‘ Rouge-Brun or Counterrevolutionary? Another Look at Michel Houellebecq’s Politics’

Michel Houellebecq has gained a reputation for combining left-wing critiques of neo-liberal capitalism with reactionary laments at the decline of nation, religion, honest labour, and the patriarchal family. Critics typically thus either declare the novelist to be unclassifiable in political terms or to be a ‘rouge-brun’ . Surveying Houellebecq’s novels, from Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) to Sérotonine (2019), we argue that there is nothing unclassifiable, ‘rouge’ or left-wing about the author’s political worldview. On the contrary, his work needs to be understood as belonging to a tradition of French counterrevolutionary thought , personified by Auguste Comte and Charles Maurras .


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liberalisation of political practices and social and sexual mores. On the basis of this assumption, Houellebecq is then judged unclassifiable in conventional political terms, representing some strange hybrid of left and right-wing beliefs; in short, he is a 'rouge-brun'.
However, this is rather a strange assumption to make, given that there is a long tradition of right-wing French political thought that is highly critical of the corrosive effects of a liberalised economy on France's social and moral order. For counterrevolutionary thinkers from the conservative Auguste Comte to the full-blown reactionary nationalist Charles Maurras, liberal or laissez-faire economics was inseparable from the liberalisation of political rights, social and sexual mores. All of these forms of liberalisation had been heralded by the Revolution of 1789 and, for right-wing thinkers like Comte and Maurras, all represented equally destructive forms of liberal individualism, whose effects in eroding the institutions of organised religion, the patriarchal family, productive labour, and the nation itself were to be lamented. 5 Further, this lament at the destructive effects of economic liberalism often had an ecological element insofar as the French counterrevolutionary tradition advocated a return to small-scale agricultural production and the supposedly unchanging certainties of the French terroir. The ecological concerns of Sérotonine might thus also be seen to owe more to that older counterrevolutionary tradition than to any modern, left-leaning current of green politics.
There is, thus, nothing new or unusual in the combination of a certain brand of anticapitalism with a conservative social, moral and political worldview, the very combination of political positions that characterises Houellebecq's novels. As Adam Gopnik rightly points out in his review of Soumission (2015), the novel is clearly informed by 'the ideology of conservative anti-capitalism in the form it took a century ago, more or less benignly in Chesterton and Belloc, and decidedly less benignly in the likes of Charles Maurras'. 6 Yet as we have noted, Gopnik's insightful comments aside, Houellebecq's potential affinities with that earlier tradition of counterrevolutionary anti-capitalism have been largely overlooked, 4 obscured by the mistaken assumption that to be anti-capitalist is necessarily to be on or at the very least indebted to the Left. Houellebecq's admiration for Comte is quite explicit, evident as much in the comments of his narrators and fictional characters as in his own essay praising the thinker. 7 As such, the novelist's debts to Comtean sociology have attracted some critical attention. 8 Yet no commentator has considered the possibility that Houellebecq's reading of Comte may have significant affinities with the uses to which Maurras put the same thinker in elaborating his reactionary counterrevolutionary politics. Those who have thus far criticised Houellebecq's apparently reactionary affiliations have focused on his tendency to reproduce demeaning racist and Islamophobic stereotypes in his writings. 9 Rather than rehearsing such criticisms, this article will examine a different, if closely related question, namely the extent to which Houellebecq's anti-capitalism is itself consistent with the French counterrevolutionary tradition. It will argue that rather than being a 'rouge-brun', Houellebecq is better understood as a novelist who rehearses and updates certain of the characteristic themes and tropes of a tradition of counterrevolutionary anti-capitalism personified, in its moderate form, by Comte and, in its most reactionary form, by Maurras. 10 One of the fundamental differences separating Comte from Maurras relates to the nature of the solutions each thinker offers to the dislocation of French society that both attribute to the corrosive effects of liberalism, in its economic as much as in its social, political and cultural manifestations. According to Comte, the liberalism heralded by the French Revolution, although destructive of social and moral order, would nonetheless prove salutary in sweeping away the anachronistic structures of the ancien régime and hence paving the way for a new 'industrial age', in which society would be ruled on rational, scientific principles by an elite of sociologists and industrialists (Cours, pp. 442-520). Maurras, by contrast, was far less optimistic; for him, the dislocations of liberalism were in no way salutary and needed to be combatted by staging a return to what had gone before, in the form 5 of a restored monarchy; a return to the terroir and to small-scale agricultural or artisanal forms of production organised in guilds or professional corporations; the restoration of organised religion; of the patriarchal family; and hence of national integrity (O.C., vol. 2). As we survey Houellebecq's output, it will become clear that his various novels see him testing these two options in fictional form, alternating between an apparent advocacy of a kind of Comtean technocratic solution and a preference for Maurras's more retrograde politics. This means that a considerable amount of ambiguity will remain concerning Houellebecq's political position, rendering it unclear whether he is closer to Comte or to Maurras as regards the precise form of counterrevolutionary anti-capitalism he advocates. Nonetheless, this residual ambiguity in no way negates the value of situating Houellebecq within that earlier tradition of right-wing anti-capitalism rather than continuing to work on the mistaken assumption that to be anti-capitalist must be to be left-wing.

