Bernard-Henri Lévy

If ever there was a case of knowing your enemy, this is it. Bernard-Henri Lévy announced that enemy’s advent and catalogued the peculiarities of its mind, its antisemitics lapses, the grotesque turns of its culture. That catalogue made it possible to gauge the danger the enemy posed before it struck. Bernard-Henri Lévy thumped the pole three times on the proscenium, three times dimmed the lights, to announce the arrival on stage of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

In 1981 Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote L’Idéologie française. A daring foray (scandalous, according to those who would form the first cadre of his detractors) into red, white, and blue fascism, into the “dark France” limned by Lévy, with its “abominably fertile womb,” its populist, xenophobic, racist, and nationalist strains, its unholy ideological alliances—from the Dreyfus Affair to the Rue Lauriston—between right- and left-wing thinking, and its daydreams of “strength, land, and body, of race and nation.”

When the Front National burst onto the political scene in the mid-1980s, Jean-Marie Le Pen had already been described. He was in every chapter, including those yet to be written. It was as if he were deduced somehow from the book. One need only follow the clues left there to run smack into the leader of the FN and his followers. Himself a caricature of the heirs to the postwar era, Le Pen had all of the credentials of the extreme right. He spent his time in the desert after having been the acolyte of Tixier-Vignancour and the Poujadist movement; he was a young deputy for the CNI and a militant for French Algeria. As for his aficionados, it seems as if a part of them— ghouls, reactionaries, bottom dwellers—were still living in the 1930s, having somehow been suppressed or distracted during the ensuing decades.

So Bernard-Henri Lévy started to write about the Front National. Against it. L’Idéologie française, volume two, in installments. And for 30 years now he hasn’t stopped—vigilant, radical, steady. And ferociously critical, too, of his republican contemporaries, whom he judges too quick to forget or too passive on the subject of the Front National. He has spoken at all the demonstrations and concerts of SOS-Racisme. He has taken the stage in all of the cities of southern France—Marseille, Vitrolles, Gardanne, Orange—from which what has become a calm, ordinary form of fascism is spreading throughout the country.

In 1986, when 35 FN deputies took their seats in the National Assembly thanks to the one-round system of proportional representation used in that election, Lévy sounded the alarm in his “Bloc-Notes” column in Le Point about the danger of the “banalization” of the FN and its leader. From that point on he has not ceased warning us of a “tasteful, well-behaved fascism pretending to be compatible with the democratic system.” He feared, he wrote at the time, that the ideas of the extreme right would wind up being admitted “as the equals of others in the catalogue of normal, respectable, and acceptable ideas.”

And that’s just what happened. In 1989, when the Front National began winning 15% of the vote in legislative elections, the process was complete. The new fascism was established. On the left, it was acknowledged to pose “good questions.” Those on the right shared “common values” with the movement. Spinelessness abounded. Pre-election deals. Resignations of French anti-fascists—even though they were in the majority. “No demonstration in Dreux,” stormed Bernard-Henri Lévy, “and no protest in Marseille.” The frustration of a writer who had shouted himself hoarse in the democratic desert: “When the intellectuals accept even the idea of a ‘threshold of tolerance,’” he wrote in 1989, “when they allow themselves to talk about all forms of immigration as a sort of disease, and when, in so doing, they give theoretical strength to phobias and impulses, they are offering Le Pen something that he had lacked: legitimacy for a body of thought that I believe should be rejected wholesale.”

From then on, in everything he wrote and every time he took the microphone at a meeting, he would pick apart, with infinite professorial patience, the deceptive notion that there are not now and never again will be “fascist battalions” in France. No more nationalist leagues; no more Cagoule; no more black uniforms or boots battering the pavement. No more fascism as it was conventionally understood. And especially no more of those thugs who used to be easy enough to keep at a distance because they were not the kind of people one would associate with. Instead we would have outstanding people, good people, points of view that would win the day because they made sense and maybe even because they were right, in the midst of the sometimes discouraging rough-and-tumble of the nation and the world.

In 1990, Bernard-Henri Lévy launched his review, La Règle du jeu. He had conceived the project as one devoted to literature, to publishing, perhaps, “a previously unpublished work by Werfel, or something from Broch or Rushdie.” But he decided to “devote space to a phenomenon that, to speak in the voice of our illustrious predecessors, constitutes an undeniable threat to the safety of the spirit”: Le Pen’s demogoguery, which was “one national version among others” of a “generalized regression.” “How,” he asked himself, “when resistance to the populist tide is the very heart of a fight, can we avoid going after the French variant?”

His “Bloc-Notes” for the second issue of La Règle du jeu was entitled “Thinking about Le Pen.” That long essay will be remembered for its accurate forecasting. It illuminated, with disturbing foresight, not only the decade to come, during which Le Pen Inc. expanded its presence in French national life, but also, and even more presciently, the decade after that, during which Sarkozyism incorporated all sorts of Poujadist and populist flotsam into government policy, legitimizing it in the process.

