They’re coming for Michel Houellebecq again. The rumpled, chain-smoking laureate of misery is once more in the crosshairs of the French state for causing offence. I’ll give you one guess who he’s offended. That’s right: Muslims. Islam really has become the premier snowflake religion, a faith so exquisitely fragile that even a grumpy novelist puffing on a Gauloise in a Parisian cafe can give its clerics a fit of the vapours.

If a faith cannot survive a mordant Frenchman calling it silly without going crying to the courts, then the problem is the faith, not those who mock it

Houellebecq has been formally charged by a judge in Nanterre, near Paris, for comments he made in 2022. Houellebecq, who denies the charges, was chatting with the philosopher Michel Onfray for the magazine Front Populaire. As is his wont – and as should be his God-given right – he had a pop at Islam. The “great replacement” is not a theory, he said: it’s a “statistical” fact. And its consequences, he mused, will be dire.

This is where the conversation got genuinely incendiary. Houellebecq said that if France falls to “Islamist control”, there will be “acts of resistance”. He said there could be “shootings in mosques, in cafes frequented by Muslims”. “In short, Bataclans in reverse”, he said, referring to the 2015 Isis massacre at the Bataclan in Paris in which 90 souls perished.

It was explosive stuff, there’s no question of that: bleak, provocative and designed to make polite society gag on their Sauvignon Blanc. Which they did. The interview caused a storm when it was first published four years ago. Both leftists and imams slammed Houellebecq as crass and bigoted. Fine. Take offence. That’s your right. But a writer’s thoughts – no matter how raw or lurid – should never be the business of the state.

Yet that’s what has happened. The judge has put Houellebecq under investigation for “complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence”. This follows a complaint lodged by the Union of Mosques of France. “Certain types of rhetoric” can “prime minds for violence”, said the Union. They can create an “ideological breeding ground for terrorist acts”. Yes, because nothing whips up a militia like an ageing enfant terrible sighing into a little-read philosophical quarterly.

The investigation of Houellebecq is outrageous. He clearly was not inciting violence – he was speculating about future social friction. He wasn’t issuing a call to arms – he was issuing a bleak, typically Houellebecqian prognosis. It is a grotesque intrusion into freedom of thought to charge a man for wondering out loud if social collapse beckons. Should French magistrates kick down the doors of every gloomy poet and dystopian scribbler who fails to peddle the state line that the future will be fab?

If a writer isn’t free to stare into the abyss and report back what he sees, then liberty is dead already. It matters not one iota whether you agree or disagree with Houellebecq. You don’t have to share his bleak worldview. You just need to defend his right to be bleak.

Free speech isn’t a dinner-party nicety reserved for those who say soothing, comforting things. It is an iron shield for the heretic, the pessimist, the provocateur. It is all or nothing. It must be enjoyed by both the misanthrope and the optimist. By both the court flatterer and the cynical iconoclast. By both Islam’s followers and grumpy old novelists who think Islam is “the stupidest religion”.

That was Houellebecq too. In a 2001 interview he said Islam is dumb. And he was put on trial. In 21st-century France a man was dragged into the dock for making fun of a religion. It was an Inquisition of Islamophobia. Mercifully he was acquitted. The Muslim leaders who initiated the tyrannical action were horrified. But he was “deliberately insulting”, they said. And? In a free society, the people’s right to mock Islam should take precedence over the feelings of Muslims, every single time.

If we are only free to speak so long as we stay within the state-decreed boundaries of “acceptable thought”, then we’re not free at all. We don’t have the freedom to speak but a licence to speak. A licence that can be revoked the minute you blaspheme against Islam or rub up against any of the shifting orthodoxies of polite society. True liberty isn’t the freedom to echo the consensus – it’s the freedom to be heretical without suffering the wrath of the state or the mob.

Here’s the thing: if a faith cannot survive a mordant Frenchman calling it silly without going crying to the courts, then the problem is the faith, not those who mock it. Religion of Peace? More like the Religion of Perpetual Umbrage. It feels like we live under a tyranny of Islamist sensitivity, aided and abetted by a cowardly state and intellectuals who long ago fed liberty into the mangle of “diversity”.

In such circumstances, blasphemy is not merely a right we should grudgingly tolerate – it’s a democratic duty. Blasphemy is the ultimate test of freedom, the pinprick that deflates clerical pomposity and reminds zealots that their sacred cows are another man’s hamburger. Houellebecq is not a dangerous tyrant – he is a servant of liberty.

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