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Emmanuel Lévy always saw himself as a man of action. A natural consequence of his scholarship, Lévy’s activism led him notably to Lyon’s local government and the position of deputy mayor. In Lyon, he was both a professor of civil law at the Faculty of Law and a socialist activist. His whole life constituted the putting into practice of legal categories he created. Milieu, confidence, merit: these were the three main notions of Lévy’s legal thought and the very same concepts which permitted him to understand and to traverse his social world. He summed up his view of law and of life by saying: “To be is to count, count with, count on, count for.”