The Impostor BHL in Wonderland

Anderson continues: #xE2;#xAC;SIt would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversalof national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded thiscrass booby in France#xE2;#xAC;"s public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of hisinability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any othermajor Western culture today?#xE2;#xAC; This book, based on a careful investigation comparing BHL#xE2;#xAC;"s words with his deeds,seeks to explore the remarkable persistence of this celebrity pseudo-philosophersince he burst onto the scene in 1977. Delving into his networks in the spheres ofpolitics, the media and big business, Lindgaard and de la Porte suggest what thesuccess of this three-decade long imposture indicates about the degeneration ofcontemporary French intellectual and cultural life. About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writinginaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the wordsof one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was #xE2;#xAC;Srunning up like parchment in the fire.#xE2;#xAC;From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that hiscollection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. such polemics reappeared bothbefore and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century.In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideologicalhirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it#xE2;#xAC;"s time to revive the tradition.Verso#xE2;#xAC;"s Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.

Jade Lindgaard is a journalist for the news site Mediapart, and she coedited La France Invisible, with Stéphane Beaud and Joseph Confavreux (2006).

Xavier de la Porte is a journalist for the radio station France Culture.