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

Kerouac at the Cinema

(28) Comments | Posted May 23, 2012 | 8:21 AM

Early '70s. A bar at the Place Saint-Georges in Paris, where the shadow of André Breton still hung in the air and where our master of masters, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, was fond of coming. In the atmosphere, there's still a bit of this "spirit of May," or this "feeling of May,"...

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Address to the Republican Right, Confronted With the New Lepenist Offensive

(1) Comments | Posted May 1, 2012 | 8:57 AM

An avalanche of reactions, readers' letters and commentaries followed my last column.

So, let me make things clear.

The Front National is not a party of the right, but of the extreme right.

Between the right and the extreme right, there is the same difference of nature, the same...

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Marine Le Pen Must Not Be Allowed to Benefit From Her Victory

(28) Comments | Posted April 23, 2012 | 11:58 AM

At the time -- Sunday night -- that I am writing this column, the Front National looks to be the big winner of this first round of the presidential elections in France.

It is winning politically because it has taken back the voters -- and then...

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Libya: Dotting All the 'i's

(1) Comments | Posted April 18, 2012 | 2:34 PM

Madame Le Pen encourages boos when she mentions my name at her rallies.

She never misses a chance to shower me with insults, sometimes rather filthy ones.

And this woman who feeds on all that afflicts the French soul, who speaks of France only to describe it as debased, humiliated,...

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The First Death of Günter Grass

(282) Comments | Posted April 11, 2012 | 8:17 AM

There is North Korea and its autistic tyrant, equipped with a by and large operational nuclear arsenal.

There is Pakistan, armed with warheads -- no one knows how many, nor precisely where they are located, nor what guarantees we have that they will not, one day, fall into the hands...

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When Algeria, Like France, Looks Its Past in the Face

(21) Comments | Posted April 4, 2012 | 4:52 PM

Marseille.

A symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, organized by the French magazine Marianne.

I am facing Zohra Drif, a senior member of the Bouteflika hierarchy who was, in her youth, an FLN [National Liberation Front] militant and a terrorist whose participation in the so-called Milk Bar attack...

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Toulouse, France, Islam

(87) Comments | Posted March 26, 2012 | 4:17 PM

The French police behaved well. I know that, down at the bar on the corner, there was a lot of talk about the RAID intervention group's methods, the way the siege was drawn out, the brutality of the assault. And I know there are armchair investigators, prophets after the fact,...

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After the Carnage in Toulouse, Together Against Anti-Semitism

(408) Comments | Posted March 19, 2012 | 5:36 PM

So France is a country where, in 2012, in the country's third largest city, one can shoot at a Jewish school and kill, point blank, children there.

We must hope that the investigation will clarify the circumstances of this tragedy, the identity of the killer, and his...

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In Afghanistan, Between Plague and Cholera, There's Dr. Abdullah

(18) Comments | Posted March 13, 2012 | 9:01 AM

It's been ten years, almost to the day, since I returned from Afghanistan with the "Report" Jacques Chirac, Lionel Jospin and Hubert Védrine had commissioned, in which I described the possible contribution of France to the political, civic, cultural and military reconstruction of this country ruined by decades of dictatorship,...

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Armenian Genocide: The French Constitutional Council's Mistake

(10) Comments | Posted March 6, 2012 | 7:36 AM

The power belongs to the law.

And to the institutions of the Republic.

Thus the Constitutional Council's invalidation of the law voted by the two Houses aiming to penalize the denial of genocides is, in the eyes of the law, and until the same two Houses reconsider it, the last...

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Now, An Intervention Must Take Place in Syria

(135) Comments | Posted February 28, 2012 | 7:32 AM

On March 19th, it will be a year, day for day, since squadrons of French planes, later followed by British, American and Arab aircraft, saved Benghazi from what would have been its inevitable destruction.

Well, things being what they are and if the international community does not pull itself together,...

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Angelina Jolie, Bosnia in Her Heart

(46) Comments | Posted February 21, 2012 | 6:53 AM

When Angelina Jolie asked me to join her in presenting the avant-première of her film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, I began, of course, by asking to view it. But once I had, I did not hesitate for a second.

Because, really, what a story!

Here is...

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What Is Really Happening in Athens

(495) Comments | Posted February 13, 2012 | 9:06 PM

The Greek Parlement's vote, during the night of Sunday to Monday, on the austerity plan the European Union demanded as a prerequisite to the release of a new installment of financial assistance was inevitable. Clearly, the alternative to the austerity plan was, in the short term, exclusion from the eurozone,...

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Marine Le Pen, Latest Maneuver

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

This new fuss the Le Pens have orchestrated about their difficulty in collecting the 500 signatures the law requires of every candidate for the presidency of the Republic is a trap.

For one of two things is true.

Either the Le Pens are not play-acting;...

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Madame Le Pen and Austrians Nostalgic for the Third Reich

(4) Comments | Posted February 1, 2012 | 7:59 AM

In Europe, the event didn't cause as much of a stir as it should have.

Yet it's at least as important as the recent performances of Hollande and Sarkozy.

In a word, Mme Le Pen, third in the race for the presidency, hot on the heals of the other...

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Madame Le Pen Does Not Love France

(7) Comments | Posted January 26, 2012 | 9:09 AM

Unfortunately, I'll have to return to the case of the Front National and the fascination it seems to exercise, once again, on the left as well as the right, on the working class no less than on conservative voters.

For the time being, notwithstanding a more detailed analysis but without...

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The Criminal Childishness of Those Who Believe in the Triple A

(109) Comments | Posted January 18, 2012 | 7:07 AM

Could we be living in an era of such madness, one that has lost its compass and its points of reference to such an extent that this affair of one of the three major rating agencies' withdrawal of America's and then France's triple "A" has taken on such importance?

...
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Could the Fate of Europe, Also, Hinge on Budapest?

(41) Comments | Posted January 11, 2012 | 5:04 PM

Among its nations, Europe is banishing Greece for failing -- it's true, big time -- to fulfill the rules of good economic and financial governance.

A decade ago, it excommunicated Austria -- and with good reason -- when its conservative leaders entered into a coalition with Jorg Haider, leader of...

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On the Armenian Genocide: The Response of a Handful of Historians

(380) Comments | Posted January 3, 2012 | 3:00 PM

Are these people really incapable of comprehending? Or are they just pretending not to understand?

The law whose purpose is to penalize negationist revisionism, voted before Christmas by the French parliament, does not propose to write history in the place of historians. And this for the simple reason that...

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A Tribute to Edmond Safra

(26) Comments | Posted December 20, 2011 | 6:09 PM

This is the man who took it upon himself to restore and glorify the tomb, on the banks of Lake Tiberias, of Rabbi Meir Baal Haness, also known as the miracle worker, one of the principle figures who recorded the Talmud, in the 2nd century A.D.

This is the...

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