It is easy to mock the incestuous and venomous world of the Parisian intellectual. But the Left Bank has lately descended into what the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut calls "the brutalisation of intellectual life." Editors and writers threaten each other; thinkers are as likely to exchange obscenities as ideas. It is partly to keep away from such unseemly behaviour that Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's best-known intellectual, prefers to work in the comparative safety of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Algeria. Just as there are war reporters, Lévy is a war philosopher. He risks his life to bring us insights into the minds of the world's warlords.
Risk taking seems to run in the family. Bernard-Henri's father was born into a poor Jewish family in Algeria, fought in the Spanish civil war and later for the Free French, before importing exotic wood from west Africa and making serious money. Lévy fils burst into the French consciousness in 1977 with publication of the anti-Marxist La Barbarie ?Visage Humain, an overnight sensation. At the time, this was bold. Marxism was still the intellectual religion. Lévy, like the anti-Soviet philosopher Andr?lucksmann, saw that people were being crushed in the name of this religion. In 1971, Lévy went out to Bangladesh during the civil war. Much later, he would help focus European attention on the plight of the Muslims in Bosnia, while Glucksmann defended the Chechens. For their pains they were reviled by the likes of Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and Lacan. Known as the new philosophers, Glucksmann and Lévy were unclassifiable, belonging neither to the caviar left of Mitterrand, nor to the right.
When not confronting Colombian drug barons or Angolan guerrillas, Lévy turned his hand to essays, novels, a play, journalism and a very expensive feature film shot in Mexico with Alain Delon. He has intermittently edited four newspapers, one in Kabul. In 1993 Lévy, the self-avowed libertine, married Arielle Dombasle, voted by Paris Match readers one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. "BHL" became a media star, and a magnet for national envy.
But Lévy, like Sartre, thrives on others' hatred. "A writer is all the greater the more greatly he is hated," Lévy writes in his 500-page study of Sartre, whose flat was bombed twice by his countrymen because he believed Algeria should be governed by Algerians. "Hatred and influence go together," continues Lévy. "You cannot pick up one without being handed the other." Many eminent French thinkers declared that Lévy's 1981 book about France during the occupation should be burned, and Lévy along with it. "Given my surname, this was not in the best of taste," he remarked. Lévy helped create SOS Racisme, a helpline for victims of racist violence.
Anti-American feeling is not new in France, but this year it has been ubiquitous. To be, as Lévy is, anti-anti-American is to be isolated. To be pro-Israel, which Lévy has long been, takes courage. The word "intellectual" was popularised in the 1890s to stigmatise the defenders of the Jewish Dreyfus. Lévy, say some of his detractors, cannot understand France because he was born in Algeria, and because he is a Jew.
In February 2002, Lévy was in Afghanistan, sent by Jacques Chirac on an official mission to consider ways of building a nation out of the chaos left by the Taleban and American bombs. The war philosopher was in President Hamid Karzai's office when the phone rang. The kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl had been ritually butchered, on camera, by Muslims in Karachi. When Lévy saw the videotape, the cold-blooded images of Pearl's head being severed by a knife, he recognised his next assignment. Abandoning his diplomatic mission, he flew to Pakistan to stand in the wretched, two-room hovel where, Lévy quickly concluded, Pearl had been kept prisoner for six days before being murdered. To breathe that air saturated with hatred, to gaze upon those squalid walls which had defined the limits of Pearl's final hours, was to imbibe his martyrdom: "My father is a Jew. My mother is a Jew. I am a Jew," was Pearl's final statement on camera. The visit to Pearl's place of execution provides the most compelling pages in Lévy's subsequent bestseller Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, now published in America and Britain. Lévy's investigation, however, and the way he wrote about it, proved less successful.