Sex and the Market
It is in Houellebecq's first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), that the notion that economic liberalism and the liberalisation of sexual morality are inseparably related is first sketched out. The novel's unnamed narrator, a disaffected unmarried software engineer in his thirties, is convinced that liberalism, whether understood as an economic doctrine based on unrestrained competition or a social philosophy involving the liberalisation of sexual mores, is responsible for the difficulties he faces both at work and in his personal life. Indeed, the title of the novel refers precisely to the narrator's perception that the 'domain of struggle', the merciless competition between actors in the economic field has, with the liberalisation of gender roles and sexual relationships, now 'extended' to permeate the realm of interpersonal relations also: 6 Dans un système économique où le licenciement est prohibé, chacun réussit plus ou moins bien à trouver sa place. Dans un système sexuel où l'adultère est prohibé, chacun réussit plus ou moins à trouver son compagnon de lit. En système économique parfaitement libéral, certains accumulent des fortunes considérables; d'autres croupissent dans le chômage et la misère. En système sexuel parfaitement libéral, certains ont une vie érotique variée et excitante; d'autres sont réduits à la masturbation et la solitude. Le libéralisme économique, c'est l'extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension à tous les âges de la vie et à toutes les classes de la société. De même, le libéralisme sexuel, c'est l'extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension à tous les âges de la vie et à toutes les classes de la société. 11 A loser in the increasingly competitive market for sexual partners, the narrator will spend much of the novel lamenting his inability to find a suitable marriage companion, settle down and have children.
Indeed, throughout the novel the narrator seems haunted by the spectre of the marriage and fatherhood that elude him. Contemplating the isolated and anomic nature of his existence, he imagines a small boy playing with some toy soldiers, who may still possess some of the same hopes and expectations for his future as the narrator himself has been forced to abandon. Yet, he laments: 'Depuis le divorce, il [l'enfant] n'a plus de père. Il voit assez peu sa mère, qui occupe un poste important dans une firme de cosmétiques' (Extension, p. 13). Later, the narrator muses of his younger colleague Bernard, 'Un type comme lui devrait avoir des enfants; s'il avait des enfants, on pourrait espérer qu'il finisse par sortir quelque chose de ce grouillement de petits Bernards. Mais non, il n'est même pas marié. Fruit sec' (Extension, pp. [18][19].
These laments at the impossibility of marriage, family and paternity appear to partake unequivocally of a fundamentally conservative vision of the social world. Yet, for a critic such as Sweeney, Houellebecq's critique of the effects of unfettered capitalism also contains 'an echo' of Marxism and it is this strange combination of right and left-wing motifs that qualifies the novelist as a 'rouge-brun'. To quote Sweeney: 'The assertion that capitalism is extending ever further into all areas of human life and particularly into relations between humans is, of course, merely an echo of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto's declaration that capital "has resolved personal worth into exchange value" and "has left remaining no other nexus between person and person than naked self-interest, than callous The dignity and simplicity of the fishermen's dangerous labours, as well as their regular religious worship, is thus contrasted to the vacuity of the narrator's own profession. For, as we have seen, that profession involves a kind of perversion of both honest manual labour and genuine religious faith, in the form of a computer programme named 'Sycomore' that bears no relation to either a tree or to craftsmanship and that relies on a computer language named 'Pascal' that bears only a tenuous relation to the author of the Pensées, itself a renowned Christian apologetic. It is surely no coincidence that this paean to a lost way of life, based around religious faith and honest toil, should be provoked by a visit to the Vendée region, a 12 region that occupies an elevated position in the French counterrevolutionary tradition as the site of the Royalist and Catholic uprising against the French revolution in 1793.
