Hitchens, Christopher. "Bons Mots and Betes Noires." NEW YORK TIMES September 19, 2008.

Levy, Bernard-Henri. Left in Dark Times: a Stand against the New Barbarism. New York: Random House, 2008. The election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency of the French Republic, on a ticket of the Gaullist and centrist right, was marked by two kinds of defection from the left. In advance of the vote, a number of former Marxist Parisian intellectuals like André Glucksmann announced their intention of voting for Sarkozy and against the rather vapid and temperamental quasi-spousal Socialist party team of Ségolène Royal and her significant other, François Hollande. And then, once the victory of Sarkozy had been assured — probably rather more by the votes of former rightists than former leftists — the new president offered some plum jobs to prominent Socialists like Bernard Kouchner, the ex-Communist and cofounder of the campaigning internationalist outfit Doctors Without Borders, who is now foreign minister, before himself proceeding to give new meaning to the term “husband and wife team” by marrying the former supermodel Carla Bruni in the Élysée Palace itself. You might say that this situation was superbly designed for an address from Bernard-Henri Lévy — universally known in France as BHL — who cuts a commanding figure both in the circles of the Left Bank intelligentsia and in the world of Parisian high fashion and salon society (and whose lovely wife, Arielle Dombasle, could look Carla Bruni in the eye any day). But the fact is that these developments make him feel extremely uncomfortable. He happens to have known Sarkozy since 1983, when Sarkozy was elected mayor of Neuilly; yet when he received a telephone call from Sarkozy last year, demanding to know when the BHL endorsement would be coming, he found himself unable to play ball. In fact, he found himself abandoning intellectual terrain for a moment and saying that he would cast his vote for the left candidate, as ever, because it was la gauche that was his “family.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/books/review/Hitchens-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin.