The political change in Submission is part of Michel Houellebecq’s imagined France of 2022. An Islamic party comes to power through an alliance with the Socialists, altering the society in which François works as a university lecturer and specialist in J. K. Huysmans.

François begins as a disengaged academic, absorbed in a diminished private routine. The new order offers him an attractive professional advance if he converts to Islam. His individual prospects therefore become entangled with the transformation taking place around him.