Bernard-Henri Lévy

Fighting Sovietism. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973, it provoked in the young Bernard-Henri Lévy and others—including André Glucksmann (The Cook and the Man-Eater)—a horror of “red fascism.”

Lévy’s two-decade struggle with the Soviet system had a long gestation. The Kravchenko trial in France (1949), the fall of Budapest (1956), the first purge of intellectuals from the French communist party, and the anti-communism of Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel were not enough to convince Lévy’s generation to abandon their vague status as (often critical) fellow travelers. Their battle was to save communism, especially French communism, from Stalinism. It is true that Lévy was more stubborn than others, his commitments more literary, his allegiances more perplexing, as in the case of his Maoist friends. At bottom his sentiments remained revolutionary (Louis Althusser, Régis Debray).

Things happened fast in Europe after 1968, but Solzhenitsyn’s work proved truly galvanizing. And because Lévy was a philosopher, it was to philosophy that he turned to trace the origin of the problem. At Grasset, where he began to work in the early 1970s, he published young authors who were ahead of their time in iconoclasm—Jean-Marie Benoist, Jean-Paul Dollé, Christian Jambet, and Guy Lardreau—the “New Philosophers,” slayers of idols, inquisitors of the great philosophers for their role in the emergence of the various forms of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Lévy himself published, in 1977, Barbarism with a Human Face, which revealed his determination to probe deeply into the sources of evil, to dig into the bedrock of xenophobia, of hate for others and for oneself, and of antisemitism—all of which contributed to the two forms of totalitarianism then known: the brown and the red.

May 27, 1977—the day that Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann appeared on Apostrophes—will be remembered in French intellectual history as the dawn of the era of the media intellectual. In fact, the appearance of the pair also signaled the end of an era. Although the left would win the legislative elections in 1978 and François Mitterrand would become president in 1981, it was already freighted by the crimes of communism and, even more, by its essential contradictions. Not much longer would French socialism be able to hide behind the fig leaf of its independence from Moscow.

Bernard-Henri Lévy continued the struggle against Sovietism, first through side activities, farflung networks, and forays into western reformism. The same man who was supporting (and even advising!) Mitterand the candidate was constantly skewering the Common Program of the French left as well as the leadership of the French communist party. Just before the presidential election, L’Idéologie française appeared, a work that traces the accommodationism of Pétain into its “red” forms. Overnight, Lévy became an outlaw in his own camp, that of the left.

For a year he kept up a watchful chronicle in Le Matin de Paris, including one staunch piece that declared, “We are all Polish Catholics.” Published shortly after the election, he castigated the French left for its reluctance to support the revolt by the trade unionists of Solidarity. He pointed his finger at the “disarray of a floating left” that did not understand what was at stake in Warsaw and Gdansk and that refused once again, as it had in Budapest and Prague, to see the footprint of the Red Army in Jaruzelski’s tracks, whereas it had been quick, in Chile, to detect the hand of the CIA behind Pinochet’s coup.

In his view, France’s intellectuals (still Marxist to various degrees) like the ministers in Mitterand’s socialist government, were wilfully blind to the Catholic nature of the Polish uprising. In Warsaw, he wrote, “the executioners speak Marxism,” while “the Blessed Virgin sides with the oppressed.” On the banks of the Vistula, the French left could no longer hope, as it was wont to do, for unlikely corrections to Marxism or for last-minute recantations that would allow it to preserve its illusions. The trade unionists of Gdansk did not have the same values as those of Billancourt. “Lech Walesa,” wrote Lévy, “does not roll with the Common Program.” The events in Poland were a refutation, he believed, of the “thin gruel of secularism, materialism, half-digested Marxism, and vague Enlightenment philosophy that is the baggage of our apparatchiks.” In Warsaw, the Church was “the only civilized alternative” capable of standing up to the “Soviet bloc” and the “idolaters of the Kremlin and elsewhere.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy took part in all of the demonstrations and meetings organized in Paris to defend the rights of Solidarity and condemn the imprisonment of Polish intellectuals and trade unionists. Over a period of several years, the street protests were for him a familiar form of expression. In the press, photos showed him under banners, a bullhorn to his mouth. A tall and thin young man of Dostoyevskian mien, with jet black hair and a passionate voice, who rallied anti-totalitarian forces wherever Stalin’s heirs muzzled freedom, he improvised committees, launched positions, and signed those of others.

It was the period when the children of May 1968 were discovering Soviet dissidence and the fate of its heros at the hands of Soviet power. Paris became the refuge of the refuseniks of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, and the young philosopher was among those who welcomed the exiled intellectuals and scientists who were lucky enough to be expelled from their native land because they had received enough western support to dissuade Moscow from killing them or wearing them down physically or mentally in internment camps. Many others suffered far more.

One such was Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, whose cause Bernard-Henri Lévy embraced. Ever since his famous press conference in Moscow in 1974, when he warned foreign journalists of the danger of an overmilitarized USSR, the renowned physicist and developer of the hydrogen bomb had seen his freedom of movement and expression chipped away by the regime. In 1975, he was denied permission to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. His wife spoke in his stead. That very day, in Vilnius, Sakharov attended the trial of another dissident, mathematician Leonid Pliouchtch. Soon after he published My Country and the World, in which he condemned Soviet repression of writing and speech critical of the regime. The publication brought new restrictions.

When Leonid Brezhnev came to Paris in 1977 at the invitation of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, everything possible was done to spoil the visit for the Soviet leader. Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the new generation of intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, invited Soviet dissidents living in France to join Parisians in an evening of denunciation at the Théâtre Récamier. The demonstrations continued into the following days, with Lévy and Glucksmann always on the front line. With other writers and journalists they began to make connections with artists detained in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Films and writings were smuggled out from behind the Iron Curtain. In these clandestine efforts, too, Lévy was omnipresent.

