Where Have the Intellectuals Gone?

Last month, an unsettling development in the Ukraine war unfolded—as the defining events of most wars do—thousands of miles from the battlefield, this time in Paris. Bernard Henri-Lévy (“BHL” in short) is an intellectual notorious in France for his buttoned-down collarless shirts and his round-the-globe advocacy of non-French causes. On Wednesday, 22 February, BHL premiered his latest show, Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine!”), co-directed with French photographer Marc Roussel. The sequel to a documentary initially aired in mid-2022, this latest installment was filmed in the year’s latter semester, with BHL trading his customary bespoke suit for a helmet and a khaki bulletproof vest, as he is escorted by Ukrainian soldiers to various locales along the battlefront. The film starts in Kharkiv, follows in Kherson the day following the city’s liberation, and ends in Ochakiv, where a future Ukrainian final counteroffensive is rumored to start. With BHL’s usual Manichean over-excitement, the film is meant as a wake-up call for Western governments to match President Zelensky’s demands of military equipment—and for Western publics to back the move.

You’d think a show like this would easily find an audience, particularly among the high-income and globally-minded Parisian public. Just that same week, a new survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations, co-authored by several foreign policy luminaries, showed that Ukraine’s war effort remains astoundingly popular across the West, with around 40% of respondents in the European Union and the United States hoping to see Ukraine regain all its pre-2014 territory even if it means a longer war with more refugees. Yet only 208 people showed up nationwide at BHL’s premiere , and that includes the ritzy cinema room in the 6th arrondissement where Henri-Lévy himself prefaced the film with an in-person talk. Given the showers of praise lavished on the show across France’s progressive press—and even by the New York Times, which praised BHL for “choosing war zones over salons”—you’d be forgiven for thinking that among those 208 attendees, a big chunk were the journalists writing the reviews themselves. The more mundane site Apar.TV called Henri-Lévy’s show “the dud of the year.”

For a measure of how great a flop this premiere really was, consider a comparable movie, one released only in January this year, and carrying a similarly warlike theme: the 1793-1796 wars of Vendée, which claimed around 200,000 lives and resurfaced at various points the following century. The film is Vaincre ou Mourir (2023), and it traces the life story of General François Athanase Charette de la Contrie, who is called to lead one of Vendée’s counterrevolutionary insurrections. Contrary to Slava Ukraini, this other film proved an instant sell-out, with 32,000 people attending the premiere nationwide—154 times BHL’s paltry figure. In other words, it isn’t that war isn’t selling at the box office—it’s selling handsomely. And it’s not just that Henri-Lévy is dismissed in France as a reckless war tourist playing action hero. Rather, viewers prefer to immerse themselves in long-past conflicts—even conflicts with little relevance to the present—rather than going to the cinema for a slightly tweaked version of that day’s newscast about the war’s development.

This raises a larger point about the war’s dynamics, both in the battlefield and behind the lines. Whereas intellectuals have proven to be key to the history of armed conflict, from Vietnam to the Spanish Civil War, in this case they are yet to make a decisive appearance. To be sure, this is not a war whose outcome intellectuals can easily sway, precisely because its widespread depiction in the Western media as a contest between good and evil makes some of the intellectual’s work slightly redundant. Whilst other French intellectuals like Emmanuel Todd and Edgar Morin have earned the ‘pro-Putin’ label by calling for de-escalation, it isn’t clear how much further in support of Ukraine’s war aims intellectuals on the other side could sway opinion at the margins. They could, as BHL does in his movie, spotlight a Russian war crime here, prod Western governments to supply more Leopard tanks there, or galvanize opinion everywhere to keep war fatigue at bay. These are things that doubtless other intellectuals are already doing, some perhaps with more success than BHL. Why their voices seem to matter so little is one of this war’s mysteries.