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Bernard-Henri Lévy
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Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher and one of the most esteemed and bestselling writers in Europe. Lévy is the author of over 30 books, including works of philosophy, fiction, and biography. American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville was a New York Times bestseller (2006). His new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism will be published by Random House on September 16, 2008.

He gained renown for his documentary film about the Bosnian conflict, Bosna! After starting his career as a war reporter for Combat — the legendary newspaper founded by Albert Camus during the Nazi occupation of France — for which he covered the war between Pakistan and India over Bangladesh. Lévy is also the founder of the New Philosophers group. His 1977 book Barbarism with a Human Face launched an unprecedented controversy over the European left’s complicity with totalitarianism. Lévy’s cultural commentary, novels and journalism have continued to stir up such excitement that The Guardian noted he is ‘accorded the kind of adulation in France that most countries reserve for their rock stars.’

Lévy has undertaken several diplomatic missions for the French government. He was appointed by French President Jacques Chirac to head a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan in 2002 in the wake of the war against the Taliban, a war that Lévy supported. He has traveled to the world's most troubled areas. He followed the trail of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan to research his "investigative novel" Who Killed Daniel Pearl? His book War, Evil, and the End of History took him to the sites of what he calls the world's forgotten wars, from Colombia to Sri Lanka. His reportage and commentary from Israel during the 2006 Lebanon war appeared to wide acclaim, in among others, the New York Times Magazine. And after an extensive, clandestine visit to Darfur in 2007, he reported on the ethnic cleansing and genocide there for Le Monde, and for the U.S. The New Republic.


"[BHL is] superman and prophet: we have no equivalent in the United States." - Vanity Fair

"Bernard-Henri Lévy does nothing that goes unnoticed. He is an intellectual adventurer who brings publicity to unfashionable political causes." - The New York Times


Photo by Alexis Duclos.

Blog Entries by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Of Bread and Games, the War and Mali

(20) Comments | Posted March 19, 2013 | 8:15 AM

In Mali, the French army is winning an exemplary war.

It is saving a friendly country that was about to fall under the law of those who are expert in stoning and the amputation of hands.

In so doing, it is smashing the connection they had begun to establish...

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Letter from Paris: The Exhibitions of Marc Roussel, Marjane Satrapi and Marcel Fleiss

(3) Comments | Posted February 13, 2013 | 6:54 PM

Marc Roussel is a photographer. But really a photographer. Not an image hunter, image taker, click clack, cell phone, I was there, I saw the light of something, went inside and took a shot. No, a photographer in the old sense of the word. A photographer from the days when...

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A Salute to Artpress

(1) Comments | Posted January 30, 2013 | 3:38 PM

In the middle of the '70s, when I was just starting out, a singular, miraculously independent magazine called Artpress first appeared in Paris.

Catherine Millet, who was not yet the internationally renowned novelist she has become, was at the helm as its director.

Jacques Henric, her companion, who...

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Marriage in '13

(637) Comments | Posted January 8, 2013 | 9:44 AM

The gay marriage debate has taken an odd and worrisome turn.

I will not waste time on the pious hypocrites who seem nostalgic for the good old days of deviant, outlawed homosexuality when gays and lesbians did not aspire to be "normal," nor on the condescension shown by those right-wing...

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What's the Matter With Montebourg

(11) Comments | Posted December 20, 2012 | 12:06 PM

I like Arnaud Montebourg.

I like his Kouchnerian style of expressing himself, high-pitched, rapid-fire, that always gives one the impression he's running after the lost object of his sentence.

I like his cheeky humor, his chutzpah, and, when he decides to wax (overwax?) eloquent on protecting the nation, the...

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For a Revival of Philhellenism

(147) Comments | Posted November 27, 2012 | 1:14 PM

Poor Greece!

There was a time, at the beginning of the 19th century, when all that Europe counted as artists, poets, and great thinkers, from Chateaubriand to Byron in Missolonghi, from Berlioz and Delacroix and Pushkin to the young Victor Hugo, rushed to the aid of Greece, actively campaigning...

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Hollande, the Syrian -- Bravo!

(85) Comments | Posted November 16, 2012 | 7:52 AM

The head of the French State took a decisive step with regard to Syria during his press conference of November 13th.

Thus, in his words, France has recognized the Syrian Coalition, the result of the meeting in Doha and the unification of various elements of the resistance to Bashar...

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Enough Evasion, We Must Intervene in Syria!