Earlier in the novel, depressed at the emptiness of his personal and professional lives, the narrator expresses a desire to leave Paris for the Vendée: 'j'avais assez d'envie d'aller en Vendée. La Vendée me rappelait de nombreux souvenirs de vacances (plutôt mauvais du reste, mais c'est toujours ça)' (p. 84). The Vendée, the counterrevolutionary location par excellence, thus clearly has a particular significance for the narrator. It is noticeable that he nonetheless undercuts any apparent idealisation of that region in each of his final sentencesthe life of the Sablais fishermen was 'assez stupide'; his memories of holidays in the Vendée are 'plutôt mauvais du reste'. That the narrator thus affects a kind of cynical distance towards these two counterrevolutionary locations seems to create two primary effects. First, it enables the narrator, and through him Houellebecq, to distance himself from the reactionary ideals he nonetheless evokes, according to a logic of disavowal that, as Martin Crowley has argued, is typical of Houellebecq's fiction. 13 Second, it emphasizes the extent to which these more authentic values have been rendered so inaccessible by the hegemony of liberalism as to make even their evocation faintly ridiculous. This sense of the impossibility of ever reclaiming the authentic values represented by a region such as the Vendée is also evident in the narrator's description of his visit to an equally important location in the French counterrevolutionary tradition.
In the course of another business trip, the narrator stays overnight in Rouen, leaving his hotel to visit the city's Place du Vieux Marché, the site where the English burned Joan of Arc at the stake. He is disgusted to find that the starkly modernist design of the square's church renders it indistinguishable from adjoining shops and a bus station (Extension, p. 69).
Joan of Arc is, of course, one of the most enduring icons of the counterrevolutionary, nationalist tradition in French politics and it is difficult not to read the narrator's 13 disorientation at visiting the site of her demise as a lament at the desecration of her memory by a combination of modernist town-planning, consumerism, and the erosion of the city's industrial base -the centre of the city is described as being overrun by 'des dizaines de loubards' who come from 'la banlieue rouennaise, qui est en voie d'effondrement industriel complet' (p. 68). Here, then, the disappearance of honest productive labour is associated with the commodification and hence desecration of a site invested with profound spiritual value by the counterrevolutionary tradition.
Extension thus contains a whole series of right-wing, counterrevolutionary themes and motifs: the conflation of economic with political and social liberalism, all seen as sources of France's current social and moral decline; the lament at the loss of family, religion, and honest labour as guarantors of social cohesion and moral probity; the evocation of iconic counterrevolutionary figures (Joan of Arc) and locations (the Vendée). At the novel's end, the narrator will retreat to another location that occupies a central role in conservative and counterrevolutionary anti-capitalist traditions, namely la France profonde, the terroir.
Suffering from the effects of depression and mental breakdown, he abandons Paris and his job, seeking solace and sanctuary in an isolated village in the Ardèche, the region in which his parents were born and brought up. Here, however fleetingly, the narrator glimpses 'la possibilité de la joie' (p. 156).
It is therefore difficult to see anything that might qualify as 'rouge' or left-wing in the depressing portrait the unnamed narrator paints of contemporary French society in Extension.
On the contrary, the novel seems to rehearse a whole series of tropes, themes and motifs that are characteristic of French conservative anti-capitalism, in general, and of Maurras's brand of counterrevolutionary thought, in particular. As we have noted, for Maurras, as for Comte, the original source of the corrosive effects of economic, social and political liberalism was to be found in the flawed thinking behind the Revolution of 1789. In his later novels, notably In contrast to Maurras, however, Comte maintained that 'revolutionary philosophy' had served a purpose in sweeping away the archaic social forms of the ancien régime and hence preparing the advent of his preferred new 'industrial age'. Nonetheless, that new 'industrial age' would require a 'réorganisation sociale' that would check the destructive  16 It is no coincidence that it should be a Michelin product that manages to achieve this unlikely synthesis of heavy industry and the French terroir. Although one of the first French companies to adopt American mass production techniques, Michelin remained, as the novel's narrator tells us, rooted in a particular French locality, 'domiciliée à Clermont-Ferrand depuis ses origines', a family firm, 'plutôt conservatrice, voire paternaliste' (Carte, p. 66).
