French writer investigated over comments on Muslims

French author Michel Houellebecq was placed under formal investigation on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, on suspicion of complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred, or violence. The case concerns comments he made about Muslims in a 2022 interview with Front Populaire magazine, a source close to the case told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

It follows a complaint the Union of Mosques of France (UMF) filed in early 2023 against Houellebecq, philosopher Michel Onfray, and Front Populaire director Stéphane Simon.

The interview

In the interview with Onfray, Houellebecq, 70, described Muslims as a threat to the security of the French people.

“What the native French population, as they say, wants is not for Muslims to assimilate but for them to stop stealing from and attacking them,” Houellebecq said, according to AFP’s translation. “Or, alternatively, that they leave.”

He also warned of future “Bataclans in reverse” targeting Muslims. The phrase refers to the jihadist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, which Islamic State terrorists carried out.

Onfray raised the “great replacement” theory, a racist idea from writer Renaud Camus that holds white Christian Europeans are being replaced by people of colour, including Muslims. Houellebecq replied: “I was very shocked that it was called a theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact,” according to The New York Times.

Lawyers reject the case

Houellebecq’s lawyers said his statements contained no element of incitement.

“A prophet of doom does not wish for misfortune to occur, quite the contrary. His place is not in a courtroom,” they said in a statement to AFP. “Michel Houellebecq can only regret the growing tendency to litigate intellectual debate.”

A lawyer for the UMF, told AFP: “Freedom of expression is fundamental, but it cannot justify everything.”

“When it is established, incitement to hatred does not fall within the realm of intellectual debate. It is now for the courts to assess the matter, while respecting the presumption of innocence,” El Haite said.

The Grand Mosque of Paris had also considered legal action against Houellebecq but decided against it after meeting him.

Houellebecq’s earlier legal history

Houellebecq described the remarks as “clumsy” in his memoir, A Few Months in My Life: October 2022–March 2023. He wrote that he had been the victim of his own stupidity or naivety, and of the greed of people who sought to exploit his notoriety.

It is not the first time his comments on Islam have led to charges. In 2001, he was charged with inciting racial hatred after calling Islam “the most stupid religion” in an interview. A Paris court acquitted him the following year, ruling that the remark was “without a doubt characterised by neither a particularly noble outlook nor by the subtlety of its phrasing” but was not a punishable offence.

Houellebecq has kept a lower profile since the backlash to the 2022 interview.

The case comes as racism and Islamophobia return to the centre of debate in France, following the fatal shooting of a Black man by a white man in Trappes, a working-class suburb of Paris, earlier this month.