Bernard-Henri Lévy

In the last days of September 2009, when Bernard-Henri Lévy stood up for Roman Polanski, no doubt he did not imagine the violence of the quarrels the film maker’s arrest and his own subsequent taking sides would engender.

Not in Switzerland, where the judicial authorities and part of public opinion appeared undisturbed by the perspective of an extradition to the United States.  Not even on the other side of the Atlantic where the media, especially the low-brow ones and television, unreservedly approved Californian justice’s resumption of a hunt, at this late date, of Polanski the fugitive.  But strangely enough, even in France, the scene of frequent quibbling over the basic support due the director of The Pianist, a naturalized citizen since 1978, and that a country, until thoroughly informed, owes a national who is persecuted from abroad.  A campaign of amalgams and fantasies arose, as brutal as it was sudden, on the internet and elsewhere, a short-sighted moralizing thrashing in which intellectuals, political figures–surprisingly, even on the left—would join the popular quarry.

But let’s consider things in the order in which they occurred.  On Saturday, September 26^th, Roman Polanski was arrested in Zurich, where he was to be honoured for the body of his work at the city’s film festival.  Swiss justice chose to comply with the reactivation of an international mandate issued in 1978 by the American authorities that cited the film maker for corruption of a minor on the person of a 13-year-old girl, to which he had pleaded guilty thirty years ago in Los Angeles.  The director had already served forty-two days in prison for this fault at the end of 1977.  Then, wary of the final decision of a judge facing re-election who was primarily concerned with his own media presence, fearing that ultimately, he would be the vehicle of an object lesson, he left the USA.  Since then, his attorneys have never ceased to pursue his defense at a distance.  Damages rendered, the victim withdrew the charges and on several occasions clearly expressed her wish to put an end to this affair that was part of another time, even for her.  But Roman Polanski never set foot on American soil again.

And lo and behold, the time that had passed that, in democracies everywhere, is equivalent to attenuation, a statute of limitations, even a pardon, was simply denied.  In the hours following the arrest in Zurich, a brutal current of public opinion resituated the entire affair in the present, 2009, like a human interest story hot off the presses, confusing a complicated case, naturally clouded by the passage of years, with the current chronicle of law and order.  Artists of cinema, beginning with the sponsors of the Zurich festival, roundly criticized Polanski’s arrest.  The French authorities certainly expressed their concern, interrogating the Swiss and American authorities and proclaiming their solidarity with the author of Chinatown, even at the Elysée and within the UMP.  But it was the caricatured monster, dealer in simplistic ideas, that proved the most prompt to show indignation, and, in the night of September 26-27, Bernard-Henri Lévy decided to confront him by launching a petition whose first signatories were Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Isabelle Adjani, and Pascal Bruckner.  Then, on October 8, 2009, he began building a barricade with an initial column in Le Point. “Abusing a 13-year old girl is obviously a grave crime,» he was careful to iterate, to prevent any misunderstanding.  “And being an artist of genius has never constituted an attenuating circumstance for any crime,” he added.  But “given the wind of insanity» presently «blowing through minds», he confined himself to a slow demonstration, pedagogical in nature, in numbered sub-headings, as he does when things become acrimonious and he believes it best to defuse them.

He reminded his readers that Polanski was not a rapist and that attempting to put the director in the same bag as Charles Manson, the psychopath who killed his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, in the 70s, as some were already writing, was “an insult to common sense, an insult to reason, and an open invitation to all sorts of mix-ups”.  The victim, then, has “withdrawn”, he observed.  Thirty years ago, there was no rape but the corruption of minor, brought to a photo shoot for Vogue by her mother.  The brutal arrest of the film maker in Switzerland, his incarceration motivated simply by the demand of the Americans, which in every way resembled that issued in 1978, go against all “requirements of compassion”.  It is to the honor of the community, ultimately, to understand that it cannot judge in the same manner, with the passage of time.

