The Torch-Bearers

Bernard Lazare

Translated by Brian Stableford

The Torch-Bearers tells the story of an itinerant Anarchist preacher who comes to the corrupt city of Geronta in the company of a fellow vagabond, where he begins preaching in parables, that being his preferred method of enlightenment. He hears a number of other story-tellers narrating their own parables, to which he opposes his own in order to expose their ideological flaws.

Here, presented in English for the first time in a superb translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most interesting novels of the Symbolist Movement, the elaborate fruit of author Bernard Lazare’s wholehearted commitment to both Symbolist and Anarchist ideals. This striking literary experiment, testing the hypothesis that the raw materials of myth, legend and folklore, which had been redeployed and pastiched so successfully by the Movement, could be adapted to Anarchist purposes.

About the Author
Bernard Lazare (1865–1903) was a French Jewish literary critic and journalist. Though mostly remembered today for his prominent role in the Dreyfus Affair and his book Antisemitism: Its History and Causes, he was also an important member of the Symbolist movement, and one of its purest and most extravagant exponents. He wrote drama and some poetry, but the core of his production consisted of an extensive sequence of short stories, or elaborated poems in prose, most of which he published in Symbolist periodicals between 1887 and 1893, and which he subsequently organized into three augmented collections.

Although somewhat neglected today, for reasons that have nothing to do with their literary and philosophical merit, Lazare’s short stories are key documents of the Symbolist movement, and a remarkable illustration of the methods and preoccupations of the writers whose activity constituted its heyday.

Paperback, 256 pages. Release date: December 4, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-194381-379-7
Price: US$18.50

Hardcover, 258 pages
Release date: December 4, 2018
Price: US$34.30