An assault on free speech is unfolding in France. On Tuesday, a judge placed Michel Houellebecq, one of the country’s most significant living writers, under investigation for his alleged “complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence,” an accusation that stems from comments he made about Muslims several years ago. Houellebecq’s remarks were controversial and insensitive, but defending his freedom to speak does not require finding his words unobjectionable. Even the most offensive generalizations about minority groups should have to meet an exceptionally high threshold to warrant such a legal intervention. Houellebecq’s do not. The fact that he now faces the possibility of criminal charges should concern anyone who professes to care about the free exchange of ideas.
Houellebecq’s supposed crime occurred in November 2022 during an interview with the magazine Front Populaire. “When entire territories come under Islamist control, I think acts of resistance will take place,” Houellebecq said. “There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims, in short, Bataclans in reverse.” He was referring to a 2015 attack on Paris’s Bataclan concert hall, one of several acts of jihadist terrorism in the 2010s that collectively killed hundreds in France.
“I believe that the wish of the population with French roots, as the phrase goes, is not for Muslims to assimilate,” Houellebecq continued, “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.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Houellebecq spoke about the “Great Replacement.” This idea, coined by the French writer Renaud Camus, casts demographic change through immigration as the replacement of native European populations, particularly by Muslims. “I was very shocked that it was called a theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact,” Houellebecq said. Camus “observed a great replacement or—to be more precise—the changing ethnic and religious composition of the European population. It is statistically evident.”
Houellebecq’s lawyers have disputed that his remarks amount to incitement, correctly noting that predicting violence is not the same as provoking it. “The incriminated remarks have no dimension of incitement, not even implicitly, and therefore fall within the bounds of freedom of opinion and expression,” they said in a statement to the French media. “A prophet of doom does not wish for disaster, quite the contrary. His place is not in a courtroom.”
After the interview came out, Muslim and anti-racist groups filed complaints against Houellebecq. In 2023, he published a memoir that described his comments as clumsy, an obvious and somewhat lame attempt at self-preservation. If the book was a ploy to eliminate his legal exposure, it didn’t work. Multiple groups declined to withdraw their complaints, which ultimately led to the investigation announced this week.
The debate over Houellebecq’s comments acquired renewed urgency following a mass shooting last month. On October 23, a 39-year-old gunman drove through the communes of Trappes and La Verrière, outside Paris, and fired a submachine gun at passersby whom he believed to be African or Muslim, according to prosecutors. He killed a 26-year-old man of African descent and injured seven others, including an 11-year-old girl. Investigators found a copy of Mein Kampf in his home. Yesterday, the Union of Mosques of France, one of the groups that had filed a complaint against Houellebecq, issued a statement invoking the attack as an illustration of the danger of his rhetoric. But no matter how deplorable the attack was, it doesn’t erase the crucial distinction between foreseeing violence and inciting it; a plain reading of Houellebecq’s words shows that he was engaged in the former.
France does not guarantee the same speech protections that Americans take for granted under the First Amendment. In the United States, the legal standard for incitement holds that speech must be aimed at producing imminent unlawful action, and is likely to produce it. In France, the standard is lower: Incitement may be punishable even if it’s merely implicit, its intended effect isn’t imminent, and it’s unlikely to have any effect whatsoever. All manner of verbal transgressions have resulted in convictions, fines, and even time in jail. In 2011, for example, a Paris court convicted the designer John Galliano of making racist and anti-Semitic insults in public.
In Houellebecq’s case, the language used by the judge is telling. The allegation concerns the incitement of “discrimination, hatred, or violence,” three terms with radically different meanings. Punishing speech that is intended and likely to provoke imminent violence is one thing. But criminalizing the encouragement of something so nebulous as “hatred” of a group is far too broad a power to grant the state. And the allegation comes years after the fact. How far back can a causal chain reach?
This isn’t the first time that Houellebecq has faced legal trouble for comments he made about Muslims. In 2002, he was prosecuted after referring to Islam in an interview as “the stupidest religion.” He was later acquitted, but the investigation was itself a penalty. The prospect of being subjected to such cumbersome proceedings, which can last years, preemptively chills speech. Right-wing American politicians such as J. D. Vance have scolded Europeans for taking such an authoritarian approach to wrongthink. They are hypocrites, given their own administration’s offenses. But they are nonetheless correct.
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The point is not whether Houellebecq said anything objectionable, but that we all ought to retain the right to express objectionable views. Immigration, demographic change, and the reality of Islamist violence are issues that France cannot wish away. Indeed, they are pressing political concerns and must remain subjects open to candid disagreement. That includes arguments that may be exaggerated, offensive, or wrong. To require a speaker to prove that his words are innocuous is too large a concession to censors. It must be the state’s burden to justify any punishment, not the speaker’s to show that his views deserve protection to begin with.
Right now, France is creating conditions in which only outright extremists will dare say what many privately believe to be true. This is no victory for minorities. People who are comfortable granting the state such an extraordinary power to referee the boundaries of intellectual and political debate should keep in mind that tomorrow it might be used by a far-right government in ways they do not support. The right to speak and offend is the safeguard of a free and liberal society, for the simple fact that the authority to punish unwelcome speech is a weapon anyone can pick up and use.
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