Submission, was due for publication on 7 January. Even before publication it had caused critical and political controversy. The plot takes French politics forward to the 2020s. President François Hollande is coming to the end of a disastrous second term. The National Front party of Marine Le Pen is ahead in the polls. The moderate right of the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) collapses, as do the Socialists. But another party has come together over recent years – a Muslim party led by a moderate Islamist who enjoys the support of France’s growing Muslim population. As the run-offs get closer it is clear to the other mainstream parties that the only way to keep the National Front from power is to unite behind the Islamist party. They do so, and the Islamist party wins. Using some pliant old French left-wingers for cover, the Islamists set about transforming France, not least by taking control of education and transforming (with the help of substantial Gulf funding) all public universities, including the Sorbonne, into Islamic institutions. Gradually even the novel’s main character – a dissolute scholar of the nineteenth-century novelist J. K. Huysmans – sees the sense of converting to Islam.

In the few public comments he made about the book, Houellebecq was at pains to stress his admiration for Islam – another demonstration perhaps that the browbeating and threats of the thought-police do work. It was to be expected that such pleas would be drowned out, if not for the reasons that transpired. Among those to attack and ridicule Houellebecq for a plot many claimed was wilfully provocative was a satirical weekly magazine called Charlie Hebdo, then little known outside France. The magazine – which has a long tradition of left-wing, secular, anti-clerical iconoclasm – had come to limited international attention in recent years after repeatedly showing itself willing to depict Islam’s prophet (a willingness it was almost alone in demonstrating after the 2005 Danish cartoons affair). Despite assaults, legal threats and a firebomb attack on their Paris offices, the publication held firm, as it had over earlier critiques of the Pope, Marine Le Pen and others.

In expectation of the launch of the new novel a typically ugly caricature of a hideous, gnome-like Houellebecq was on the cover of the magazine on that January morning when two Islamist gunmen forced their way into Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices and shot dead ten of the magazine’s staff and two policemen. As the Yemen-trained French Muslim gunmen left the offices they were heard shouting, ‘We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad’ and ‘Allahu Akbar’. Among the victims of their assault on the magazine’s morning editorial meeting was the economist Bernard Maris, a close friend of Houellebecq.