In Notre Jeunesse, or Our Youth, his memoir of the Dreyfus Affair, Charles Péguy, the poet of Catholic France’s salvific mission, wrote that “the prophet in this great crisis of Israel and the world was Bernard Lazare. Let us salute here one of the greatest names of modern times and . . . one of the greatest among the prophets of Israel.” If, for Péguy, the Dreyfus Affair was proof that in the republic “everything begins in the mystical and ends in the political,” Lazare was one of the few to withstand this degradation of a noble cause. He said of Lazare that “he undeniably had elements of a saint, of saintliness. And when I speak of a saint, I shouldn’t be suspected of speaking metaphorically. . . . He was a prophet. It was thus only right that he was buried prematurely in silence and oblivion.” Lazare earned these exalted words of praise from his fellow Dreyfusard by being the first person outside Alfred Dreyfus’ family to come to his defense after he was found guilty of treason in 1894. If other names, more famous ones such as that of Émile Zola, come to mind when we think of Dreyfus’ defenders, that is more a reflection on the vagaries of history and memory than of the truth of events. And Lazare was more than just a noble controversialist. He was also a Jewish thinker who, after perversely explaining antisemitism as the fault of Jews, created a form of radicalism that viewed the Torah as a foundational revolutionary document. A saint with a strange trajectory. BC Lazare was born Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard in Nîmes on June 14, 1865. On his mother’s side his family had resided in that city for several centuries; one of his maternal ancestors was said to have been a silversmith in service to the pope in Avignon in the fourteenth century. His father, a successful tailor, came from a family that settled in the South of France in the late eighteenth century after leaving its native Lorraine region. Lazare, after completing his high school studies in 1882, chose to educate himself in literature. After leading a literary society in Nîmes, he “ascended,” as they say in French, to Paris in 1886. Writing as Bernard-Lazare, he published symbolist tales, a collection of which was reviewed by Anatole France. France wrote floridly of Lazare that “there is in him the Asiatic and the African. His style has the thorny richness, the thick and heavy abundance, the enormous flower, the bitter juice of the vegetation of the torrid zone.” France concluded on a note that never had the chance to be proven true: “He is precise and firm in his thinking, and he expresses himself with verve. He will be totally to my taste when age will have given him gentleness and a tad of indulgence.” Lazare’s early death saved him from gentleness and indulgence, and the fire France saw in him never dimmed. Lazare was militantly apolitical at the beginning of his writing life, but he soon became an outspoken anarchist. He explained his commitment in a book published in 1895 by his friend, the anarchist writer Augustin Hamon, called Psychologie de l’anarchiste-socialiste. Lazare’s contribution to the volume was a veritable profession of faith. “The value of authority is something I could never understand . . . . For me, that a man could arrogate to himself the right to in any way dominate his kind was, and still is, something inconceivable. In my eyes, nothing was and is as dishonoring as obedience, that is, the partial annihilation of the individual.” He was, by his nature, a purist, a dissenter, an agitator, an almost naive sort of moralist. He continued to write literary fables, but now with a political point. Lazare would publish articles in a variety of anarchist journals, coming in contact with leading figures of the movement such as Sébastien Faure and Zo d’Axa. He also established a number of journals of his own, editing the impressive though little-read Entretiens politiques et artistiques, which had a total of eighty paid subscribers. (But here we are, remembering it!) Though some have questioned the sincerity of Lazare’s anarchism, he was serious enough in his beliefs to have the police trailing him and reporting on his doings. A police report on one of his speeches quoted Lazare proclaiming, “Yes, we want no more armies, no more fatherlands, and our acts of revolt are acts that are just.” Lazare found much to admire in the act of Auguste Vaillant, who threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1893. This violence became known as the “propaganda of the deed,” a concept with a long and highly destructive career in modern politics. Writing to the Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, he praised Vaillant for his courage and spoke of how “the blood of sacrifices is a fertile rain; it causes the good wheat to germinate even in the souls of the indifferent; it prepares the harvests of the future.” The panic that accompanied the wave of bombings in the early 1890s resulted in a series of laws known to history as the lois scélérates, which effectively banned anarchist propaganda. Fearing for his freedom, Lazare briefly fled to Brussels. He returned home and defended his friend Félix Fénéon, an art critic who was accused of planting a bomb in a Paris café that cost its one victim an eye, in the press. Fénéon was found not guilty. Lazare’s activities during this period earned him a reputation as a man willing to defend the unjustly accused, a reputation he would soon confirm. BC In 1892 Lazare took to the pages of the journal he edited, Entretiens politiques et litteraires, and published the first of a series of articles which he would later expand into a book that remains his most controversial book, L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Antisemitism, its History and Causes). The book marks the
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