The election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency of the French Republic, on a ticket of the Gaullist and centrist right, was marked by two kinds of defection from the left. In advance of the vote, a number of former Marxist Parisian intellectuals like André Glucksmann announced their intention of voting for Sarkozy and against the rather vapid and temperamental quasi-spousal Socialist party team of Ségolène Royal and her significant other, François Hollande. And then, once the victory of Sarkozy had been assured — probably rather more by the votes of former rightists than former leftists — the new president offered some plum jobs to prominent Socialists like Bernard Kouchner, the ex-Communist and cofounder of the campaigning internationalist outfit Doctors Without Borders, who is now foreign minister, before himself proceeding to give new meaning to the term “husband and wife team” by marrying the former supermodel Carla Bruni in the Élysée Palace itself.
You might say that this situation was superbly designed for an address from Bernard-Henri Lévy — universally known in France as BHL — who cuts a commanding figure both in the circles of the Left Bank intelligentsia and in the world of Parisian high fashion and salon society (and whose lovely wife, Arielle Dombasle, could look Carla Bruni in the eye any day). But the fact is that these developments make him feel extremely uncomfortable. He happens to have known Sarkozy since 1983, when Sarkozy was elected mayor of Neuilly; yet when he received a telephone call from Sarkozy last year, demanding to know when the BHL endorsement would be coming, he found himself unable to play ball. In fact, he found himself abandoning intellectual terrain for a moment and saying that he would cast his vote for the left candidate, as ever, because it was la gauche that was his “family.”
The verbatim account of this telephone call, which forms a sort of prologue to “Left in Dark Times,” is actually the key to the entire book. Lévy defends himself vigorously from the aggressive and often vulgar baiting of a fairly obvious egomaniac, who loudly demands to know what he is doing in such a galère of fools and fellow travelers as the French left has become. While resenting the demagogy, BHL keeps being forced to admit that the candidate of the right has some shrewd points to make, about Darfur, about Hezbollah, about Chechnya. Indeed, I sometimes can’t help feeling that it might be nice to live in a country where a presidential nominee will call you up, drop the names of your intellectual enemies and recall their perfidious reactions to one of your books, before adding, “Do you really think I’m an idiot or do you really believe what you are saying, that these people are your family?”
Rather than respond conventionally — because after all, isn’t a lot of family life like that? — Lévy embarks on a long excursion into what Diderot may have been the first to call l’esprit d’escalier, all the fine rejoinders that occur to one only when one is descending the stairs and it’s just too late. He feels bound, in other words, to vindicate the honor of the left. And he also feels obliged to say that the left requires a bit of a makeover. Navigating these shoals, and continually asking himself as well as others to confront the hard questions, he produces a text that I think many readers will find highly absorbing.
I should not delay any further in saying that BHL and I have been on the same platform once or twice (on opposite sides in the case of the American intervention in Iraq and on the same side concerning the veiling of Muslim women in Europe) and that we have a fairly friendly truce on some other matters. If you wanted to sum up his political outlook in a phrase, you would find yourself borrowing Orwell’s remark that it’s not enough to be antifascist; one must also be in principle antitotalitarian.
I sometimes wish that Lévy were capable of being this terse and lucid. He can take a long time to show how agonized he is by leftist compromises with every disgraced regime and ideology from Slobodan Milosevic to Islamic jihadism, but the effort expended is worthwhile and shows some of the scars of political warfare from Bangladesh to Bosnia. He is much readier to defend Israel as a democratic cause than are most leftists and many Jews, but he was early in saying that a Palestinian state was a good idea, not because it would appease Arab and Muslim grievances but for its own sake. (This distinction strikes me as both morally and politically important.)
