I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the delight of the French intellectual class at the ridicule to which Bernard-Henri Lévy (aka “BHL”) had exposed himself when he was caught quoting the “work” of a fictitious philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Botul, in one of his two newly published books. BHL’s extraordinary media profile in France (think Alain de Botton attracting Katie Price-style column acreage) has ensured that l’affaire Botul won’t be expiring any time soon.
A week after BHL’s working practices were first impugned by Aude Lancelin in the weekly Nouvel Observateur, Delefeil de Ton, who writes a column in the magazine every Monday, compared BHL to Patrick Balkany, mayor of the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret, and an intimate of Nicolas Sarkozy, who claimed in a recent book to have slept with Brigitte Bardot when he was 18 — a boast that attracted a furious rebuttal from Bardot herself.
At the same time, Le Nouvel Observateur issued a communiqué congratulating itself — with some justification, it must be said — for its “independence” during the whole affair, which contrasted favourably, it claimed, with the “servility that most of the French press had displayed towards Bernard-Henri Lévy”.
BHL’s reaction was immediate and ferocious: in an appearance on the France Inter radio station (a video of which you can watch here), he expressed his dismay at such an august journal (“the paper of Foucault and of Sartre”) engaging in a “manhunt”.
And, in the latest twist in the tale, one of BHL’s powerful friends, the former Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, has come to his aid. In a piece in Le Monde entitled “BHL, François Mitterrand, the mob and me“, Royal complains about the “incredible manhunt” launched against Lévy, deplores the tone of the debate, and points out that the newspaper Libération was forced to close the comment facility on its website after it was polluted by the ravings of anti-Semites (BHL is Jewish).
She ends by quoting something Mitterrand said about the book that made Lévy’s name in the late 1970s, Barbarism With a Human Face: “It is, in the image of its author,” the former president wrote, “a book at once superb and naive.” Royal concludes with this extraordinary paean to a man whose lack of professionalism ought to have made him persona non grata in polite circles:
The Bernard-Henri Lévy I know, whose advice I have sought, the upright and engaged man whom I admire profoundly, is, at bottom, exactly the one François Mitterrand had sensed. That surprises you? It doesn’t surprise me.
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