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BHL dans le New York Times


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July 22, 2007

New-Look Bonaparte

By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY

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TESTIMONY

France in the Twenty-First Century.

By Nicolas Sarkozy. Translated by Philip H. Gordon.

251 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.95.

It’s truly a French specialty. I do not know a ranking French politician who has not considered at one time or another writing and publishing a book, one with ideological and often even literary ambitions, as an essential rite of passage in his or her career.

Is it the prestige, more acute in France than elsewhere, accompanying the creation of a book, a real book, and not merely a political platform?

Is it the link between the pen and the sword, between politics and literature, which has been particularly close ever since the Encyclopedists and the French Revolution?

Could it be because of writers who, like Chateaubriand, dreamed of being in the cabinet? Or those who, like Malraux, wanted to be renowned for their use of arms as much as for the books they wrote? Or could it be the opposite, Stendhal’s syndrome of lamenting the battle of Waterloo, since because of it he missed by a few days being named prefect of Le Mans?

From Richelieu, who wanted to be a playwright; to de Gaulle, who was fascinated by Malraux; from Clemenceau, our prime minister during the First World War, who wrote an opera (“The Dream Veil”); to François Mitterrand, whom I personally heard say several times that nothing was more enviable in this world than being the author of “The Charterhouse of Parma,” France is this bizarre country where if the writers are often failed men of action, the men of action are always failed writers. French presidents do not wait to recount and justify their deeds in office; they write their memoirs before they come into power. And so Nicolas Sarkozy, though seemingly the least literary of them all, has, like the others before him, published his.

I imagine that the original intention of this book — rather, of these two books combined into one for publication in English — was to lay out his vision of France and its future before he stepped into the battle. But now that Sarko, our new-look Bonaparte, has won the election and acceded to the Elysée Palace, the book has quite a different sense than originally intended and may be read as a precise and priceless live self-portrait.

In “Testimony” we discover the first president of the Republic who dares to write of love, true love, when discussing the tumultuous relationship he has had with Cécilia Sarkozy, the woman who left him, whom he reconquered, who ended up coming back to him and is now our first lady in the Jackie Kennedy mold. Yes, a president who tells us about the storm and joys of love, about the woman of his life, about desire and suffering. Is it possible that this passion was more important to him in the end than his passion for power?

We discover a young man, apparently happy, whose evident good humor seems to be a part of his political agenda. Much has been said about his postelection escapade in Malta on the ostentatious yacht of the French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, which some have called Sarkozy’s first political mistake. What if it was the other way around? What if the gesture was really in keeping with the part of his project that calls for unguilting us when it comes to luxury, success and money, even at the risk of going whole hog into bad taste and kitsch? What if this young president wanted to reconcile France, if not with actual happiness, then with the signs of happiness that our puritanism, our depression and fear of glitter and success, have long discredited and suppressed?

We discover a character willing to talk about anything, without stonewalling or taboos, without censoring himself or being self-conscious. Sarkozy writes about his public and private lives, about subjects noble and less noble, expresses doubts as well as certainties, launches insults and retorts, pronounces cut-and-dried judgments about adversaries and partners alike. We are spared nothing that crosses his mind. I have personally observed in him this odd character trait — namely, that not an idea goes through his head that he doesn’t feel the need to shout out to the cheap seats. Sarkozy is the only person I know who is a perfect Sartrean subject — the prototype of that subjectivity described in “Being and Nothingness” that draws its strength, and even its freedom, from the fact that it has no inner core, nothing in reserve; as if it were an empty place, a mere transit zone in which impressions, information and emotions spin around without stopping or connecting.

And finally we discover — as will Americans — the first of our presidents for whom our relationship with the rest of the world is so clearly inspired by the best result of the antitotalitarian movements of the ’70s and ’80s, namely a fidelity to Israel that will no longer waver in the face of “ups and downs in our interests in Arab societies”; a sensitivity to genocide and in particular to the Holocaust, that “stain on the 20th century and all of human history”; a refusal of that “cultural relativism” that would allow us to look at the Chechen drama or the fate of Chinese political prisoners differently from events happening in Europe; a true concern that human rights be respected in relationships between states, between democracies and dictatorships; and last but not least, his view of America, for which, beginning in his preface, he declares an outright and unfeigned admiration if not love, contrasting sharply with the stubborn antiAmericanism that for decades has been part of the platform of much of the French political class.

So in light of all that, why did I not vote for him? And why for the entire campaign, unlike most of my comrades in the ideological battles of the last 30 years, unlike most of my friends from the leftist anticommunist movement born during the 1970s, did I fight against this man who seems so likable?

