Bernard Lazare was a French Jewish

History of the Jews in France

The history of the Jews of France dates back over 2,000 years. In the early Middle Ages, France was a center of Jewish learning, but persecution increased as the Middle Ages wore on...

 literary critic, political journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

, polemicist, and anarchist. He was also among the first Dreyfusards.

Youth

He was born Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard (he later switched his first name and last name) in Nîmes

Nîmes

Nîmes is the capital of the Gard department in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France. Nîmes has a rich history, dating back to the Roman Empire, and is a popular tourist destination.-History:...

 on 15 June 1865, the eldest of four sons of Jonas Bernard and Douce Noémie Rouget. This bourgeois

Bourgeoisie

In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...

 family had introduced the Jacquard loom

Jacquard loom

The Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns such as brocade, damask and matelasse. The loom is controlled by punched cards with punched holes, each row of which corresponds to one row...

 to Toulouse

Toulouse

Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

, and founded one of the first (and very successful) textile mills, producing draperies and passementerie

Passementerie

Passementerie or passementarie is the art of making elaborate trimmings or edgings of applied braid, gold or silver cord, embroidery, colored silk, or beads for clothing or furnishings....

s. The family was Jewish, and although not very religious still celebrated the traditional holidays.

Lazare received his baccalauréat

Baccalauréat

The baccalauréat , often known in France colloquially as le bac, is an academic qualification which French and international students take at the end of the lycée . It was introduced by Napoleon I in 1808. It is the main diploma required to pursue university studies...

 in science, but his passion lay in literature, a passion which he shared with his friend, the poet Ephraïm Mikhaël. It was Mikhaël who, while studying in Paris at the École des Chartes encouraged Bernard to join him and conquer the literary world. Lazare arrived in Paris in 1886, the year in which Édouard Drumont

Edouard Drumont

Édouard Adolphe Drumont was a French journalist and writer. He founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole.- Early life :...

's antisemitic pamphlet Jewish France (La France Juive) was published. Lazare signed up to the École pratique des hautes études

École pratique des hautes études

The École pratique des hautes études is a Grand Établissement in Paris, France. It is counted among France's most prestigious research and higher education institutions....

 (Practical School of Higher Studies). He attended lectures by the abbot Louis Duchesne

Louis Duchesne

Louis Marie Olivier Duchesne was a French priest, philologist, teacher and a critical historian of Christianity and Roman Catholic liturgy and institutions....

, for whom the Catholic Institute of Paris created a chair of History of the Church. Lazare's rigour and insistence on precision, his ability to call into question supposedly established facts had undoubtedly influenced Duchesne, whose History of the Ancient Church (l’Histoire de l’église ancienne) was placed on the Papal index

Index Librorum Prohibitorum

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of publications prohibited by the Catholic Church. A first version was promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1559, and a revised and somewhat relaxed form was authorized at the Council of Trent...

 and who reproached Lazare for writing like a "historian" and not a "theologian".

In 1888, together with Ephraïm Mikhaël, Lazare wrote La Fiancée de Corinthe, a mythological drama in three acts, where he first adopted his nom de plume, Bernard Lazare. Two years later Ephraïm Mikhaël died of tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

. It was around this time that Lazare became actively engaged in anarchism

Anarchism in France

Thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who grew up during the Restoration was the first self-described anarchist. French anarchists fought in the Spanish Civil War as volunteers in the International Brigades. French anarchism reached its height in the late 19th century...

. Although he never took "direct action

Direct action

Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...

", he always continued to support its ideals and his comrades, whose publications and legal defences he financed.

It was as an anarchist that he became a literary critic and journalist (his articles were later published in several collections). During the Trial of the thirty

Trial of the thirty

The Trial of the Thirty was a trial in 1894 in Paris, France, aimed at legitimizing the lois scélérates passed in 1893-1894 against the anarchist movement and restricting press freedom by proving the existence of an effective association between anarchists.Lasting from 6 August-31 October in 1894,...

 in 1894, he defended the anarchists Jean Grave

Jean Grave

Jean Grave was an important activist in the French anarchist movement. He was involved with Élisée Reclus' Révolté...

 and Félix Fénéon

Félix Fénéon

Félix Fénéon was a Parisian anarchist and art critic during the late 19th century...

 (also a painter). He then covered the 1895 miners’ revolt in Carmaux for the Écho de Paris. In 1896 he attended the Socialist Congress

Second International

The Second International , the original Socialist International, was an organization of socialist and labour parties formed in Paris on July 14, 1889. At the Paris meeting delegations from 20 countries participated...

 in London, where he denounced Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

 as "a jealous authoritarian, unfaithful to his own ideas, driving the Internationale away from its goals".

