Set in a near-future France, this satirical novel imagines the 2022 presidential election delivering not the far right but a moderate Muslim party whose charismatic leader becomes president through an alliance with the mainstream establishment. The story is narrated by Francois, a jaded, middle-aged literature professor at the Sorbonne and a scholar of the nineteenth-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. Adrift in a life of empty affairs, careerism, and spiritual exhaustion, Francois watches as the new government quietly transforms French society: universities are Islamized, women withdraw from the workforce, polygamy is normalized, and the secular republic gives way to a new religious order. Rather than depicting violent upheaval, the novel traces accommodation, how elites, including Francois himself, find reasons to convert and submit in exchange for comfort, status, and renewed purpose. Provocative and deliberately ambiguous, it functions less as a political prediction than as a mordant critique of Western liberalism's exhaustion and the longing for meaning beneath secular malaise. Cool, ironic, and frequently funny, it weighs individual passivity against civilizational drift.
