Last September Bernard Arnault,
chairman and CEO of the luxury conglomerate company LVMH, held a little “do” to
mark the 60th birthday of the couture house of Dior.
He
spared no expense, with Dom Pérignon champagne, caviar, 75 waiters for 25
tables, 14 cooks, 4,000 roses and 8,000 sprigs of lily of the valley (the late
Christian Dior’s signature flower). But then the 270 guests were rather special
too, including the justice minister Rachida Dati; the interior minister Brice
Hortefeux and his wife, dressed by Dior; the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë;
the television news anchor Claire Chazal, also draped in Dior; former foreign
minister Hubert Védrine and the parliamentary leader of the governing UMP
Party, Jean-François Copé; Elton John and Farah Diba, wife of the late Shah of
Iran (1). Also present was the prime minister, François Fillon, who only four
days later said: “I am in charge of a bankrupt state. This has got to stop.”
There is nothing new about
billionaires indulging in conspicuous consumption. But the social portent of
such festivities now reaches beyond the pages of glossy magazines.
The election of President
Nicolas Sarkozy heralds a new approach to the exercise of power, completing the
merger of several parts of France’s elite: big bosses, opinion-makers and
political leaders, right and left, providing they uphold free-market
principles. Ideally they should be very rich too.
Arnault is the richest man in
France, worth an estimated $21bn in 2006. He is a personal friend of the
president, whom he invited to the wedding of his daughter Delphine — a big
occasion, with guests including six members of the government of the day, and
Copé and Védrine (who is on the LVMH board). A long truck was chartered to
transport the bridal dress without creasing it.
Arnault owns a financial daily,
La Tribune, which he is selling to buy Les Echos, a more influential paper. The
staff of both are against the project, but Sarkozy backs his friend. In 2006
LVMH handed out 1,789,359 stock options, including 450,000 to its boss. The
government has recently awarded substantial tax breaks to the wealthy,
including Arnault, perhaps as a token of its gratitude for holding down
inflation by keeping tight control over pay. Many of those who manufacture
Arnault’s luxury goods earn only the minimum wage.
Britain’s Labour prime
minister, Gordon Brown, asks Arnault for advice, but in France the tycoon is
convinced he is seen as a pariah: “The problem for business leaders in France
is that the country has difficulty accepting a market economy. I think Marxist
ideas still exert an influence. Over the last 20 years their influence has even
increased in political discourse” (2).
Arnault must be living in a
different France from everybody else. His friend is now president and even the
Socialist opposition, following the example of its British counterpart, talks
about little else but rehabilitating free-market values, individualism, merit
and money. Meanwhile Bernard-Henri Lévy — a neo-liberal, pro-US socialite,
astute manager of an immense fortune and established star of intellectual show
business — has just published a book (3), which he hopes will establish him as
a key Socialist Party (PS) thinker.
The restoration marches on
France resembles a plutocracy;
money is all that counts. The government abounds with corporate lawyers.
Influential MPs such as Copé make no secret of their ambition to fulfil their
public mission while making a fortune in business. With recurrent scandals in
the stock market and finance, growing public fascination with billionaires and
frequent lobbying, France is turning into another Monaco-style principality.
The recent wedding of Socialist MP Henri
Weber was an extravagant celebrity event attended by former leftists, such as
Bernard Kouchner, who are now ministers in the rightwing government (4).
Jacques Attali, once a special adviser to François Mitterrand, was also on the
guest list. He recently accepted Sarkozy’s
proposal to chair the newly established Committee for the Liberation of French
Growth and is proving a keen advocate of competition and mass distribution. The
restoration marches on.
On 13 June 1971, in a speech at
the Epinay congress (5), Mitterrand condemned “all the powers of money, money
that corrupts, money that buys, money that kills, money that brings ruin and
money that rots even the conscience of men”. Now Lévy is suggesting that the PS
should organise a congress to make a new start, an “anti-Epinay”. He does not
see the corruption, death, ruin and rot in money, but rather “its ability to
replace war with trade, closed worlds with open borders. Thanks to [money],
negotiations, transactions and compromise take the place of impatience,
violence, barter, rapine, arbitrary settlements and fanaticism” (6).
