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April 5th, 2011

Bernard-Henri Lévy, vu par le Financial Times : entre James Bond et Platon

It is a story straight from a Bond film. A man on a top-secret mission seeks a taxi to sneak across the Libyan border. ...

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April 5th, 2011

By His Own Reckoning, One Man Made Libya a French Cause (The New York Times, by Steven Erlanger, April 1, 2011)

BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY, 62, is such an inescapable figure in France — of mockery, admiration, amusement, envy — that he is by now unembarrassable. Making his mark young as a philosopher, he was satirized neatly by a critic with the words: “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”

But in the space of roughly two weeks, Mr. Lévy managed to get a fledgling Libyan opposition group a hearing from the president of France and the American secretary of state, a process that has led both countries and NATO into waging war against the forces of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

It was Mr. Lévy, by his own still undisputed account, who brought top members of the Libyan opposition — the Interim Transitional National Council — from Benghazi to Paris to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy on March 10, who suggested the unprecedented French recognition of the council as the legitimate government of Libya and who warned Mr. Sarkozy that unless he acted, “there will be a massacre in Benghazi, a bloodbath, and the blood of the people of Benghazi will stain the flag of France.”

Mr. Lévy, a celebrated philosopher, journalist and public intellectual, gives Mr. Sarkozy sole credit for persuading London, Washington and others to support intervention in Libya.

“I’m proud of my country, which I haven’t felt for many years,” Mr. Lévy said in an interview. “When I compare Libya to the long time we had to scream in the desert about Bosnia, I must agree that despite all our disagreements, Sarkozy did a very good job.”

He is known simply as B.H.L., a man of inherited wealth, a socialist whose trademarks — flowing hair, black suits, unbuttoned white shirts, thin blond women — can undercut his passionate campaigning on public causes, including stopping genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia, strong support for Israel and an early critique of France’s unthinking fascination with Communism, revolution and the Soviet Union.

His flamboyant advocacy has annoyed many in the past, including the current foreign minister, Alain Juppé, who seemed largely excluded from Mr. Lévy’s Libyan initiative. Mr. Lévy negotiated directly with Mr. Sarkozy, with whom Mr. Lévy has an extremely complicated relationship going back to 1983.

While they were friends and once vacationed together, Mr. Lévy openly supported Mr. Sarkozy’s Socialist opponent in the 2007 presidential election; Mr. Sarkozy then married Carla Bruni, who had broken up the marriage of Mr. Lévy’s daughter, Justine, who wrote a novel about it.

Still, Mr. Lévy also had close ties with François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, using his media and family connections — the industrialist François Pinault is his godfather — to push for action on the most pressing human rights issues of the day.

BUT he has outdone himself on Libya, playing to Mr. Sarkozy’s vanity and need for success as well as gratifying his own, and it is hard to say who used the other more.

It is an extraordinary tale, about which neither the Élysée Palace nor the Foreign Ministry wished to comment, other than quietly urging a grain of salt. Mr. Lévy was in Egypt at the tail end of the Tahrir Square uprising, went to the Libyan border but had pressing business in Paris. But on Feb. 27, before returning to North Africa, he called Mr. Sarkozy, asking if he was interested in making contact with the rebels. He was, so Mr. Lévy rented a plane and flew to Marsa Matrouh, the Egyptian airport closest to Libya.

Accompanied by his oldest friend and longtime collaborator, Gilles Hertzog, and, of course, a photographer, Marc Roussel, Mr. Lévy walked across the border past hundreds of yards of refugees and foreign workers and flagged down a car, which was delivering vegetables every 20 miles on the way to Tobruk, the first Libyan city inside the border. He then went to Bayda, where he found Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan minister of justice and leader of the Interim Transitional National Council.

On March 3, Mr. Lévy attended an early meeting of the council with Mr. Jalil in Benghazi in a colonial villa by the sea. He made a little speech about liberty and justice, said that Mr. Sarkozy was a political descendant of Charles de Gaulle, and asked if they would like him to call Mr. Sarkozy and try to arrange a meeting.

Unsurprisingly, they said yes, but first insisted that France “make a gesture.” Mr. Lévy called Mr. Sarkozy on an old satellite phone and Mr. Sarkozy agreed. On Saturday, March 5, France issued a press release, largely unnoticed everywhere except in Benghazi, greeting the formation of the transitional council.

