Lévy, Bernard-Henri

views updated

Bernard-Henri Lévy

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (born 1948) is one of the best known writers in contemporary France, notable for his sheer celebrity as well as for the range and depth of his writings.

Lévy has a level of public visibility perhaps unmatched by any philosopher outside of France; he is popularly known simply by his initials, BHL. Deeply concerned with political and cultural issues in most of his writings, he has rejected and challenged the extremes of both leftand right-wing philosophies, in France and around the world. Unusual for French thinkers, Lévy has been generally supportive of the United States, and several of his books, including Who Killed Daniel Pearl? and American Vertigo, have brought him a wide readership in the English-speaking world.

Born in Algeria

Bernard-Henri Lévy was born on November 5, 1948, in Beni-Saf, in what was then French-controlled Algeria. His father, André, was a member of Algeria's small French-Jewish population who saw military action both with republican forces during the Spanish Civil War and in the underground anti-Nazi resistance in Italy during World War II. After the war's end he returned to Algeria and started a lumber wholesale business called Becob, which proved spectacularly successful; the father grew up poor, but the son and his two siblings grew up wealthy. The family moved to Morocco and then, in 1954, to the Paris suburb of Neuilly, where Bernard-Henri attended the Lycée Pasteur. Quickly identified as a top student, he was placed in the special yearlong kâgne classes that identify top French students and groom them for elite university studies. As a young man he obtained a black belt in judo.

Lévy attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a French university known for the large number of intellectuals it has graduated. Among his teachers were Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser, two of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Althusser especially was of a Marxist orientation, and Lévy was pushed in that direction as well by the eruption of left-wing French student activism in the spring of 1968. From the start, however, he was uncomfortable with the positions of the far left. He traveled extensively during and just after his student years, visiting Mexico, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. He received his philosophy degree from the Ecole Normal Supérieure in 1971 and was selected as part of a French government “Groupe des Experts” by Socialist party leader and future French president Franc¸ois Mitterand.

In the 1970s Lévy taught at a high school near Paris and then joined the philosophy faculty at the University of Strasbourg. He tried his hand at fiction and wrote a book about Bangladeshi nationalism. The book that put Lévy on the intellectual map was 1977's La barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face), in which he broke decisively with Marxist thought. Entertainingly written in a polemical style that attracted readers despite the philosophical density of the subject matter, the book sold well in the United States as well as in France, and even landed Lévy on the cover of Time magazine. In France, he became identified with a group of young thinkers, known as the New Philosophers, who rejected leftist thought.

Leftist writers attacked Lévy furiously, accusing him of being a media creation, of lacking originality, and even of being an agent of the American Central Intelligence Agency. But Communism was on the decline in France, and Lévy was ahead of the trend. His writings were treated with equal hostility by the French right wing, which Lévy placed under scrutiny in his 1981 book L'idéology franc¸aise. Lévy argued that France's rightist politics had roots in French collaboration with Nazi rule during World War II. “I put my finger into the wound, and it provoked such convulsions—it was like the Devil convulsing when faced with the truth,” he recalled to Joan Juliet Buck of Vanity Fair. Once again, Lévy proved prescient; his warnings of a resurgent extreme right in France were borne out by the electoral success of the National Front party in the 1980s and 1990s.

Supported Solidarity Labor Union

These twin controversies made Lévy irresistible to the French media, and he was a frequent guest on television talk shows. In 1981 he became a columnist for the left-leaning daily newspaper Le Matin, where he wrote essays supportive of the Solidarity labor union in Poland. Lévy married his first wife, Isabelle Doutreligne, in 1973; that marriage produced a daughter, Justine (named after the central figure in a novel by the Marquis de Sade). Lévy married Sylvie Bouscasse in 1980, and the two had a son, Antonin-Balthazar. Both children have pursued literary careers, Justine as a novelist and Antonin-Balthazar as an editor and columnist.

In the late 1980s Lévy began to express concern at the rise of militant Islam. He was one of the first supporters of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie, whose death had been ordered by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1989, acting under the auspices of the French Secretary of State for International Cultural Relations, Lévy began visiting the countries of Eastern Europe as they emerged from decades of Communist rule.

In 1992 Lévy became one of the first writers to raise the alarm over the outbreak of genocidal violence that followed the formation of the new nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia. He made two documentaries, Bosna!, about the general chaos in Bosnia, and A Day in the Death of Sarajevo, about the siege of Sarajevo by Yugoslav and Bosnian Serb forces between 1992 and 1996. His persistence in highlighting the breakdown of order in the former Yugoslavia contributed to the European and American military intervention that ended the regional conflict in the Balkans. Divorced from Bouscasse, Lévy married actress Arielle Dombasle in June of 1993.

Lévy and Bouscasse were a glamour couple, dividing their time between France and Morocco, where they lived in an elaborate villa they acquired from French actor Alain Delon. Lévy, with his usually partially unbuttoned white silk shirt, did not fit the public image of an intellectual. He had never learned to drive, and traveled in chauffeured limousines, staying in luxury hotels. Once, in Afghanistan, he was forced to choose between a secure hotel room that had no hot water or a more dangerous building where the water heater was operating. He chose the hot water.

Lévy's 1997 film Le jour et la nuit (Day and Night) was both critically and commercially unsuccessful, and he returned to writing. He took up the cause of his Algerian homeland, now beset by Islamic fundamentalist attacks, and in 2000 his book The Century of Sartre, a biography and evaluation of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, was critically acclaimed. Among Lévy's most controversial books was Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (2003), which used a mixture of fiction and reportage to explore the world of the Al Qaedaaffiliated terrorists who beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Visited United States

Through this entire period, Lévy clashed with thinkers on both sides of the political spectrum in his staunch support for the United States. Dombasle had been born in the United States, and Lévy admired the country's strong traditions of democracy and pluralism. Furthermore, he mistrusted the roots of anti-Americanism in France. “I'm not pro-American as much as anti-anti-American,” he told Buck. “When the French begin to feel a mad visceral hatred toward an imagined America, I know the cauldron is boiling and the filthy genie is about to jump out again.” In 2004, at the request of Atlantic Monthly magazine in Boston, Lévy made a tour of the United States, loosely retracing the route of another famous French political philosopher and observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville.

Lévy's observations were serialized in Atlantic and then appeared in book form as American Vertigo in 2006. Mixing anecdote (he is cited by a state highway patrolman for public urination but then discovers that the officer is well acquainted with Tocqueville's writings) with deeper reflections on such matters as sport as an American religion, the book won wide attention in both the United States and France. I have strong links with the U.S.,” Lévy observed to Donald Morrison of Time International. “Yet I discovered on this trip that I did not know anything. Every single step was a surprise, every moment a paradox, every meeting an education. Europeans have a poor understanding of the U.S., not because they don't spend time here, but because of a smog of cliché and prejudice.”

By that time Lévy had published more than 30 books and, despite ups and downs in his career, had demonstrated a knack for identifying hot topics and making contributions, buttressed by his background as a philosopher, that advanced the debate regarding those topics. Several of Lévy's other books were translated into English in the early 2000s: Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century appeared in 2003, and the set of essays War, Evil and End of History followed in 2004. In 2006 and 2007 Lévy was at work on the hottest of all hot topics, the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors.