Bernard-Henri Lévy

He makes a clandestine trip to Darfur in the spring, and his reporting, as were previous ones, is published in Le Monde as well as several of Europe’s major newspapers (Corriere della Sera, El Mundo, the Financial Times Magazine, etc.). This clandestine reporting, which begins at the Chad border, takes him several hundred kilometers inside devastated Darfur; he is one of the few Europeans, along with Dr. Richard Rossin, to go there. He is accompanied by Gilles Hertzog and the photographer Alexis Duclos, who has documented a number of war zones with Lévy.

He also militates for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics—China being at the forefront of support for the murderers of Khartoum. To this end he heads up, with François Zimeray (SOS Darfour) and Jackie Mamou (Urgence Darfour), a large rally at the Mutualité in Paris, where the presidential candidates are called upon to speak out on the issue.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, contrary to some of his old comrades in thought and struggle, opposes Nicolas Sarkozy and supports the candidacy of Ségolène Royal, who he points out is the only presidential candidate to have taken a clear position on the Darfur tragedy and on the mafia-like evolution of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Some books appearing in the midst of the election, like Raphaelle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin’s La Femme Fatale, attribute to him an active, direct, and important (too important?) role in the defeated Socialist candidate’s campaign.

In the fall he publishes a new book, Ce grand cadavre à la renverse (Grasset), which prompts heated, sometimes violent critiques from the extreme left, in particular in Monde diplomatique circles. At this time the ex-comic Dieudonné, who has become an open anti-Semite, makes him one of his favorite targets.