(107) Comments | Posted October 30, 2012 | 2:21 PM

Co-written with Jacques Bérès, Mario Bettati, André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner

The barbarian Assad gang and the Islamic extremists are the enemies of Syria's democratic future. They are the enemies of peace in the Middle East. They are our enemies. When the contention began in Deraa, in March 2011,...

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Marat, David and Jean-Claude Milner

(2) Comments | Posted October 23, 2012 | 8:19 AM

Can it be that, in 2012, in Paris, an important book by a very important author is passing under the radar of public opinion?

Judging by the press's reaction to Jean-Claude Milner's latest text, Malaise dans la peinture (A Malaise in Painting), published by Editions Ophrys last June, that seems...

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Confronting the Black Tide of New Antisemitism

(161) Comments | Posted October 16, 2012 | 3:02 PM

The new antisemitism has arrived.

For a long time now, some of us have seen it coming.

But this time it's here, and in no uncertain terms, with its combat cells, its symbolic figures, its small-time hoods and its heavies who have made the easy transition from gangsterism...

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Why Barack Obama Is Going to Win

(254) Comments | Posted October 9, 2012 | 2:20 PM

I am amazed at the tone of the press in the wake of the first of the three scheduled debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Not that Romney wasn't, indeed, better than expected.

And not that Obama did not appear strangely on the defensive, ill prepared and not...

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Money, Qatar and the Republic

(35) Comments | Posted October 2, 2012 | 5:18 PM

Given the current state of things, why is the matter of Qatar's investment in the French suburbs so problematic?

Not because it's Qatar, of course.

Nor, even less, because it's an Arab country, the very nature of whose funds would be less welcome than those of others.

And,...

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The Honor of Benghazi

(5) Comments | Posted September 24, 2012 | 5:05 PM

Indeed, history has more imagination than men do.

It is Friday, September 21st.

The burning, global-wide topic of the hour is the demonstrations of hatred from one end of the Arab-Muslim world to the other, on the pretext of a despicable anti-Islamic "film."

Everywhere, talk is exclusively of...

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The Eternal Culprit (Israel, a Film, and the Media)

(246) Comments | Posted September 18, 2012 | 6:46 PM

Last week's demonstrations in the Arab Muslim world have already cost lives, many lives, beginning with that of American Ambassador Stevens, a friend of Libya and architect of its liberation.

They have made another collateral victim, and what a victim, since it's a matter of the Syrian people in...

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Build a Political Europe, or Die

(20) Comments | Posted September 13, 2012 | 8:28 AM

If Europe does not become a political entity, the euro will disappear.

This disappearance can take a number of forms and go through several detours.

It may be an explosion, an implosion, slow death, a dissolution, or a division.

It may take two, three, five, ten years, preceded by...

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Reflections on the Richard Millet Case

(21) Comments | Posted September 8, 2012 | 10:12 AM

Strangely enough, what I find most shocking in this Richard Millet affair (this editor at Editions Gallimard who caused a scandal in Paris by publishing "Eloge litteraire de Anders Breivik") is not the white trash racism he recycles, from one book to the next, in his story of the RER,...

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Do You Know Gasiorowski ?

(0) Comments | Posted July 23, 2012 | 9:14 AM

For this last column of the season, and since it's festival time, I would like to pay honor to one of the most amazing and surprisingly underestimated artists of the second half of the 20th century. His name is Gérard Gasiorowski, and the Fondation Maeght, at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, has chosen his...

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The Tobruk Theorem

(25) Comments | Posted July 9, 2012 | 6:53 PM

Well, there you have it.

There is a Libyan exception.

The Islamists won in Tunisia.

In Egypt, they are sharing power with the army.

In Libya, this is not the case.

And even if, as I am writing this, we don't have the definitive figures yet, the...

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Strauss-Kahn and the Killers-by-Virtue

(40) Comments | Posted July 3, 2012 | 10:47 AM

An event has just occurred that should be marked with a black spot in the history of the society of spectacle.

It happened Friday morning, when virtually all the radio stations and news networks, most of the printed press (not only French, but worldwide), the most reputable news sites, the...

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Egypt, Year Zero

(35) Comments | Posted June 26, 2012 | 9:28 AM

Let's not tell ourselves any stories.

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate just won the presidential election in Egypt, is not a democratic organization.

They were not at Tahrir Square, in Cairo, at the beginning of the revolution.

Engaged in a curious game where, as long as they were...

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