This definition of capital as a
rampart against fanaticism is very much in vogue and seems unlikely to upset
members of the property-owning classes such as Arnault, Arnaud Lagardère, the
man behind the media and aerospace conglomerate of the same name, or François
Pinault, owner of the PPR global retailing group. The last two are close
friends of Lévy, who has no qualms about tailoring his columns to suit their
interests.
Who cares about Lévy? For the
past 30 years his fan club has acclaimed his work and the media have made a
fuss, yet no one would think of buying one of his books once the public
relations barrage subsides. The title of his autobiography, Comédie, suggests
that even he sometimes realises the whole process is a farce.
In 1979 Cornelius Castoriadis
admitted to being baffled by him: “How can a country with a fine, long-standing
culture allow a writer to get away with such nonsense, with critics lauding his
work and the reading public obediently lapping it up? No one silences nor
imprisons those who point out it is all a sham, yet their words make no
difference” (7). He optimistically added: “This piffle will certainly go out of
fashion. Much like all contemporary products it has built-in obsolescence.”
Nearly 30 years later the piffle is still selling.
This trade in nonsense is
doubly revealing of our current malaise. The excesses of Lévy’s prose and its
repetition on TV and radio no longer prompt any response. His habitual targets
— the “left of the left” and the writers least in thrall to the media –must
have given up the struggle. Meanwhile his pro-US, free-market ideas are in tune
with those of a growing number of socialist leaders. Diminishing resistance
goes hand in hand with greater impact. Any cultural scene, and by extension
public debate, that can allow a writer to accuse Jacques Derrida, Pierre
Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek of being anti-semitic
is in trouble. It is strange that any of them should be suspected of taking
their cue from a “Nazi thinker” (see “Lévy’s pet hates”). When the left starts
taking its inspiration from Lévy, it further proves that it is dead on its
feet.
Fans and favours
Lévy’s friends have recently
gratified him with favours (interviews with Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, a leading
radio personality, and Jean-Marie Colombani, the former editor of Le Monde; an
immediate review in the same paper, a huge spread in Paris Match, front-page
coverage in Le Nouvel Observateur). But he has recruited new fans, who in their
youthful enthusiasm are all the more eager to serve his cause. Nicolas
Demorand, on the France Inter radio station, and Philippe Val, the editor of
the satiric journal Charlie Hebdo, are no fools; yet when Lévy calls key
contemporary leftwing writers fascists, anti-semites or Nazis, they pretend not
to notice. After encouraging Lévy to make liberal use of insults and bad
language, Demorand let him conclude by saying: “We are the guardians of words
on this programme.” Demorand may look forward to a long career.
Following its third consecutive
defeat in a presidential election, the PS is tempted to lean even further to
the right. Having embraced “realism” in the early 1980s, the idea of “breaking
with capitalism” has become meaningless. But media and business leaders keep
demanding that the party should go even further, espousing free-market values
more absolutely. Last August this pressure led to an outburst from the MP Henri
Emmanuelli: “How dare they ask a party that has produced the director of the
World Trade Organisation [Pascal Lamy] and very probably the future director of
the International Monetary Fund [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] finally to accept the
market economy?”
In 1986, 1993 and 2002, the
election defeats of the PS pushed the party line a few degrees to the left — a
move it could afford, it hardly being possible to blame their electoral
misfortunes on having strayed too far to the left. Nor did Ségolène Royal lean
far leftwards during last year’s presidential campaign (in which Lévy was
closely involved). In the face of Sarkozy’s aggressive rightwing policies, the
PS could surely afford to adopt a more militant stance, however superficial it
might be in practice.
Encouraged by the Blairist
ambitions of several PS leaders, Lévy has wheeled out his media battlewagon to
ward off any such eventuality. He plans to dictate to any hypothetical leftwing
government the ultimate theoretical basis for future neo-liberal,
anti-revolutionary policies. In 1986 Lévy supported the deregulation of
broadcasting. In 1995 he condemned striking railway and public transport
workers, highlighting the lack of responsibility of the public sector which was
“in the process of assuming all the characteristics of what we once called a
Soviet-style economy” (8). Two years later he mocked those who “demonise money
and all those who deal in it”. Now he has written a book specially for the
left, to rid it of its “poisons”. But the worst thing is that people actually
listen.
