Winter 2009

Wait, shoot me from the right             

All of those clichés about the fashionable French and the lumpen Americans cannot be entirely discounted. These differences surface even in French and American intellectual life. Compare for instance Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, who were born and died in almost the same years. They were both exceptional thinkers, but Derrida dressed in classy tweeds and fine shirts. He played the role of the star. Rorty looked like a schlumpy American professor; he vanished in a crowd. He probably drove an old Volvo, which would bolster Stanley Fish’s thesis that American academics choose to be dreary.

Not so France’s Bernard-Henri Lévy—or BHL, as he is almost universally known. He bathes in the limelight. It is difficult to imagine any American intellectual who even remotely plays the role that BHL assumes in France. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens comes closest, although Hitchens retains the rumpled look of a British import. Wealthy and telegenic, BHL dresses to the nines and consorts with the rich and the beautiful. His American foothold began with a book on the murder of Daniel Pearl (Who Killed Daniel Pearl?), and was followed by a book on his travels throughout the United States (American Vertigo), a venture sponsored by The Atlantic magazine. His book Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism, has recently been published. Increasingly BHL pops up on American radio and op-ed pages. He is everywhere. He is going global.



These are but the latest productions of BHL, who first received attention with his 1977 Barbarism with a Human Face. As with many of his books, fireworks and self-advertising preceded its publication. BHL announced on television the appearance of a new species—the “new philosophers,” which included himself and other disenchanted leftists such as André Glucksmann. BHL was not yet thirty. Barbarism with a Human Face staked out the new position on a post-Marxist politics, although the book nearly drowns in cloudy narcissism. “As the tenant of my name and a journeyman of passing time, I have no claim to write except as a witness. Since I am absent from the making of history and have been formed into the little bit of humanity that I am, I know that I have no right to preach or to prophesy. And yet I have decided to write because I have a passion to persuade.” BHL offered less an argument than a mood.

Marxism proved to be a disaster, politically and intellectually, BHL suggested in that book. Along with technology, and something called “desire,” it constitutes the new face of barbarism. BHL summoned forth the “antibarbarian intellectual,” who will resist serving princes or power. As often with BHL, speechifying drowned precision. “All that is left to us, against the barbarian procession, are the weapons of our language and the places on which we stand—the arms of our museums and the place of our solitude.”

In spite of the heavy breathing, BHL captured a moment or a lesson—namely, the French leftist disillusionment with Marxism, triggered by the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, published in France in 1973.  “I owe more to Solzhenitsyn,” wrote BHL, “than to most of the sociologists, historians and philosophers who have been contemplating the fate of the West for the last thirty years . . . All Solzhenitsyn had to do was to speak and we awoke from a dogmatic sleep.” 

By the time BHL awoke, however, the sun was high in the sky. In this he partakes of a national trait. In France, the owl of Minerva does not spread its wings at dusk but at mid-morning the next day. For all of France’s stylishness, intellectual and political news arrives late. Hegel was not really received in Paris until the 1930s—and this by way of a Russian émigré (Alexandre Kojève). Freud complained that France proved resistant to psychoanalysis, and indeed that resistance was not overcome until the 1950s. Despite, and perhaps because of, a French socialist tradition, Marx was not studied in France until the later twentieth century. If BHL can be believed, news of Stalinism did not arrive in France before the 1970s—decades after the rest of Europe and North America.

Why then? The French apparently ignored an old and convincing literature that savaged Stalinism and the Soviet Union. The first years of the 1950s saw The God that Failed, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which squarely equated Nazism and Stalinism, and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, which was written in Paris. “This book was written in 1951/52 in Paris,” stated Milosz thirty years later, “at the time when the majority of French intellectuals . . . placed their hopes in a new world in the East, ruled by a leader of incomparable wisdom and virtue, Stalin.” If these literary events failed to awaken the French, the political earthquake triggered by the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union might have stirred them. Stalin pursued “mass repressions and terror,” declaimed Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, who should have known. “Mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation created conditions of insecurity, fear and even desperation.” French intellectuals slumbered on.

