My project examines the work of five major contemporary and, in some cases, infamous French authors: Renaud Camus, the coiner of the term “The Great Replacement,”; Michel Houellebecq, a writer perhaps best known for his novel Submission, which imagines France electing a Muslim president; Richard Millet, a former editor at Gallimard who was defenestrated for appearing to pen a sympathetic essay about the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik; Laurent Obertone, a former provincial journalist whose Guerilla trilogy shows France descending into civil war; and Jean Raspail, the author of The Camp of the Saints, one the twentieth century’s most controversial novels. As a matter of content, I explore each author’s treatment of social and political topics of importance in France, Europe, and the West today, namely, mass migration, Islam, crime, demographic change, Americanization, secularization and de-Christianization among native Europeans, and the specter of religious conflict and civil war. The significance of the project lies in its engagement with pressing political and, indeed, existential issues in the contemporary West, especially non-Western and specifically Muslim immigration to Western Europe. All of the authors included in this project have been critical, in their various and often provocative ways, of the demographic and cultural changes they see underway in Europe, at times addressing them directly in essays and interviews, at other times using fiction to dramatize transformations of a civilizational nature. Crucially, all share a suspicion that the open-society ethos of the post-war West has become maladaptive and thus a threat to the survival of European civilization in its present form. Insofar as the questions they raise are coming to define an entire generation of European politics, I argue that these authors deserve close, careful, and, indeed, sympathetic reading by scholars concerned with the cultural, political, religious, and demographic trajectory of Europe and the West.

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Louis Betty is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, where he teaches courses in French language and literature as well as general humanities. He is also a co-founder of Vauban Books, a publishing house specializing in the English-language translation of modern and contemporary French authors. He has written extensively on the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and is the editor and co-translator of a forthcoming collection of writings by Richard Millet, a French novelist, essayist, and former editor at Gallimard. Dr. Betty grew up in California and received his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2011.

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