Even then Bernard-Henri Lévy wanted to draw a line under the tired debate over “whether the Front was or was not a neo-fascist party.” “I most definitely am one of the pessimists,” he wrote. He feared that which seemed to reassure others and was sometimes used as an excuse for their awkward silence—that Le Pen’s movement was “diverse,” “like a mille-feuille pastry with its many layers.” “That’s how it always goes,” protested Lévy. Neo-fascist movements always have many layers—that soon become glued together. “As in Germany: the unemployed, malcontents, decent people, and Nazis.” “In France,” he continued, “from Déroulède to Doriot, fascism has always had the power to bring together rich and poor, the humble and the grand, men of the left, of the right, of the extreme left and extreme right, avowed racists, abashed anti-semites, strayed socialists, disaffected communists—the essence of fascism being precisely that power to combine opposites in a single völkisch or populist organization.”

The threat posed by Le Pen’s movement, wrote Bernard-Henri Lévy, was no longer a phantom or an anachronism of history. In many ways, it was even on the march—because of its capacity, in less than 10 years, to appear dynamic in contrast to democratic forces that had been sterilized into caution and consensus by the death of ideology. Forces that were no better than the Gang of Four with its tired phrases. By contrast, Jean-Marie Le Pen gave the impression of giving political speech “the charge, the flesh, and the flavor that it had lost.” Unless we were careful, Le Pen would succeed in spreading the belief that his simplistic ideas about immigration or against Europe were a dynamic alternative, a real possibility for change from the prevailing ideological paralysis. In the role of the black hole, the stationary body around which other stars orbit, against which they define themselves, the National Front had replaced the French communist party.

“Thinking about Le Pen.” A long, wide-ranging essay that covered every inch of the set of problems posed by the adversary, omitting nothing, not even the weaknesses of the anti-fascist forces or those of his friends within SOS-Racisme. A gloomy essay as well, in which the only possible remedies were gradual and partial: to stop stigmatizing Le Pen’s movement, because that only strengthened it and gave it a seat at the table; to take it on in its own terms, pitting arguments against arguments; to play the right against the extreme right; to educate; to continue to speak out. “Never stop speaking out,” urged Lévy.

The staying power of the Front National on the French political scene has meant that Bernard-Henri Lévy has often had to write or speak about elections. In 1995, on the occasion of the presidential election, he deplored the tendency of candidates to fish for votes based on the reasoning that voters were one thing and Le Pen was another, the idea that, behind the leader were “good citizens, bewildered by joblessness, fear of crime, and immigration to whom one should extend a fraternal hand.” Once again, he protested that Le Pen’s 15% of the electorate had not simply been led astray. He reminded us, again, that the vote for Le Pen was not just a protest vote. Instead, it had deep roots; it was the result of ideas that had come to form a body of doctrine on subjects—fear, immigration, and the rest—that had cast a shadow over French society.

After the election Lévy was back in the south of France for a July 14 concert sponsored by SOS-Racisme in La Seyne, a suburb of Toulon, which the Front National had won. And then again in Vitrolles, later the same year, between the two rounds of the municipal election, to prevent a victory there by Bruno Maigret, a Le Pen ally. And then again in Marseille, in 2002, for a meeting of republican forces organized by François Bayrou. On that occasion, with Lionel Jospin having been eliminated in the first round of the presidential voting, Lévy called on Jospin’s supporters to vote for Jacques Chirac, whom he is said to have counselled before his televised debate with Le Pen. “To vote for the right when one believes in the left is hard,” he explained at the dais. “It breaks with two centuries of history, tradition, and habit, but that is just what a huge majority of people of the left are preparing to do next Sunday for the first time in their lives.”

Over the years, Bernard-Henri Lévy has often had the impression of repeating himself from one piece of writing to another. But that is the price to be paid for divining the course of history before it unfolds. In 2007, the right—and part of the left—was delighted to see Nicolas Sarkozy harvest the votes of Le Pen supporters in the second round of the presidential election. Lévy was of a different mind, fearing the strategy would backfire. Not Bernard-Henri Levy, which in Left in  Dark Times kwill be very tough on this strategy. Subsequent elections saw the FN recover and even increase its share of the vote.

The philosopher’s prediction has come true: The ideas emanating from the black hole have become effective to the point of crossing the threshold of the “republican bloc.” They inspire our debates and shape our public policy to the extent that, on certain subjects (the familiar ones: distrust for outsiders, fear of crime and immigration), it may seem as if Le Pen were running things. Not Jean-Marie, mind you, because he has decided not to stand for election in 2012, but his daughter, Marine. The succession does not bode well. Marine Le Pen is not prone to the anti-semitic outbursts that used to rally anti-fascists against her father. She is more presentable and can pass easily pass for a democrat.

What comes next promises to be tough. The political horizon is already choked by themes whipped up by the Front National, whose phantasmagorical creations dominate our public space. The air is becoming unfit to breathe. Bernard-Henri Lévy is preparing to give us volume three of L’Idéologie française. Not a moment too soon.

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 : Demonstration in southern France in 1997, after the election of Catherine M , Vitrolles. (c) D.R.