immigration as the backdrop to civilizational collapse. The Camp of the Saints imagines the turmoil produced when a million migrants set out to land on the shores of France. Submission imagines an Islamic takeover of France. These crises are used to examine the spiritual malaise of France and the West more broadly. Both novels use satire and black humor to reveal the causes of Western suicide. The tragic error of the main characters in both novels comes from viewing foreigners as spiritual saviors, rescuers from the supposed fatal error of being Western.

The Camp of the Saints explores the consequences of white guilt. The fleet of a million migrants is invited by a small group of Western activists, missionaries, and philanthropists driven by sentimental egalitarianism and confidence in the universal brotherhood of man. The West is the land of plenty; the rest are lands of scarcity. What’s a little redistribution of wealth and people to even things out? The trouble, the novel shows us, is that this redistribution is not guided by properly ordered loves. The legitimate distinction between love of one’s own and love of others is erased. In its place is a gnawing, insatiable sense of collective Western guilt.

This feeling drives the redistribution of wealth and people. Every time Westerners learn of the suffering of non-Westerners, they regard it as their fault and their responsibility. Love of one’s neighbor becomes an unlimited duty to distant strangers. Fulfilling these duties promises to purify the corrupt, tainted West. This passion for the stranger is paired with disdain for one’s actual neighbors. It turns into contempt for one’s own people and, eventually, for oneself. The point is not that these characters love humanity too much. It is that they have learned to call self-hatred love.

The novel draws attention to the postcolonial left, which encourages terrorism against the French army and French institutions in an effort to settle the score with the Third World. They earn their just reward: the migrants of the Third World kill them upon landing. This narrative exposes the nihilism of their creed, and Raspail sees much of the Catholic and Christian world as having embraced the same nihilism. In the novel, the World Ecumenical Council, a body representing Protestant Christians, pronounces “that modern Western society cannot be reformed and must therefore be destroyed so as to build upon its ruins a new world equitable for all, so help us God.” Civilizational suicide is turned into a spiritual duty. Destruction no longer needs to defeat the civilization from outside; it needs only to convince the civilization that surrender is virtuous.

Raspail’s novel targets an intellectual alliance between Christians and the left. Houellebecq’s dystopia has a different target.

Houellebecq was already France’s most famous novelist, but Submission—a study of the political problem posed by Islam—made a spectacular splash. It was released in 2015, on the same day that Islamists stormed the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed its employees.

In Submission, a charismatic leader of a French Muslim Brotherhood party wins the presidential election. He is swept into power by the Muslim immigrant vote and with the help of France’s other political parties, which unite against the other contender, Marine Le Pen and her Front National. It is the old cordon sanitaire against the far right, supposedly meant to save the Republic, but it becomes a suicide pact.

Once in power, the Muslim Brotherhood begins the official Islamization of France. Social norms change: short skirts disappear, while hijabs and halal food dominate the streets. Conversion to Islam is required to advance professionally. The most prestigious academic institutions are run by Muslims; the Sorbonne becomes the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne.

The novel tells this story through the eyes of François, a dissolute and disillusioned professor. He has the usual sexual preoccupations of Houellebecq’s characters. But he is fascinated by Robert Rediger, a prestigious academic and politician who has converted to Islam. In the end, François decides to preserve his career and converts as well. France is not conquered by men willing to die for Islam. It is handed over by men who cannot think of anything worth making a sacrifice for.

It is easy to read the novel as a criticism of the political alliance between Islamists and the left, which the French writer and politician Éric Zemmour has called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of the 21st century. Since 2015, this “Islamo-gauchisme” has become part of the mainstream political landscape in Western Europe.

France’s hard-left party La France Insoumise, once a bastion of anti-clerical secularism dedicated to eliminating religious influence from public life, has recast itself as a home for Islamists. Using the events of October 7, 2023, to mobilize Muslim voters hostile to Israel, it has successfully rallied these voters in the banlieues of French cities.

In the 2024 UK elections, several pro-Gaza independents broke through in safe Labour seats and now sit in Parliament. The Green Party, sensing an opportunity, is busy rebranding itself. Earlier this year, the Greens won a by-election in Gorton and Denton, a Labour stronghold near Manchester that the party had held for nearly a century. They won by embracing ethnic sectarianism and mobilizing Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims furious with the Labour Party over Gaza. In a decade, a casual observer of British politics might be forgiven for thinking the Greens owe their color to Palestinian politics rather than environmentalism.