In France, a new era of human rights was dawning, focusing on civilian victims of war or police actions. Although it had become impossible in many cases to support one warring camp or another, because their causes often were too murky, it was nevertheless important to save their victims. That was the theme hammered home by the young Bernard-Henri Lévy. Here, too, came feverish motion, euphoric at first and then increasingly urgent as Lévy struggled to escape the ideological dead-ends that he himself, through his essays, had helped frame.

The street. Always the street. Media coups that borrowed elements from advertising and agit-prop. With Bernard Kouchner, Bernard-Henri Lévy led a campaign to rescue the “boat people” of Vietnam. He was probably the inventor, at a memorable meeting at the home of the dissident Russian writer Vladimir Maximov, of the idea of “a boat for Vietnam.” With writer Marek Halter, he demonstrated against the Moscow Olympics and the timidity of the Europeans vis-à-vis their giant Russian neighbor. When Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky in 1980 and kept under constant surveillance by the KGB, Lévy led a protest march on the Soviet embassy in Paris.

The Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Two years later, Bernard-Henri Lévy decided to travel to the country with Marek Halter and Renzo Rossellini, founder of the Romanian radio station, Radio Cita Futura. They entered from Pakistan, a stone’s throw from Peshawar, to deliver to the resistance a radio transmitter for a free radio station in Kabul. It was a potent symbol, multiplied tenfold by subsequent stories in the press, a symbol powerful enough to instill in Lévy a loyalty toward Afghanistan, to bring him back to the country in 1992, and to solidify his commitment to Commander Massoud.

From then on, Bernard-Henri Lévy kept a close watch on the symbolic Wall—and on all the other physical and mental walls of the “bloc” and its dependencies. Many of his generation, because of their anti-Americanism, preferred to direct their militant compassion to the victims of “brown” fascism, as in El Salvador or Nicaragua. Lévy looked east, along the pathways of the Holocaust. It was the beginning of an autobiographical pilgrimage that would never end. Its markers were verbal support for dissidence, often backed up by his physical presence. Those actions revealed a need to get close to Polish trade unionists, Czech intellectuals, and Russian scientists violating their ban. Lévy wanted to join them, to speak with them face to face, to forge personal bonds—as if to help them hold on to their hope and resolve. The products were prolific reports and long clandestine interviews for Le Monde and other European newspapers, and eventually for his review, La Règle du jeu. Bernard-Henri Lévy began to walk the perimeter of the totalitarian world in long strides.

Were Lévy’s proclivities the result of his Jewish upbringing? He certainly was more familiar with the infidelities of history on that side of the street. He described the details better, the drab grit blending into grey backgrounds. He caught the leprous tone, as had Brecht before him, the absence of joy in the air, even on the cusp of a possible liberation. He was in Moscow in the fall of 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and again in 1991, two days after the Soviet regime fell. Both times he wondered at “the same tired, slow gestures” of Muscovites whom one might expect to feel delivered. “Isn’t this the happiest day they’ve seen in 74 years?” he asked in 1991. Hold on, came the response—they’re waiting for what has to come next.

So Bernard-Henry Lévy waited with them. He knew, or suspected, what had to come next. As if by premonition, he had begun writing about it in the 1970s: the return of the original monster, without its Marxist trappings; various forms of Slavism and other ancestral savagery would be back on stage. “On the one hand we have a Europe that is nationalistic, identity-obsessed, tribal, racist, xenophobic, racist, chauvinistic, and so on,” Lévy explained in an interview. “And on the other, a Europe that is liberal, democratic, cosmopolitan, universalistic—it is the existence of that Europe that keeps me from giving up hope.”

He was indignant when intellectuals proclaimed “the end of history” and the opening of a great democratic ballroom on the former site of the communist charnel house. Paradoxically, those optimistic prognostications caused Lévy to redouble his efforts as a vigilant sentinel. As soon as the regime fell in the GDR, and again when the Soviet Union breathed its last, he increased the frequency of his visits to the East. More reports, major interviews, investigations in the former people’s democratic republics—through them all Lévy listened for the echoes of nationalistic and extreme temptations. He also traveled in what was still called western Europe—Germany, Austria—exploring the same question: what would be the new color of fascism in the new Millennium? He was sure it would appear in one guise or another.

The misery of Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo would circumscribe his travels for several years. He described, on paper or on film, and often from the field, his shame for Europe. Were we condemned to relive Auschwitz for all eternity? Was the spirit of Munich still all we could muster? The same collective cowardice; the same tired mechanisms?

It seemed that way. To say what he had to say, Bernard-Henri Lévy employed words appropriate to his European surroundings. A vocabulary different from the one he used in Afghanistan or the United States. In his descriptions, in Hungary or the Balkans, in Moscow or Prague, people often come off as more oppressed than elsewhere, as if hollow inside. As if a generalized lobotomy were still taking its toll almost a century after it was administered, leaving its descendants without the possibility of a future. The delayed effects of the USSR, as it were. Lévy feels those effects more acutely than most, leading him to fear “what has to come next.” So he keeps the watch.

Philippe Boggio

Former reporter at Le Monde, Philippe Boggio is the author of many books including biographies of Coluche (Flammarion, 1991 and 2006), Bernard-Henri Levy (La Table Ronde, 2005) and Johnny Halliday (Flammarion, 2009).

Translation by Steven Kennedy

Photo : Bernard-Henri Lévy demonstrating, in 1977, against Brejnev’s visit in Paris, in front of Soviet Embassy (c) D.R.