POLITICO: On the Rocks is an occasional interview series in which we engage with thought-provoking political figures in relaxed, candid conversations over a drink.
PARIS — Bernard-Henri Lévy has been so famous in France for so long he is known by his own acronym. BHL is a wealthy philosopher, celebrity war reporter, television executive and friend to presidents and movie stars. He is as quintessentially French as croissants, the tricolor and extramarital affairs.
I’m meeting him on a glorious fall morning at one of Paris’ most refined restaurants, where the maître d’ has shown me to BHL’s favorite table in the darkened “library” to wait for him. He’s asked me not to name the establishment because he is under police protection thanks to numerous death threats, including from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He arrives late, wearing sunglasses in the dim light and his signature white shirt unbuttoned far down his smooth, hairless, 75-year-old chest. He’s on the phone, and his long wavy hair reminds me of a quote often misattributed to him: “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”
He hangs up and apologizes politely for being late — his previous interview with The Wall Street Journal ran over time. A subtle flex to get us off on the right footing.
A French acquaintance of mine who runs in BHL’s intellectual circles observes that he was very early to appreciate the power of personal branding. The open shirt, the hair, the effortless insouciance — all part of the persona he has cultivated since the mid-1970s, when he rocketed to stardom as the leader of a group known as the “new philosophers.”
I tell him our interview will be published under the headline “On the Rocks” and he should order whatever he normally likes to drink. It turns out BHL doesn’t drink alcohol — he’s even given up tea.
“I replaced [alcohol] 40 years ago with tea,” he tells me as he orders an “extra strong” fresh ginger infusion. “I drank tea day and night, and since one or two years I switched radically, as I do many things.”
I order an espresso, and he tells me he calculated Balzac drank three tons of coffee while writing La Comédie humaine. He then recounts a charming Hemingway-esque story about an all-night drinking session with a Portuguese army captain named Othello during the country’s 1970s “Carnation Revolution.”
He speaks quietly, gesticulating with his extraordinarily long and elegant fingers. We talk about his admiration for the United States — “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract made alive” — and his scorn for the deep anti-Americanism that pervades Europe and especially France.
He believes the “alleged empire” of America and its democratic allies, is under “heavy attack by a loose but more and more tight front” composed of China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and radical Islam. Humanity has already entered the early stages of a new world war, and the main front lines are Ukraine and Israel. He thinks Taiwan will soon become the third front.
He’s agreed to our interview because he has just launched the English version of his book, “Israel Alone,” which grew out of his first-hand account of the horrific aftermath of October 7, 2023.
BHL has written so many books he can’t remember if this is number 40 or 45. He has witnessed and written about nearly as many wars — although he is quick to point out he is not a mere journalist but a philosopher and writer engaged in “grand reportage.”
There is something so endearing about BHL, and so little hint of malice in his grandiose statements, that I am not in the least bit offended by his insistence on the distinction between his work and that of lowly reporters like me.
He tells me he thinks Benjamin Netanyahu is a terrible prime minister — a man addled by an excess of power. But as a Jew whose father fought the Nazis, BHL worries deeply about the rise of antisemitism in the West today.
“I’m not a Shabbat celebrator, so on that Saturday morning [October 7, 2023] I had the news immediately when I woke up. I understood something huge was happening — an event with a capital E,” he tells me. Later “I was with a group of soldiers on the south front who were preparing to enter Gaza … and I made a solemn promise to write this book.”
In French politics, BHL reserves particular venom for the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom he accuses of actively stoking antisemitism. He describes the founder of the “France Unbowed” political party as a former “courtesan” of François Mitterrand, the longest-serving president of France, who BHL also worked for.
Mélenchon, he says, is a symptom of a worldwide crisis of leadership, which in the U.S. includes the growth of “wokeism,” an ideology he says that “ proceeds from wicked, false readings — too quick and completely absurd readings — of the books of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.”
By his telling, pseudo-intellectuals on American campuses — he specifically mentions the academic Judith Butler — have hijacked Derrida’s concept of “deconstructionism” and distorted it beyond recognition. He asserts the right to make this judgment because he knew Derrida well; the older French philosopher was a professor at his university when he entered the elite École Normale Supérieure.
“I’ve fought all my life for inclusion,” he says. “But that is not what [wokeists] are saying. They claim for safe spaces, separation of identities, borders between identities. That’s not inclusion, that is the opposite.”
He has finally taken off his sunglasses so I can see the piercing eyes in a face that is still extremely handsome.
Part of BHL’s enduring fame and appeal stems from his movie star looks, his movie star wife (the actress Arielle Dombasle), his celebrity friends and the great fortune he inherited from his father.
Knowing full well I am committing the ultimate faux pas, I ask him directly how much he’s worth. For the only time in our conversation, he is stunned speechless. In stark contrast to North America and much of Asia, nobody in Western Europe, and especially France, talks about or shows off how much money they have.
Undeterred, I tell him I found a public estimate that he was worth €150 million back in 2006. He says he never comments on his personal wealth. A friend who knows him well tells me he is probably now worth around €200 million.
The money came from his father, a World War II hero from a poor French family in Algeria. BHL was born in Algeria, making him what the French call a pied noir.
When we speak about his father, BHL’s entire demeanor changes. Gone are the gesticulations. He speaks in a quiet, reverent voice as he tells me how his father built one of the two biggest timber companies in France from scratch. The other one was owned by the billionaire François Pinault, who now owns Gucci, YSL, Balenciaga, Christie’s auction house and many other trophy assets. When Lévy senior died in the mid-1990s, Pinault bought the timber company, providing BHL and his siblings with their fortune and becoming in the process a “good-willing godfather” to the philosopher.
BHL is also reticent when I ask him about his marriage of more than three decades. In past years, tabloid papers have been filled with titillating stories of BHL’s affair with Daphne Guinness — an heiress to the Guinness beer fortune and granddaughter to the infamous Diana Mitford, who married the English fascist Oswald Mosley.
“I don’t comment on my marriage, and I have no theory on marriage,” BHL tells me, with just a touch of impatience. “What is important is love, not marriage. I love my wife.”
I have one more question, which I’ve saved for last in case it caused him to end the interview prematurely.
In preparation for it, I ask him if he is easily offended.
“It depends,” he answers with a laugh, “on what you ask.”
I dive right in: Does he not think perhaps, to a non-French, Anglo-Saxon audience that he comes across as a caricature of a French intellectual?
He pauses and stares at me a bit nonplussed.
He reassures me (half-convincingly) that he is not offended and this is a question nobody asks him. “I don’t feel that,” he says. “I would just recommend you come with me next time to the front line in Ukraine, and you will see if I’m playing a role.”
I agree to his invitation instantly. We shake hands on it, and I walk out of the restaurant into the stunning Paris late-morning sun.