Furthermore, in sponsoring maps and regional guides, to encourage car use and hence tyre consumption, Michelin became a guarantor of specifically French values of gastronomy, of regional identity and history, able, then, to achieve a miraculous synthesis of American mass production techniques and the French terroir. However, if Jed's series of maps and photographs are testaments to an era of specifically French, paternalist and masculine industrial prowess, they also lament the passing of that glorious age. For, as the reader learns, Michelin's technological and industrial activities, once rooted in the French territory, have now become dematerialised, deterritorialised, and feminised. Michelin is now owned by and beholden to foreign institutional investors, notably the Russians and Chinese (Carte, p. 106). presque celui d'une faute de goût' (pp. 98-9). Michelin's virile, authentically French, sublime project, rooted in material production, has thus been replaced by a feminised, foreign, dematerialised one that relies on selling a commodified simulacrum of the French terroir to the now dominant Russians and Chinese. In the wake of globalisation, the novel implies, France has lost its former industrial might and economic power and is hence reduced to prostituting itself, its culture, historical heritage, and gastronomy, to foreign tourists.
If Jed's paean to a lost era of industrial prowess suggests affinities with Comte's vision of the 'industrial age', elsewhere in the novel the benefits of smaller-scale, traditional or artisanal production are, by contrast, emphasized. This is evident in a series of conversations between Jed, his father (a retired architect), and the fictionalised version of Michel Houellebecq that appears as a character in the novel. All three express their admiration for William Morris's advocacy of skilled artisanal or craft labour. This is, however, a depoliticised Morris, 'ancrage socialiste mis à part, bien entendu', as Jed reflects, or before 'il s'est rallié au marxisme', as the fictional Houellebecq explains (p. 227; p. 253).
Of course, once shed of its Marxist or socialist commitments, Morris's advocacy of craft production becomes pretty much indistinguishable from the return to an artisanal mode of production advocated by someone like Maurras. Indeed, in one series of paintings Jed sets out to document precisely a range of trades and professions that seem to exemplify Maurras's belief in the wholesomeness of small-scale commercial or artisanal activity, at the same time as being emblematic of traditional French identity. The first two paintings in this 'série des métiers simples' are dedicated to '"Ferdinand Desroches, boucher chevalin", puis "Claude Vorilhon, gérant de bar-tabac", à des professions en perte de vitesse' (p. 116). The novel's narrator insists that it would be wrong to see such paintings as expressing any nostalgia for these traditional métiers, assuring the reader that Jed simply wanted to record them before they disappeared. Besides, the narrator claims, the subject of the third painting in the series 22 proves Jed was equally interested in new, emerging professions (p. 117). The subject of that third painting is '"Maya Dubois, assistante de télémaintenance"', whose profession is 'emblématique de l'adoption de la politique de flux tendus qui avait orienté l'ensemble du redéploiement économique de l'Europe occidentale au tournant du troisième millénaire' (pp. 116-17). Regardless of the narrator's claims, however, it is hard not to be struck by the contrast between the first two métiers Jed paints, both male and traditionally French, and his third painting, the epitome of feminised, immaterial and deterritorialised labour.
This sense that, despite the narrator's claims to the contrary, Jed's 'série de métiers simples' is inspired by a profound nostalgia for more authentic, small-scale commercial activities seems confirmed by his vain attempts to paint a Catholic priest. Poorly paid and marginalised, priests represent for Jed embodiments of an altruism, moral virtue and spirituality that have no place in a godless, individualistic, and basely mercantile contemporary France; for those who do not share their faith, they therefore represent 'un sujet François observes these developments with considerable equanimity, even welcoming many of them. In order to retain his job in a public university, François agrees to convert to Islam.
Although this does not correspond to any genuine religious conviction on his part, he clearly does appreciate the structure and moral order that organised religion brings both to his own life and to French society more broadly. As a result, François ends the novel happily anticipating the benefits of marriage and secure career that his imminent conversion to Islam will bring. As he remarks: 'ce serait la chance d'une deuxième vie, sans grand rapport avec la précédente. Je n'aurais rien à regretter' (p. 315).
Soumission thus offers a vision of a future France in which the restoration of organised religion, the patriarchal family, and small-scale artisanal production is shown to have fundamentally salutary effects for both individuals like François and society as a whole.
