4 ideas
François, a middle-aged Sorbonne specialist in the decadent novelist Huysmans, watches the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Ben Abbes win the 2022 runoff against Marine Le Pen with the backing of the Socialists and the center-right. The university becomes a Saudi-funded Islamic Sorbonne, and non-Muslim faculty are retired on generous pensions.
The novel's political scenario works as a diagnostic, not a prophecy. France submits because the narrator and his class believe in nothing, so anything that offers structure, status, and sexual order meets no resistance. The discomfort comes from recognizing that the conversion is a rational choice for someone with no inner life to defend.
Read liberal individualism's endpoint as exhaustion. When a person has already used up pleasure, career, and romance and found each hollow, total submission to an external authority feels like rest rather than defeat. On this view, the appeal of an authoritarian order lies in removing the burden of self-authorship, not in its doctrine.
Institutions change hands without confrontation when the new power pays the old guard to comply. Academics, politicians, and professionals adjust their convictions to preserve salaries, prestige, and comfort, and they reframe opportunism as pragmatism or openness. The regime change is completed by careerism rather than coercion.