The Diva and the Socialist Sarah Bernhardt, Camille, and Eugene Debs’s Crusade to Save the Fallen Woman

Abstract

Sarah Bernhardt was a great dramatic actress, considered one of the best of her era. Eugene V. Debs was an unrepentant radical, a member of the Socialist Party who ran for U.S. president five times. In 1920, Debs was in prison, con victed under the 1917 Espionage Act for speaking out against the war. While in prison, Debs wrote a letter to his brother Theodore about a night in February 1881 when he had seen Bernhardt perform in Indianapolis’s Park Theater. By Debs’s own account, Bernhardt’s Marguerite in Camille helped to shape his attitudes about women’s vulnerable place in modern society. Author Jason Martinek reflects on how that influence played itself out in Debs’s social activism.