Better late than never, but the late riser often rushes about in panic knocking over things. The alarm clock and dishes are eventually set aright, but little has been accomplished. This often seems to be the case with French intellectuals. They arise late and careen about making up for lost time, but what do they achieve? Sartre’s Hegel, Lacan’s Freud, and Althusser’s Marx may dazzle, but eventually readers perceive that what is new lacks substance and what is old rings familiar. So it is with BHL’s book on barbarism and Glucksmann’s kindred book from 1975, La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (The Stove and the Man Eater), subtitled “An Essay on the Connection between the State, Marxism and the Concentration Camps.” These pamphlets do not advance a discussion.



The temptation to dismiss BHL as all hype might be mistaken, however. For starters, BHL and his allies represent a French version of the American neoconservatives; and few would suggest that BHL’s American cousins have had little impact on politics or ideas. Like the Irving Kristols and Norman Podhoretzes of the American crowd, the French coterie are largely Jewish and largely emerge out of the left; and like the Americans they back an aggressive foreign policy that defends human rights and democracy. BHL himself has traveled to Sarajevo, Darfur and, most recently, Georgia to raise the alarm for an imperiled people. Concerns about anti-Semitism, the fate of Israel, and Islamic extremism also link the Americans and French, although BHL himself treads carefully when it comes to Israel. Nor is it accidental, to use the classic phrase of Marxism when discussing Marxism, that these former Marxists—including Hitchens—have invented or pushed the term Islamic fascism, Islamofascism, or, in BHL’s formulation, “fascislamism.” Ex-Marxists, like Marxists, love the term fascism.

Yet a critical distinction jumps out between the French as represented by BHL and the American neocons. The American group breaks with the left and joins the conservatives in an effort to remake American foreign and social policies. BHL wants to remain on the left. Why? Sartorial reasons may play a role. The neocons look even worse than leftists. In his American journeys, BHL visited Bill Kristol, the conservative columnist and editor—and son of Irving Kristol. BHL with his hip jacket and carefully unkempt tresses meets Kristol with his “big-boss suit” and “impeccably combed hair.” BHL is disappointed. Kristol appeared more like an executive “than Europe’s idea of an intellectual.”

Beyond the sartorial issues, Left in Dark Times addresses why BHL remains on the left as his friends fall away. How he raises the issue offers a window into the clubby world of French intellectuals and politicians. His friend André Glucksmann wrote a front-page article in Le Monde explaining why he was supporting the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election and not the socialist candidate. For Glucksmann the left has “mislaid the banner of international solidarity,” which Sarkozy has “appropriated.” Sarkozy, not the left, has denounced the massacres in Darfur, the persecutions of the Chechens, and the sufferings of Muslim women. I have “struggled” for forty years against leftist “ideological ossification,” proclaimed Glucksmann. But “I will lose friends” in coming out for Sarkozy because the left is “my political home.”

The piece pleased and then riled Sarkozy. If Glucksmann could support him, where, he wondered, was BHL? Wouldn’t you know it: Sarko and BHL go way back. They were neighbors in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly. They traveled and palled around together. In fact their interconnections get almost incestuous. Since his election—and since BHL’s book—Sarko divorced wife number two and married Carla Bruni, a supermodel and singer. But CB and BHL had already crossed paths, as it were, first by way of his best friend, JPE (Jean-Paul Enthoven), an editor, and then by way of JL, Justine Lévy, his daughter. Before marrying Sarko, CB had taken up with JPE, when his son RE (Raphaël Enthoven), a writer and philosopher, caught her eye. CB left JPE for RE, but RE was married to JL. JL’s marriage foundered. JL took revenge in her novel NS (Nothing Serious) about CB, RE, and BHL.

