Bernard-Henri Lévy

The Atlantic Monthly publishes the short essays that will form the basis of his larger work American Vertigo. Four years ahead of time he foretells Barack Obama’s election in an article titled « A Black Clinton ».

The Bosnian translation of his work Le Lys et la Cendre is launched.
Hélène Brenkman becomes his U.S. agent.

Under the direction of Will Murphy, Random House U.S. releases the final, complete, English version of American Vertigo, followed by the original French version’s release in March (Grasset).

In April, Lévy takes a strong stand, along with Fred Vargas and others, against the extradition of the former extreme-left activist Cesare Battisti, whose book Ma Cavale he publishes and prefaces.

In July, as war erupts between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, Bernard-Henri Lévy returns to the bombed towns of Northern Israel, inspiring an extensive report published simultaneously in The New York Times Magazine and Le Monde.

He is awarded the Prix Scopus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, joining the likes of Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, Eric de Rothschild, and Roman Polanski, among others. Bernard-Henri Lévy dedicates an increasing amount of his time in the U.S. He is currently under contract with The New York Times Syndicate to write a syndicated column presenting his forthcoming journalistic essays.

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.

Doctorat Honoris Causa awarded by Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In September, the publication by Random House of Left in Dark Times, the American version of Ce grand cadavre à la renverse. The book is a Los Angeles Times bestseller and solidifies the author’s reputation in the U.S.

In August he travels to Georgia to cover the outbreak of the war provoked by South Ossetia and Abkhazia separatists and their Russian backers. His reporting appears in Le Monde and again in the European newspapers to which he is traditionally connected. In the United States, the Huffington Post publishes it, marking the beginning of a regular collaboration with the online newspaper created by Arianna Huffington.

In October Flammarion and Grasset co-publish his correspondence with Michel Houellebecq under the title Ennemis Publics. 70,000 copies are sold. Foreign rights are sold worldwide, including of course in the United States, where the book is scheduled to appear in 2010 from Random House, which is more than ever Bernard-Henri Lévy’s home port in the U.S.

As he has in Georgia and at the moment of the war in Lebanon, as in all of Israel’s wars, he goes to Tel Aviv at the start of the conflict. He visits the Israeli towns under rocket attacks by Hamas. He is also, with Alexis Duclos, the first foreign journalist to enter Gaza, “embedded” in an elite Israeli army unit.

In June he produces many texts, calls for demonstrations, and expressions of solidarity with Iranian people in their struggle for democracy and an accurate recount of the election which went to the one who henceforth can only be called “unelected president Ahmadinejad.”

June 22, he is reelected, for a fifth consecutive term, president of Arte-France’s Conseil de Surveillance.