We study the small deviation problem log P(sup t∈[0,1] |Xt| ≤ ε), as ε → 0, for general Lévy processes X. The techniques enable us to determine the asymptotic rate for general real-valued Lévy processes, which we demonstrate with many examples.As a particular consequence, we show that a Lévy process with nonvanishing Gaussian component has the same (strong) asymptotic small deviation rate as the corresponding Brownian motion.F. AURZADA AND S. DEREICH Further, f ∼ g means that lim f /g = 1. We also use f gThis paper is organized as follows. In Section 1.2, we review results of Simon, who studied the question when the problem (1) actually makes sense for Lévy processes. Section 1.3 contains our main results, which are illustrated by several examples in Section 2. The proofs are postponed to Sections 3 and 4 (proofs of the main results) and Section 5 (proof of the explicit rates in the examples).1.2. The small deviation property. In [19], the following question was studied: for which Lévy processes does the small deviation problem make sense? Namely, one says that a stochastic process X = (X t ) t∈[0,1] possesses the small deviation property if P supSimon investigated this property for R d -valued Lévy processes. For realvalued Lévy processes, it reduces to the following, easily verifiable, equivalent characterization [19].Proposition 1.1. A (ν, σ 2 , b)-Lévy process X possesses the small deviation property if and only if it is not of type (I) or if it is of type (I) and, for c := b − |x|≤1 xν(dx), we have:• c = 0, or • c > 0 and ν{−ε ≤ x < 0} = 0 for all ε > 0, or • c < 0 and ν{0 < x ≤ ε} = 0 for all ε > 0.Let us visualize this fact with a simple example.Example 1.2. Let us consider an α-stable subordinator with drift: X t + µt, where X has the characteristic function: