ABSTRACT
In his 1998 bestseller, novelist Michel Houellebecq recounts the trip characters Bruno and Christiane made to Cap d’Agde, the Mediterranean nudist resort dubbed the “naked city” by Anglophones and other Europeans. With a realistic description reminiscent of nineteenth-century French novelists, Houellebecq portrays Cap d’Agde as a milieu combining “traditional naturisme”1 and a sexualized nudity of swingers’ nightclubs. On their second day at the beach, Bruno and Christiane meet Rudi and Hannalore, a middle-class German couple who have been coming to Cap d’Agde for 10 years. Rudi is a satellite technician while Hannalore works in a bookstore in Hamburg. Aer a seafood dinner, they have group sex, as Rudi says mechanically “gut, gut [good, good].” Bruno, who is writing an article about the Cap, then describes the pornographic spectacles that take place daily in the dunes behind the beach. Emphasizing the northern European, particularly German, origins of many participants and the exceedingly polite, almost contractual, respectful, and even courteous approach of men hoping that women would accede to their joining in, Bruno proclaims that the Cap d’Agde is a sort of “sexual social democracy.” In the end, Bruno writes that group sex at the Cap has “the same qualities of discipline and respect of a contract that permitted the Germans to conduct two horribly murderous world wars before reconstructing … a powerful and export-oriented economy.”2
