The Patriotic Mask: Nationalist Propaganda in the Antisemitic Press During the Dreyfus Affair

The Patriotic Mask: Nationalist Propaganda in the Antisemitic Press during the Dreyfus Affair

Sara Reynolds Dr. Alice Freifeld, Supervisor April 2011

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iii

Introduction ...... 1 The Dreyfus Affair ...... 4

La France aux Français: Nationalism in Antisemitic Writing...... 8 Antisemitism and the Works of Edouard Drumont ...... 12

Non, le capitaine Dreyfus ne peut pas être, n’est pas un Français: Jews as Foreign Invaders ...... 16 Fueling Antisemitism in the Press ...... 18

Un Episode de l’Histoire Juive: The Jews and Treason ...... 27 Jews and the Army ...... 27 Dreyfus and Judas ...... 34

Dreyfus n’a été que l’instrument d’une sorte de syndicat israélite: The Jewish Conspiracy ...... 40 The Jewish Conspiracy and Financial Control ...... 41 The Jewish Conspiracy and Intimidation: Contradictions in Antisemitic Thought and Action ...... 45 The Henry Subscription: Intimidation and Financial Conspiracy on the Side of the Antisemites...... 51

Les Juifs sont nos maitres: Jewish Dominance in French Society ...... 56 Jewish Dominance of the Press...... 58

Conclusion ...... 64

Appendix ...... 68

Notes ...... 72

Bibliography ...... 79

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my profound gratitude to the following:

I would like to thank the University Scholars Program, the Daniel E. Koleos Scholarship and the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies for the funding that made it possible for me to conduct research in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. These scholarships allowed me to analyze the motivations and contradictions behind antisemitic rhetoric in articles and illustrations from nineteenth century French journals such as La Libre Parole, La Libre Parole

Illustrée and Psst…!

I would like to thank my parents, who have made available their support in countless ways. Mom, thank you for sparking, almost two years ago, the idea from which this thesis developed. Dad, thank you for your unwavering support and encouragement, in the past year and in life. Lauren, I am indebted to you for providing me with friendly competition. You have been an excellent sister, friend and role model and without your example, I would never have been motivated to strive so high. I owe my deepest gratitude to the three of you for bestowing me with the encouragement, support and stepping stones for success.

I am grateful to my professors: Dr. Noll, for aiding my discovery of numerous opportunities in history; Dr. Louthan, for offering me reassurance and reminding me that I have what it takes to be successful; and, last but not least, my advisor, Dr. Freifeld, for inspiring my interest in the study of antisemitism, for encouraging me to pursue new ways to follow my scholarly passions, for being an excellent advisor and mentor and for offering infallible support and advice at all times and under all circumstances.

To all of you, I owe my everlasting thanks and gratitude.

Gainesville, FL April 2011

iii

I. Introduction

Antisemitism, although it did exist, did not have an influential presence in France until the 1880s.1 The modern French antisemitic movement appeared with the publication of Edouard

Drumont’s La France Juive (1886). Drumont, a prominent leader of the modern antisemitic movement, was influenced by earlier works such as Alphonse Toussenel’s Les Juifs rois de l’époque (1845). Antisemitic material flowing out of Austria and Germany after 1870 also influenced the French antisemitic movement, such as Wilhelm Marr’s Der Sieg des Judentums

über des Germanentums (1879), from which the term “antisemitism” originated. After the successful publication of La France Juive, Drumont continued to publish works which stressed themes of Jewish perfidy and nefariousness, including Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891) and the antisemitic daily newspaper, La Libre Parole, established in 1892.2 The foundation of La

Libre Parole exemplified an important aspect of the modern antisemitic movement, which owed its “coherent ideology” and “structured and intellectualized system of ideas” to mass literacy and the popular press.3

In the Republican tradition, newspapers expressed the views of certain political parties and groups. La Croix, founded by the Catholic order, the Assumptionists, famous for their militancy, organization of pilgrimages and virulent antisemitism, and La Libre Parole, established by Edouard Drumont, the main antisemitic daily in France, served as the conveyors of a political antisemitic ideology.4 Illustrated journals such as Psst…! and La Libre Parole

Illustrée reiterated the messages of La Croix and La Libre Parole through illustrations and captions which mocked Jewish appearance, lifestyle and speech. By focusing on the differences between the culture, language, religion and history of the French Jewish community and the

French Christian community, these newspapers asserted the antisemitic view that Jews were not

French, never could be French and, as such, were not loyal to France. Their lack of allegiance rendered Jews as internal enemies and potentially treasonous residents of France. According to antisemites, true Frenchman should beware of Jewish presence in and domination of French society. Jewish conquest of French institutions like the army was responsible for the instability of the Third Republic and threatened to destroy the nation.

France in the nineteenth century experienced much social and political turmoil. The century began with the end of the French Revolution, which introduced Republican ideals into the formerly monarchist French society. The Third Republic, established in 1871 after the

Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), ended the Second Empire (1852-1871) and resulted in the

German annexation of two border provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. At the end of the nineteenth century, different political groups expressed feelings of unease about Republican ideology, the vulnerability of which coincided with the development of the modern antisemitic movement.

Antisemites felt threatened by the Republican idea of nationalism, characterized by a state-centered and assimilationist approach to defining who could be a French citizen. Birth and residence in France automatically made a person a citizen, even if their parents were not born in

France. French assimilation began after the French Revolution but did not fully assimilate groups such as Bretons, Corsicans and Alsatians. The assimilationist understanding of French national identity was rooted in political and cultural geography which was reinforced during the 1880s with educational and militaristic reforms carried out by the Third Republic. Primary schools became free, secular, and mandatory and acted as the place in which ideas of a unified nation were expressed. The army was reorganized to include universal conscription and was thought of as the “school of the nation.” These institutions acted as agents of assimilation because of their expansion into the French periphery. Fustel de Coulanges, in a letter to German historian

Mommsen on October 27, 1870, wrote, “It is possible that Alsace is German by race and by language, but it is French by nationality and by its sense of fatherland.” De Coulange’s comment exemplifies French Republican ideas of nationalism, which were characterized by inclusion, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or culture.5

Unlike the inclusive Republican ideologies, which placed less emphasis on ancestry and inheritance and more emphasis on merit and competitive examinations, antisemites defined membership through exclusion. Before the French Revolution, the French ancien régime based membership on privilege. A form of “xenophobic nationalism” developed after 1792 which based national identity on an ethnocultural level, in which one’s race and culture defined one’s nationality, instead of on a political level, in which birth and residence in the nation granted citizenship. This xenophobic nationalism developed because political groups on the right, such as the antisemites, believed that internal and external enemies threatened a government which already suffered from instability.6 Their ideology explained social threats in terms of Jewish treachery, conspiracy and domination rather than through social change and class conflict. It helped explain changes in the economy, social relationships, bureaucracies and governments, and the sense of a loss of privilege and control, while at the same time prevented antisemites from feeling responsible for any such changes. Antisemites wanted to return to the stable society of the past, imagining a hierarchical world which favored the nobility and the upper bourgeois classes, instead of the changing and fluctuating society in which they lived. Nationalist antisemitic ideology provided antisemites with a community to which they belonged and from which they could never be excluded.7

The Dreyfus Affair

In September 1894, a concierge assigned to the German embassy in Paris removed a note, known as the bordereau, torn into six pieces from the wastebasket in the office of the German military attaché, Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen. The note, delivered to the Statistical Section, a bureau of the General Staff in charge of espionage and counter-espionage, revealed that the

General Staff had a traitor in their midst. After a hasty investigation, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a

Jewish officer and intern of the French Army’s General Staff, was arrested, interrogated and taken to court on charges of treason.

On September 15, 1896, La Libre Parole stated that “we have always abstained from producing and discussing the moral and material proof which condemned the Jew Dreyfus, the guilt doesn’t appear to us to be disputable.” The paper proceeded to report seven factors

“proving” Dreyfus’s guilt, including “the repulsion which Dreyfus inspired in all his comrades,”

“the letter from the German military attaché to the Italian military attaché designating Dreyfus in all letters,” and “the letter announcing the dispatch to Germany of a dossier with military documents, recognized as being written in Dreyfus’s hand.”8 A letter discussing military affairs in Nice had, in fact, been exchanged between the German and Italian military attachés which referred to a “canaille de D. [swine D.]” Those who believed Dreyfus was guilty thought “D.” stood for “Dreyfus” despite the German military attaché’s declaration that “D.” stood for

“Dubois.” Additionally, in the beginning of the investigation of the scandal in 1894, graphologists examining the bordereau had been unable to come to a consensus about whether or not Dreyfus had written it. Some firmly believed that the bordereau had been written by

Dreyfus. Others admitted there were similarities between handwritings but did not confirm that

Dreyfus had actually written the incriminating document.9

Nevertheless, Dreyfus was tried, declared guilty by a unanimous vote on December 22,

1894 and sentenced to exile on Devil’s Island, off the coast of South America.10 Not long after his conviction, Dreyfus’s wife, Lucie, and brother, Mathieu, fully convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, began a campaign for revision. This campaign began an ordeal known as the Dreyfus

Affair, which enveloped France for twelve years (1894-1906). Extensively covered by the press, the Dreyfus Affair divided the French nation into two vehement groups: the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards. The Dreyfusards believed in Dreyfus’s innocence, the miscarriage of justice surrounding his trial, and saw the Church and the army as institutions opposed to a modern, secular state. The anti-Dreyfusards believed in Dreyfus’s guilt and supported the Church and the army, which, in their eyes, represented stability through resistance to social conflict and change and protection against internal and external enemies.11 It is important to note that not all anti-

Dreyfusards were antisemitic and that some Dreyfusards expressed antisemitic views.

