A Prime Minister in a political fiction scenario. In his book “Soumission”, published in 2015, Michel Houellebecq had already made François Bayrou the tenant of Matignon.
In this anticipation novel, the author described a near future in which a candidate from a Muslim political party, “The Muslim Brotherhood”, is elected president following the 2022 election. the State, an enarch called Mohammed Ben Abbes, supported against Marine Le Pen by a “republican front” going from the PS to the right, then chose François Bayrou as Prime Minister.
In one of the passages of the book, the main character, François, professor of French literature at the Sorbonne and specialist in the 19th century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, meets Alain Tanneur, a general intelligence agent ready to retire. The latter then paints a scathing portrait of François Bayrou.
“Perfectly stupid”
“The old Béarnais politician, beaten in practically all the elections in which he had presented himself for thirty years, worked to cultivate an image of height, with the complicity of different magazines; that is to say that he was regularly photographed, leaning on a shepherd’s staff, wearing a Justin Bridou-style cape, in a mixed landscape of meadows and cultivated fields, generally in Labourd », writes Michel Houellebecq.
“What is extraordinary about Bayrou, what makes him irreplaceable is that he is perfectly stupid, his political project has always been limited to his own desire to access, by any means, the supreme magistracyas they say; he never had, or even pretended, to have the slightest personal idea; At this point, it’s still quite rare. This makes him the ideal politician to embody the notion of humanism, especially since he considers himself Henry IV, and a great peacemaker of interreligious dialogue; he also enjoys excellent popularity with the Catholic electorate, who are reassured by his stupidity,” explains Tanneur in the book.
When the book was released, the boss of MoDem responded to the writer on Radio France, after having read the book “which devotes three or four paragraphs to my modest person in all and which describes me as worthless to simplify,” he grumbled at the time. “The subject we are talking about is a carefully organized commercial operation, hats off to Flammarion! It is made to sell based on a proven recipe which is: let’s create a scandal, a controversy, let’s surf on the hottest, most aggressive subjects “, he castigated.
“Submission” was published on January 7, 2015, the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack. A caricature of the writer was also on the front page of the satirical weekly on the day of the tragedy. Sixth book by Michel Houellebecq, it sold 120,000 copies in the first week, then 345,000 copies one month after its release.