So it is of some interest that he confronts Sarkozy on the very question that probably propelled the former mayor of Neuilly to the forefront of French politics in the first place: the highly toxic question of violent conduct in les banlieues. In these gruesome districts on the Parisian periphery, Muslim youths of Arab and African provenance have long been staging a rolling showdown with the French police. Some secular liberals and leftists agreed in general with Sarkozy when he referred to the rioters as “scum” or “riff-raff.” These racaille were not deprived, but depraved. And behind their vandalism lurked the specter of radical Islam. The problem, then, was to be defined by Sarkozy only as one of law and order. In reply to this, Lévy collects himself and delivers a very eloquent statement to the effect that one must never define the have-nots out of existence. He offers, first, a play on the word banlieue itself, which is associated with the medieval term lieu de banor place of the outcasts. For this one must substitute the term “neighborhood,” Lévy argues, and for the following reason:
“Better that than connotations of banishment; better something overly sociological than something that reeks of banished pariahs, the refuse of the social contract, rubbish, ghosts, the damned. Because after all . . . arsonists are one thing. But how useful is it to treat entire neighborhoods just as the ‘dangerous classes’ used to be treated?”
He continues in this vein for some time. One or two of his chapters can be described as almost an interior monologue or stream of consciousness, where the son of a man who fought for the Spanish Republic is having trouble with a redefinition of what the verses of the “Internationale” call “the wretched of the earth.” Not everyone will share in the historic misery of this experience, of having seen Cambodia or Zimbabwe, say, turn into something rather worse than a negation of the liberating dream.
But for those who have, as well as for those who haven’t, Lévy provides a good register of what it felt like. And then there is this:
“I’m convinced that the collapse of the Communist house almost everywhere has even, in certain cases, had the unexpected side effect of wiping out the traces of its crimes, the visible signs of its failure, allowing certain people to start dreaming once again of an unsullied Communism, uncompromised and happy.”
If this is not precisely true, even of those nostalgic for “Fidel,” apologetic about Hugo Chávez, credulous about how “secular” the Baath Party was, or prone to sympathize with Vladimir Putin concerning the “encircling” of his country by aggressive titans like Estonia and Kosovo and Georgia, still it does contain a truth. One could actually have gone further and argued that the totalitarian temptation now extends to an endorsement of Islamism as the last, best hope of humanity against the American empire. I could without difficulty name some prominent leftists, from George Galloway to Michael Moore, who have used the same glowing terms to describe “resistance” in, say, Iraq as they would once have employed for the Red Army or the Vietcong. Trawling the intellectual history of Europe, as he is able to do with some skill, Lévy comes across an ancestor of this sinister convergence in a yearning remark confided to his journal by the fascist writer Paul Claudel on May 21, 1935: “Hitler’s speech; a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe.”
Lévy is better when tracing these filiations and complexities than when making idealist generalizations like: “the double crown of freedom and equality … a liberal torpedo in the egalitarian granite … the two-headed eagle of the desire for emancipation.” This constitutes, I think you may agree, a surfeit of metaphors. The possibility also exists that he may have been ill served by his translator, who renders the wicked old antireformist slogan of “the worse the better” as the confusingly neutral phrase the “politics of the worst.”
In his last book, a retracing of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” Lévy appeared in the role of mediator at a time when French-American relations were in a sorry condition. Here, too, he takes a stand against the mindless anti-Americanism that is so prevalent among the lumpen intellectuals of Europe. In his view, the phenomenon has two highly unpleasant subtexts to it. The first is envy and resentment, deriving from the fact that the United States has several times intervened to save Europe from itself and from the consequences of its ideological dementias. The second, perhaps not unrelated, is a no-less-envious perception of America as a handmaiden and vassal of the Jews.
This blending of a relatively modern prejudice with the oldest prejudice of them all is what sickens Lévy enough to give it the appellation “Red-Brown.” It is the “new barbarism” of his subtitle. Against it, he counterposes the values of the Enlightenment, the France of the Dreyfusards, of Camus rather than Sartre, of Jean Moulin and Pierre Mendès-France rather than Maurice Thorez or — BHL’s true bête noire — that debased Jacobin of today’s French Socialism, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The left, he insists, must renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you.
In conclusion, Lévy repudiates radical sympathy with theocracy, and indeed theology, by inverting Pascal and saying that “we have to make an antiwager that we can win not by betting on the existence but on the nonexistence of God. That’s the price of democracy. And the alternative, the only one, is the devil and his legions of murderous angels.” It’s hard not to wish him well in striving to purge the left of its demons. But an antiwager is still a wager, and one sometimes has the feeling that the dark times of the old left are only just beginning.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 5, 2008
A review on Sept. 21 about “Left in Dark Times,” a book of political analysis by Bernard-Henri Lévy, misspelled the given name of the president of