In any event, Sarko did what any self-respecting French presidential candidate would do when endorsed by a left-leaning philosopher: he called up BHL and asked, when are you going to write “for me” a “nice little article”? Anything similar in an American context would be difficult to imagine. Imagine for a moment a New York Times opinion piece by a political philosopher endorsing a presidential candidate that would elicit a phone call from this candidate to another political philosopher. Not possible. BHL takes the call but hems and haws. He can’t do it. “Personal relationships are one thing. Ideas are another . . . the left is my family.” Sarko hangs up angrily. BHL’s Left in Dark Times explains why he could not vote for his occasional buddy.



His initial reply to Sarko already contains the contradiction. If ideas and family loyalties both define the left, they could conflict. To which do you remain devoted? BHL never directly addresses any of this. Instead he outlines the history of the left and its failings. For BHL, four events gave backbone to the French left: the defense of Dreyfus, the resistance to Vichy France, the opposition to French colonial rule in Algeria, and May 1968. Those constellations belong to the past, however. Since the sixties the left has learned new lessons and surrendered faux notions of the New Man and the Dialectic of History. No one speaks any longer in capitalized words about the Revolution and the Struggle. “I don’t hear many people say that the Chechen rebels are the salt of the earth of the Caucasus; or that the Palestinians are not only about to achieve their own state but to regenerate humanity,” monsieur Lévy opined. The left has transcended the totalitarian temptation.

New temptations beguile it, however. BHL believes that because “a whole part of the Left” has been deprived of Marx, it has embraced the Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt to fill the gap. The evidence he offers does not persuade. Yes, there has been a Carl Schmitt renaissance. Yes, Derrida, Peter Sloterdijk, Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe, and others study, use, and sometimes praise Schmitt, but this amounts to little. They command no troops; they represent no movement. The Schmitt renaissance remains the exclusive property of a few professors and their students.

The other temptations—anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism—belong to another order of phenomena. These are buzzwords, but BHL does little more than lean on the buzzer. He distinguishes “legitimate” criticism of Bush, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Texan capital punishment from the rote and passionate anti-Americanism that infuses the left. He recalls that historically the French (and German) right promoted anti-Americanism, and the left at least until the Cold War was pro-American. Nowadays the whole left cheers Michael Moore when he received the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Fahrenheit 9/ll. Why? BHL does not explain. He believes simply that the “sewer” of anti-Americanism keeps flowing.

He gives few examples of contemporary anti-Americanism. He mentions indifference to the genocide in Darfur and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. BHL overstates his cases. To the extent it exists, leftist impassiveness about Darfur has many causes—and is hardly due to anti-Americanism or, for that matter, the notion that Christian fundamentalists drove the White House to put Darfur on the world’s agenda. BHL offers only one bit of evidence that such a notion stopped leftist agitation. The former president of Doctors Without Borders, Rony Brauman, concedes in a radio discussion that because of his doubts about the U.S. role, he steered clear of Darfur. On Bosnia, BHL can call up more particulars. Harold Pinter and a few others rallied to Slobodan Miloševic for the simple reason that the United States bombed him. But so what? Others like Susan Sontag camped out in Sarajevo.

Apathy about suffering in Darfur and Bosnia may be due more to general apathy than anti-Americanism. Was there really a left anti-American consensus about Darfur or Bosnia? The sad truth is that few international conflicts elicit attention for long. Does anti-Americanism today block a left from demanding action in Zimbabwe, the Congo, or Sri Lanka? Distance, lack of knowledge, and doubts about the efficacy of any intervention play a larger role than anti-Americanism.

BHL skates around anti-Semitism. “It is getting harder and harder, in certain areas of certain French cities, to go out wearing a yarmulke.” Yet he believes traditional anti-Semitism has lost its power. “I am willing to bet that neither in France nor in Europe will there ever again appear a mass movement” of anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, new forms of anti-Semitism have emerged that are defined by anti-Zionism, Holocaust denial and competition for victimhood.  Again his discussion lacks precision, even vigor. BHL provides an almost standard catalogue of books and Holocaust denial groups. He signals, for example, the 1991 Nation of Islam sponsored work, The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, which claims Jews monopolized the slave trade, as an example of competition for victimhood.  

