Stéphane Hessel’s 2010 pamphlet Indignez-vous fueled the global anti-establishment protest wave

Evidence

Houellebecq’s run of good luck was abruptly interrupted when the spotlight shifted to an unlikely competitor. In October, ninety-three-year-old Resistance veteran and former UN diplomat Stéphane Hessel published a short pamphlet titled Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage!), which sold a million copies within weeks. Hessel struck a deeply un-Houellebecquian tone: he called on Western citizens to rise up against their political elites and to halt the West’s slide into economic apartheid. “The worst attitude,” he wrote, “is indifference.” “‘There’s nothing I can do; I get by’—adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 166

Categorization

• SEED: The juxtaposition of Houellebecq’s apathetic resignation (top of fiction charts) with Hessel’s outrage (top of nonfiction charts) in the same year is a crisp cultural snapshot of the antipolitical turn.