Bernard Lazare

Bernard Lazare (14 June 1865, Nîmes – 1 September 1903, Paris) was a French literary critic, political journalist, polemicist, and anarchist. He is known as the first Dreyfusard. He was born Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard (he later switched his first name and last name) in Nîmes on 15 June 1865. His bourgeois family was Jewish, although not very religious. Lazare's initial contact with symbolists introduced him to anarchism and led to his career in literary criticism. During the Trial of the thirty in 1894, he defended anarchists Jean Grave and Félix Fénéon. In the spring of 1894 he published Anti-Semitism, its History and Causes (L'Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes), an in-depth study and critique of the origins of antisemitism. It was published within a few months of the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer accused of treason. 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. Initially, he drafted a pamphlet that framed Dreyfus's trial not as a simple miscarriage of justice, but the action of a specifically anti-Semitic conspiracy. Although this version was not published (at least in part because the family and their lawyer appear to have wanted to downplay the relevance of anti-Semitism to the case), Dreyfus's wrongful conviction became a turning point for Lazare's views on anti-Semitism, particularly regarding how Jews should respond. He began publishing more strident defenses of Jewish people in Parisian newspapers, and, after calling him out by name in Le Voltaire, even fought a duel with his former colleague, anti-Semitic extremist Édouard Drumont. (Neither man was injured.) Lazare's pamphlet, Une erreur judiciaire: La vérité sur l’affaire Dreyfus ("A Judicial Error: The Truth about the Dreyfus Affair") was finally published in November 1896 - in Belgium, rather than France, because he feared it would be seized by the French police.