There’s a not-so-nice biography out about Bernard-Henri Levy, the Frenchman who wrote a book about the murder of Danny Pearl. Here’s a quote from the biography’s review:
Character assassination in France is less of a sport than in Britain, because the French care less about character, and in the culture that gave us Les Liaisons Dangereuses it is hard to inflame prurient sentiment by saying that a man has slept with a woman not his wife. On the other hand you can seriously damage a reputation by suggesting that an idea for a book was not the author’s own, or that he has misconstrued his classical sources.