All his major work is, at a certain level, a form of self-study. If Lévy's best book to date is his study of Sartre, it is because in it he could freely describe himself. Lévy's Sartre has all the outlines of Lévy (the brilliant, execrated but finally redeemed philosopher, novelist and playwright). And he clearly hoped writing about Daniel Pearl was going to give him the same opportunity. In the opening pages he describes Pearl as "this fine journalist, citizen of the planet, a man curious about other men, at home in the world, friend to the forgotten, standing in solidarity with the downtrodden, a luminous character who had chosen to answer evil with good and above all to understand." It is easy here to make out Bernard-Henri Lévy gazing in the mirror; less easy to make out Daniel Pearl. Colleagues on the Wall Street Journal suggest Pearl was not like that-or if he was, there was also the prickly, ambitious man, possibly not destined to remain long on the newspaper. Lévy has not convincingly explained why he could get no comment from the WSJ, or from many of Pearl's colleagues or friends. Pearl's widow makes a fleeting appearance for form's sake, adding nothing.
Perhaps sensing his mistake, Lévy spends only 80 pages out of 495 on Pearl himself. He quickly decides that Omar Sheikh, the convicted mastermind behind the kidnap, if not the execution, is going to give him better material. So he sets the stage for a Manichean confrontation: that of a truth-seeking Jew murdered by a Muslim fanatic. The exciting thing for Lévy is that Omar Sheikh is not an illiterate peasant, brainwashed in some ayatollah's madrasa, but an LSE-educated Londoner. Thus he can identify the evil as being here, in our midst. And that is the first disappointment with Lévy's book. No sooner has he begun to sketch a vision of the world which is satisfying in its complexity, than he simplifies it back into one in which evil is ranged against good. The opening chapters and closing pages of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? should be music to the ears of neoconservatives.
But Lévy the writer has a problem. It is too risky to "fabricate" (Sartre's word, used to describe his own portrayal of Flaubert) Daniel Pearl in his own image, because there are so many people who knew him and care about his memory; and Omar Sheikh is evil incarnate (Lévy doesn't want to inhabit that). His solution is to bring centre stage a character he finds more interesting: himself. This has been fuel for his critics. He is much more at ease describing his own adventures meeting undercover agents or rabidly antisemitic police officers, lying his way into holy places or getting face time with world leaders to discuss the Pakistan problem.
There is no equivalent to Lévy in Britain or America. He is a genuinely powerful figure, and this is another reason the French intelligentsia dislike him. For years he was close to Fran?s Mitterrand-until Lévy discovered that Mitterrand had been decorated by P?in. His father was an associate of Fran?s Pinault (head of France's largest retailing group and a friend of Jacques Chirac, who in turn launched Lévy on his diplomatic career in Afghanistan). Lévy is on the board of Yves St Laurent. He is woven into a network of the Grandes Ecoles which has control over almost every branch of French life. And not just French life. Lévy feels, when in Israel, that he can call up Ariel Sharon and invite himself round for a chat. He is at home anywhere: guerrilla camp or president's office. Indeed, what was that plan he was mulling over in President Karzai's office when news came through of Pearl's murder? The proposal of his report on the reconstruction of Afghanistan was to create an Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Kabul ("we did it in Algeria," he told the FT, "why not in Kabul?"), a network of administrators who would, presumably, think as Paris dictates. Lévy's evolution has taken him from the supple, multifaceted philosophy of his youth to a position where he now advocates what is known as Franco-Fran?s post-imperialiste imperialisme (postcolonial French imperialism).
In his book about Pearl, he seeks proof for what he already believes and so fails in the basic disciplines of a reporter. He finds the house in east London where Omar Sheikh grew up, which he describes as a "typical English cottage." Then in a rather bizarre scene, he gives us Monsieur Lévy creeping round the outside while the family is asleep, peering through the windows to note a ready-laid table: eggcups, cereal, pitcher of milk and flowered plates. It's Tintin in the land of the English breakfast. He says that this adventure took place in Colvin Street, which is not listed in the A-Z. Lévy may mean Colvin Gardens, E11. He says Omar's father works at Perfect Fashions, 235 Commercial Road in Wanstead. Actually, that's 125 Commercial Road in Aldgate. The LSE becomes the "London school"; its director Anthony Giddens becomes Christopher. Leytonstone is spelled "Leydenstone." This may just be poor editing, uncorrected in the French, American and British editions (though the LSE professor Fred Halliday may be grateful that for the British edition someone has at least removed two adjectives used to describe him in the French: inepte and con). But if the devil is in the detail, how are we to trust Lévy later on, in Pakistan?
