This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

“I don’t believe in history as progress, I do not believe in purity, I do not believe in the ‘good’ society. I believe that man is a failed species.” Philosopher, writer and campaigner for the right of Kurds, Ukrainians and Israelis to live without threat from a belligerent neighbour or fanatically-inclined zealots, Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) is more than a public intellectual in a French TV studio. He has faced harm on several battlefronts. His reporting presents the facts of war as directly as they can be from a non-combatant point of view. All this in his emblematic chemise blanche déboutonnée and costume noir.

Who is he? Lévy was born in Béni Saf, a coastal town in Algeria, in 1948. His parents were of Sephardic origin and pieds-noirs, which is to say, French citizens. His mother was descended from a line of Algerian rabbis; his father had served with the Free French and went on to found a profitable timber import-export business. In due course Lévy would inherit his father’s substantial wealth.

The family relocated to France in the early 1950s and settled in the elegant Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Lévy studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure from 1968–71 under the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and the Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser, and — in those febrile times — he became a Maoist. Upon graduation he taught at a lycée and the University of Strasbourg, but the appeal of teaching and academia soon faded.

Lévy the young man was well-placed and not shy in coming forward: Derrida’s cousin owned the local chemist’s shop where Lévy bought his amphetamines; François Mitterrand asked him when still a student to join a think tank on workplace democracy post-1968; André Malraux, culture minister under de Gaulle, recruited Lévy for a proposed international brigade to liberate Bangladesh from Pakistani rule (it didn’t happen).

Public recognition as a young gun New Philosopher came in 1977 with his appearance on the TV programme Apostrophes. There to publicise his book, Barbarism with a Human Face, which begins “I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism”, he denounced both with equal vigour.

The footage is a gallic delight: a cramped studio full of disputatious, supercilious speakers, viewed through blue spirals of cigarette smoke. Lévy is there in a black jacket, white shirt, black mane. The visual elements of the BHL trademark are all in place. From this point on, one can assign the aperçus, sharp commentary and prophesising as coming from Lévy the philosopher; whilst the poise, lifestyle and self-assurance emanate from BHL the boulevardier.

It is not known if Lévy underwent a Damascene conversion to liberalism and humanitarianism

What is he against and what is he for? It is not known if Lévy — en route to a lifetime’s struggle of insurgency, peasant mobilisation and the creation of strategic alliances — underwent a Damascene conversion to liberalism and humanitarianism.

Like many, he would have reflected, matured and perhaps re-read more critically his textbooks on the power of the state and on revolution. In any event, as he entered his thirties, Lévy had rejected the Hegelian notion of the state as “the march of God on earth”, as well as the Marxist and Soviet re-interpretations of this.

Lévy has devoted much of his career to reporting in media res on war and failed or failing states. In 1992–95 he covered events in Bosnia and Sarajevo, then under siege by Milošević’s Serb militias. The turn of the century saw Lévy spend several months in Afghanistan, at the request of President Chirac, to report on how France might contribute towards the eventual rebuilding of the country.

In 2011 he even acted as an intermediary in Libya between anti-Gaddafi forces and the French, UK and US governments. In 2015 Lévy spent six months with the Peshmerga, travelling the length of the 600-mile border separating Iraqi Kurdistan from territory occupied by an advancing Islamic State.

Since 2014 he has covered events in Ukraine, supporting the anti-Yanukovych protestors at Maidan in Kyiv; in 2023 he was an embed again, this time with the Ukrainian forces during their counter-offensive. Most recently, Lévy has borne witness to the aftermath of Hamas’ slaughter of innocent Israelis on 7 October last year. He arrived in-country the next day.

I will never forget my first impressions. The smell of sour milk that filled the bullet-pocked, blasted, half-burned houses; the contents of their kitchen cabinets scattered in the rooms, as if blown away by a hurricane. (Israel Alone, 2024)

Lévy’s pessimism flows from what he sees as the diminished status of the US-led international order. The Global West — Europe, the anglophone nations and elsewhere with similar values — shares a faith in the European enlightenment. Worryingly, this is diminishing geographically and in people’s minds.

In its place will come what he calls the Five Kings of our era: Russia, China, Iran, neo-Ottoman Turkey and jihadist-prone Arabic countries. They will resolve their old hostilities with each other to create new authoritarian grandeur at the expense of the West, if we allow it. This is the concern that so exercises him.

Where does he stand domestically? Lévy is a centrist who has supported Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron. However, the ecology of French politics is changing. The middle ground is ceding to what were once minority parties or to alliances of convenience.

The response to this year’s parliamentary gains for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) was the formation of an alliance between Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) with the Socialists, Greens and Communists to become the largest bloc in the National Assembly. The RN is not the runaway success it nearly was, but, for Lévy, an equally bad party — LFI — will now hold sway on legislative business for the next four years.

Mélenchon is no friend of Jews nor of Israel and appears to want to turn Paris into Palestine-sur-Seine. Lévy despises him and lambasts him on social media as devious, Putinian and a Marxist-Leninist buffoon. It is this defence of Israel and Jewry, plus the commitment to telling the story of those under the cosh in Mosul and Bakhmut that distinguish him from a lukewarm centrist. The extent to which others identify with those causes is the measure of his support in France.

He once stated to Michel Houellebecq: “In the face of assaults my ego is fireproof, shatterproof.” And well he might. Timidity is not the mark of the man. Some have dismissed him as a vain celebrity. Without doubt, BHL has “un look” that has endured, whether on the battlefield or the boulevard. As for celebrity, he is in the front rank, behind Macron and Kylian Mbappé. With the wealth, charisma and intelligence have come the properties, fame, success and the actress-singer wife.

There have been failings of course, notably his willingness to defend Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The balance sheet though is demonstrably in his favour. Whether he believes in them or not, he is on the side of the angels.