"You too?" On one of his sleepless nights, like so many others he has spent over the long years, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy glanced outside. From the window of his beautiful apartment in Paris's 8th arrondissement, the philosopher watched the last light in the Elysée Palace go out. "I know he's moving on to the 'Madame wing,' where he's going to switch on another one," he writes in his book Nuit blanche ("Sleepless Night"), to be released in French on January 8. Like him, the "young monarch," as the writer has dubbed the president, suffers from sleepless nights. Is he a superman or a tormented soul? Is it Ukraine, invaded by the Russians, that deprives Macron of rest? The Middle East going up in flames? Power slipping from his grasp? We will never know. Only that Macron stays up late into the night.
From these sleepless nights shared by the president and the philosopher came a correspondence via Telegram, perhaps even some form of influence. In one of these night-time messages, Lévy suggested to Macron, a few weeks after the October 7 attack in Israel, that he should put together an anti-Hamas coalition, on the same model as the one targeting the Islamic State (IS) organization. The newspaper Libération revealed that he was behind this idea, on December 1 that same year. It was a disconcerting suggestion: Equating Hamas, an Islamo-nationalist movement, with the IS group, a transnational jihadist network, took the French diplomatic corps by surprise, and ended in a bitter diplomatic failure. "People make up their minds. They imagine chats. Evening visitors. Planned ideological rapprochements. But we're just some brothers-in-insomnia with nothing better to do, after a certain hour, than talk on Telegram," writes Lévy.
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