Omar's parents came to Britain from Lahore in 1968, and their son was born in London five years later. So, for Lévy, Omar is English, with an "English" passport. Lévy's failure to distinguish English from British is an excusable technical confusion, but it is one which creates a stereotype, particularly for the French reader. Lévy describes Omar as "the perfect Englishman and the ultimate enemy." This inaccurately monocultural characterisation is in stark contrast to Lévy's description of Pearl's widow: "such an odd mixture of French, now American, and a little bit of Cuban, and Buddhist, and Jewish because of Daniel."
But there is a more serious problem with Lévy's treatment of Omar Sheikh. When Pearl met his future kidnapper on the 11th January 2002, it was well known that in 1994 Omar had kidnapped four tourists: three British and one American. He had been imprisoned for this. Five years later, fellow jihadists hijacked an Indian Airlines plane and threatened to kill the 155 passengers unless Omar Sheikh and two other militants were released. Omar and the others were freed, marking him as an extremely significant figure in the militant Islamic world. In October 2001, four months before Pearl fixed his meeting with Omar, the press reported that the same Omar Sheikh was personally involved in financing 9/11. So when Lévy, at the start of his book, writes "The Hotel Akbar, where [Pearl] met for the first time his future executioner Omar Sheikh," you wonder if Pearl was naive or stupid. Either way, we need to know why he put himself in danger.
Lévy doesn't offer an explanation, and 150 pages later he goes back over their meeting in the Hotel Akbar, still maintaining that Pearl spent three hours with Omar Sheikh. During the build-up to the execution, Lévy creates a fictional scene in which Pearl refers to Omar Sheikh, who is not present ("He wants to shout: 'Would a spy have trusted Omar Sheikh?'"). It is only on page 408 that Lévy tells us that Omar Sheikh never used his real name with Pearl. For their meeting, he called himself Bashir or Shabir. This is not merely sloppy writing. To put Omar's name into Pearl's mouth during the execution verges on dishonesty.
"It happened like this, or some other way, it doesn't matter," wrote the master, Sartre, describing how Jean Genet became a thief. Lévy borrows this mode of literary licence to justify what he calls, in the French version, his romanqu?e ("fictionvestigation"). "My aim was to cull through the evidence for the most factual account possible. And when the tracks were missing, I did my job as a writer: the method of romanqu?e-never give in to the imagination when reality is there, but give it a role when reality eludes you." In other words, you've spent months looking for evidence to support what you want to say and you don't have enough facts to prove your point, so you embellish them. After all, you're in the third world, the interviews are conducted through an interpreter, some details have become confused, and such anonymous sources aren't going to read the book anyway. So Lévy tells us that Pearl's murder was a "state crime," committed because he knew too much-that Pakistan's bomb is no longer controlled by the "duplicitous" government but by the bearded ones, hand in glove with the secret service. Lévy tells us that Saddam was yesterday's tyrant, that Bush chose the wrong target, that Pakistan is the true rogue state.
Some of this may be true, but even when Pearl was alive it was not new. The New Yorker ran a story in November 2001 about the risks of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal; the Washington Post had an article in December about Bin Laden's nuclear connections. With Pearl dead, Lévy takes the liberty of alleging that his protagonist was on the trail of a great story for which he was killed. The WSJ has formally denied any such possibility, and Pearl's father told the Los Angeles Times, "it doesn't gel with the facts." So let's take Lévy's lead and "fabricate" an explanation for his explanation; maybe he was in a hurry, needed a thesis for his book, and made it up.
Bernard-Henri Lévy does still take risks with his life, but no longer with his ideas. Here is a respected French philosopher, a man of experience and conviction who has spent a year investigating militant Islam, at times with diplomatic access. Yet he brings no convincing thought to bear on the subject. The French have often criticised the Americans for lack of subtlety in their thinking, but if this is the alternative, we should be grateful for US sophistication. There is no clear global analysis, no grasp of militant Islam in general nor Omar Sheikh in particular. And, perhaps most disappointingly, there is no real insight into the violence which Lévy has made the centre of his philosophy. He might learn as much about brutality on a visit to the Left Bank as he did by poring over the grotesque video footage of Pearl's decapitation.
