“A cry of unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool”: this was how George Orwell described Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1932 novel Journey to the End of Night, an odyssey through the bleak landscapes of early twentieth-century modernity: the trenches of the First World War, the brutality of colonial Africa, the anomie of New York City, the alcoholism-inducing barrenness of working-class suburbs. Céline did not, of course, confine his literary talents to describing modern life. He also used them to support fascist organizations and ideas, notably a series of pamphlets from the late 1930s whose antisemitism remains shocking to this day.
Contemporary France has given rise to its own literature of “unbearable disgust.” Michel Houellebecq, perhaps the country’s best known living novelist, made a name for himself examining the unacknowledged humiliations of contemporary existence, particularly those experienced by men. In 2010, when he was invited to the Elysée Palace after winning a major literary prize, Houellebecq brought as a guest a young author who calls himself Laurent Obertone. Houellebecq introduced Obertone to former President Nicolas Sarkozy as the “great polemicist of tomorrow.”
Like Houellebecq and Céline, however, Obertone’s literary reputation is difficult to separate from his political positions. Houellebecq once described Islam, the faith of many French people of immigrant origin, as “the dumbest religion.” He later published a novel imagining France under the rule of a Muslim president whose title—Submission—mischievously alluded to the Arabic etymology of “Islam.” Obertone, for his part, has been highly critical of immigration’s impact on French society and has ties to “great replacement” theory. His three-volume novel, Guérilla (published between 2016 and 2022) is the story of France’s descent into civil war following an uprising of racial minorities.