The break with the past Lévy
proposes is no different from that promised by Sarkozy. “For reasons related to
its past and the history of its national software [sic], the whole of France is
resisting free-market principles,” he writes, rather as the president might. He
adds: “The question of whether the revolution is possible has given way to
another question that is even more disturbing and above all more radical,
namely whether the revolution is desirable. The answer to this question has
become `No’, clearly `No’.” Pierre Moscovici (who is close to Strauss-Kahn)
promptly picked up the ball and wrote: “Bernard-Henri Lévy concludes with an
appeal to the melancholic left in opposition to the lyrical left, to a left
stripped of its revolutionary Utopia, the `dream that always ends in a
nightmare’… That is also my version of the left” (9).
But is Lévy really best placed
to suggest solutions to suit most people? His book hardly ever deals with the
economy or finance, inequality, relocation of production, occupational hazards
or purchasing power. Apart from a 10-page chapter on France’s underprivileged
housing estates, there is no mention of social issues. A few ideas, essentially
comparing his opponents to fascists, float past, unrelated to their causes. He
devotes half a chapter to the Khmer Rouge (in Cambodia), pointing out that they
“sampled the work of [Charles] Bettelheim, Althusser, Lacan”, but overlooking
the fact that the US war in southeast Asia increased their power at least as
much as the three French writers did.
‘I write in hotels’
No one can be blamed for their
origins, but it is unlikely that Lévy has suffered a great deal from
inequality. So why does his manifesto for the left so completely disregard the
topic? During
an interview in 1984 he explained how he works: “I do not write in cafés, but
in hotels. All over the world. In Paris, in a room at the Pont-Royal, number
812, because it looks out over the roofs, commanding a view of the city. Also
room 911 at the Georges-V. … My stamping ground reaches from the Jardin du
Luxembourg, where I live, to the rue des Saints-Pères, where we are now, or the
Récamier, where I often lunch. In the afternoon I like the Twickenham, or
otherwise the [café] Flore, and [the flat in] Rue Madame” (10).
Since
then his home ground has reached into other enchanted worlds. At the wedding of
Pinault junior, in 1996, he “arrived in style, landing on the lawn of the
château in a helicopter”. When he married the actress Arielle Dombasle, in
1993, “a plane was chartered to transport guests to La Colombe d’Or, the
mythical hotel in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Paris Match obtained exclusive rights to
cover the event, with a six-page spread worthy of a royal wedding, not to
mention the front page which featured an emotional Arielle in a white dress
with a low-cut back, designed by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel” (11). Guests
included Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest person in France), Jack Lang,
the former minister, and Alain Carignon, then mayor of Grenoble, as well as the
columnist Louis Pauwels and Jean-Luc Lagardère.
Lévy believes we forget how much we owe to
capitalism. “We think we are attacking George Soros,” he warns, “but in fact we
are murdering Gavroche” (a key figure in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables). Here
again Lévy has something in common with Sarkozy, who rolls out a succession of
reforms, the better to thwart his adversaries, unable to counter-attack on all
sides simultaneously. The writer piles on names, approximations and historical
wisecracks. The historian Pierre Vidal-Naquel noted this habit in 1979: “Whether
he is dealing with the history of the Bible, Ancient Greece or even
contemporary affairs, Lévy displays, in every field, the same alarming
ignorance and stunning presumption” (12). Lévy had written that Heinrich
Himmler, who actually committed suicide in May 1945, gave evidence six months
later at the Nuremberg trial. In another instance he presented François Guizot,
a conservative, free-market thinker in Restoration France, as one of the
forerunners of the Paris Commune when he had in fact supported its bloody
repression.