A wave of anti-élitism, intense in nature, has also descended upon France in the past few years.  In sum, people at the base, whose circumference corresponds to that of the web, may have attributed the reaction of intellectuals and artists who signed the BHL petition to the fact that Roman Polanski is a much admired film maker.  They insisted that Mr. Polanski’s celebrity «sanctuarized» him.  BHL was sure of precisely the contrary.  Anonymous, with neither history nor legend, anyone else in the same legal circumstances would have been forgotten, his crime written off as a loss, as is often the case when it comes to human justice.  “Celebrity does not protect Roman Polanski», he noted, «it is a drawback.”  This inversion made of him «[…]not an ordinary defendant, but a symbol—one whose eventual appearance in court would be more a politico-cathodic ‘great shambles’ than a fair trial.”  La Règle du Jeu, moreover, which is the on-line review that serves as Lévy’s battleground, did research on all sexual crimes of the same nature committed that year.  And what did they discover?  That, of all the offenders recorded in the archives of American justice, the only one to have done time was—Roman Polanski!  QED.

Bernard-Henri Lévy was indignant to see the basics of the affair thus taken hostage by «the perfume of mob justice floating around it all and transforming the commentators, the bloggers, and the citizens into so many sworn judges of the great Tribunal of Public Opinion.”  He called them “the knitters” and accused them of confusing Polanski with the Belgian pedophile Dutroux.  He blamed them for passing over this Californian violence with a delayed effect, consciously revived by a new district attorney, «starved for recognition and glory» and banking his re-election, he too, “on the vindictiveness of voters galvanized into action.”  He pleaded.  He fought them.  Not an episode of the affair escaped him.  He threw all his forces and that of his review into the battle.  And yet his point of view sometimes seemed barely audible.  The ignoble, the summary, took up all the space during those weeks in the autumn of 2009.  Roman Polanski was placed in detention for two and a half months in the prison of Winterthur.  Then his attorneys obtained permission for the 76-year old film maker to be placed under house arrest in the chalet he owns in Gstaad, with an electronic bracelet around his ankle.  In that way, apart from the guards, the Swiss and western journalists camping a few dozen meters away could all be sure that the fugitive was well-guarded—by them.

La Règle du Jeu led the fight, with the intent to introduce a little more judicial serenity in answer to the groundless accusations against the director.  Another petition was launched on the occasion of the Cannes Festival, this time with Jean-Luc Godard and addressed to Polanski’s colleagues present at the Cannes competition of 2010.  Articles.  Pamphlets.  The writer Yann Moix, whose column appears regularly in the review, abruptly blew up at the Swiss in a book, La Meute [The Pack] (1).  Bernard-Henri Lévy himself visited the director several times.  He gave interviews in the Swiss press (2) and spoke on television.  He appealed to French Académiciens and reminded them that Roman Polanski is a member of the Institut, and thus one of theirs.  With his friend Olivier Corpet, head of IMEC, he even organized a trip to Gstaad for three members of the Institut, led by Michaël Levinas.  He multiplied his speeches and written interventions, in the USA on the Huffington Post, the on-line journal that has become his base and his launching pad.  He flew off the handle on Jean-Pierre Elkabbach’s program, on radio station Europe 1, and took the entire affair apart on France-Culture, in a conversation with Florence Colombani.  He spoke of nothing else, thought of nothing else but that.  It has been rumoured that he even thought up an audacious plan of evasion by air that Roman Polanski firmly rejected.  The new man in the iron mask, Polanski tended to be reticent; however, he chose La Règle du jeu to break his silence on two occasions.  At Christmas, 2009, he expressed his gratitude to all those who had written to send him their sympathy(3).  And, four months later, he made public a plea in his own defense (4), Je ne peux plus me taire [I Can No Longer Remain Silent], which Lévy arranged to have published that same day in Switzerland’s three major daily newspapers (in French, German, and Italian).  His arguments finally began to change public opinion—and beyond public opinion, the opinion and the judgment of the Swiss authorities.