I will explain elsewhere, in another way, when it is time. I will say, for example, how such and such a remark on national identity and how it must be preserved pushed me far away from him. Perhaps I will say, more precisely, that to be a Frenchman in the 21st century means to make a choice about certain major and seminal events, like Vichy, colonialism or May 1968. And I will look at the positions he took on these three questions and conclude that when he said that the Vichy government was not an integral participant in genocide, when he thundered that France should not be embarrassed by its “civilizing” work in Algeria, and when he vowed that if elected he would “liquidate the heritage of May 1968,” which for 40 years has been a secret wound, a torment, sometimes the nightmare of the most radical reactionary right wing of this country, Nicolas Sarkozy cut himself off from men like me. The essential components were nevertheless already laid out in Sarkozy’s books, which I admit not having carefully read when they first came out in France. I discover now that the software was already, shall we say, preinstalled.

There are the pages on repentance, for example. Or more exactly the pages about his love for France, which should be “proud of its past” and which we must love completely, without nuance, far from the “denigration” that the possible future president saw as a kind of illness. I personally have nothing against a little denigration. Frankly, I am not against the idea of political leaders and citizens speaking about the sadness, the pity, even the horror they feel when examining some of the blackest pages of their national history. In other words, I think that shame is quite useful in politics, and the idea of not feeling, as Emmanuel Levinas said, “accountable for” or even “hostage to” the crimes we did not commit, and even worse, not feeling accountable and responsible for those in which we or ours have had some part — I think this is exactly what Sartre (him again!) called a politics of “bastards.” Where would the United States be if it were not ashamed of its past of slavery, then of racism? Where would France be if — under the pretext that, as Sarkozy says, we have not “produced” a Hitler (true) or Stalin (unclear, given how much the French intelligentsia participated in the creation of the Stalinist vulgate) or Pol Pot (rather doubtful, given that Pol Pot and his men all trained in Paris, in the very cradle of human rights) — we were simply to sing together the sinister “proud to be French” refrain the new president keeps humming, which amounts to finessing, for example, the enormous anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus era, or the huge collaborationist enthusiasm of the cultural and administrative elite in the darkest Vichy years, or the practice of state-sanctioned torture in the last years of the war in Algeria?

There are also several pages dealing with the full-blown crisis in the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005, when Sarkozy, then the minister of the interior, nearly set the country ablaze and came close to torching his own political future as well. He reminds us (with reason) of the exact circumstances surrounding his uttering the infamous remark (in theory, only about the young rioters in Argenteuil) — “Yes, madame, that’s what I’m here for. I’m going to get rid of this scum for you” — that was in large part responsible for his demonization in certain sectors of public opinion. He also explains, and here he is convincing, how the ideas of “racism” and “xenophobia” are intolerable for him, the son of immigrants, and that he also believes in a France that has become many-sided and rich in “diversity.” But then he slips up, betraying the definitive conservative that he really is, when he sees in the mini-riots of 2005 only foolish, nihilist outbursts of violence, deserving the strict intervention of the police, where only the hopelessly idiotic intellectual conformism of what he calls “uniform thinking” still glimpses the shadow of a “ ‘social’ protest.” I am not a “Sarkozist” because I did in fact see the beginnings of a social movement, no doubt a terrible one, brutal and savage. A movement that, for the first time in the history of this kind of movement, seemed mute, aphasic, burning schools and clinics, like true barbarians or idiots (although it is unclear if the rage of the Communards who set fire to the library of the Tuileries was more articulate than that of the unemployed youth setting fire to their children’s nursery schools or their fathers’ cars). But it was a social movement nonetheless. A movement to which we should have applied, to which we must always apply, a form of treatment that is not only penal but social.

And finally there is Sarkozy’s pragmatism, although perhaps we should say opportunism and cynicism, which we observed in the days after his victory, when he was like a voracious child placed in the middle of Hammacher Schlemmer or Toys ‘R’ Us and told: “Everything here is yours; it’s all free. Take what you want!” Which he did, on every floor of the store, snapping up the “best” merchandise, the iconic Bernard Kouchner, the sage Hubert Védrine, the great knights of the Mitterandian Holy Grail he mentions in the book, saying how much he admired them when he was a young minister. The totems of the left to whom he throws pieces of meat for the sheer pleasure of watching them fight over it. The legends of literature and the arts whose truth, or myth, he would gladly gobble up. Who’s the patron saint of the Socialists? Léon Blum? “O.K., get me Blum!” The “Christ” of the Communists? Guy Môquet? “Fine, bring me … certainly not Guy Môquet” — a 17-year-old resistance fighter executed by the Nazis — “but his last letter to his parents, so beautiful, so moving.” And today’s queen of victims? Who gets the martyr’s crown of contemporary suffering? Ingrid Betancourt, you say? “Well, let’s hustle, let’s get the Betancourt family back together at the Elysée!”

I do not deny that this may indeed have a good outcome. Nor that, because of that same appetite, Nicolas Sarkozy may have some good surprises in store for us, such as ordering — as he did in his inaugural address — that at the beginning of each academic year Guy Môquet’s letter be read in all the schools of France. I do not rule out that with his will and determination he might actually obtain the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt, held hostage in Colombia by the FARC for more than five years. I am even ready to admit that he is capable of making the Chinese give in on the terrible situation in Darfur where, as everyone knows, they hold the reins of Khartoum’s regime of assassins.