OVERNIGHT, Mr. Lévy said, French flags festooned Benghazi, with a huge tricolor on the court building serving as opposition headquarters. On Sunday, Mr. Lévy drove the 10 hours back to the airport and flew back to Paris, and on Monday morning called Mr. Sarkozy on a better phone line and went to meet him. They agreed, he said, to keep the initiative a secret, even from the Foreign Ministry, though Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain was informed Wednesday evening.

On Thursday morning, a Libyan delegation, headed by Mahmoud Jibril, the de facto foreign minister, sat with Mr. Lévy in Mr. Sarkozy’s office. There Mr. Sarkozy agreed to recognize the opposition as the legitimate government of Libya, which shocked other European capitals and the French Foreign Ministry alike. He agreed to exchange ambassadors and to bomb three airports when he could.

According to Mr. Lévy, Mr. Sarkozy said he would work on getting international support and a United Nations Security Council resolution, but if he failed, he and Mr. Cameron might go ahead anyway with the mandate of the European Union, the Arab League and the African Union. Mr. Sarkozy swore them to secrecy on this “Plan B,” but told them to speak of everything else as they liked, Mr. Lévy said. He said Mr. Sarkozy told them, “My resolution is total.”

Convincing Washington was crucial. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was coming to Paris for a Group of 8 foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday, March 14, and wanted to meet Mr. Jibril. The Qatar Embassy facilitated his travel from Doha, Mr. Lévy said, and he went to Bourget airport to pick him up for a scheduled 4 p.m. meeting with Mrs. Clinton. But the Élysée had not been informed, and Mr. Jibril was held for two hours, until 5 p.m., before he was allowed into France. The meeting was rescheduled for 10 p.m. at Mrs. Clinton’s hotel after a Group of 8 dinner at the Élysée.

Mr. Lévy brought Mr. Jibril, who was staying with him, to the hotel, spent a few minutes with him and Mrs. Clinton, then left the room as the two spoke for nearly an hour. Afterward, Mr. Jibril was disconsolate, believing that he had failed to sway Mrs. Clinton. He insisted on leaving the hotel through a back entrance, to avoid waiting journalists.

At Mr. Lévy’s apartment he, Mr. Hertzog and Mr. Lévy, all of them depressed, stayed up until 2 a.m. on March 15 writing an appeal to the world, what Mr. Lévy called “our last card.” But they did not issue it, and at 3 p.m., Mr. Sarkozy called Mr. Lévy to say that “the American position is shifting.”

Mr. Sarkozy then hit the phones, Mr. Juppé flew to New York and by the time of the Security Council vote, on Thursday, March 17, Washington voted along with France and Britain for a resolution authorizing the use of force in Libya to protect the civilian population, while Russia and China abstained. That night, Mr. Sarkozy called Mr. Lévy to tell him, “We’ve won.”

On Saturday, March 19, as Mr. Sarkozy hosted a luncheon summit on Libya, the opposition called frantically for help. Qaddafi forces had reached the suburbs of Benghazi. That afternoon, France began the bombing, to general political applause at home, even from the Socialists. Mr. Lévy feels that he has helped to save lives and that Mr. Sarkozy has done the right thing, leading a diplomatic effort to intervene to save the entire “Arab spring” and “all the hopes it has raised.”

He claims to be indifferent to those who mock him. “What happened is more important than all the criticism,” Mr. Levy said. “We avoided a bloodbath in Benghazi.”

April 5th, 2011

NOTEBOOK : (Français) Libye : Monsieur de Norpois est de retour (Le Point, 7 avril 2011)

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

April 4th, 2011

One Man Made Libya a French Cause (International Herald Tribune, by Steven Erlanger, April 1, 2011)

PARIS – He is the Gabriele d’Annunzio of the 21st century, agitating not to free Fiume, but Tripoli. Some find him as vain and even absurd as d’Annunzio, another handsome man of journalism, literature and interventionist action who seized the city of Fiume in 1919, to prevent its loss in the peace treaties that ended World War I.

But in roughly two weeks, Bernard-Henri Lévy managed to get a fledgling Libyan opposition group a hearing from the president of France and the American secretary of state, a process that has led both countries and NATO itself into waging war against the forces of Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Mr. Lévy gives Mr. Sarkozy sole credit for convincing London, Washington and others to support intervention in Libya.