The first significant study of the Jews during the Dreyfus Affair came from Michael

Marrus in The Politics of Assimilation (1971). Marrus argued that the Jewish community possessed a self-defeating assimilation policy in which they attempted to avoid provoking antisemitism by asserting their patriotism instead of asserting their Jewish identity. According to

Ruth Harris in The Man on Devil’s Island (2010), not many historians today support Marrus’s argument but instead argue that the Jews attempted to find a place in mainstream French society without erasing their Jewish identity.12 Stephen Wilson’s Ideology and Experience (1982) is an excellent and influential work for historians studying the antisemitic press and the Dreyfus

Affair. Wilson discussed the many forms and appearances of antisemitism during the late nineteenth century and argued that the Affair provided antisemitism with an event around which it could apply and solidify its belief in the impossibility of Jewish assimilation and its belief in

5 the threat of Jewish domination of French society. Wilson, with whom many historians agree, argued that the Affair was provoked and exacerbated by the newspaper press. Mary Louise

Roberts illustrated the connection between journalism, theatricality, antisemitism and sexuality during the Dreyfus Affair in Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (2002).

Ruth Harris argued that the Affair and its aftermath solidified a “legacy of intolerance” in

France.13 This legacy transcends cultures and time periods, as Louis Begley demonstrated in Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (2009), in which he argued that the same national mindsets, modes of conduct and mistakes and illegalities in governmental procedure still exist and are even implemented in societies today.

The literature focusing on the broader issues surrounding the Dreyfus Affair includes

William Brustein’s Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust (2003), one of the only sources providing a comparative and empirical examination of pre-Holocaust antisemitism in Europe. Brustein argued that racial, religious, economic and political prejudice influenced the development of antisemitism, which manifested itself primarily during times of economic, social or political distress.14 Christophe Charle’s Le Siècle de la Presse, 1830-1939

(2004) covered a broad period of time in which the French newspaper developed. Charle argued that the media acted as a mode of connection in communities and nations and that mass media was influenced by the desire to influence public opinion, to maintain a competitive place in the economic field of publishing and to create “new cultural forms” in an age of rapid development and change.15 Rogers Brubaker’s Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) provided a comparative study of the ideas of nationalism in France and Germany and discussed the development of this idea in both nations.

The Affair represented “the struggle between the individual and the state; between civilian government and military authority; between the politics of parliamentary institutions and the politics of the mob; between the belief – religious or secular – in a common humanity and the modern calculus of racism.”16 It provided an environment in which French political ideologies developed and were expressed and was one of the first moments in history when the ideas of nation, race and religion played a significant role in the motivations of each opposing side and the outcome of the Affair itself. The press acted as a particularly important medium through which these ideas manifested themselves. Issues of national identity and loyalty became so important because many of the members involved in the Affair came from Alsace, a province bordering France and Germany. Because Dreyfus and so many other major participants originated in Alsace, antisemites characterized them as even more likely to commit treason. The antisemitic press, specifically Edouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole, adopted a nationalist perspective to legitimize itself in the eyes of the French public but, in reality, used patriotism as a means of avoiding concerns of social hierarchy, class conflict and a changing society.

II. La France aux FrançaisI: Nationalism in Antisemitic Writing

Nationalism as an ideology developed during the eighteenth century, when thought shifted from a religious to secular focal point. Nations created new identities which decreasingly rested on antiquity and heritage. Nationalism became infused with racism and a fear of the

“foreign.”17 Modern antisemitism, once religiously based, now focused on nationality and citizenship fueled by political, social and economic resentment. The antisemites argued that Jews were not part of the nation based on their religion, ethnicity or race. Stephen Wilson argues,

“Antisemitism and nationalism were the two sides of one coin, and when one side seemed to be losing its effect, it was natural to put more emphasis on the other.” Nationalists and antisemites often ended up expressing similar ideas by combining and manipulating elements of each ideology in order to create a political ideology which would arouse public support and result in political control.18

The development of a mass-circulated press and print culture contributed to the development of nationalism and antisemitism. The national community appeared in the novel, connecting characters through nation, society or community regardless of whether or not the characters ever met each other. Benedict Anderson argues, “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”

Print culture contributed to the formation of a national consciousness by creating a community in which populations became connected through the written word. Print languages allowed individuals to view and understand their world as a community in membership was formed,

I Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894. “French for the French.” This slogan was used by La Libre Parole as well as by other antisemitic organizations and was still in use during the time of the Vichy regime in 1940s France. 8 defined and connected by linguistic similarity. Those who spoke a different language were excluded from the community.19 Antisemites formed a community through the press based on linguistics and print languages. “Semites” were made up of a linguistic community, including

Arabic and Hebrew, as opposed to the Indo-Germanic or Aryan language community, which spoke languages developed from Sanskrit. This idea appeared in the works of Ernest Renan, who wrote that the Semitic languages corresponded to a certain division of humanity and the people who spoke these languages possessed original traits and characteristics which distinguished one race from another. Renan’s thesis on the Semitic languages and races influenced antisemitic literature, especially in the writings of Maurice Barrès and Edouard Drumont.20

However, Renan’s works, like the works of many other nationalist and antisemitic thinkers, was not without its hypocrisies. His manifestation of liberal nationalism, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? [What is a nation?]” was a work in which both conservative and liberal views appeared. Renan began by saying that most modern nations were based on feudal foundations in which families were connected to the soil. This idea of nationalism was visible in the works of

Maurice Barrès, an influential French nationalist thinker. Renan later explained that connection to the land did not make the nation: “the land furnishes…the field of the struggle…man furnishes the soul.” The nation was a spiritual concept, not a predetermined group of people. However,

Renan also argued that a “pure race” did not exist and that the noblest land was that in which

“the blood is the most mixed.” He argued that to define the nation on ethnic terms was a mistake because the separation of races prevented progress, whereas the acceptance of and intermingling of races would allow European culture to move forward. Defining patriotism based on ethnicity was “more or less paradoxical. One would say to the patriot, “You fool yourself….you think you are Celtic; no, you are German.” He also argued that racism and religious prejudice could not be

9 applied to politics, a paradoxical idea since nationalists and antisemites used their anti-Judaic and racist notions to arouse a political following. Renan concluded by stating that man was not enslaved by race, language or religion; men form a nation if they share spirit and passion.21

Renan’s liberal thesis in “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” is interesting because it does not correspond to the actions and beliefs of right-wing thinkers, on whom Renan had tremendous influence.

Zeev Sternhell declares that the “debt of French antisemitism towards Renan is indisputable; it is difficult to imagine the success of Drumont…without the respectability that had been acquired by, thanks to Renan, the idea of the inferiority of the Semites.”22

Exclusion based on linguistic differences, “Semite” and “Aryan,” later transformed to exclusion based on ethnic differences, “Jew” and “Frenchman.” The founder of French integral nationalism, Maurice Barrès, was extremely influential among French nationalists and antisemites in the late nineteenth century. Barrès was one of the first writers to realize the potential influence of antisemitism as a political force, but his nationalist ideology did not become a political agenda and his writings and ideas were contradictory.23 Barrès believed that in order to form a national identity, one must have a historical connection to the land through one’s ancestors. The link between oneself and one’s ancestors provided the nationalist drive needed for goal-oriented, nationalist actions.24 Barrès coined the term “nationalist socialism,” in which he encouraged the subordination of the individual to the community.25 Barrès did not perceive the nation as a group of free citizens with equal rights, but as a great, enlarged family centered on the village church and rooted in its ancestral community. To have a unified nation, one must replace the ideas of modernity with a biologically-based cultural determinism.26

Antisemitism appeared in Barrès’s nationalist ideals because he believed in a closed nationalism in which only a specified group of people could belong to the nation, therefore ensuring the

10 integrity of the nation.27 The combination of socialism, nationalism and antisemitism illustrated the complexities of Barrès’s work and the hypocrisies of antisemitic rhetoric. Socialist groups were perceived as representative of the major threats to elite and middle-class Christians. Jews and socialists were often linked because antisemites believed that both groups disregarded religion, patriotism and nationalism. As early as the 1880s, Edouard Drumont had connected

Jews, socialism and internationalism, writing in La France Juive that the leaders of the socialist and internationalist movements were Jews who manipulated the movements to achieve their own capitalist goals.28

Due to rising nationalistic sentiment in Europe during the nineteenth century, an ideology known as “scientific racism” developed. William Brustein defines scientific racism as the

“differences in human behavior derive[d] from inherent group characteristics” and claims that these differences “can be demonstrated through anthropological, biological, and statistical proofs.”29 The nation became the main channel of racial development and with the development of national consciousness, the idea of nationalism became synonymous with racism. Between

1850 and 1880, both left- and right-wing political groups adhered to certain racial science ideas.

