Posted on 05/01/2005 8:32:31 PM PDT by denydenydeny
NEW YORK - In the glory days of the French-American cultural love affair, visiting Gallic thinkers brandished Gauloise cigarettes when uneasily fielding questions from reporters here.
Sartre, Beauvoir and others swirled their miniature teachers' pointers to signal passion about ideas. They held them skyward to evince disdain. They snuffed them out forcefully to shut down a subject.
Welcome to 2005. Now peace-loving Jacques Chirac raises cigarette taxes 20 percent a year as he wages a "war on tobacco" against the third of French adults who still smoke. And here in a Manhattan conference room, Random House also lives by no-smoking rules.
So Bernard-Henri Levy, France's most telegenic and controversial philosopher for more than a quarter century - at 56 still flashing the familiar swarthy good looks, the glowing tan showcased by his serially unbuttoned white shirt - makes do by massaging his cell phone between answers.
As communicative symbols go, it's not a bad one for Levy's current grand project.
The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine widely praised in recent years for top-notch long-form journalism, invited Levy last year to retrace the famous nine-month visit to America of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1831-32). That trip by Tocqueville, only 26 at the time, produced the two volumes of Democracy in America (1835-40), an instant critical success at home and still considered by many the finest book ever written on America.
The bicentennial of Tocqueville's birth takes place on July 29. And the first of Levy's seven articles, offering his experiences and insights, appears in the magazine's May issue. A Random House book based on the articles is promised for early 2006.
"On the whole," Levy remarks, asked how his year of exploring the United States affected him, "I did not change. I remain the same anti anti-American. I continue to love this country. I even love it more."
A metaphor comes to mind.
"It is like with women," says the longhaired lightning rod envied by many countrymen not just for (a) his fame, (b) his sparkling career, and (c) the 150-million-euro fortune that resulted when he sold his father's timber company, but for (d) a legendary love life now focused on his marriage to Arielle Dombasle, the beautiful French actress.
"It is a crazy idea," Levy continues, "to imagine that when you know a woman better, you love her less. When you know her better, in ordinary life, she is even more moving than seen from afar."
Tocqueville's visit here ostensibly began as an investigation into America's penal system. Democracy in America nonetheless became, historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, "the standard source for generalizing about America."
Tocqueville brought a brilliant overview to American society, putting U.S. politics into perspective while astutely commenting on the worldwide move toward social equality and the growing significance of "individualism," a word that first entered English through the translation of Democracy in America.
Like Tocqueville, Levy came ashore at Newport, R.I. He went on to visit, among other places, New York's Rikers Island prison, a mega-church in Barrington, Ill., and Minnesota's Mall of America, mirroring if not exactly re-creating Tocqueville's travels.
Judging from the first installment, Levy reverses Tocqueville's priorities, placing raw reportage first, overarching generalizations second. He talks to the well-known, such as novelist Jim Harrison and American Indian activist Russell Means, as well as to such ordinary Americans as the Illinois cop who catches Levy relieving himself on the side of a highway.
The peripatetic Frenchman is "struck by the omnipresence of 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' " impressed by our "extraordinary sense of the law," convinced that America isn't all "backward cowboys and uneducated people."
In fact, Levy says, he rejects the cliche of America as an unphilosophical country: "If you mean ideological country... I would even say the reverse. The ideological debate might be stronger today in America than in France."
That, he suggests, is one change from Tocqueville's America. Others, Levy notes quickly, include a surprising growth of puritanism on the American left, and the rise of America's "democratic messianism."
Levy came to prominence internationally thanks to Barbarism With a Human Face (1977). That book began with a now-famous definition of himself as "the bastard son of a diabolical couple, Fascism and Stalinism." Levy meant that he, as a former student radical turned grown-up intellectual, felt forced by history to free himself of both traditions.
Levy assumed the leadership of the so-called New Philosophers, young French thinkers influenced by Eastern European dissidents and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's groundbreaking work The Gulag Archipelago (1973). They turned against the French left's long tradition of apologetics for the totalitarianism spawned by Marxism.
In the nearly three decades since, Levy has thrown himself - as thinker, author, journalist and editor of a book series at the prestigious publisher Grasset - into countless controversies, from the siege of Sarajevo to the murder of reporter Daniel Pearl.
Meanwhile, his steady succession of books - among them L'Ideologie Francaise, about French fascism, Le Testament de Dieu, about monotheism, and a major biography of Jean-Paul Sartre - have protected him from devolving into a mere talking head on French TV.
Nonetheless, more academically inclined French philosophers have frequently derided Levy. Gilles Deleuze, for instance, long ago dismissed the "New Philosophers" as "a media racket mounted by the Right."
But today many of the Left's putative "masters of thought" (such as Deleuze) are gone, while Levy endures as a major combatant in Parisian intellectual wars. That stamina strikes Levy as one reason he remains a frequent object of attack.
"Maybe it's because I am vivant - living, really living," he says. "... Because I am producing too much, working too hard, saying too many things."
He believes he also draws criticism from across the political spectrum because, despite some moves to the right on foreign policy, he has "never become a neo-conservative." He says he has "stayed a leftist" and a secularist on such issues as abortion and the death penalty.
Why, then does he make himself a bigger target, a la Tom Wolfe, by his flamboyant dress - those signature billowy white shirts open to the navel?
Levy's reply indicates that he's not only "really living," but capable of coming alive fast with gestures and explosive phrases worthy of an Italian.
"It is my madness!" Levy exclaims, his cell phone barely staying earthbound. "I cannot stand, I never wore in my life, a tie! I cannot! I feel strangled... . For me, it's a way to breathe. I am physical. I am a man of the sun. I'm sportive. I spend half of my life, when I don't travel, in the south of France. I live naked. Nearly naked. So this is a compromise. I cannot to please them put a tie. I went to the Pope without tie. I button more, but without a tie."
So there.
BHL is a treasure. Part Hitchens, part showman, exuberant, bombastic, but doggedly (as he puts it) anti anti-American, he both embodies and breaks all the stereotypes about the French. One minor critique: his current article in the Atlantic Monthly is a bit weak (and definitely weak by his standards).
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