This vision, of course, corresponds very closely to that advocated by someone like Maurras.
Indeed, although Maurras called for the restoration of Catholicism, this did not correspond to any personal religious conviction on his part. Maurras was himself agnostic and his advocacy of organised religion reflected his belief in its importance as a unifying moral force rather than as a revealed truth. Comte took a similar approach; his advocacy of a new positivist religion adequate to the 'industrial age' reflected not personal religious faith but rather a belief in the vital role played by organised religion in securing the social bond. As Indeed, the extent to which the role of Islam in the novel reflects Comtean and Maurrassian ideas is hinted at in its very title.
At one level, 'soumission' is simply a translation of one of the meanings of the word 'Islam'. Yet the notion of 'soumission' was also central to Comte's social theory: it is by means of submission to rationalised forms of religion, the family and the industrial division of labour, he argues, that 'la réorganisation sociale' will be achieved, ending the 'anarchie' unleashed by liberalism. Indeed, Comte even goes so far as to posit the existence of a general 'instinct de soumission' that will predispose individuals to accept the order imposed by a dominant new leader 'à l'instant même des plus violentes convulsions politiques' (Cours, pp. 438-39). It is precisely this emphasis on the role of submission in re-imposing order on a post-revolutionary French society characterised by atomisation and political anarchy that explains Maurras's immense admiration for Comte. In the essay he dedicated to the thinker, Maurras describes Comte's declaration that 'la soumission est la base du perfectionnement' as representing 'des syllables sacrées'. 18 He goes on to praise Comte's call for a new 'Religion Positive' as expressing 'le sentiment de la supériorité de l'obéissance et de la soumission sur la révolte' (O.C. vol. 3, p. 482).

Sérotonineterroir and Christianity
If Soumission is unusual for the optimism of its dénouement, Sérotonine appears to mark a return to a more characteristic pessimism. The novel's narrator, a disillusioned, unmarried, himself dead. In the wake of his friend's desperate gesture of protest, Florent visits a local café, being struck by 'une étrange ambiance […] presque Ancien Régime, comme si 1789 n'y avait laissé que des traces superficielles, je m'atttendais d'un moment à l'autre à ce qu'un paysan évoque Aymeric en l'appelant "notre monsieur"' (pp. 269-70). He concludes that his friend's suicide possessed a certain nobility: 'il était mort les armes à la main pour protéger la paysannerie française, ce qui avait été de tout temps la mission de la noblesse' (p. 272).
Not only does Sérotonine seem to express a lament at the passing of honest agricultural labour, the traditional role of the aristocracy and rootedness in the French terroir, 27 it also contains a rare suggestion of genuine religious conviction. Sporadically throughout the novel, Florent suggests that love is the only authentic value. On the novel's final page, he identifies this as a specifically Christian conception of love, the love of God for all humans and the love showed by Christ in sacrificing himself so that we might live. Florent empathises with Christ's doubts on the cross: 'Est-ce qu'il faut vraiment que je donne ma vie pour ces minables?' (p. 347). Since Florent is himself contemplating suicide, the question applies equally to him. His response, and the novel's final words -'il semblerait que oui'thus implies he has decided to end his life in a redemptive gesture of defiance at what he earlier characterised as 'le triomphe du libre-échangisme' (p. 251).
Certainly Sérotonine is unusual in Houellebecq's oeuvre in its depiction of an apparently genuine faith in the possibility of religious salvation. Nonetheless, it shares with his earlier novels a whole series of themes and tropes characteristic of French counterrevolutionary anti-capitalism. Indeed, as we have attempted to show, the worldview expressed across those various novels is remarkably consistent in its replaying and updating of the key elements of that tradition. The belief that a liberal, apparently egalitarian revolution, whether 1789 or May '68, has in fact merely led to intensified forms of competition and exploitation, to social atomisation and moral degeneration; the claim that political and social liberalism are inseparable from and as corrosive as economic liberalism; the lament at the decline of those 'intermediary' institutions (religion, the family, the guilds or corporations), that had regulated the market and secured the social bondall these are at once recurrent themes in Houellebecq's fiction and key tenets of both Comte and Maurras's thought. The role played by locations such as the Vendée, Rouen's Place du Vieux Marché, and Alsace in Houellebecq's novels hints at further affinities with the counterrevolutionary tradition.