Republicans and anti-clericals believed that each race represented a separate species, rejecting the biblical views of a common ancestry among men, beginning with Adam. Right-wing political groups believed that some races were inferior to others, which proved the worldwide degeneration of the human species. Antisemites blended this idea with religious prejudices, concluding that Jewish corruption resulted from a pathological biological foundation.30 Scientific racism itself did not define Jews as inferior or superior in relation to another race and sometimes referred to Jews as members of one specific race or members of a variety of races. In fin-de- siècle France, Jews were increasingly portrayed as a unique race instead of as a separate religious

11 group. Nationalist antisemites believed that Jews, as a separate race, were inferior, yet dangerous, to Aryans.31

Antisemitism and the Works of Edouard Drumont

Antisemites invented an ideal, imaginary nation with a pure, uncorrupt society where social changes like immigration and urbanization were not problems. Through this imaginary nation, antisemites gave themselves “a false sense of unity that operated according to a logic of exclusion.”32 By constantly comparing the real France to the ideal France, antisemites convinced themselves that they were living in a corrupt, degenerate, decadent society but believed that through nationalism, society could be purified.33 The most notorious antisemite of late nineteenth century France was Edouard Drumont. A practicing Catholic, Drumont, like Barrès, was one of the first to realize the political power of antisemitism.34 Drumont exercised enormous influence over the public, ideological and political literature of fin-de-siècle France, influencing other nationalists and antisemites like Barrès, Paul Déroulède and Charles Maurras, the founder of the

Action Française, a proto-fascist movement.35 His beliefs inspired other antisemitic movements throughout France in the 1890s, such as La Ligue Antisémitique Française, La Ligue de la Patrie

Française, La Jeunesse Antisémitique et Nationaliste and La Fédération Nationale Antijuive.36 In addition, Drumont had a reputation for his ability to influence public opinion. His newspaper, La

Libre Parole, established in 1892, had a circulation of 200,000 in 1893 and remained the leading antisemitic daily journal in France until 1905, and his work, La France Juive (1886) became the most widely read book in France, alongside the Bible and the works of Emile Zola, selling over

100,000 copies during the first year of its publication and reaching 200 editions by the turn of the century.37

Drumont’s works stressed the nefariousness of Jews and their responsibility for the degeneracy of the French nation. In La Fin d’un Monde (1888), he wrote that France would perish as a result of her decadence and characterized Jews as the embodiment of the corrupt society which threatened the ideal France of which antisemites dreamed.38 More than any other work, Drumont’s La France Juive influenced nationalist and antisemitic thinking and had a huge effect on the mentality of the French public during the Dreyfus Affair. In this work, Drumont did not differentiate between traditional anti-Judaism and modern antisemitism, but combined anthropology, economics and political theory to connect Catholicism with science in order to prove that Jews were fated to undermine Christian society. Drumont often failed to use factual information and expressed contradictory beliefs, exemplifying the complexities of antisemitism.39

Drumont discussed the “Jewish problem” in racial terms, often comparing the “inferior

Jews” to the “superior Aryans.” He established a theory of history as a race struggle.40 Drumont characterized Jews as deceitful, greedy, criminal, disease-ridden and physically unappealing while Aryans were earnest, chivalrous, just and handsome.41 He believed Jews were completely different from Aryans, writing, “These people really do not have brains like ours; their evolution is different from ours; and everything to do with them is exceptional and odd…”42 He believed

Jews suffered from neurological disorders and other infirmities such as arthritis.43 For Drumont, racial inferiority did not equate to racial weakness and the power of the Jew rested in his apparent weakness.44 Drumont believed Jews had a drive for world domination and had already succeeded in overtaking France, where they controlled the economy, elite society, the political system, the magistracy and the press.45 Following Drumont’s example, nationalist movements focused on the need to end Jewish influence and financial power.46 Drumont called for legal

13 restoration of the ghetto, seizure of Jewish wealth, the reinstatement of the medieval practice of requiring Jews to wear yellow badges, and the removal of Jews from France. Drumont blamed

France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War on wealthy and politically influential Jews with

German heritage. Drumont also emphasized Jewish control of the state, a standard theme in antisemitic polemics.47 Drumont blamed Jews for the political corruption of the government, a result of the decadent society for which Jews were also responsible.48

The main accusation against Jews was that they were foreign, not French. In La France

Juive, Drumont declared that Jews existed among all nations without being a part of them. Jews were “neither French, nor German, nor English, nor Prussian, they are Jewish.” Nationalist antisemites saw Jews as alien invaders who represented an international conspiracy, the goals of which were to dominate and destroy nations. Thus, the Jews living in France were threats because they had no allegiance to the French nation and therefore, were potential traitors.49

Maurice Barrès argued that Jews did not possess the qualities required for acceptance into the

French national community for several reasons. Jews had not been considered French citizens until the French Revolution when emancipation occurred around 1792 and Jews became naturalized citizens, encouraged to assimilate into French society. However, nationalist antisemites did not accept naturalization and assimilation as adequate proof of Jewish French citizenship and still saw the Jews as a threat to the “soul and soil of France.”50 In 1900, Barrès wrote, “The Jews have no homeland, no nation in the sense in which we understand it. For us, the nation is the soil and our ancestors; it is the land of our dead. For them, it is simply the place where it is in their greatest interest, for the moment, to live.”51 In his work Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, Barrès argued that Jews failed to uphold the Revolutionary ideals of liberty because of “their habits of monopolizing, of speculation, of cosmopolitanism.”52

Nationalist propaganda in antisemitic writings illustrated the discomfort antisemites felt in the changing society of fin-de-siècle France, a society in which anonymity became more common and in which social organization of the ancien régime, based on privilege and hierarchy, began to disappear. The threat of the Jew could only be overcome through the return to the old order, by the re-establishment of a “stable social order, stable moral values, immutable and absolute categories,” and an allegiance to institutions like the army and the Church.53

Antisemites formed communities which transformed intolerance into a symbol of fraternity between those patriots who believed in “France for the French.”54 They combined developing ideologies of racism and nationalism to pursue their own means of illustrating how Jews, as a separate race, did not constitute a part of the French nation, and, as a result, were a direct threat to the safety and integrity of France.

III. Non, le capitaine Dreyfus ne peut pas être, n’est pas un FrançaisII: Jews as Foreign Invaders

The development of the nation-state was accompanied by the definition of citizens.

According to Rogers Brubaker, “Every modern state identifies a particular set of persons as its citizens and defines all others as noncitizens, as aliens.” Citizenship included legal, ideological and conceptual boundaries which defined the requirements for citizenship, determining who would enjoy certain rights and who would not. Insiders, citizens, were defined as members of a clan, association, organization or state. Outsiders or foreigners were defined as nonmembers of a nation or people with a disqualifying quality. Ethnocultural closure occurred when outsiders were defined by ethnic or religious means. The modern nation-state was inherently nationalistic because its legitimacy rested on the protection and promotion of the interests of a particular group or citizenry. The creation of the nation-state created the foreigner as a legal and political category, forming the foreigner through exclusion. All nation-states faced the issue of foreigners and resident foreigners, an issue which developed in France after 1792, when the creation of an egalitarian, bourgeois society established common rights for all members and equality before the law.

