On 8 January 2015, the day after eight Charlie Hebdo satirists and four others were murdered, a posthumous cartoon by one of the victims appeared in France’s answer to Private Eye. It showed two decrepit-looking authors side by side at a book signing, with the caption ‘71 per cent of the French are pessimistic’. One was Michel Houellebecq, hawking his novel Soumission, which imagined a France that out of sheer malaise elects an Islamist president; the other was the then-journalist Éric Zemmour, with his own Le Suicide Français.
As an encapsulation of the mood of France, it was hard to beat. Soumission went on to sell 800,000 copies; Le Suicide Français, in which Zemmour ranted against the decline and fall of French civilisation, sold 500,000. Both Houellebecq and Zemmour have been threatened with the fate of the Charlie journalists.
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