Bernard-Lazare

Bernard-Lazare (1865-1903) was a French Jewish writer who was the prime mover in the Dreyfus Affair. The Dreyfus Affair lies at the centre of this 1978 book as it was the turning point in Bernard-Lazare's life. In the first part of the book Dr Wilson traces his early career: his defence of the Symbolist aesthetic as a philosophy of freedom; his sympathy for oppressed individuality and minority groups, and his passion for social justice; above all his analysis of antisemitism where, initially, he argued for social assimilation only to reject such an idea later in favour of a concept of…