In ancien régime society, “inequality was built into the fabric of society.” Everyone had rights but these rights depended on their social category and not on whether or not one was

French. The nobility and the clergy enjoyed specific privileges that the lower classes did not, such as the right to carry a sword or exemption from certain taxes. The French Revolution changed the view of citizenship from a hierarchical orientation to an egalitarian orientation in which distinguishing foreigners developed a practical and ideological significance that had not previously existed in society. Brubaker argues, “Only from 1792 on, when new order felt itself

II Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894. “No, Captain Dreyfus cannot be, is not French.” 16 besieged by enemies within and enemies without, did there develop…elements of a xenophobic nationalism at home and an expansive, aggressive, nationalism abroad.”55

Ethnic nationalism appeared in the nineteenth century with the nationalist movements, developing mainly after 1830. The word “nationalité,” by 1848, denoted an ethnocultural community and only later developed a legal meaning. Thus, the nation was structured to match up the distinction between nationality and state. Before 1870, race in France was linked with class and not nation. Race explained tensions, divisions and weaknesses within the nation but did not explain tensions between the French and foreigners. Social phenomena explained through ideas of race were common but racial theory thinkers did not express sympathy for nationalism or patriotism. With the Franco-Prussian war, race became identified with nation and was based on international, not intra-national, conflict.56

Racial theory developed thanks to European colonialism, rising nationalist sentiment and a fear of immigration and emphasized that differences in humans derived from inherent biological characteristics. Intellectuals proposed the existence of a natural hierarchy characterized by racial differences. Racism became fused with nationalism throughout the mid- nineteenth century. Nationalists rejected Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and believed that national rights and citizenry belonged to a culturally identifiable population with a shared history, language and national sentiment. By the end of the nineteenth century, Jews were increasingly portrayed as a unique race instead of as a separate religious group. Race science allowed antisemites to mask their hatred and fear of Jews in scientific terms. Jews were thought to constitute a separate, inferior race that threatened the Aryan race.57 After the Revolution, the

French nation did not tolerate any group that appeared to be a “nation within a nation.”58 Jews were viewed as cosmopolitan, foreign and representative of the anti-nation. The Jew should be

17 excluded because of his racial difference. Antisemites believed Jews threatened the moral and national integrity of the French nation. Jews were associated with rapid social changes like immigration and urbanization which threatened antisemites.59

At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, antisemitism had a nationalist emphasis directed against foreigners. Nationalist antisemitism in the press indicated “ultra- patriotism.”60Antisemites believed:

“that the Jews were indelibly foreign, and that they were involved in a

more or less successful conspiracy with other forces to dominate and rule

France to the detriment of its native citizens. The nationalism of the

antisemites was thus directed…against internal enemies primarily; its

function had less to do with France’s external policy than with dampening

potential internal conflict, projecting a hierarchical conception of society,

and providing its adherents with security in a world of complexity and

change.”

Antisemites were against the Jews because they supported France for the French. Antisemitism belonged to a wider movement known as the nationalist movement, members of which often adopted “France for the French” as its slogan.61

Fueling Antisemitism in the Press

On November 3, 1894, La Libre Parole published an article written by Edouard Drumont in which he asserted, “The business of Captain Dreyfus…is only an episode of Jewish history.”

Drumont continued to relay a series of instances throughout history in which Jews betrayed their leaders and their nations, also stating, “It’s the fatality of their type and the malediction of the race.”62 The next day, the paper published an article written by Gaston Méry reiterating

Drumont’s previous statements. Méry questioned whether Dreyfus’s crime was “the synthesis of all the crimes that his race committed in France for years?” He also asserted that “a sort of fatality” prevented Jews from assimilating into French society.63 Declaring that Dreyfus had committed treason because he was Jewish and therefore inherently criminal, allowed antisemites to affirm the superiority of the French race. As the opposite of the Jewish race, the French race was morally superior because the French would not have committed such a dishonorable crime.

Drumont and Méry also presented an image of the Frenchman as naively tolerant.

Drumont declared, “It is not the Jews, it is we who are the guilty ones, and it would be right to ask ourselves, ‘…Why do you confide your secrets to those who always betray you?’ ”64 In an interview with La Patrie, he stated, “The true guilty are those who give confidential missions to the Israelites.”65 Gaston Méry asserted that by trusting the Jews and allowing them to enter the offices of national security, France risked inadvertently confiding her secrets to other nations.66

Drumont’s statements were not printed to imply that the French people were actually guilty, but to illustrate their ideals of liberty and trustworthiness, qualities which belonged to the Aryan race and not to the Jewish race.67 France had the most experiences with Jewish treason, “without a doubt because it is she who hospitalizes the most warmly” the Jews.68 In 1898, Drumont reinforced this idea, claiming, “[The Jews] played too many bad turns on those who gave them hospitality, that one is obliged to defend oneself against them like one defends oneself against harmful animals.”69 Once again, La Libre Parole emphasized the hospitality of the French nation, who opened up her country to the Jews and was repaid with ungrateful, greedy and treasonous acts.

Antisemites believed Jews were unable to assimilate into French culture. An assimilatory policy towards immigrants demands that there is only one culture, one religion and one language

19 and does not allow for diversity within society. Emancipation had an “implicitly contractual nature” which put pressure on Jews “to prove their worthiness to become citizens.”70 La Libre

Parole emphasized the idea that “…a sort of fatality prevented [Jews] from ever assimilating to us…”71 stating:

“See the confidence the members of the Convention of Year II had in the

patriotism of the Jews, to whom the Constituent Assembly…blindly

granted the quality of the French, as if the stigma of a race which refuses

assimilation, could disappear as easily as recanting a religion.”72

By attributing the Jewish failure to assimilate to “a sort of fatality” allowed antisemites to reject entirely any possibility of Jewish assimilation.73 The idea of social mobility and assimilation frightened antisemites because it “assumed a society in flux, permeable, in which social identities were not given, but could, or worse had to, be made, and in which they could be lost.”74 Antisemites also asserted that, not only did Jews fail at assimilating, they outright refused it. Some antisemites, such as Maurice Barrès, believed Jews, as recently naturalized citizens, lacked historical ties to French soil and did not share the same patriotic connection to the land as those French citizens whose ancestors had resided in France for centuries.75 Others believed that

“the international business connections of Jews would prevent them from becoming ‘zealous patriots.’ ” La Libre Parole’s references to the French Revolution also illustrated that antisemites blamed the government for a fluctuating society. During the Revolution, the privileges of the nobility and the Church were abolished. The First Republic adopted a new flag, a new calendar and launched a movement of secularization and de-Christianization. Despite its many changes, the end of the ancien régime resulted in a long period of revolutionary instability.76 Antisemites disagreed with these revolutionary policies because they believed in a hierarchical society based

20 on privilege and they supported the Church as a traditional facet of French society. Antisemites undermined the Third Republic by questioning the changes of the Revolution upon which the foundations of the Republic rested. By referencing the Revolution, La Libre Parole reminded its readers that instability also existed under Republican rule. Rejecting the “concept of a society into which Jews might be assimilated, antisemites posited a counter-concept of France as a nation, even a race.”77

Illustrated journals also emphasized the notion that Jews were unable to assimilate. On March 12, 1898, Psst…! published an image [see figure 1 in Appendix] ironically portraying a Jewish family’s attempt and failure to assimilate.78 A Jewish man, woman and boy are in their home, dressed in French clothing and surrounded by French objects. Les Chants de Soldat by Paul Déroulède rests on the piano. The man says to the woman, “Ah! the pretty soldier!” and the woman responds, “But that’s not a soldier,

Saloman, it’s Joan of Arc!” There are a number of aspects of this image which convey the idea that this family was a Jewish family which failed, despite clear efforts, to assimilate. The Chants de Soldat by Paul Déroulède on the piano was one of the first indicators of attempts at assimilation. This collection of patriotic poems, written by a virulent nationalist, symbolized a protectionist view of nationalist ideals which had developed after the Franco-Prussian War. The shock of defeat caused Déroulède, one of the most popular nationalist figures in fin-de-siècle France, to question the Republic’s

“universalist tradition” and to promote a policy in which the nation protected itself from

“internationalist doctrines” and exploitation by foreigners.79 The image also symbolized the idea of revanche, revenge against Germany for France’s loss and the return of Alsace-

Lorraine to France. The illustrator created irony with the juxtaposition of the Jewish

21 family with Déroulède’s poems. The fact that a Jewish family would own Déroulède’s poems was ironic because they were the antithesis of everything the poems represented.

Antisemites saw Jews as international, foreign and more specifically, German, the nationality Déroulède most strongly wanted to fight against.

The image of Joan of Arc and the book which the Jewish woman holds by Marbot were two more illustrations of ironic juxtaposition. For antisemites, Joan of Arc symbolized an ideal, virginal, racially pure France. The “Jewess” was the opposite, representing the threat of racial disorder and of a corrupt, exploited, invaded France.80

Additionally, Joan of Arc represented Church values, military power and French patriotism and provided a connection to the societies of the past which antisemites glorified. For conservatives, Joan represented social order and Church power characteristic of the medieval period. The conservative vision of Joan illustrated the antisemitic fear and hatred of modernity.81 The fact that the Jewish man did not realize that the picture was of Joan of Arc illustrated the Jewish failure to assimilate. Clearly this man had not successfully assimilated because he did not recognize figures which so significantly symbolized the French nation. The book by Marbot which the Jewish woman holds was also ironically included into the image. Jean Baptiste Antoine

Marcelin, baron de Marbot, was a French soldier during the Napoleonic Era. His

Memoirs of his Life and Campaigns was published in 1891, providing a romantic view on the Napoleonic age and warfare, another time period celebrated by the antisemites.82 Not only did Napoleon’s reign symbolize French military power but under Napoleon’s regime, the rights accorded to Jews during the Revolution were limited.