I am only saying that there is in Sarkozy a relationship to memory that troubles and worries me. Men usually have a memory. It can be complex, contradictory, paradoxical, confused. But it is their own. It has a great deal to do with the basis of who they are and the identities they choose for themselves. Sarkozy is an identity pirate, a mercenary of others’ memories. He claims all memories, meaning that in the end he just might not have any. He is our first president without a memory. He is the first of our presidents willing to listen to all ideas, because for him they are literally indistinguishable. If there is a man in France today who embodies (or claims to embody) the famous end of all ideologies, which I cannot quite bring myself to believe in, it is indeed Mr. Sarkozy, the sixth president of the Fifth Republic.

There is an odd feeling in having a president about whom so much (his foreign policy, his generosity, his style) draws you together and so much else (his vision of France, his memory-greed, his cynicism) profoundly separates you. Such will be my lot for the next five or 10 years. Then again, why not? It’s fine.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French philosopher and writer, is the author, most recently, of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.” This review was translated by Sara Sugihara.

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C'est un maître dans les relations publiques. Son meilleur ami est son carnet d'adresses.

Ou peut-être parce qu'on aime bien les globe trotters, hihi. C'est toujours sympa de savoir où il en est dans ses aventures! Tout le monde le trouve nul, faux philosophe, nombriliste et agaçant mais tout le monde l'invite. Avec BHL c'est magique! :icon_up:

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Ou peut-être parce qu'on aime bien les globe trotters, hihi. C'est toujours sympa de savoir où il en est dans ses aventures! Tout le monde le trouve nul, faux philosophe, nombriliste et agaçant mais tout le monde l'invite. Avec BHL c'est magique! :icon_up:

En tout cas, je le trouve nul, faux philosophe, nombriliste et agaçant, mais je ne l'ai jamais invité. Comme quoi…

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Comment il fait BHL pour être tout le temps sur le devant de la scène? On dit que ses chefs d'oeuvre seraient comparable à Tintin au Congo (ça tombe bien, on en parle dans un autre topic). Marrant.

N'insulte pas Hergé STP! Lui au moins avait des idées (nauséabondes, certes) et du talent créatif.

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:icon_up:

Un album sur vingt-six (et sérieusement révisé par la suite) c'est en effet largement suffisant pour juger des idées "nauséabondes" d'un homme…

Oh, je ne parlais pas de cet album. Hergé semblait avoir une affection particulière pour la gauche, les juifs, les franc-maçons..

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Oh, je ne parlais pas de cet album. Hergé semblait avoir une affection particulière pour la gauche, les juifs, les franc-maçons..

(Re)lis ses albums avant d'ânonner ces poncifs ridicules.

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Invité Arn0
Oh, je ne parlais pas de cet album. Hergé semblait avoir une affection particulière pour la gauche, les juifs, les franc-maçons..
Je me demande bien ce que la gauche vient faire dans cette liste. Ne pas aimer la gauche c'est du même ordre que de ne pas aimer les juifs ?
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Oh, je ne parlais pas de cet album. Hergé semblait avoir une affection particulière pour la gauche, les juifs, les franc-maçons..

Pas dans tous les albums, bien loin de là. Mais L'Etoile Mystérieuse, tout de même…

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C'est moi ou j'ai l'impression que BHL écrit l'anglais avec une française syntaxe ?

Oh, je ne parlais pas de cet album. Hergé semblait avoir une affection particulière pour la gauche, les juifs, les franc-maçons..

Que veux-tu dire par là ?

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C'est moi ou j'ai l'impression que BHL écrit l'anglais avec une française syntaxe ?

Que veux-tu dire par là ?

BHL parle le germanopratin, c'est une langue à la syntaxe universelle :icon_up:

Pour le reste, je dit seulement qu'Hergé a baigné pendant l'entre deux guerres dans un milieu catholique de droite, où entre autres la gauche, les franc-maçons, les juifs n'étaient pas très bien vus. Il ne fut pas le seul et il a su évoluer alors que d'autres du même background se sont enfoncés dans l'abject.

Qu'il ait été lucide sur le communisme est aussi vrai.

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Pour le reste, je dit seulement qu'Hergé a baigné pendant l'entre deux guerres dans un milieu catholique de droite, où entre autres la gauche, les franc-maçons, les juifs n'étaient pas très bien vus. Il ne fut pas le seul et il a su évoluer alors que d'autres du même background se sont enfoncés dans l'abject.

Qu'il ait été lucide sur le communisme est aussi vrai.

Pour la gauche et les frères trois points, oui. Et alors, où est le problème ? Concernant l'antisémitisme que tu imputes à la droite catholique, c'est de la basse calomnie.

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