But this is only the novel’s surface theme. Unlike Raspail, Houellebecq targets neither Western leftists nor Christians who confuse leftist universalism with the Christian vision. In Submission, the left is a spent force. Rediger describes Islamo-leftism as “a desperate attempt by moldering, putrefying, brain-dead Marxists to hoist themselves out of the dustbin of history by latching onto the coattails of Islam.”

There are Christians—Catholics—but they exist only at the margins. At one point, François’s wanderings take him to a monastery. He cannot bring himself to believe and stay, so he leaves. The Western creed the novel targets is a right-wing one. While the novel’s main characters are not right-wing, they have all read René Guénon.

Born in France in 1886, Guénon was a brilliant, largely self-taught intellectual who became one of the leading critics of modernity during the interwar period. Like others, he was concerned with the way modern intellectual forces had undermined and destroyed traditional social and political forms. But Guénon pushed this critique further, measuring modernity’s origins not in centuries but in millennia.

For Guénon, the destruction of traditional social and political structures in the West began with a fateful turn away from mythology. This turn produced the spirit of inquiry that made philosophy and science possible. But it also doomed the possibility of enchantment, making traditional forms of life impossible. Guénon’s critique implicates Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. It draws a dividing line between Western civilization and traditional societies that preserve an esoteric spiritual inheritance. And this critique points neither toward a return to Christendom nor to classical civilization. It points toward Islam.

Guénon became convinced that the only spiritual force with enough vitality left to save the West came from the East. Later in life, he converted to Islam, moved to Egypt, and took an Arabic name. He died there in 1951.

Submission echoes familiar critiques of late capitalism and of instrumental reason reducing meaningful human relationships to transactions. But it is Guénon’s shadow that hangs over the novel. Guénon sees Westerners as trapped within a culture of disenchantment. It is not simply that Westerners have gained a higher level of scientific awareness that requires them to abandon Christian premises. Rather, their spiritual instincts have been dulled to the point that they can no longer respond to ritual. When François visits the monastery to explore conversion, he finds himself too restless to take part.

In a sense, the novel assumes that Guénon’s critique of the West is correct. Moreover, Guénon’s account of Western decay and disenchantment has proved attractive, both in real life and in the novel, to parts of the conservative and nativist right. Disgusted by the West, they look elsewhere for alternatives. They come to admire the strength and vitality of Islam because these are qualities their own civilization seems to have lost. Having abandoned confidence in their own inheritance, they begin envying anyone who still possesses one.

Houellebecq teases his right-wing reader more than his left-wing one, suggesting that the Muslim Brotherhood is better at carrying out the conservative agenda than conservatives themselves. It cuts waste from the welfare state and lowers taxes. It redirects resources toward pro-family initiatives. It brings an end to the obsessive sexual desires of post-1968 France. François observes: “As the new Islamic regime pushed women’s clothing in the direction of decency, I had felt my own sexual impulses gradually diminish. I sometimes went whole days without thinking of sex.” And through its foreign-policy successes, the new regime begins rebuilding the Roman Empire.

This is Houellebecq’s cruelest joke. The right’s desired social order arrives, but only after the right has proved too weak to build or defend it. Islam supplies the discipline, hierarchy, family policy, and civilizational confidence that Western conservatives praise but cannot summon.

Guénon also proves to be what draws François toward Islam. The novel’s climax comes when Rediger asks François to meet him. During an evening-long lecture, Rediger more or less persuades François to convert. It is the novel’s only erotic scene. François finds Rediger’s arguments, rooted in Guénon’s ideas, the most seductive.

The main characters of The Camp of the Saints cast migrants as spiritual saviors who will heal a broken civilization. In Houellebecq’s novel, the characters cast Islam as the spiritual savior, not so much because of its theological content as because of the social functions it performs.

In François’s case, Islamic polygamy promises to reconcile his disordered desires—he does not have to work very hard to discipline them. Rediger’s argument is that man cannot really be educated out of his nature. Rather than struggle against his desires or try to sublimate them, François submits to a foreign creed. His conversion is not a triumph of faith. It is the final victory of appetite over conviction.

Some people believe we can escape the struggle against Western fetishes by fetishizing foreign cultures instead. The Camp of the Saints and Submission show two different ways of doing that. The former describes the more immediate political danger. But the latter, rooted in serious philosophy rather than sentimentalism, poses the greater spiritual challenge.

Raspail’s West destroys itself because it believes it deserves to die. Houellebecq’s West gives itself away because it no longer knows what living is for. One civilization is overcome by guilt, the other by boredom. Neither is finally defeated by a superior argument or an irresistible army. Both collapse because their people have lost the will to remain themselves.