France fetes philosopher, author, activist, envoy ... star

By Sebastian Rotella
Los Angeles Times

PHILIPPE DESMAZES / AFP/ GETTY IMAGES Bernard-Henri Levy, right, confers with Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Palestinian information minister, in Geneva, Switzerland, last year.

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In France, as in America, high-powered monograms are few and far between. Americans reserve such iconic status for an elite of presidents (JFK), entertainers (J. Lo) or athletes/defendants (O.J.).

BHL, in contrast, stands for Bernard-Henri Levy: philosopher, author, journalist, filmmaker, diplomatic envoy, world traveler, political activist and all-around celebrity intellectual.

Levy's omnipresence here reaffirms a French tradition that may seem odd in countries where philosophers don't exactly dominate prime time.

The French revere intellectual achievement and celebrate "grandeur," a concept that combines excellence and glory. Not only do certain French authors and academics become institutions, Levy is the latest to show that they can be stars, too.

And for someone trying to conjure up a mental image for the phrase "French celebrity intellectual," Levy's got the look: dark suit over open-collared white shirt, lean and unshaven, solemnly and sleepily cool.

During the past 25 years, Levy has written 30 books along with essays, columns and articles. His 2001 book, "War, Evil and the End of History," a quintessentially BHL melange of war reportage and erudite "reflections," has just been published in English. His latest book in French, a greatest-hits collection of essays, dispatches and interviews titled "Recidives" (Repeat Offenses), tips the scales at 989 pages.

Levy, 55, delights, infuriates and fascinates the French. He inherited a family fortune in a country that is more puritanical about money than morality. His third wife is a popular movie actress, Arielle Dombasle. He rubs elbows with presidents, Cabinet ministers, tycoons and jet-setters.

"He's one of what Edith Wharton called the 'happy people of the world,' " said Gilles Hertzog, an old friend and editor of the journal Rule of the Game, which he co-founded with Levy in 1989.

"He's got a great life, he's rich, he's married to an actress, he knows everybody. It creates a kind of exasperation for people for whom life is tough. To see a guy who doesn't need to do what he does, like the trips to war zones, it seems to them like a provocation — a kind of super-luxury dandyism."

Beyond the accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence, though, there's another reason for the resentment. Levy goes against the grain of certain stereotypes and prevailing ideologies. He's an ardent foe of anti-Americanism, one of the driving forces of intellectual activity in a Europe where it has become fashionable to trash America for such things as the death penalty, fast food and Hollywood movies.
 
Although Levy criticizes President Bush and the Iraq war, he still sees the United States as "a model of democracy, an exemplary democracy."

"Anti-Americanism is a horror," Levy said recently. "It is a magnet of the worst. In the entire world, and in France in particular, everything that is the worst in people's heads comes together around anti-Americanism: racism, nationalism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism."

Levy, who is Jewish, also breaks ranks with the European intelligentsia when it comes to Israel. Europe's political and media elite are resolutely pro-Palestinian, he said, and tend to portray Israel — a rare democracy in a region full of strongman regimes — as a dangerous partner of a supposedly imperialistic United States.

A fixation with the plight of the Palestinians, Levy asserts, diverts attention from suffering in forsaken corners of the world such as Sudan, where he wrote three years ago about combat in the Darfur region that now has become a focus of international concern about slaughter and famine.

"The Palestinian 'victimocracy' has a tendency to hide wars that are infinitely longer and more murderous," Levy said. "Because we all have our eyes locked on one war alone — well, two: the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian war. And this emphasis has the terrible effect of hiding, of silencing, of erasing from our memories and our mental map the other wars that are thousands of times more lethal."

Levy also sees himself as a man who combines action with ideas. He was among the founders of SOS Racisme, one of France's most prominent civil-rights groups, in 1984. He has been an occasional adviser to politicians and went to Afghanistan as a cultural envoy of France's foreign minister in 2002.

But most of all, his career has been a restless writer's odyssey among combat zones. It began in 1971 when he responded to a call for an international brigade to aid the nascent nation of Bangladesh. The brigade never materialized, but Levy stayed as a fledgling correspondent to chronicle the country's turmoil.

Levy later became a champion of the cause of war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina, filming a documentary there in 1994. In Afghanistan, he interviewed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban warrior assassinated two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

And a series of harrowing, semi-clandestine research missions took him to Pakistan for his book last year about the shadowy politics of terrorism surrounding the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.

The front-line globetrotting makes it hard to accuse Levy of being the typical cafe pontificator. Few pundits venture into the killing fields of Sri Lanka or Burundi. Few war correspondents use rough-terrain interviews with warlords and peasants in Colombia to riff on the relevance of Hegel and Nietzsche to "forgotten wars" and their silent victims.

"Returning their names to people, identifying their lives and faces, was already a way of coming to their aid," Levy writes in "War, Evil and the End of History." "We sent doctors to Colombia. ... It would be almost as useful to send [nongovernmental organizations] of archivists and historians there. To save the past and the present, that's what's urgent. To save the events swallowed up by the black hole, swallowed up by the whirlwind, that's the idea."

Nonetheless, Levy's exploits generate ferocious backlash. One can almost hear his critics snarling over their keyboards as they accuse him of superficial self-promotion.

"BHL is an intellectual whose most accomplished work is the construction of his own biography," Pierre Assouline of the literary magazine Lire wrote in his review last year of Levy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?"

Then Assouline unleashed an indictment that is familiar to BHL-watchers: "The only subject that interests BHL, that he has addressed since 1977, driven by a perseverance that merits praise, is: Me against the problem of Evil."

Like a literary duelist, Levy does not flinch from the fray. He fired off a lengthy rebuttal last year to an article in The New York Review of Books that savaged his Pearl book as "simplistic and badly documented."

There's no doubt about Levy's taste for danger, adventure and righteous political causes. He's inspired by the writer-adventurer mystique.

The strength and weakness of Levy's work probably emanate from the same root: It is neither traditional journalism nor traditional philosophy. Unlike conventional reporters, he does not hesitate to use pretexts or undercover identities to get stories in high-risk environments or to blur fact and fiction by imagining a protagonist's thoughts.