“I’m proud of my country, which I haven’t felt for many years,’’ Mr. Lévy said in an interview. “When I compare Libya to the long time we had to scream in the desert about Bosnia, I must agree that despite all our disagreements, Sarkozy did a very good job.’’

Mr. Lévy, 62, is such an inescapable figure in France — of mockery, admiration, amusement, envy — that he is by now unembarrassable. Making his mark young as a philosopher, he was satirized neatly by a critic in the phrase: ‘‘God is dead, but my hair is perfect.’’

He is known simply as BHL, a man of inherited wealth, a nominal leftist whose trademarks — flowing hair, black suits, unbuttoned white shirts, thin blonde women — can undercut his passionate campaigning on public causes, from stopping genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia and strong support for Israel to an early critique of France’s unthinking fascination with Communism, revolution and the Soviet Union.

Still, Mr. Lévy also had close ties with François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, using his media and family connections — the industrialist François Pinault is his godfather — to press for action on the most pressing human rights issues of the day.

But he has outdone himself on Libya, playing to Mr. Sarkozy’s vanity and need for success as well as gratifying his own, and it is hard to say who used the other more.

It is an extraordinary tale, about which neither the Élysée nor the Foreign Ministry wished to comment, other than quietly urging a grain of salt. Mr. Lévy was in Egypt at the tail end of the Tahrir Square uprising, went to the Libyan border but had pressing business in Paris. But on Feb. 27, before returning to North Africa, he called Mr. Sarkozy, asking if he was interested in making contact with the rebels. He was, so Mr. Lévy rented a plane and flew to Marsa Matrouh, the Egyptian airport closest to Libya.

Accompanied by his oldest friend and longtime collaborator, Gilles Hertzog, and, of course, a photographer, Marc Roussel, Mr. Lévy walked across the border past hundreds of yards of refugees and foreign workers and flagged down a car, which was delivering vegetables every 20 miles on the way to Tobruk, the first Libyan city inside the border. He then went to Al Bayda, where he found Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan minister of justice and head of the Interim Transitional National Council.

On March 3, Mr. Lévy attended an early meeting of the council with Mr. Jalil in Benghazi in a colonial villa by the sea. He made a little speech about liberty and justice, said that Mr. Sarkozy was a political descendent of Charles de Gaulle, and asked if they would like him to call Mr. Sarkozy and try to arrange a meeting.

Unsurprisingly, they said yes, but first insisted that France ‘‘make a gesture.’’ Mr. Lévy called Mr. Sarkozy on an old satellite phone and Mr. Sarkozy agreed. On Saturday, March 5, France issued a press release, largely unnoticed everywhere except in Benghazi, greeting the formation of the Transitional Council.

Overnight, Mr. Lévy said, French flags festooned Benghazi, with a huge tricolor on the court building serving as opposition headquarters. On Sunday, Mr. Lévy drove the 10 hours back to the airport and flew back to Paris, and on Monday morning called Mr. Sarkozy on a better phone line and went to meet him. They agreed to keep the initiative a secret, even from the Foreign Ministry, though Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain was informed Wednesday evening.

According to Mr. Lévy, Mr. Sarkozy said he would work on getting international support and a United Nations Security Council resolution, but if he failed, he and Mr. Cameron might go ahead anyway with the mandate of the European Union, the Arab League and the African Union. Mr. Sarkozy swore them to secrecy on this “Plan B,’’ but told them to speak of everything else as they liked, Mr. Levy said. “My resolution is total,’’ Mr. Sarkozy told them.

Convincing Washington was crucial. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was coming to Paris for a Group of Eight foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday, March 14, and wanted to meet Mr. Jibril. The Qatar Embassy facilitated his travel from Doha, and Mr. Lévy went to Bourget airport to pick him up for a scheduled 4 p.m. meeting with Mrs. Clinton. But the Elysee had not been informed, and Mr. Jibril was held for two hours until 5 p.m. before he was allowed into France. The meeting was rescheduled for 10 p.m. at her hotel after a G-8 dinner at the Élysée.

At Mr. Lévy’s apartment he, Mr. Hertzog and Mr. Lévy, all of them depressed, stayed up until 2 a.m. March 15 writing an appeal to the world, what Mr. Lévy called “our last card.’’ But they did not issue it, and at 3 p.m., Mr. Sarkozy called Mr. Lévy to say that ‘‘the American position is shifting.’’