At first, Lévy had the greatest difficulty making himself heard.  The judges of the Tribunal of Public Opinion made too much noise.  Without bothering with nuances.  Daniel Cohn-Bendit was the one who declared that Polanski should be judged like anyone else.  The producer, Luc Besson, said the same.  Several ex-quadras of the Socialist Party, Manuel Valls, Arnaud Montebourg, Benoît Hamon, in turn.  But, judged for what?  To hear all their mediatic simplifications, any visitor staying in France would think that a prominent individual had just been indicted, but that a handful of trendy intellectuals intended, for reasons of corporatism or class privilege, that he should avoid prison.

What trial?  For a crime of what decade?  At the end of what legal procedure?  Basically everyone, at varying degrees, followed the demagogic and electioneering line of manipulation demonstrated by the Front National, always striking through a confused lumping together of elements that would have everyone believing the director had, just now, violated a little victim.  Better still, that he even had an accomplice, or at least a political sponsor, in the affair–Frédéric Mitterrand, the new Minister of Culture who had, perhaps imprudently, offered his support to the film maker with a misplaced argument when he expressed his regret “that a new ordeal should be inflicted upon one who has already known so many”.  Allusion to Roman Polanski’s past, to his childhood in the Krakow ghetto; the disappearence of his loved ones and the death of his mother in Auschwitz; the censure of his works in Stalinist Poland; the assassination of Sharon Tate by the mad disciples of Charles Manson; and finally, this interminable procedure, these flights and exiles, all of it a continuation of a life lived under a threat, for the regretted corruption of a minor in Jack Nicholson’s unoccupied villa on Mulholland Drive.  Marine Le Pen jumped on the occasion.  During a  program, she cited passages from Frédéric Mitterrand’s autobiographic novel, La Mauvaise vie, published in 2005, in which he confessed to having had sexual relations with young men in Thailand (5).  “Sexual tourism!»  cried the FN.  Here is the élite, with two pedophiles in its ranks—an old film maker, perverse and unpunished, and the nephew of a president and current minister, who hunts in the bars of Bangkok.

But the wave of hatred finally subsided.  Out of lassitude?  To go on to another scandal story?  Other eye-popping suspicions?  Or is it the fact that Bernard-Henri Lévy hung on and that his belligerent side ultimately produced results?  His review and, even more, its new Internet site that accompanies it became, I repeat, the meeting place for all those who still sought a bit more serenity and impartiality with regard to this story.  For months, he himself was the indefatigable strategist of a battle he led with the competence of an attorney and the faith of a secular mystic.  On July 13, 2010, Swiss justice finally made the decision not to extradite Roman Polanski.  The director was free to move around, to come and go.  He could leave his chalet.  BHL had won.  His neo-Dreyfusard combat had paid off.  He, who doesn’t care for Péguy, had never been so close to this detested Péguy than when he took over the case of this man and saw, far beyond this case, all the injustice, all the folly of a society, magnified to the point of insanity.

Philippe Boggio

1)   La Meute, Grasset, 2010
2)   Interview, Matin Dimanche, 19 December 2009, in La Règle du jeu
3)   Letter from Roman Polanski to Bernard-Henri Lévy, 27 December 2009, La Règle du Jeu.
4)   Letter from Roman Polanski addressed to the site of La Règle du Jeu, 2 May 2010
5)   Robert Laffont

Born in 1950, formal reporter for the French daily “Le Monde”, he wrote various works among which we are able to find biographies of Coluche (Flammarion, 1991 and 2006), Bernard-Henri Lévy (La Table Ronde, 2005) and Johnny Halliday (Flammarion 2009).
Translation by Janet Lizop

Photo 1 : Bernard-Henri Lévy and Roman Polanski (c) D.R.
Photo 2 : November 2010. Roman Polanski (c) Vincent Bitaud.
Photo 3 : Bernard-Henri Lévy (c) D.R.