For anti-Zioninism he points to the article (and later the book) by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on the Israeli lobby. BHL hints that the book might not have been publishable in France as it may have violated the Gayssot law, the statute that makes it illegal to question crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust. Would this have been a blow for freedom? Using the state to suppress a book that raises issues, however sloppily, about U.S. foreign policy toward Israel? To be sure, BHL parts from Alain Finkielkraut and others who detect anti-Semitism everywhere. He does not agree that anti-Semitism has sullied anti-racism. BHL wants to remain a good anti-racist. He will raise the “same SOS when either a Jew or an Arab” is attacked.

As the final example of new temptation, BHL presents the left’s “indulgence” of radical Islam, which he wants to call fascislamism. He again wants to prove his credentials. His argument is not with Muslims, but politicized Muslims. He distinguishes “my friends in Sarajevo from their fathers and grandfathers who, in 1944, signed up for the Muslim divisions of the Waffen SS . . . All are Muslims. All have the Koran in common. The real line that separates them is therefore not a religious one but a political one.”

With some passion BHL rehearses familiar facts: the historical links between the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazism; the omnipresence of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Arab world; the regular expressions of rank anti-Semitism by Muslim leaders; the frequent “fatwas” and calls to kill Western critics of radical Islam. Faced with these phenomena, many leftists prove quite tolerant and explain it all away by the suffering masses or the existence of Israel. While BHL admits that the creation of a Palestinian state is “urgent,” it plays little role in Islamic extremism. “All we have to do, as I have done, is spend a bit of time in the Afghan or Pakistani madrassas which are the real academies of jihadist crime” to discover that Israel and Palestine play little role. The extremists are much more agitated by Kashmir. Really? What about the Saudis—the bulk of the 9/1l hijackers—or the Egyptians? And again what about the Iraqi war that is widely perceived as an attack on Muslims by the world’s pre-eminent military power?

BHL closes this bill of particulars with a ringing defense of “universals.” He eschews a belief in European superiority—after all, Europe gave birth to fascism—but human rights, law, intellectuals and ideas in general need to be defended without embarrassment. The notion that “an adulterous woman shouldn’t be stoned to death or burned alive is an idea worth universalizing.” He defends the right of the Danes to lampoon Muslims in cartoons and the right of a French teacher (Robert Redeker) to sharply criticize Islam; he signed—along with few or no leftists—a petition defending Redeker, who had to go into hiding because of death threats.



On the terrain of universal rights, BHL genuinely stands tall. Indeed, we need people who will defend without reserve the rights of teachers, writers, and cartoonists. Leftists too often calibrate their defense of these rights by measuring how much a group might be insulted or outraged. With this approach, free speech dwindles. To be sure, BHL’s own dual standards are numerous. He suggests that a scholarly article on the Israeli lobby should be banned, while popular attacks on Islam must be defended. Moreover, he makes the defense of universals too easy by staying above the nitty-gritty. The argument proceeds without addressing the configuration of power; the Iraq War hardly enters his discussion. A defense of universal values often becomes the raison d’être of war. This is an old story.

The issues can hardly be settled in a page—or a library of books, for that matter—since they depend on the specific situation. BHL and his friends may feel righteous defending universal values, but the point is how they subsist in the here and now. If the patient dies, the operation to improve his life has failed. The call for equality and human rights is one thing; how they play out in real life is another. It is fair enough to raise the issue of treatment of women in Muslim communities in France, but the hard facts of discrimination and unemployment can hardly be ignored; nor how one reinforces the other. On this subject BHL evinces little interest.

BHL prefers to fly above. Literally. It is here that BHL the writer and the celebrity converge. Years ago Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the German poet and critic, wrote an essay berating “tourists of the revolution,” those leftists who dropped into revolutionary-societies-in-the-making and returned home with enthusiastic reports. Revolutionary societies no longer exist, but threatened societies do aplenty—and so do the opportunities for the new tourists of endangered peoples. BHL flies to Darfur; he flies to Pakistan; and, most recently, he flies to Georgia to raise the alarm about the Russian incursion. He sniffs about and has drinks with President Mikheil Saakashvili, who downs cans of Red Bull. Saakashvili is a liberal and a cosmopolitan European surrounded by advisors from Yale, Princeton, and Chicago. BHL raises the specter of a new Munich or appeasement: Europe is surrendering before the Russian ogre. BHL flies home.