On Saturday, March 19, as Mr. Sarkozy hosted a luncheon summit on Libya, the opposition called frantically for help. Qaddafi forces had reached the suburbs of Benghazi. That afternoon, France began the bombing to general political applause at home, including the Socialists. Mr. Lévy feels he has helped to save lives, and that Mr. Sarkozy has done the right thing, leading a diplomatic effort to intervene to save the entire “Arab spring’’ and “all the hopes it has raised.’’

He claims to be indifferent to those who mock him. He laughs about the analogy to D’Annunzio, who was a proto-Fascist.

‘‘What happened is more important than all the criticism,’’ Mr. Levy said. ‘‘We avoided a bloodbath in Benghazi.’’

April 4th, 2011

Bernard-Henri Levy : My philosophy? It’s war (by Matthew Campbell, Sunday Times 04/03/2011)

France’s top thinker is a man of action who galvanised western support for the Libyan rebels after sneaking into Benghazi on a fruit truck.

The people of Libya will be eternally grateful, no doubt, to our politicians for backing military action against their dictator if he is eventually deposed. Yet the man who really took us to war in the desert is a trendy Parisian intellectual who looks like a cross between Eric Cantona and Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, and who wears his trademark white shirts undone to the navel.

Nothing can keep Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s celebrity philosopher, from a battlefield: he mixes good looks, a glamorous lifestyle and swaggering self-belief with an interest in noble causes. From Bosnia to Georgia, the limelight-loving author has missed no opportunity for deploying his tanned chest, designer wardrobe and big thoughts in the service of “truth”.

Now the self-styled “man of action” and legendary séducteur is being hailed — with some justification — as the driving force behind the allied war against Muammar Gadaffi’s forces in Libya. How did it happen? How did the preening philosopher stud with the British heiress girlfriend, Daphne Guinness, to go with his blonde, film-star wife, manage to take control of French — and in this case western — foreign policy?

“I don’t do it because I like it. I’m a writer, not a minister,” he says, describing how he took it upon himself to put the rebel leaders in contact with President Nicolas Sarkozy. It resulted in France becoming the first country officially to recognise them. “I told Sarkozy that if he did nothing, the French flags hanging in Benghazi would be spattered with the blood of innocent Libyans,” explains Lévy. “My personal feeling is that these were among the words that moved Sarkozy, that tilted him into action.”

French intellectuals have a tradition of political involvement — from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, they have frequently dabbled — and the country’s people seem to approve of figures such as BHL, as he is universally known, pushing politicians into the right moral choices. The flowing locks and unbuttoned Byronic look may seem caricaturish and annoying on our side of the Channel. He is deadly earnest, though, a stranger to irony. That, too, is a very French thing.

From his chic Boulevard Saint-Germain apartment to his luxurious Moroccan villa, the writer moves, often by private jet, in a glamorous celebrity sphere. It is a bit different from the British notion of a philosopher’s life — a tweed jacket, a pipe, an ivory tower: BHL likes life in the fast lane and says that “philosophy is war, not debate”.

The only British equivalents, he suggests, of the Gallic thinker-action figure might be rock stars such as Bono and Bob Geldof, even if they are Irish and not generally renowned as intellectuals. “They try to put pressure on western leaders,” says BHL, approvingly. “They use the same logic.”

He was a long way from the Café de Flore, his headquarters on the left bank, when he hitched a ride on the back of a fruit truck into the besieged city of Benghazi at the beginning of last month.

Somehow, he managed to keep the trademark black suit and white shirt, made to measure by Charvet, unruffled. He began to explore the battlefield.

“I was moved by the imbalance between Gadaffi’s forces and these ill-equipped young guys,” he says. He was also worried that their rebellion might be short-lived. “Gadaffi was saying that he was about to take revenge, to purge the city of its insurgent elements. I knew what it would mean: a bloodbath.”

He decided to act. He wangled his way into a meeting of the rebel leadership. “I told them that I was honoured to be there, and moved by the trust they had in me.” Then he gave them a brief history lesson. “In France,” he told them, “we have a tradition of resistance dating back to the second world war.” He also explained he had a personal contact with Sarkozy and could try to arrange a meeting with him for the leaders.

“At first, I don’t think that they took it all that seriously,” he recalls. That evening, though, he got on his battered old satellite phone to try to reach the French leader.

“The connection was very difficult,” he said. “It is a phone I have had since a trip to Afghanistan in 2000. Every few seconds the line would go dead.”