The last aspect of the picture of failed assimilation resided in the misuse of language, denoted in the conversation between the man and woman:

- Ah! le choli cuirassier!

- Mais c’est pas un cuirassier, Salomon, c’est Cheanne t’Arc!

These two phrases show that the Jewish family had not fully mastered the French language. The woman’s response was grammatically incorrect. A French person would have said, Mais ce n’est pas instead of Mais c’est pas. The woman’s incorrect use of negation illustrated that the Jews did not speak standard French. Their accents also betrayed their Jewish character. The conversation spoken by a true Frenchman would have sounded differently:

- Ah! le joli cuirassier!

- Mais ce n’est pas un cuirassier, Saloman, c’est Jeanne d’Arc!

Thus, the way in which the Jews spoke characterized them as foreigners who were unable to assimilate.83

Those involved in the Dreyfus Affair were labeled as foreigners. Dreyfus, in addition to being Jewish, which automatically labeled him as foreign, came from Alsatian origins and was often associated with Germany. After an article falsely published that Dreyfus had escaped from

Devil’s Island, La Libre Parole reported, “…Dreyfus will have fled from Guyana and will sail towards Germany, his true homeland, that is if he has one at all.”84 Here the antisemites emphasized their belief that the Jews had no homeland while further undermining them by claiming that Germany, France’s enemy, would be the nation to which their loyalties lied if, in fact, they were capable of expressing national loyalty. The paper also claimed that Dreyfus “only had admiration for the German army” and insisted that, “German of taste and of education and

Jewish of race, he did the work of a German and of a Jew...”85 Refuting Dreyfus’s French nationality confirmed his guilt in the eyes of the antisemites and emphasized his vile nature as well as the nefarious nature of all Jews. Associating him with Germany increased the negative view surrounding Dreyfus by playing upon the emotions of the French population towards

France’s bitter loss to Prussia. Emile Zola was also labeled as a foreigner because of his Italian heritage. On January 14, 1898, the day after Emile Zola’s famous publication, “J’Accuse…!” in

L’Aurore, La Libre Parole printed an article written by Jean Drault, who asserted that the army had been insulted by “an Italian.”86 Drault discredited Zola’s argument that Dreyfus was innocent and that the entire Affair “was the affair of the War Office, an officer from the General

Staff, denounced by his comrades on the General Staff, condemned under pressure from the

Chiefs of the General Staff.”87 Drault, by insisting upon Zola’s foreign heritage and criticism of the army, played upon the xenophobic mentalities of the French population to undermine Zola’s argument and ignored the fact that, despite its exaggerations and oversimplifications, the argument made extremely valid points. Drault also exemplified one of the standard beliefs of the antisemites, extreme loyalty to the army no matter what. Another article published by La Libre

Parole reinforced the notion that Zola was a foreigner and should not be trusted. “Zola, the son of an Italian, the deserter of 1870, wrote to the president of the Republic…[H]e takes handfuls of mud and he strives to dirty all the officers who, near or far, were mixed into the Dreyfus

Affair.”88 Here, the paper undermined Zola by reasserting his foreign character as an Italian. The author’s comment that Zola was a “deserter of 1870” questioned Zola’s judgment in comparison to a true Frenchman. The press criticized Zola’s most recent work, La Débacle, which criticized the actions of the General Staff during the Franco-Prussian War.89 Emphasizing Zola’s criticism

24 of the army allowed antisemites to characterize Zola as unpatriotic, further supporting the notion of Zola as foreigner.

Edouard Drumont wrote an article mimicking that of Zola’s “J’Accuse..!” in which he defended the honor of the army and accused the members of the so-called Jewish Syndicate for

“maneuvers against State security.” Drumont proclaimed, “I accuse Joseph Reinach...the leader of high Prussian espionage in France; I accuse Mathieu Dreyfus, brother of the traitor and probably his accomplice; I accuse Leblois, who made himself the possessor of confidential documents which could only come from the Ministry of War, of having made auxiliaries and foreign agents…”90 This article challenged Zola’s “J’Accuse…!” by turning the argument upside down, claiming that Zola had been paid by the Jewish Syndicate to write his infamous article and that, to have paid someone to do this, the Jewish Syndicate must have “lost all moral sense and every notion of decency.” By defending the army and condemning Zola and the Jewish

Syndicate, Drumont reinforced his own patriotism and the patriotism of the antisemites. The antisemites labeled themselves as the opposite of Zola, Dreyfus and the Jews. They were true

Frenchman, grounded in their moral sense and decency and their patriotic support of the army and the nation.

Antisemites attempted to refute the national identity of the Jews by repeatedly claiming that they were not French. Antisemites emphasized Jewish inability to assimilate into French culture and society by stressing Jewish linguistic difference and by affirming that the Jews were ignorant of French national icons and traditions. This tactic used by antisemites illustrated their desire to maintain a society based on a closed citizenship and enforce their own position as true

French citizens included in a national community from which Jews were excluded. The press acted as a medium for the formation of this national community by connecting people in

25 different areas and regions through their mutual hatred of Jews expressed in the newspapers and illustrated journals to which they subscribed. Antisemites also asserted the foreignness of Jews and Dreyfusards by asserting that they did not belong to a nation or by linking them to enemy nations, such as Germany. Dreyfus, partially because of his Alsatian roots and partially because he was Jewish, was associated with Germany by the antisemites. This was an attempt to demonstrate that Jews and Dreyfusards were not loyal citizens, if they could be defined as citizens at all. Antisemites believed the allegiances of Dreyfusards and Jews rested elsewhere.

They strengthened their own position as loyal citizens by denouncing those they opposed as disloyal and foreign.

IV. Un Episode de l’Histoire JuiveIII: The Jews and Treason

As seemingly internal foreigners, Jews were natural targets for allegations of espionage and treason. The press published articles and illustrations which accused Dreyfus, the Jewish community and Dreyfusards, of treason, espionage, false patriotism and disloyalty, and connected them with Germany, a long-time enemy of France. Visual and printed polemic allowed antisemites to emphasize their own elite status and to denounce as meaningless the merited status of Jews or Dreyfusards. Publications in the press also demonstrated attempts by antisemites to explain the failures of the decadent society in which they thought they lived, allowing themselves to remain unaccountable for corruption, military failure, mediocrity and weakness.

Jews and the Army

After the Franco-Prussian War, many families, both Jewish and non-Jewish, opted for

French citizenship and moved from Alsace to metropolitan France. Many Alsatians joined the military out of patriotism, hoping to avenge their homeland. Antisemites viewed these officers with suspicion on account of their Alsatian roots, since Alsatians had a reputation for disliking military service as well as for having close cultural, social and linguistic connections to

Germany. Antisemites were doubly suspicious of Dreyfus’s loyalty as an Alsatian and as a Jew.91

Antisemites distorted these acts of patriotism, using their suspicions as evidence that Jews and foreigners threatened national grandeur and security by infiltrating the army in order to commit treason. La Libre Parole emphasized the infiltration, espionage and treasonous tendencies of

Jews in the military in the series of publications in 1892 entitled “Jews in the Army.” This series of articles emphasized the existence of German espionage in France and reminded the French

IIIEdouard Drumont, “L’Espionnage Juif,” La Libre Parole, November 3, 1894. “An Episode in Jewish History.” 27 public that Germany paid French agents for information. On May 23, 1892 an article was published in La Libre Parole stating that the “sons of Israel,” the Jews, “traffic[ed] without shame in the secrets of national defense.” These publications influenced the French public, whose reactions towards Jews in the military changed from indifference to hostility. They were also an attempt to boost sales and circulation. The idea of the treacherousness of Jews in the army was especially powerful in manipulating the feelings of the French public because, in the eyes of the French public, the army remained one of the only pure, uncorrupt organizations in which the public could still place faith.92 Antisemites believed the army acted as a symbol of national grandeur and was one of the last institutions which could impart their ideals of national purification and patriotism onto the French nation. Belief in military authority was central to the anti-Dreyfusard cause. Monarchists, Catholic aristocrats and royalists had remained distant from the Republic since its establishment, with the exception of entering the army. They saw the attacks on the military by the Dreyfusard campaign as an “assault on their last bastion of power and patronage.”93 Antisemites needed Jews in order to excuse the faults of the army. The army was weak because the Jews had infiltrated it and, having succeeded in gaining a place in the army, sold secrets to Germany. By blaming the Jews for the failures of the army in the area of national security, antisemites made it possible for military leaders to remain unaccountable for these failures and also allowed antisemites to ignore signs of French military weakness, allowing antisemites to delude themselves into believing that they lived in a powerful society reminiscent of the society of the ancien régime.