Dreyfus Affair

From 1892 onwards he was in contact with Achad Ha’am

Asher Ginsberg

Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg , primarily known by his Hebrew name and pen name, Ahad Ha'am, , was a Hebrew essayist, and one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers. He is known as the founder of Cultural Zionism. With his secular vision of a Jewish "spiritual center" in Palestine he confronted...

, one of the founders of the Lovers of Zion (Hovevei Tsyion

Hovevei Zion

Hovevei Zion , also known as Hibbat Zion , refers to organizations that are now considered the forerunners and foundation-builders of modern Zionism....

) movement. In the spring of 1894 he published Anti-semitism, its History and Causes (L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses cause), an in-depth study and critique of the origins of anti-semitism

Anti-Semitism

Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...

. It was published within a few months of the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history...

, a Jewish army officer accused of treason

Treason

In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against one's sovereign or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife. Treason against the king was known as high treason and treason against a...

. Having a reputation for combativeness and courage, Bernard Lazare was contacted by Mathieu Dreyfus to help prove his brother's innocence.

Lazare devoted his time exclusively to the case. He published his first paper, The Dreyfus Affair

Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...

 – A Miscarriage of Justice in Belgium in November 1896; it was in effect a complete rewrite of an earlier text which he had written at Mathieu's request in the summer of 1895. Basing it on an article in L’Eclair from the 15 September 1896 edition which revealed the illegality of the trial of 1894, Lazare refuted the accusation point by point and demanded the sentence be overturned. This tactic conformed more to the wishes of the Dreyfus family, as the first version of the text was a savage attack on the accusers, ending with the phrase "J’accuse

J'accuse (letter)

"J'accuse" was an open letter published on January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L'Aurore by the influential writer Émile Zola.In the letter, Zola addressed President of France Félix Faure, and accused the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army General...

", later made famous by Émile Zola

Émile Zola

Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

.

Due to this experience with anti-Semitism, Lazare became engaged in the struggle for the emancipation of Jews, and was triumphally received at the First Zionist Congress

First Zionist Congress

The First Zionist Congress was the inaugural congress of the Zionist Organization held in Basel , Switzerland, from August 29 to August 31, 1897. It was convened and chaired by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionism movement...

. He travelled with Zionist leader Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl , born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl was an Ashkenazi Jew Austro-Hungarian journalist and the father of modern political Zionism and in effect the State of Israel.-Early life:...

, the two men sharing a great respect for each other, but he fell out with Herzl after a disagreement over the project whose "tendencies, processes and actions" he disapproved. In 1899 he wrote to Herzl – and by extension to the Zionist Action Committee, "You are bourgeois in thoughts, bourgeois in your feelings, bourgeois in your ideas, bourgeois in your conception of society." Lazare's Zionism was not nationalist, nor advocated the creation of a state, but was rather an ideal of emancipation and of collective organization of the Jewish proletarians.

He visited Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

 in 1900 and 1902, after which he denounced the terrible fate of Romanian Jews in L’Aurore, written in July and August 1900. He also visited Russia where he reported on the dangers facing Jews, but did not have a chance to publish due to illness; and Turkey where he defended the Armenians against persecution. In a 1898 writing in Pro Armenia, he did not hesitate to denounce the "Congrès Sioniste de Bâle

First Zionist Congress

The First Zionist Congress was the inaugural congress of the Zionist Organization held in Basel , Switzerland, from August 29 to August 31, 1897. It was convened and chaired by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionism movement...

" which had publicly honoured sultan Abdülhamid II: "Representatives of the oldest of persecuted peoples, whose history cannot be written, but in blood, send their salutations to the worst of assassins".

Soon Dreyfusardes censored him and he could no longer write for l’Aurore after the Rennes trial. He covered the trial anyway and sent his vitriolic accounts to two American journals, The Chicago Record and The North American Review. At the end of his life, he became close to Charles Péguy

Charles Péguy

Charles Péguy was a noted French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a devout but non-practicing Roman Catholic.From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his...

, and wrote in the Cahiers de la quinzaine.

He died on 1 September 1903, aged 38, following an operation for colon cancer. He left an unedited Manuscript, Job's Dungheap (Le fumier de Job), and authorised the republication of Anti-semitism, its History and Causes, on the condition that the preface state "my opinions have changed on many points".

Further reading

• Bernard Lazare, Anarchiste et nationaliste juif – Textes réunis par Ph. Oriol – Ed. Honoré Champion (1999)
• Bernard Lazare – de l’anarchiste au prophète – J-D Bredin – Ed. fallois (1992)
• Bernard Lazare – Ph. Oriol – Stock (2003)

External links

• Homage to Bernard Lazare by Mitchell Cohen
• Writings of Lazare at Marxist Internet Archive
• Anti-Semitism, Its History and Its Causes By Bernard Lazare Free online book for download in adobe PDF format 991KB.
• Dreyfus Rehabilitated