Albert Regnard

Albert Regnard (caricature)

Adrien Albert Regnard (b. 20 March 1836 in La Charité-sur-Loire; d. 27 September 1903 in Paris) was a French doctor, journalist, writer, politician, radical republican and socialist activist in France during the 19th century.

Life

A Blanquist, Regnard took part in the Paris Commune in 1871 and was made Secretary General of the Police for it. When it was suppressed he escaped to London and became a follower of Léon Gambetta. After an amnesty he returned to Paris in 1880 and became an Inspector General of the Ministry of Interior. Regnard, along with his friend Gustave Tridon, supported secularism in the spirit of Voltaire by championing the Aryan pagan values of Hellenic civilisation, stating that Christianity was a Semitic, Jewish poison meant to destroy the Aryan spirit. He was also an atheist Freemason.

Quotes

• Even the mainstream socialist theoretical journal, Revue Socialiste, edited by Benoit Malon, adopted an antisemitic line in the 1880s (Malon had been influenced by Proudhon and Bakunin in his earlier years)-publishing, for example, a series of articles entitled "Aryens et Semites" from 1887-1889. Their author, an ex-Communard and Blanquist, Albert Regnard (1832-1903), claimed that capitalism was mainly "a Jewish creation" whereas Socialism "is a Franco-German creation, Aryan in the fullest sense of the term." Regnard, drawing heavily on the ideas of Gobineau, Renan, and various racist authors, sought to prove "Aryan" (which include the Graeco-Roman, Indian, Persian cultures) superiority over the nomadic, sterile, materialistic "Semitic" race. Regnard's "scholarly and superb study," which breathed the spirit of genuine "Aryanism," was welcomed by Malon, who had recently introduced his friend Drumont to Parisian workingmen. — Robert S. Wistrich, 2012, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel

• Chirac and Regnard's "spiritual" Aryan socialism had been carefully crafted to challenge Marx's supposedly "Jewish" historical materialism. Left anti-Semites, accused the Jews of having begotten Christianity and that their jealous God now reigned over Christian civilisation's sickening synthesis of church, state and cash box. These three debilities were ascribed to Jewish monotheism, to Jehovah's unconditional triumph over antiquity's wholesome (and Aryan!) polytheism. The Jewish poison seeping through the Christianised Roman Empire, quasi-socialists like Gustave Tridon contended, had dribbled undiluted down the centuries, eventually infecting Europe's nineteenth-century body politic and throwing up a putrid mess of arid theocracy, authoritarian politics and usurious exploitation. — Robert Stuart, 2006, Marxism and National Identity

• Another advocate of laicism, also a follower of Gambetta, Albert Regnard refused to "couple the Jewish horde and ancient Greece", or to consent to "such an inoculation of monotheism". In September 1889, at the first International Congress of Free Thought, the same Albert Regnard was met with applause when he argued that "the Semitic race culminates in monotheism and the Aryan race in polytheism". Referring incessantly to Voltaire, whom he fervently admired, he didn't have any hesitation in writing: "[Voltaire], who has demolished the Bible and undermined the New Testament [is] the first coherent anti-Semite". — Jean-Claude Guillebaud, 2007, Re-Founding The World: A Western Testament

Works (excerpt)

• Aryens et Sémites. Le bilan du judaïsme et du christianisme, 1890
  • Aryans and Semites: The Balance of Judaism and Christianity