Antisemites also accused the Jews of infiltrating and dominating the army.94 “The Army is maybe the most striking example of the fashion in which the directing Oligarchy, Financiers, great Jews, sold deputies and degenerate gentlemen, demoralized this land, killed in it all

28 patriotism and all ideals.”95 The assertion that Jews infiltrated and dominated the army allowed antisemites to reject the idea that their one symbol of national purity was corrupt because of the actions of the French generals. Any corrupt actions involving the military were the fault of the

Jews who infiltrated it. Drumont stated, “Look now at what the directing Oligarchy did to these good wills…Look at this War Ministry which should be the sanctuary of Patriotism and which is a cavern, a place of perpetual scandals…”96 If Jews were responsible for the corruption in the military, the symbol of national grandeur, then Jews were also responsible for the corruption of the government and of France as a whole.

Antisemites largely exaggerated the belief in Jewish infiltration and treason in the army.

During the 1890s, there were only 300 Jewish officers in an army totaling 500,000 men.97

Antisemites irrationally believed that Jews weakened the army, even though in reality they made up less than 0.1% of military personnel. Through exaggeration, antisemites created and provided an excuse for French military losses and failures. Allowing the Jews to serve in the military caused the army to be weak. Antisemites glorified the ancien régime. In their ideal society, Jews were not considered citizens, did not have rights and did not serve in the military. The Jewish population of Alsace-Lorraine had a reputation for hostility towards military service and was criticized for this reputation. A non-Jewish observer wrote in the early eighteenth century that, although Jews seemed to be repelled by military service, soldiers did not seem to want to accept them in the army either.98 In the 1890s, Edouard Drumont printed that military posts were always available for Jews in the Ministry of War and that the “traitor[s]” often obtained these posts thanks to the recommendations of socially and politically influential Jews, like Joseph Reinach.99

Drumont had been preaching that Jews stole military positions since 1892 when he published his polemical campaign against Jews in the army.100 In reality, it was very difficult for Jews to retain

29 a spot in the military thanks to the favoritism and patronage which occurred among the largely

Catholic and aristocratic officers who made up the majority of the officer corps. Thus, Drumont was actually turning the entire traditional system on its head, claiming that Jews enjoyed favoritism when Catholic aristocrats were the ones who received positions thanks to patronage.

Drumont once again created a situation in which antisemites rejected responsibility for the state of the society in which they lived, specifically for the weakness and corruption in the military.

By refusing to admit that Jewish officers had obtained their positions thanks to hard work and intelligence, antisemites disregarded their own mediocrity or the failure of their valued institutions.

The weakness of the French army in comparison to the German army caused discomfort and instability among the officers of the French General Staff. Despite attempts to readjust the

French military system, by the 1890s France failed to catch up with the sophisticated military system of Germany. This failure created a “sense of insecurity that verged on paranoia” and an obsession with espionage and counter-espionage. The prefecture of police, an organization focused on espionage and counter-espionage, named 165 individuals as spies in the mid-1870s.

The Statistical Section of the General Staff, an organization “preoccupied with spying,” was also focused on counter-espionage, especially in cases of national security, and was directed by

Colonel Jean Sandherr, an Alsatian from Mulhouse. The Statistical Section believed that

“German spies abounded in France” and, during the late 1880s and early 1890s, attempted to form a list, known as Carnet B, naming foreigners and Frenchmen suspected of spying. Allan

Mitchell declares that, as a result of his work in counter-espionage, Sandherr would have been

“the first to advocate ‘the arrest and imprisonment of all suspect persons’ ” in the case of

30 espionage and treachery. The foundations for the Dreyfus Affair were planted in the French army in Carnet B.101

The press aided this sense of paranoia by instilling a sense of “Germanophobia” in the

French public, linking Germans and Jews with spies and traitors. It was widely accepted that

Germany paid many French agents as spies acting for the German government. It was believed that the Rothschilds, a famous Jewish banking family, were informants of Otto von Bismarck and that Joseph Reinach was the nephew and son-in-law of a German spy.102 The

Assumptionists, a militant Catholic order, believed Jews fostered German espionage.103 Léon

Daudet, an antisemitic novelist, a contributor to La Libre Parole between 1900 and 1908, and an avid follower of Drumont, denounced “German-Jewish espionage” in order to emphasize the treachery of Jews, their alliance with foreign powers and their “alien nature.” Drumont recognized a difference between German Jews and non-German Jews, claiming that the German

Jew was the “real Jew” and therefore the real threat.104 In January 1898, La Libre Parole emphasized the need for the French army, “the only power which remains standing on the ruins of all the others,” to defend itself against “the attacks of German Jews.” Jean Drault, the author of the article, expressed the idea that the army remained strong but that the parliamentary government, the “progressive republican party,” was weak and, despite its attempts and assertions, did not have the strength to protect the army from the Jews.105 By highlighting the weakness of the republican administration, antisemites undermined the government which they held in contempt and validated their desire to return to a stronger, pre-Revolutionary government in which the army and the nation remained strong, in which the government would be able to protect the army and vice versa, and in which national security remained unthreatened.

The paper also warned about the “horde of German Jews who…enrich themselves of our spoils, who rob us, exploit us, corrupt us in all ways…” Drumont wrote that these characteristics were common and expected of Jews, arguing that selling state secrets and aiding Germany in a campaign to bring down the French army made up parts of their “Jewish job.”106 Drumont emphasized the threat of the other, the Jew, the German, and, above all, the German Jew. By blaming the exploitation and corruption on German Jews, Drumont allowed antisemites to avoid holding themselves or the French people liable for the corruption of French society. French society could not be decadent or corrupt because it was not controlled by true Frenchmen. In

November 1894, not long after news of Dreyfus’s arrest became public, La Libre Parole implied that Dreyfus should’ve simply remained German after the annexation of Alsace, like other members of his family, instead of disgracing France with treachery by one of her own citizens.107

In late December, after the conviction of Dreyfus, La Libre Parole claimed that Dreyfus often expressed his admiration for the German army and hatred for the French people and for the

French army, “where he only rested, without a doubt, with the goal to better betray.” The paper claimed that Dreyfus was “German of taste, of education and Jewish of race,” and used these characteristics to work for Germany.108 By emphasizing Dreyfus’s Alsatian origins, Drumont implied that Dreyfus was foreign, more German than French in character, and therefore the

French nation was not at fault for the treason that occurred within her ranks. Drumont explained the motives for Dreyfus’s actions by establishing his foreign origins, which, in the eyes of antisemites, made Dreyfus loyal to Germany and therefore willing to betray France.

Chastising Jews in the army presented a way for nationalist antisemites to deal with changes in the military system by which they felt threatened. Students in higher education who were exempt from military service demonstrated their own loyalty to the army by fulminating

32 against the Jews instead of actually joining the army themselves.109 Jews were also named as traitors in the army because of the new competition they presented to non-Jews after the General

Staff had been reorganized in the late 1880s and 1890s by Minister of War Charles de Freycinet.

The traditional military system was based on co-option, in which graduates from the military academies of St-Cyr or the Ecole Polytechnique were appointed to positions based on connections, patronage and favoritism.110 The Chief of the General Staff, General François de

Miribel reformed the General Staff by creating the position of stagiaire, or intern, on the General

Staff for the top twelve graduates of the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, in an attempt to end the influx of aristocratic, Jesuit-educated officers. Miribel’s reforms challenged the traditional practice of patronage and attempted to replace this practice with competitive examinations and merit. This challenge opened up anti-Jewish feeling since newcomers admitted on merit were often members of anti-clerical families as well as graduates from the Ecole Polytechnique, an academy which accepted students based on merit and was not run by Jesuits. Louis Begley argues, “When the newcomer was also a Jew, suspicion was added to the aversion.”111 Dreyfus became a scapegoat in the bordereau scandal because of his meritocratic entrance into the military and because he was a Jew. The traditionalists and antisemites in the army did not support Republican principles, secularization of military institutions or equal rights, regardless of ethnicity or religion.112 They displayed their dislike for the meritocratic, secular system by criticizing Jews and labeling them as potential or actual traitors. They also legitimized their own hierarchical, patronage-based system by alluding to the treacherousness of Jews and the threat they posed to the army and the nation. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that antisemites attached themselves to a “community of the mediocre” in which they despised Jews for their intelligence and diligence, solely to overlook the lack of diligence of the antisemites. Sartre also asserted that

33 by treating the diligent Jew as an inferior, the antisemite made himself part of the elite, an elite which differed from the meritocratic Republican elite and was closely connected to the elite of the ancien régime in which one did nothing to earn one’s superiority and in which this superiority could never be taken away.113

Dreyfus and Judas

The treasonous Jew was often portrayed by referencing Judas. By the end of the Middle

Ages, Jews were identified with Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic Church sanctioned works which emphasized the Jewish responsibility for the murder of Christ.114 The word “Judas” was often used to describe a traitor and “Judas the traitor” became a traditional stereotypical figure in popular literature, providing antisemites with a ready-made myth to exploit.115 During the late nineteenth century, antisemites believed Jews were going to betray France, just as Judas had betrayed Christ, a theme often reinforced by Drumont.116 Dreyfus was depicted and connected with Judas throughout the Affair.

