The year 2010 was a good one for Michel Houellebecq. As food riots broke out across North Africa and spread into Southern Europe in November, his novel The Map and the Territory won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious of all French literary prizes. In the following months, his satire of the contemporary art world would go on to top the nation’s best-seller lists, rack up sales in the hundreds of thousands, and at last grant Houellebecq the public recognition he had so long sought. He summed up the year in a characteristically poised manner: “In 2010, I won the Prix Goncourt; France didn’t do too well in the World Cup; and Apple launched its iPad.”

Early in 2011, however, Houellebecq’s literary thunder was stolen by an unlikely competitor  —  a twenty-page pamphlet by a ninety-three-year-old veteran of the French resistance named Stéphane Hessel. His Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage!) struck a profoundly un-Houellebecqian chord, calling on Western citizens to revolt against their elites and halt a slide into economic apartheid. “Some things in this world,” Hessel railed, “are unacceptable,” while “the worst possible outlook is indifference,” depriving one of an elementary human quality: “the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged.”

The coup was merciless and swift: Hessel’s manifesto for malcontents sold a whopping five hundred thousand copies in its opening months and then vicariously lent its name to the international “Indignados” movement, which had already been trickling onto squares in European cities through the summer in the wake of the Arab Spring. Both movements stood out as late products of the 2008 crash, which unleashed exchange crises in North Africa and public debt ultimatums across Europe’s southern flank. To some observers, Houellebecq’s loss to Hessel carried an irresistibly symbolic quality: the indignant grandfather outstripping the middle-aged cynic. “At a time when this sinister oracle, with his neurasthenic, museum-like France, is ascendant,” one French journalist recounted, this “surprising little book . . . has been topping the sales charts.” At the dawn of the populist era, a literary prototype from the 1990s and 2000s  —  decades marked by relative political quiescence — was dying, politically and commercially.