Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy (; born 5 November 1948) is a French public intellectual. Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976. His opinions, political activism, and publications have also been the subject of several controversies over the years.

This profile of Bernard-Henri Lévy covers Early Life and Family Background, New Philosophers, Notable books, Notable movies and 1980s and 1990s.

Early Life and Family Background of Bernard-Henri Lévy

Lévy was born in 1948 in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to an affluent Sephardic Jewish (Algerian-Jewish) family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. He is the son of Dina (Siboni) and André Lévy, the founder and manager of a timber company, Becob, who became a multimillionaire from his business. He is the brother of Véronique Lévy.

Inspired by a call for an International Brigade to aid Bangladeshi separatists made by André Malraux, he became a war correspondent for Combat in 1971, covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. The next year he worked as a civil servant for the newly established Bangladesh Ministry of Economy and Planning. His experience in Bangladesh was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangladesh, Nationalism in the Revolution", 1973). He visited Bangladesh again in 2014 to speak at the launch of the first Bengali translation of this book and to open a memorial garden for Malraux at Dhaka University.

New Philosophers of Bernard-Henri Lévy

After his return to France, Lévy became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg where he taught a course on epistemology. He also taught philosophy at the École normale supérieure. He was a founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who developed an uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas.

Notable books

Although Lévy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in gaining a wider US audience was the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly, later collected as a book. In preparation for the series, In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Lévy crisscrossed the United States, interviewing Americans, and recording his observations, with direct reference to his acclaimed predecessor, Alexis de Tocqueville. His work was published in serial form in the magazine and collected as a book by the same title. The book was widely criticized in the United States, with Garrison Keillor publishing a damning review on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

In February 2016, Lévy published a book entitled L'Esprit du Judaisme. An English version, The Genius of Judaism, was published by Random House in January 2017. Liam Hoare wrote in Moment that the book examines "the humanism, ethics and politics of Judaism, as well as address the issues of Israel and anti-Semitism in France today".

Notable movies

Lévy's involvement with the Kurdish cause goes back to the early 1990s. On 16 May 2016, Bernard-Henri Lévy's new documentary film, Peshmerga, was chosen by the Cannes Film Festival as a special screening to its official selection. Lévy developed his vision of the Iraqi Civil War, through the Peshmerga fighters (Kurdish fighters armed by Westerners and fighting in particular against Daesh). It consists of images shot on the spot by a small team, especially with the help of drones. It portrays notably the female regiments of the Peshmerga army.

"The third part of a trilogy, opus three of a documentary made and lived in real-time, the missing piece of the puzzle of a lifetime, the desperate search for enlightened Islam. Where is that other Islam strong enough to defeat the Islam of the fundamentalists? Who embodies it? Who sustains it? Where are the men and women who in word and deed strive for that enlightened Islam, the Islam of law and human rights, an Islam that stands for women and their rights, that is faithful to the lofty thinking of Averroes, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Ibn Tufail, and Rumi?..."

"Here, with this third film, this hymn to Kurdistan and the exception that it embodies, I have the feeling of possibly reaching my goal. Kurdistan is Sunnis and Shiites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Syrians living freely with Muslims, the memory of the Jews of Aqrah, secularism, freedom of conscience and belief. It is where one can run into a Jewish Barzani on the forward line of a front held, 50 kilometers from Erbil, by his distant cousin, a Muslim, Sirwan Barazi... Better than the Arab Spring. The Bosnian dream achieved. My dream. There is no longer really any doubt. Enlightened Islam exists: I found it in Erbil."

A year later, Lévy said that "Jews have a special obligation to support the Kurds", and that he hopes "they will come say to the Peshmerga: 'For years now you have spilled your blood to defend the values of our shared civilization. Now it is our turn to defend your right to live freely and independently.'"

This documentary, released in 2022, shows Lévy visiting several countries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic as he documents various atrocities and humanitarian crises.

Since 2022, Lévy made four documentaries on the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Why Ukraine, Slava Ukraini, Glory to the Heroes and Our War.

1980s and 1990s

In 1981, Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), in which he offers a dark picture of French history. It was strongly criticised for its journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history by Marxism-critic Raymond Aron.

In the 1990s, Lévy called for European and American intervention in the Bosnian War during the breakup of Yugoslavia. He spoke about the Serb POW camps which were holding Bosniaks. He referred to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other nations.

At the end of the 1990s, with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, Lévy founded an Institute on Levinassian Studies at Jerusalem, in honour of Emmanuel Levinas.

2000s

Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur.

In 2006, Lévy joined the British debate over Muslim women's veils by said to The Jewish Chronicle that wearing a veil had the effect of dehumanizing the wearer by hiding her face –and suggested, alluding to a passage by Emmanuel Levinas, that "the veil is an invitation to rape".

In August 2008, Lévy interviewed the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, during the Russia-Georgian War.

In 2009, Lévy started a petition in support of film director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

2010s

In January 2010, Lévy publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_L%C3%A9vy), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.