Bernard-Henri Lévy

He founds, along with Michel Butel, a short-lived daily, L’Imprévu. Travels to Portugal in the summer of 1975; associates himself with the far-left figure Otelo de Carvalho, and writes a long report co-signed with Gilles Hertzog, published in Le Monde Diplomatique. Travels to Angola, among the Jonas Savimbi resistance fighters, with Gilles Hertzog and Dominique de Roux.

He meets Louis Aragon who casts him in the role of Paul Denis in an adaptation of Aurélien by Michel Favart and Françoise Verny.

Publishes La Barbarie à visage humain (Grasset), thereby launching the “BHL” phenomenon : this essay, which aligns itself with l’idéologie progressiste, a new progressive ideology by looking beyond fascism, Stalinism, and Marxism, provoked impassioned discussions and enjoyed immediate success. Supported by the dual benediction of Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into several languages. Leonardo Sciascia prefaces the Italian edition, and Octavio Paz is its standard-bearer in Spain and Latin America. Thus, BHL (the acronym creates a furor) becomes an object of admiration as well as controversy.

Having entered the fascist Argentina of the generals at the time of the Soccer World Cup with fake credentials as a sports reporter, he is arrested on his arrival in Buenos Aires and briefly jailed, but nevertheless files his reports on the human rights violations the regime is guilty of. This text appears in France in the Nouvel Observateur and in the U.S. in The New Republic.

Le Testament de Dieu (Grasset) is released, taking up where La Barbarie à visage humain left off, proposing a response to the current nihilism and disenchantment by referring to the biblical text. The work is praised by Emmanuel Levinas, to whom the author makes several references in his work.

Bernard-Henri Lévy travels frequently to Italy, where he participates actively among left and extreme-left groups, and in the intellectual fight against terrorism, thereby coming into contact with the psychoanalyst-activist Armando Verdiglione. Concerned with, as he puts it, “combating the adversary on his own territory”, he writes a number of texts for the alternative daily newspaper Lotta Continua, in which he underscores the fascist heritage of the extreme left’s terrorist actions. In Paris, he becomes close to Romain Gary, whom he sees regularly until the eve of his death in December 1980.