Many on the left have praised
Lévy’s latest book. “The left we have yet to reinvent should draw inspiration
from this work. It has a fresh, youthful energy I particularly appreciate,”
said Lang (13). Moscovici, Vincent Peillon and Manuel Valls, all of whom are
vying for the leadership of the PS, joined in the praise. Valls was one of
those to whom Sarkozy offered a cabinet job. This came to nothing, but
nevertheless suggests that the two men see more or less eye to eye. Valls
subsequently hailed the policy statement of the incoming prime minister, François
Fillon, as “on a par with the country’s expectations”, adding that he was
prepared to “support the majority provided it listens to us” (the PS). He
supports the current reform of special pensions and is calling for a change in
the party’s name.
In his book Lévy pays tribute
to Valls: “Although many socialists still cling to their socialism much as a
repertory actor hangs on to a familiar part, the most lucid among them — Manuel
Valls, the MP for the Essonne, springs to mind — know there is no salvation for
the left without a clean break with the past, and consequently a change of
name.” Valls quickly wrote a review of this “brilliant book” for Les Echos,
though he failed to mention that in so doing he was merely returning the author’s
compliment. He even singled out for special praise the passage in which he was
mentioned (14).
Valls, suspected by some of his
fellow travellers of harbouring rightwing sympathies, added: “Those who say
this book is simply a celebration of neo-liberal values and a conservative left
refuse to admit that it is a sincere attempt at introspection by a writer who
quite certainly belongs on the left.” He did acknowledge, though, that Lévy
tended to disregard social issues. Not so long ago, anyone admitting, as Lévy
did, to being “slightly deaf to social concerns” (15) would have been banished
by the left. Such ostracism would now be considered archaic, or “Marxist” as
Arnault would say.
Lévy’s political ideas are
clear enough. He promotes free-market values and condemns radicalism. While
Sarkozy is in power, Lévy manufactures for him a “moral left”, with plenty of
emotion and indignation. Not the sort of left that might greatly hinder the
government, which, in the words of a former captain of industry, is “methodically
dismantling the programme of the National Council of the Resistance” (16).
1.
Pour le récit de cette soirée, cf. « L’ère
monarchic », Point de vue, Paris, 26 septembre 2007.
2.
Challenges, Paris, 13 septembre 2007.
3.
France 2, 11 décembre 2006.
4.
Ariane Chemin, « La gauche à la noce », Le
Monde, 3 octobre 2007.
5.
Lire « Les droites au pouvoir », Manière de
voir, n° 95, octobre-novembre 2007.
6.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ce grand cadavre à la
renverse, Grasset, Paris, 2007, p. 190. Sauf indication contraire les citations
suivantes de cet auteur sont tirées du même ouvrage.
7.
Lire « Cela dure depuis vingt-cinq ans », Le
Monde diplomatique, décembre 2003.
8.
Cornelius Castoriadis, « L’industrie du vide »,
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 9 juillet 1979. C’est Castoriadis qui souligne le
« n’importe quoi ».
9.
Lire Grégory Rzepski et Antoine Schwartz, « A
gauche, l’éternelle tentation centriste », Le Monde diplomatique, juin 2007.
10.
« Le PS bouge encore », Libération, Paris, 3
septembre 2007. M. Strauss-Kahn est devenu depuis directeur général du Fonds
monétaire international.
11.
Le Point, Paris, 2 décembre 1995.
12.
Le Point, 29 mars 1997.
13.
Pierre Moscovici, « La gauche mélancolique de
Bernard-Henri Lévy », Le Monde, 12 octobre 2007.
14.
VSD, Paris, 8 novembre 1984.
15.
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 20 juin 1996.
16.
Philippe Cohen, BHL, Fayard, Paris, p. 366-367.
17.
Lettre du 12 juin 1979 au directeur du Canard
enchaîné. Texte intégral sur : www.monde-diplomatique.fr/dossiers/bhl/
18.
Paris Match, 11 octobre 2007.
19.
Les Echos, Paris, 8 octobre 2007.
20.
Libération, Paris, 8 octobre 2007.
21.
Denis Kessler, Challenges, Paris, 4 octobre
2007.