It was a pure BHL production, one-third fiction, one-third self-promotion, one-third reality. BHL chartered his own jet to get to Georgia. He headquartered at a five-star hotel in the capital, and stayed all of two and half days before flying to Nice. He taxied to Gori, which had been occupied by the Russians, and made his way past checkpoints to the center of town. He reported devastation. “Gori does not belong to the Ossetia which the Russians claim they have come to ‘liberate.’ It is a Georgian town. And they have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town.” But this was not true. A careful study of BHL’s trip concludes he never reached the town; and witnesses agree that Gori was attacked, but hardly burned down.

With gusto the critics took BHL’s reporting apart. An English newspaper commented, “The Americans have sent blankets and the Estonians doctors, but it is the French, surely, who have come to the rescue of South Ossetia’s people, with their offer to send nouveau philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy.” The paper noted that BHL was staying at the Tbilisi Marriott with a personal photographer, publicist, and bodyguard. The entourage is easy to spot, reported a guest. “They are all loafing around in the foyer puffing clouds of smoke, and gesticulating meaningfully. BHL is in his element going around in a crumpled white shirt, hair coiffed into a sort of wind tunnel effect, and reeking of perfume.”

This is hardly the first time BHL has been upbraided; he has been regularly chastised for elementary blunders in his writings. Perry Anderson, the estimable editor of the New Left Review penned a withering appraisal of French intellectual life with BHL as Exhibit A. “The general condition of intellectual life is suggested by the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy . . . It would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France’s public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?” Thirty years ago the historian (and leftist) Pierre Vidal-Naquet sharply criticized a BHL book for its mistakes. More recently—just before his death in 2006—he was asked about BHL’s career. He lamented that he had thought that he had finished off BHL long ago. Instead BHL passed from the “Republic of Letters to the anti-Republic of the Media.”

There is something to this; media success feeds media success. Biographies and exposés of BHL tumble from the French press. At least five have appeared in recent years, the latest titled The French Imposter. But his critics cannot keep up. BHL remains a moving target with a genius for publicity. Several months ago he surprised the reading public with a book, Public Enemies, co-written with his opposite, the unphotogenic and unrepentingly conservative anti-hero of French fiction, Michel Houellebecq. BHL and Houellebecq could not be more different except for one thing: they share an uncanny media sense—or media manipulation. Critics charge that BHL orchestrates his own media coverage; that through his connections and wealth he rigs reviews and squashes negative publicity.

Even some of his most uncompromising critics admit, however, that he has shown courage in his forays into forgotten wars and his advocacy of ignored causes. He brought radio transmitters to Afghan resistance fighters. He recently enabled a French-Afghan film (Earth and Ashes) to see the light of day. He does good work with his foundation. Moreover, his defense of human rights should be saluted. In a sharply critical biography, Philippe Cohen concedes that pure resentment drives a good deal of the attacks on BHL. “You want me to tell you what I think?” interjects one interlocutor to his queries about BHL. “Bernard is handsome, rich and intelligent. In Paris that is unforgivable!”

That is forgivable. What might not be is BHL’s relentless narcissism. Mariane Pearl, the widow of Daniel Pearl, put it well. BHL, she said, “is a man whose egoism destroys his intelligence.” At the end of Left in Dark Times, BHL seems to nominate himself as a successor to Jean Moulin, the resistance icon who died in Nazi hands. But BHL is less the “lay saint” he calls Moulin than he is a leftist fabulist in an age of mechanical reproduction. And yet in a period in which the left has lost its bearings, it can ill afford to brush aside even its most megalomaniac critics. Even a showman can sometimes show the way.

Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of The Last Intellectuals and Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age.

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