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To identify what is common to the intellectual and political trajectories of Jean Jaurès and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, I use a concept that neither of them used but which echoes their time and ours: the sentinel. In the management of health and environmental disasters, this concept refers to a living being placed on the edge of a community who, through his or her singular sensitivity, perceives warning signals of threats that will affect the whole community. I distinguish between three uses of the notion of sentinel in the works of Lévy-Bruhl and Jaurès which I read in relation to each other. In an epistemological sense, the sentinel is a device that makes it possible to counter the false evidence of Dreyfus’s guilt manipulated by the General Staff with evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence based on his sense of injustice. In political terms, the sentinel is a tool used to prepare a society for a catastrophe such as a world war or a general strike. In a metaphysical sense, the sentinel is a warning signal that shifts perception from an accident to a whole movement, making it possible to anticipate it.