[8] The novel's narrator is François, a middle-aged literature professor at Paris 3 and specialist in Huysmans, who in 2022 feels he is at the end of his sentimental and sexual lives – composed largely of year-long liaisons with his students.
He fears that he is heading towards suicide, and takes refuge at an abbey situated in the town of Ligugé; it is also where his literary hero, Huysmans, became a lay member.
He pacifies the country and enacts sweeping changes to French laws, privatizing the Sorbonne, thereby making François redundant with full pension as only Muslims are now allowed to teach there.
The new president campaigns to enlarge the European Union to include North Africa, the Muslim Levant and Turkey, with the aim of making it a new Roman Empire with the now-Islamicized France at its lead.
In this new, different society, with the support of the powerful politician Robert Rediger, the novel ends with François poised to convert to Islam and the prospect of a second, better life, with a prestigious job, and wives chosen for him.
"[12] Houellebecq commented on the novel in an interview with The Paris Review: … I can't say that the book is a provocation — if that means saying things I consider fundamentally untrue just to get on people's nerves.
The real target of Houellebecq's satire — as in his previous novels — is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man, intellectual or otherwise.
Erik Martiny's review in The London Magazine highlighted that "gender hierarchy is presented in the novel as the essential backbone to a healthy, stable society.
[16][11] On 5 January 2015, French president François Hollande announced in an interview for France Inter radio that he "would read the book, because it's sparking a debate.
")[18] On the day of the publishing of the book and hours before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Houellebecq said in an interview for France Inter radio: There's a real disdain in this country for all the authorities.
[22][23] Grégoire Leménager of L'Obs downplayed the similarities to The Camp of the Saints, as Submission does not deal with ethnicity, and instead placed Houellebecq's novel within a trend of recent French novels about immigration and Islam, together with La Mémoire de Clara by Patrick Besson, Dawa by Julien Suaudeau and Les Événements by Jean Rolin, speculating that the concept of the "Great Replacement" ("Grand Remplacement"), as formulated by Renaud Camus, was becoming fashionable as a literary device.
In 2020 Ivan Strenski, professor of religious studies at the University of California in Riverside, published in the academic journal Terrorism and Political Violence an extensive comparison of Houellebecq's novel with the non-fiction book and bestseller The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray.
Both authors would strongly emphasize the risk of a near end of traditional European culture.Murray could not have imagined a better metaphor for a dying Europe than Houellebecq’s portrayal of France’s ‘general atmosphere of tacit and lazy acceptance’ of its Islamization.