Bernard-Henri Lévy

Student at NYU : My first meeting with Bernard-Henri Levy.

Barbarism with a human face had been recently published. It had not only received very good critiques in France, but had also got a very positive coverage across the Atlantic. I had read this book with great interest. A friend told me that Bernard-Henri Levy was going to give a seminar at New York University on ‘ The French Intellectuals since the Dreyfus Affair.” Although I was a student at Columbia University, I decided to register for this course at NYU and postpone my yearly trip to France.
This course was held from Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to noon , but the first day of the course with the stifling heat of a New York spring, a professor of NYU announced that unfortunately Mr. Levy could not come this morning and he would substitute for him. Keen disappointment. During the class, a few minutes later, a student came in, but to my great surprise, instead of sitting with us the students, he remained standing. Suddenly, the professor from NYU stopped talking and announced :” Well, finally, let me introduce you your professor, Mr. Bernard-Henri Levy.” This student wearing a white T shirt, corduroy pants, long hair casually styled was the famous Bernard-Henri Levy ! I was flabbergasted! Living in New York, I had never seen him in the many TV shows in France where he had participated. We were silent, fascinated, dumfounded by his eloquence, his stream of words flowing toward us. His classes were always quite lively. Professor Levy, like no one else I ever had before, encouraged questions and debates. Our class, mostly French teachers discovered in a few weeks : “Red Petainism”, “Berlin the brown and Moscow the red” ”Resistance in France”, but also the names of well-known French collaborators such as Charles Maurras, Drieu de la Rochelle, Robert Brasillach, as well those less well known but all the more pernicious. Being shy and reserved, I was surprised to find myself interceding to take sides for this young professor who was revealing to us aspects of a fascism ‘ à la française ‘ that some students in the class did not accept.
Thirty years have now passed, but this course still remains as alive and memorable in my memory as if it just happened. I suspect that our class of twenty students did not realize that they were assisting to the birth of L’ Idéologie française, published in 1981, which raised intense reactions and passionate discussions, not only among French intellectuals such as Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel, but also among the media and the public.