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.”
“Orthodox in Nothing”: The Saga of Bernard Lazare
