A Novel Made for the “Yellow Vest” Moment

PARIS—In Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel, Submission, the narrator converts to Islam after France has elected a Muslim president. The book’s imagined future tapped into (and also questioned) a pervasive fear in some quarters of France that Muslims were taking over. It was hailed by the French right as prescient when it debuted the same day terrorists killed 12 people at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

Now France’s has done it again. latest novel, , came out in the country last week to , and was an instant best-seller, capturing a new moment. It contains a scathing critique of the European Union and imagines farmers blocking roadways and taking up arms against the state. And it arrived in the throes of the “yellow vest” protest movement, an inchoate populist revolt against