As Judas posed an internal threat to the Christian community by betraying Jesus, so Dreyfus posed an internal threat to the French nation. Another connection made between Judas and

Dreyfus was that both betrayed for money.117 On November 3, 1894, only six days after the arrest of Dreyfus had been publicly announced, Edouard Drumont wrote an article condemning

Jews for treason, saying, “Judas sold the God of mercy and love. . . . Alfred Dreyfus sold to

Germany mobilization plans.”118 Again on November 7, in an interview with La Patrie, Drumont stated, “Dreyfus’s treason has not surprised me. . . . Dreyfus did that which Judas did.”119

Drumont reminded the reader that not only did Dreyfus give privileged information to France’s enemy but also that he did it as a form of self-profit, implicating his selfish interests instead of national interests. By connecting Dreyfus to Judas, antisemites gave Dreyfus’s actions

34 apocalyptic implications. The connection also implied the amount of depravity and sinfulness of

Dreyfus’s character, a metaphor which would have resonated in a largely Catholic nation in which one Assumptionist priest stated that “[t]o be Catholic and to be French are one and the same thing.”120 Additionally, by comparing Dreyfus to Judas, antisemites succeeded in alienating

Dreyfus from his peers and from the French people as a whole. At Dreyfus’s public military degradation on January 5, 1895, the observing crowd shouted, “Wretch! Judas! Long live France, dirty Jew!” and a group of officers shouted, “Judas! Traitor!” Maurice Barrès described the degradation as the “parade of Judas.”121 Bernard Lazare explained the Judas-Dreyfus phenomenon by saying, “They [antisemites] needed their own Jewish traitor to replace the classic Judas.”122 The link between Judas and Dreyfus also exemplified the ambiguity of modern antisemitism. A coherent ideology for modern antisemitism, which discriminated against Jews on secular and ethnic levels, was still developing during the Dreyfus Affair and, in order to create this ideology, it relied on many traditionally antisemitic images and notions, discriminating against Jews on religious levels.

The illustrated press contributed visually to the polemic surrounding the Dreyfus Affair.

Caricatures portraying Jews in negatively stereotypical ways existed throughout the nineteenth century, commonly appearing in illustrated newspapers and published images during the 1880s and 1890s. It was easy for antisemites and anti-Dreyfusards to apply traditional images to the figures and events of the Dreyfus Affair.123 The illustrated press often portrayed Dreyfus as a traitor using stereotypical and pejorative images. La Libre Parole Illustrée, the illustrated component of La Libre Parole, printed the image entitled, “About Judas Dreyfus,” [fig. 2] in which Edouard Drumont was shown lifting up a man with a hooked nose, a traditionally stigmatized Jewish image, wearing a German military cap with the label “traitor” written across

35 his forehead. This man was clearly supposed to be Dreyfus and the caption reads, “Frenchmen, for eight years I have repeated this to you each day!”124 The image and its message reminded the viewer that Dreyfus’s loyalties were in question; that, as a Jew, he was a foreigner and as an

Alsatian Jew he was linked to Germany in more than militaristic ways; that he was depraved and sinful by nature and, most importantly, that his guilt justified and legitimized the antisemitic arguments Drumont had been publishing for a decade. Antisemites needed Dreyfus to justify their accusations; without the Jew, the antisemite would be unable to exist. As Sartre states, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”125 The treacherous Jew of Drumont’s works was an invented Jew until the Dreyfus Affair, when antisemites were able to project their fears and irrational beliefs onto a specific person. No longer was the nefarious Jew an abstract notion, but, in Dreyfus, real and concrete.

On November 14, 1896, the illustrated journal published an image entitled “Judas defended by his brothers,” [fig. 3] which shows Dreyfus in the background looking at several stereotypically Jewish figures holding copies of Bernard Lazare’s Une Erreur Judiciaire, a pamphlet published in November 1896 which condemned the injustice of Dreyfus’s 1894 trial.126

The title of the image was reminiscent of the connection between Judas and Dreyfus, between treason and Jews. It condemned Jewish support of the Dreyfusard cause, a condemnation which also appeared in the antisemitic theories on the Jewish international conspiracy. This image expanded on the validation of antisemitic notions. Antisemites already established that Dreyfus represented a real, not an imagined, threat to society. By illustrating the connection between

Dreyfus, other Jews and the Dreyfusard cause, antisemites broadened the threat to not only one man, Dreyfus, but to the Jewish community and the Dreyfusard cause as a whole. By scapegoating the Jewish community and the Dreyfusards, antisemites refuted any accusations

36 denouncing the antisemitic community. La Libre Parole printed an article which stated, “When analyzing the almost immutable character of the Jew, we claimed a sort of fatality preventing him from ever assimilating to us, one said of us [the antisemites] that we were the fanatics, the bad citizens searching to provoke a race war.”127 In this polarized name calling, as well as in the images presented in the illustrated press, antisemites claimed their own status as good, loyal citizens by labeling Dreyfus and the Dreyfusard cause as disloyal, foreign and threatening. On

April 13, 1895, La Libre Parole Illustrée published an image [fig. 4] in which Dreyfus was portrayed, once again with the stereotypical hooked nose, carrying a sign which reads,

“Treasonous Nobleman.”128 This image is particularly interesting because, without the Jew, antisemites would be criticizing the nobles, the elite, the very part of society to which they wanted to belong. Without the Jewish noble, the antisemite would simply be denouncing the nobility and therefore putting his own patriotism in question. This image also called attention to the antisemitic belief that Jews, through their domination of French society, had replaced the pure, hierarchical, ancien régime society. Antisemites believed that because many Jews held high positions in government, universities and other professions, it was easier for them to commit treason and cause weakness and instability in the French nation. Notions of Jewish dominance in society played upon the visibility of a few Jewish figures in certain professions, largely exaggerating the role of the Jewish community as a whole in higher echelons of society.129 By labeling the Jewish “nobleman” as “treasonous,” antisemites also undermined the social status and worth of successful Jews and Dreyfusards, affirming their own status as part of the elite, therefore establishing, in the minds of the antisemite, the hierarchical society which they desired.

On November 17, 1894, La Libre Parole Illustrée published an image in which Dreyfus, with the word “traitor” across his forehead, attempted to free himself of his crime by bathing in gold.130 This image [fig. 5] connected Dreyfus with Judas by reminding the Christian readers that both Dreyfus and Judas betrayed for money and also reminded the reader of the Jewish connection to and control of the financial industry. The image illustrated the antisemitic idea that

Jews believed they could achieve anything, including innocence, using their financial resources.

Antisemites believed that truth and innocence could not and did not come from wealth, but from the hearts and minds of the true Frenchman, loyal to his country because he was ancestrally rooted to it. The illustrated journal Psst…! published an image on February 5, 1898 called “The

House of Alfred Dreyfus, Judas and Co.” [fig. 6] in which a man dressed in German clothes hands a large check to a Jewish clerk.131 This image again asserts Dreyfus’s ties to Judas,

Germany and the financial industry. Antisemites insisted upon the decadence of Dreyfus and persisted in alienating him from the French public. The irony of this argument was that Dreyfus rejected German citizenship and opted for French citizenship after the Franco-Prussian War and excelled in military training, influenced in part by his desire for revenge against Germany’s annexation of his homeland. He also had a large independent fortune and would not have needed the petty cash earned from espionage.132

The nationalist antisemitic press used the notion of Jews and treason to influence public opinion and justify their own position in a changing society. By labeling Jews as traitors, antisemites undermined the secular, meritocratic system of the Third Republic and established the foundation for the definition of a “good citizen” which would best suit the role of the antisemite in society. Antisemites exaggerated the numbers of Jews in the army to support their argument that Jews were infiltrating military institutions and that, because of this infiltration, the

French army and government could not be held accountable for the weakness it exhibited in comparison to the German army. Connecting the Jews to Germany not only emphasized the alien nature of Jews but also aided antisemites in characterizing Germany as an inferior power, reinforcing the myth that France retained her ancien régime role as one of the most influential continental powers. The publications of the nationalist antisemites before 1894 and the formation of agencies dealing with espionage, like the prefecture of police and the Statistical Section, laid the foundation for the conviction of Dreyfus and explained why believing in Dreyfus’s guilt was easy for much of the French public.

