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From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. Franz Kafka |
Bernard-Henri Lévy (born November 5, 1948) is a French public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976.
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Lévy was born in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to a wealthy Algerian Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the multi-millionaire founder and manager of a timber company, Becob.
After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy enrolled in the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Some of his professors there included prominent French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1971, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent, and was in Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangla-Desh, Nationalism in the Revolution"), which was published in 1973.
Returning to Paris, Lévy became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas. Throughout the 1970s, Lévy taught a course on epistemology at the Université de Strasbourg and he taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was in 1977, on the television show Apostrophes, that Lévy was presented, alongside André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.
In 1981 Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work, in which he offers a dark picture of French history. It was strongly criticized for its journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history by some of the most respected French academics — including Raymond Aron (see his Memoirs).
Lévy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and spoke out early about the alleged Serbian concentration camps. He referred to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other nations.
When his father died in 1995, Lévy became the manager of the Becob company, until it was sold in 1997 for 750 million francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.
At the end of the 1990s, he founded with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut an Institute on Levinassian Studies at Jerusalem.
He is member of nonprofit advocacy group JCall.
In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been beheaded by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl’s death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy. He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won praise for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions but was condemned by the British historian of India and travel writer William Dalrymple (among others) for its lack of rigour and its caricatural depictions of Pakistani society, as well as his decision to fictionalize Pearl's thoughts in the closing moments of his life.
Although Levy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in the English language was with the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly. In the series, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville", Levy imitated his compatriot and predecessor in American critique, Alexis de Tocqueville, criss-crossing the United States, interviewing Americans and recording his observations first for magazine and then book publication. The book was met with derision in the United States, and was ridiculed by Garrison Keillor in a review on the front page of the New York Times.
In March 2006 a letter Lévy co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Muslim world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. When questioned about the Niqab face-veil worn by some Muslim women, during the United Kingdom debate over veils, Lévy told the Jewish Chronicle that "the veil is an invitation to rape".
With the aid of real Washington political advisers, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli, created two commercials for competing US presidential campaigns – pitting Sharon Stone against Bernard-Henri Lévy – in a project entitled Democrazy, shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to promote his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.
On June 24, 2009, Lévy posted a video on Dailymotion in support of the Iranian protesters who were being repressed after the contested elections.
He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La Règle du Jeu ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.
Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur.
In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.
At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010) Lévy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy."
Lévy has reported from troubled zones during wartime, in order to attract the public opinion, in France and abroad, over those political changes. In August 2008, Lévy reported from South Ossetia (Georgia) during the 2008 South Ossetia war; in that occasion he interviewed the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.
In March 2011 he engaged in talks with Libyan insurgents in Benghazi, and publicly promoted the international acknowledgement of the recently formed National Transitional Council. Later that month, worried about the Libyan uprising, he prompted and then supported Nicolas Sarkozy's seeking to persuade Washington, and ultimately the United Nations, to intervene in Libya in order to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.
In May 2011 Levy defended IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn when Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in New York City. Levy suggested that the chambermaid had been sent as part of an anti-Kahn conspiracy, stating in The Daily Beast "It would be nice to know — and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.”
In May 2011 Levy argued for military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad after violence against civilians in response to the 2011 Syrian uprising.
In September 15 2011, Lévy's personal struggle for freedom and democracy in Libya is broadly acknowledged to be the principal reason why Nicolas Sarkozy (accompanied by Bernard-Henri Lévy) was cheered during his, visit to Libya by thousands of people, holding french flags and shouting “Vive la France!”.
On the 9th of November 2011, his book, "La guerre sans l'aimer" (éditions Grasset) was published, to glowing reviews, knowing great acclaim.
Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals, from noted intellectuals such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile". Their most common accusation towards Lévy is of him being one-sided and, ultimately, shallow as a thinker. Vidal-Naquet went as far as saying: "BHL's intellectual dishonesty is properly unfathomable".
More recently, in the essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010), Lévy was embarrassed when he used, as a central point of his refutation of Kant, the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul. Botul's writings are actually well-known spoofs, and Botul himself is the fictional creation of a French living journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès, as is easily guessed from his thought-system being botulism.
Another round of criticisms addresses Lévy's reliance on his connections with the French literary and business circles to promote his works. Lévy had for years business ties with billionaire François Pinault, befriended Jean-Luc Lagardère, who owned Hachette Livre, the largest publisher in France, and Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the largest magazine publisher in the world. Lévy was even briefly related to Jean-Paul Enthoven, publisher of Grasset (a novel and essay division of Hachette Livre), when his daughter Justine Lévy was married to Enthoven's son Raphaël. Lévy has been chairman of the supervisory board for French-German cultural TV channel Arte, was for years a columnist for French newspaper Le Monde and is currently a columnist for both news magazine Le Point (owned by François Pinault) and national daily newspaper Libération, in addition to being a shareholder and member of the supervisory board. In the essay Une imposture française, journalists Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer claim that Lévy uses his unique position as an influential member of both the literary and business establishments in France to be the go-between between the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.
For instance, Beau and Toscer noted that most of the reviews published in France for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? didn't mention strong denials about the book given by experts and Pearl's own family including wife Marianne Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego".
In 2011 he commented in support of his friend of twenty years Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he was arrested on sexual allegations, referring to the allegations as, "absurd."
Lévy is married to French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle. His eldest daughter by his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne, Justine Lévy, is a bestselling novelist. He also has a son, Antonin-Balthazar Lévy, by his second wife, Sylvie Bouscasse.
Lévy is, with his third wife, a regular fixture in Paris Match magazine, wearing his trademark unbuttoned white shirts and designer suits. Some have attributed to Lévy a reputation for narcissism. One article about him coined the dictum, "God is dead but my hair is perfect." He once said that the discovery of a new shade of grey left him "ecstatic." He is a regular victim of the "pie thrower" Noël Godin, who describes Lévy as "a vain, pontificating dandy".
Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in world society and world politics.
Lévy has been friends with Nicholas Sarkozy since 1983. Relations between them deteriorated during Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential run in which Lévy backed the Socialist candidate and also described Sarkozy as "A man with a warrior vision of politics". However, they grew closer again after Sarkozy's victory.
Lévy was one of six prominent European public figures of Jewish ancestry targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group in 2008. The list included other Frenchmen such as Josy Eisenberg. That plot was reportedly foiled after the group's leader, Abdelkader Belliraj, was arrested based on unrelated murder charges from the 1980s.
Lévy's works have been translated into many different languages; below is an offering of works available in either French or English.
Bernard-Henri Lévy
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