ARTICOLI / 11 / Maria Stella Barberi /
Starting from Tocqueville’s theories on modern democracy and Dostoyevsky’s allegory of Grand Inquisitor, this article attempts to detect the hidden ‘inclination to catastrophe’ that inspires the French writer Michel Houellebecq in its political novel Submission (2015), a bestseller that imagines a Muslim party might be winning the 2022 presidential election in France, with the support of Socialist Party. The temptation of Christ, as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, is the hermeneutical key to explain why, in this completely different society, François – the main character of the novel – is finally led to convert to Islam.