There was more than dodgy technology stacking the odds against him. Henri Guaino, one of Sarkozy’s closest lieutenants, once described BHL as “a pretentious little git”. And Lévy, for his part, was not known as an admirer or friend of the centre-right president. So why should the president listen to him?

“I did not vote for Sarkozy; we disagree on nearly everything,” Lévy acknowledges. “But I wanted to put the rebel cause on the agenda, and Sarkozy seemed the best vehicle for achieving this. French diplomacy is paralysed when it comes to initiatives like this.”

As it turned out, Sarkozy was all ears: he has a complex about not being as well read or cultured as his predecessors and, under the influence of Carla Bruni, his former supermodel and folk singer wife, has been dropping the names of obscure German film-makers and befriending left bank figures such as Lévy from the world of art and ideas.

“He was instrumentalising me, yes, of course, but I was also making an instrument of him,” says the philosopher.

What made Sarkozy particularly receptive to BHL’s pitch was the fact that he had been having a dreadful “Arab spring”.

The Elysée Palace had removed from its website pictures of Sarkozy warmly welcoming Gadaffi to Paris four years ago — he had been allowed to set up his bedouin tent in a garden in central Paris. Sarkozy also had to sack his foreign minister over her ties to the former, rapacious Tunisian regime. Known for an impulsive and impatient streak, he barely hesitated when asked by Lévy if he would meet the rebel leaders in Paris. “He just said ‘okay’,” Lévy recalls.

The philosopher was soon escorting the rebel leaders into the Elysée. Sarkozy announced to the delighted Libyans that he would recognise their council as the sole, legitimate leadership in Libya. He would send an ambassador to Benghazi and push for airstrikes on Gadaffi’s forces.

Not a man to pause for anything so trivial as a United Nations resolution, Lévy emerged onto the palace steps to announce that France recognised the rebel leadership and was preparing for airstrikes on Libya.
Descending from a train in Brussels two hours later, Alain Juppé, the newly appointed foreign minister, was dumbfounded when confronted by journalists wanting to know what he thought about BHL’s backstairs diplomacy. Furious to have been kept out of the loop, Juppé threatened to resign, but an ebullient Sarkozy managed to cajole him into flying to New York to press the case at the UN.

Much though the French expect their thinkers to leap into the political ring, it was not the first time that BHL had been accused of grandstanding and meddling. “Eighteen years ago I fixed up a meeting between Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian president, and François Mitterrand, the former Socialist leader,” he explains. He tried in vain a few years later to arrange a meeting between the former president Jacques Chirac and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir” and scourge of the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

More recently he has campaigned for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to execution by stoning; and for Roman Polanski, the film director who admitted the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1977 — “It was not a rape,” he exclaims.

For all the reverence that the French accord their thinkers, BHL has also become a figure of fun, all the more so since quoting extensively, in his latest book, the work of Botul, a philosopher who turned out, with his school of “botulism”, to have been a journalist’s hoax.

And even the French find it hard to take too seriously a man who once wrote, in one of his more introspective books: “What writer can deny that the reason he writes is to seduce women?”

Some of his comments on the Arab spring are also inclined to provoke smirks. Asked what he believes will be the ultimate effect of the protests sweeping the Middle East, he predicts an end to the history of western powers pandering to desert despots and makes the point graphically: “It will be more and more difficult for the western powers to give blowjobs to dictators.”

The defection of Musa Kusa, Gadaffi’s foreign minister, during a visit to London last week was “good news” as he was a “pillar of the regime”. Lévy predicted that others would follow like “rats leaving a sinking ship”. With any luck, this would hasten the downfall of Gadaffi. Just in case, though, he thinks the allies should start arming the rebels.

Whatever the criticism, Sarkozy must be happy with BHL’s antics. Residents of Benghazi are chanting: “One, two, three, merci Sarkozy!” If only French voters were so enthusiastic: there has been no hoped-for “Libya bounce”. “Of course there was calculation,” says Lévy, “but Sarkozy has not gained one inch in the polls.”

Lévy, by contrast, seems to have got what he wanted as he basks, shirt undone, in the public’s acknowledgment of his flamboyant “diplomatic activism”. There is a pause when he is asked if he expects a statue of him to be erected one day by a grateful Benghazi. “I was just the messenger,” he says. For once he sounds modest.

April 4th, 2011