We suppose that a Lévy process is observed at discrete time points. A rather general construction of minimum-distance estimators is shown to give consistent estimators of the Lévy-Khinchine characteristics as the number of observations tends to infinity, keeping the observation distance fixed. For a specific $C^2$-criterion this estimator is rate-optimal. The connection with deconvolution and inverse problems is explained. A key step in the proof is a uniform control on the deviations of the empirical characteristic function on the whole real line.