Between margin and heartland: the aesthetics and ideology of far-right regionalism in Richard Millet and Michel Houellebecq

This article examines the novels Sérotonine (2019), by Michel Houellebecq, and Province (2016), by Richard Millet, as examples of a wider trend of far-right regionalism in contemporary French literature. It situates the two authors with the ideological framework of the Nouvelle Droite, whose emphasis on local rootedness, cultural difference and opposition to universalism has increasingly shaped right-wing cultural discourse over the last decades. Here, rural and provincial France is presented as a privileged space of authenticity and continuity, opposed to Paris and other globalised environments associated with placelessness and homogenisation. In the examined novels, this regionalist worldview is articulated not only through explicit political themes (such as anxieties about gender and race), but also through narrative strategies, spatial metaphors and literary style. In Millet’s work, the vertical landscape of the Haute Corrèze is linked to hierarchy and stability and mirrored in a dense, stratified prose, while in Houellebecq’s novels, iterative narration and standardised settings convey the flattening effects of globalisation and deterritorialisation. The article thus highlights how literary form contributes to the circulation of far-right imaginaries in contemporary fiction.