Bernard-Henri Lévy's 'Ce grand cadavre à la renverse' Dissects the Left's Decay

In his new essay 'Ce grand cadavre à la renverse' (Grasset), Bernard-Henri Lévy diagnoses the French Left as a corpse infested with ideological worms. Taking Sartre's 1950s preface to 'Aden Arabie' as his epigraph, Lévy argues the Left has degenerated into a 'gauche de droite' — a left that borrows from the far-right's nationalism, anti-Europeanism, and anti-liberalism. He traces a 'good' lineage from the Enlightenment, Jaurès, Camus, and Mendès-France, contrasting it with a 'bad' line embodied by figures like Chevènement, Mélenchon, and the altermondialistes. A central chapter, 'Le néo-antisémitisme sera progressiste ou ne sera pas,' identifies a new antisemitism hiding under progressive masks, from the Durban conference to Dieudonné. Lévy recounts a phone call with Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he refused to support, and his critical backing of Ségolène Royal, whose advisor Chevènement he blames for nationalist blunders. The book, a 'coup de pistolet' into the soft corpse, calls for a resurrection of a lucid, antifascist left.