- Person
- Sarah Bernhardt
- Lived
- 1844–1923
- Field
- Theatre
- From
- French
The story
Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress of her age, was the daughter of Judith Bernard, a Dutch Jewish woman. Although she was baptised Catholic, she described herself as a Roman Catholic and a member of the Jewish race. In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War brought German armies to the gates of Paris, she was a rising young star at the Odéon theatre. The theatres closed, and the city was besieged.
Bernhardt decided to use her theatre to save lives. She turned the Odéon into a hospital for soldiers wounded in the battles outside Paris. She set up 32 beds in the lobby and the foyers, asked wealthy friends for supplies, and had her own chef make soup for the patients.
She did not simply lend her name. Bernhardt worked as a nurse herself, assisting the chief surgeon with operations and amputations. As the siege tightened, Paris ran short of food and fuel. When the coal ran out, she kept the wounded warm by burning old scenery, benches and props from the theatre.
In early January 1871 German long-range guns began bombarding the city, and the patients had to be moved into the cellar before the hospital closed. The most serious cases were sent to another military hospital, and Bernhardt rented an apartment on the rue de Provence to care for the remaining 20 patients.
By the end of the siege her makeshift hospital had cared for more than 150 wounded soldiers. One of them was a young student from the École Polytechnique named Ferdinand Foch, who decades later would command the Allied armies in the First World War.
Bernhardt's hospital was a striking example of an artist turning her fame, her contacts and her own two hands to the service of people in desperate need. It showed that a theatre could become a place of care, and that celebrity could be used to gather help quickly in a crisis.
Why it matters
Bernhardt's wartime hospital is remembered as an early model of a public figure using her fame and her own labour to care for the wounded in a crisis.
About Sarah Bernhardt
‘The Divine Sarah’, daughter of a Dutch-Jewish mother, who became the first international star of the stage, toured the world, ran her own Paris theatre and stood up for Dreyfus.
More about Sarah Bernhardt
Sources
- Sarah Bernhardt Wikipedia
- Bat hat, wooden leg, coffin bed: Sarah Bernhardt's wild life offstage The Local France
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.