Bernard-Henri Lévy

When Harlem Désir and Eric Gehbali went to meet Bernard-Henri Lévy at the Twickenham—a now-vanished bar that sat across from Grasset’s offices on the corner of the Rue des Saints-Pères and the Rue de Grenelle—to convince him to join the movement they were about to launch, the two-part insight that lay behind SOS Racisme had already occurred to them. The first half of that insight was that young people were not in fact depoliticized—they just needed to be reached in new ways, notably through humor and music. The second half was that racism had again become, after 40 years of dormancy (or banishment), a major topic in France, as shown by a spike in race-based crimes and the electoral success of the Front National, which, in June 1984, had for the first time gleaned more than 10% of the vote in a national election.

The celebrated author of La Barbarie à visage humain and L’Idéologie française shared the insight of Désir and Gehbali and had been writing along parallel lines. He understood what they were talking about.

It was at that meeting that SOS Racisme, even before its founding, attracted one of its most important supporters. After co-organizing the successful press conference that launched the organization at the Lutétia on February 19, 1985, Bernard-Henri Lévy seemed to appear wherever he was needed, and it seemed as if he were needed everywhere.

You be the judge. On February 21 he was at La Mutualité for the constitutive meeting of the organization (with the sardonic theme “I’m not a racist, but …”). On March 7 he and Harlem Désir held a press conference in Le Havre following an ugly race-based crime. On March 28 he spoke to an audience of 2,000 at the University of Paris II, then considered a bastion of the extreme right.

At the time he marched under slogans that linger in our memories: “Jews in Paris; Arabs in Toulon (or Lyon or Menton)—they’re always killing our friends.”

In this context, Bernard-Henri Lévy let the new movement define its doctrine against a resurgence of racist violence, as evidenced by the his co-signed opinion piece in Le Monde on March 27, 1985, under the headline “Words That Kill”: “Whatever else it is, a race-based crime is never an act of pure madness or insanity …, it corresponds to something in the mood of the time, a collective unconscious from which it draws confidence, legitimacy, and meaning.”

We often hear that “everyone” (including Coluche, Simone Signoret, Guy Bedos, Jean-Jacques Goldman, and so many others) belonged to SOS Racisme. But Lévy’s presence among the celebrities is unique—first because he was present at the creation, as I’ve just said, and second because of he has stuck with it.

Far from pushing us apart, the years have brought us closer as we faced more than a few baseless accusations and no shortage of new challenges. Bernard has always been around to debunk the groundless charges of differentialism that have often been leveled against us.

In a broader sense, at every demonstration or fund-raising event, in France or abroad, we’ve been able to count on Bernard-Henri Lévy. Whether the fight was about an effort to repeal the right of citizenship for children born on French soil (1993) or about the extreme-right Austrian populist, Jörg Haider (1999), Bernard always answered the call.

Most important of all, we worked together on—and won, I believe—the debate that emerged a decade ago over the meaning of antiracism. At the time, some sought to justify or excuse antisemitism through recourse to a positive form of racism or “racialism”—a trap that ensnared some young people.[1] It was also together that we stood up to the latest peddlers of anti-Jewish hate, Dieudonné and Tribu Ka (since disbanded).

On May 1, 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round of the French presidential election, Bernard marched with SOS, surrounded by thousands of little yellow hands that read “Touche pas à mon pote” (hands off my friend!), the SOS motto.

Later, I traveled with Bernard to Chad to visit the camps of displaced persons who had fled the barbarism unleashed by the authorities in Khartoum against the black population of Darfur.

Our collaboration has continued in recent years through our joint support for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose secular, feminist stances left her terribly isolated, and for Charlie Hebdo in the trial over the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. And let us not forget his testimony in the 2009 retrial of the killer of Chaïb Zehaf. In the midst of these shared struggles, we paused to draft the petition “Hands off my DNA!” and to mount a rally and concert at the Zénith in fall 2007 to protest the use of DNA tests on applicants for family reunification.

As I hope this account shows, when you think of SOS Racisme, it’s hard not to think as well of Bernard-Henri Lévy. And given the number of times our paths have crossed and the distance we’ve traveled together, I like to think that the converse is also true: that when you think of Bernard-Henri Lévy, you also think of SOS Racisme.

Dominique SOPO

Dominique Sopo, born July 30, 1976 in Valenciennes, is the president of SOS Racisme since June 2003. He teaches economics and social sciences at Lycée Claude Monet in Paris in the thirteenth arrondissement. . He has published SOS Antiracisme (Denoël, 2005) et Manifeste pour l’égalité (First, 2007) et Combat… Laïque (le Cherche Midi, 2008)

Translation by Steven Kennedy

Photo 1 : Paris, first meeting of SOS Racisme (c) Sipa.
Photo 2 : Concert of SOS Racisme 15th june 1985 (c) D.R.
Photo 3 : Concert of SOS Racisme 15th june 1985 (c) D.R.
Photo 4 : Touche pas 0 mon Pote (c) D.R.
Photo 5 : Touche pas à mon ADN (c) D.R.