Social and Discursive Capital as Illiberal Enabler: A Tale of Two Far‐Right Fictions in France
Périne Schir and
Marlène Laruelle
Additional contact information
Périne Schir: ERIAC, University of Rouen Normandy, France
Marlène Laruelle: Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, The George Washington University, USA
Politics and Governance, 2025, vol. 13
Abstract:
There is a growing body of scholarship examining the circulation of illiberal ideas. While the majority of approaches have centered on political culture, we instead explore how such ideas manifest themselves in domains not traditionally viewed as overtly political, such as novels and works of fiction. We take two examples from the French literary scene: The Camp of the Saints, written by Jean Raspail in 1973, and Submission, written by Michel Houellebecq in 2015. Both works incorporate great replacement theory into their narratives, but while Raspail’s novel generally belongs to fringe far-right literature, Houellebecq’s has achieved widespread media and commercial success, establishing the author as a leading figure in contemporary French literature. We hypothesise that this discrepancy can be explained through the differing levels of social and discursive capital employed by the two authors. We argue that practices of illiberal diffusion encompass the entirety of the author’s “posture,” which includes both rhetorical or intra-textual practices (that is, how ideas are formulated within the text to align with prevailing norms), as well as instrumental or extra-textual practices (that is, how authors secure favorable reception by controlling external factors, such as media coverage or institutional networks). This broader lens provides a more nuanced understanding of how political ideas circulate within society.
Keywords: cultural circulation; France; great replacement theory; illiberalism; Jean Raspail; Michel Houellebecq (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/9654 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v13:y:2025:a:9654
DOI: 10.17645/pag.9654
Access Statistics for this article
Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia
More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().