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http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_02/7708
Summer 2011
The Strenuous Life
How Bernard-Henri Levy fought his way into chronic interventionism
Christopher Caldwell
I.
Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture
on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old
celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so.
Perhaps, Zéro speculated, it had to do with dual identity. There was
Bernard-Henri Lévy, who launched his career in the 1970s with La
Barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face), an attack on
Communism, and who in the decades since had written three dozen more
books, most of them about current affairs, and many of them best
sellers. Then there was BHL (“Bay-Arsh-Ell”), as he was called in the
gossip magazines, the very wealthy heir to a lumber fortune, who owned
John Paul Getty’s old palace in Marrakech, who had married a fashion
model, and who had counted the country’s last three presidents among his
personal friends. Zéro seemed to suggest that the glamour and privilege
of BHL clashed with the roles that Lévy accorded himself in his
writings—Tribune of Democracy and Conscience of France.
Lévy had another theory. He believed he provoked strong feelings among
French people because he was right so often. “Because I was right about
Bosnia,” he said. “Because I was right about Rwanda. Because I was right
about Darfur. Because I was right about Communism.”
The West has good reason to hope Lévy is right just now. He is credited
with—or blamed for—having started the war that NATO is fighting in
Libya. Lévy chartered a jet in late February, flew to the Egypt-Libya
border, and made contact with the National Transition Council (NTC), a
rebel group in Benghazi. He was swept off his feet. This was at the
point when a Libyan uprising seemed to have a good chance of driving
Múammar Gadhafi from power, although the dictator was beginning a
counteroffensive. Lévy phoned Nicholas Sarkozy—a friend of three
decades’ standing, with whom he has vacationed several times—to urge him
to back the rebel group with air strikes. Lévy set up a meeting between
the rebels and Sarkozy on March 10, and Hillary Clinton met their de
facto leader, Mahmoud Jibril, in Paris a few days later. Britain’s prime
minister, David Cameron, began calling for air strikes himself. On March
17th, ten countries on the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973,
and the French Air Force swung into action to block Gadhafi’s army at
the gates of Benghazi.
Going to war has looked like a less good idea ever since. Sarkozy and
Cameron, writes the military historian Max Hastings in the Financial
Times, “have supported the weaker faction in a civil war without knowing
who the rebels are or whether their cause is sustainable.” Barack Obama
has been willing to invest US machinery in the war (including drones),
but not troops or political capital. As prospects on the ground look
more dire, Zéro’s question about dual identity takes on a paramount
importance. Sarkozy’s future may hinge on whether it was Bernard-Henri
Lévy or BHL who prodded him to act. It is one thing to take one’s
country to war after consulting with a thoughtful moral philosopher,
quite another to do so at the urging of a rich and influential crony.
II.
Lévy recently wrote of his late mentor at the École Normale Supérieure,
the brilliant and doomed Marxist Louis Althusser: “In ‘doing
philosophy,’ Althusser used to say, the important word is not
‘philosophy’ but ‘doing.’” Lévy thinks a philosopher must be a man of
action, in contrast to those who believe his purpose is to “reflect or
meditate or ruminate.” For him, the only kind of intellectual is a
public intellectual. The register in which Lévy tends to write is that
of Zola’s “J’accuse” and Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.” He wants not to
interpret the world but to change it.
You can see this in his prose. “It is, once again, five minutes to
midnight in Benghazi,” he wrote in mid-April in his “notebook” in the
French weekly Le Point, but then, it always is. These notebooks have an
undercurrent of hot rumor and unverified intuition about them, as when
Lévy, in April, derided “the attitude of an Obama whom people here in
Benghazi are beginning to suspect of dreaming of a new Dayton Accord, an
agreement to partition the country.” The result resembles yellow
journalism, except that a sentimental idea of humanity takes the place
of the usual nationalism. The “fair wind of democracy,” to use a phrase
of Lévy’s, is always blowing at gale force.
It is false to say, as some do, that “only France” could produce such a
figure as Lévy. He is a type of journalist recognizable in any
country—the hortator