V. Dreyfus n’a été que l’instrument d’une sorte de syndicat israéliteIV: The Jewish Conspiracy

Antisemites blamed social change and instability on the Jewish community and its apparent domination of French society through the existence of a Jewish Conspiracy. The

Conspiracy was a “universal secret society, a permanent conspiracy against security, peace, honor and fortune of other peoples.”133 Belief in the conspiracy reflected a lack of social consciousness but also acted as an explanation for the changing society in which antisemites found themselves. It helped to explain the development of a capitalist economy; the development of bureaucracies; the feeling of a lowering of bourgeois status; and relieved antisemites of feeling responsible for these changes. The myth of the Jewish Conspiracy illustrated the contradictions in fin-de-siècle French antisemitic thought and provided antisemites with an institution against which they could subject their ideological insecurities while maintaining their own self-esteem.

The myth of the Jewish Conspiracy originated in the Middle Ages with the belief that

Jews wanted to control the world or avenge themselves for centuries of oppression. These beliefs persisted into the modern period when Jews were accused of plotting world domination and of undermining existing social and political orders by acting as instigators of revolutions and radical movements. Antisemites and non-Jews saw the Jewish community as an international, cosmopolitan community because of the worldwide dispersal of Jews.134 Antisemites connected

Jewish cosmopolitanism with the notion of Jewish foreignness and lack of roots. These characteristics combined to form a conspiracy with the goal to bring down the French nation. For antisemites, the myth of the conspiracy aided national unification by creating a “false sense of unity that operated according to a logic of exclusion.”135 The belief in a conspiracy directed by

IV Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 8, 1894. “Dreyfus was only the instrument of a sort of Israelite syndicate.” 40 internal enemies resulted in the unification of antisemites and those seen as good, pure French citizens.

The Jewish Conspiracy and Financial Control

Antisemites used the Jewish Conspiracy to explain the cause of social changes like immigration and urbanization, which caused them to feel threatened. The conspiracy was responsible for the corruption and decadence of French society because it controlled all aspects of society thanks to its financial means. Antisemites assigned a “fluid identity” to the Jew and connected this identity to the belief that Jews controlled international capital, which was also

“liquid and unstable.”136 For centuries, Jews were connected with financial manipulation, viewed as miserly, and were believed to possess extraordinary amounts of wealth. This may be explained by the fact that moneylending was one of the few professions available to Jews in Christian

Europe, from the medieval period to modernity. Economic antisemitism before the nineteenth century consisted of accusations towards Jews of unethical business practices in trade, commerce and moneylending. During the nineteenth century, antisemites accused Jews of controlling domestic and foreign policies by dominating national economics. Emancipation and industrialization contributed to the myth of Jewish economic dominance by providing Jews with access to higher education and to careers in the liberal professions. It also caused increased competition between Jews and Christians.137 Antisemites created internal enemies and labeled them as members of financial and international conspiracies in order to provide themselves with a common enemy to struggle against.138 This imagined common enemy also provided antisemites with a purpose by providing them with a force against which they could fight. They displayed their patriotism and proved their own worth as French citizens by vilifying Jewish financial and international conspiracies.

Although the myth of the Jewish Conspiracy was well established in Europe by the nineteenth century, antisemites in fin-de-siècle France extended and elaborated it.139 There were several events and institutions which antisemites believed proved the existence of the Jewish conspiracy, also known as the “Syndicate.” The Consistory, an institution in charge of Jewish

Affairs in France, and the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Universal Jewish Alliance), which concerned itself with international Jewish affairs, were both perceived as organizers of the

Syndicate.140 Drumont believed the Universal Jewish Alliance, headed by Republican politician

Adolphe Crémieux, organized and controlled a Talmudic conspiracy which advocated tricking, robbing and killing non-Jews in order to take their money. Drumont believed the Alliance’s international concerns illustrated a lack of connection to the French nation. His “proof” rested in a comment by Crémieux, who said, “The Alliance is not an alliance which is French, German or

English. It is Jewish, it is universal. That is why it works, that is why it will succeed.”141

Drumont blamed defeat in the Franco-Prussian War on wealthy and influential Jews with ties to Germany, asserting that Jews in France had conspired with Jews in Prussia to defeat

French national interests. In 1873, one of the first major economic crises of the new industrial economy occurred, a crisis so devastating it caused prices to fall until the 1890s. This crisis coincided with a heightened appearance of economic antisemitism, connecting fears of a Jewish international conspiracy with the belief in the existence of an international Jewish Banking system. Jews were prominent in the banking industry thanks to their historic role as moneylenders. Economic antisemitism based its accusations on the visibility of a few notable

Jewish families in financial and commercial professions. The Rothschild family served as the prime example of the prominent Jewish banking family in France and many people believed that the Rothschilds controlled the Jewish banking system.142 After the arrest of Dreyfus in 1894,

42 right-wing polemicists demanded that Dreyfus suffer the death penalty, which had been abolished in 1848.143 Edouard Drumont stated, “You know well that at this time when the Jews are our masters, one doesn’t shoot a coreligionist of Rothschild in the back.”144 La Libre Parole also printed an article which asserted that Dreyfus was related to Rothschild and other powerful

Israelites.145 By insisting upon the power of prominent Jews, antisemites exaggerated an already imaginary threat. They also relinquished responsibility for legislative change that accompanied a constitution based on principles of the February Revolution of 1848, which antisemites would have blamed on Jews because they believed Jews were radical revolutionary instigators, and which created the Second Republic, a government opposed by antisemites because it replaced the hierarchy and order of the ancien regime.146

In 1882, a second recession began with the collapse of the Union Générale Bank. The bank had been founded as a specifically Catholic bank in order to end the stronghold of Jewish and Protestant banks in the French banking industry. The Catholic Church and its members of all financial means invested in the bank. The crash, due mainly to the mismanagement of its founder but blamed on “Jewish finance,” caused many right-wing families to significantly lose money.147

Antisemites used the crash of the Union Générale to overlook the fact that many Catholics had profited, along with Jews, thanks to industrialization.148

In the early 1890s, the Panama Canal Company, under the direction of celebrated French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, went out of business due to financial difficulty and lack of funds.149 Many small investors lost money.150 The company bribed French politicians and the press to keep the difficulties from the public and to prevent investigation of the company. La

Libre Parole was one of the first journals to divulge information regarding the Panama Affair in

1892.151 The paper singled out two Jewish bankers of German heritage, Cornélius Herz and

Baron Jacques de Reinach, accusing them of masterminding the company’s fraudulent actions.152

Ironically, the paper failed to mention that de Lesseps, who was not Jewish, was also largely responsible for the scandal.153 The scandal confirmed fears of a Jewish syndicate with the goal to rob “honest” Frenchmen of their savings. Drumont, in La Libre Parole, and Barrès, in his newspaper La Cocarde, not only accused Baron de Reinach of corruption but targeted him as the epitome of Jewish subversion, capitalism and the evils of Republican parliamentarianism.154 The perpetrators of the scandal were tried and all but one were acquitted in 1893. The trial results convinced antisemites that Jews controlled and corrupted the Third Republic. The Panama Affair confirmed beliefs in a financial conspiracy, causing a sense of paranoia in which the public saw the work of Jewish financiers in every crisis or scandal.155

The myth of the Jewish conspiracy allowed antisemites to explain rapid social and economic changes by substituting the conspiracy for social or class conflict. As many antisemites originated in the bourgeois or petty bourgeois classes, they blamed the instability and material and moral decadence of their day on the Jewish conspiracy. They looked to the ancien régime as the foremost example of a society based on order and hierarchy, which they so badly desired.

Belief in the conspiracy illustrated a “lack of social consciousness” as well as a form of

“irrational social analysis…that performed certain specific functions for those who adopted it.”

The conspiracy “explained the fact that society had changed and was still changing in a

‘capitalist’ direction; it explained the change in social relationships…and the development of bureaucracy; it explained the bourgeoisie’s sense of having lost status, privilege and control, and of being threatened with the further loss of all three; but…it relieved the bourgeoisie of responsibility for this change, it freed them from blame…”156

The Jewish Conspiracy appeared in the works of Drumont leading up to the Dreyfus

Affair. Drumont claimed that a Jewish plot for world domination existed and repeatedly emphasized this belief, beginning with La France Juive, in which he wrote that the Jew believed he had the right to enslave and oppress the Aryan. In La Dernière Bataille (1890), Drumont asserted that the Jewish Conspiracy manifested itself in the Jewish will to power. Drumont’s assertions, as well as the already-existent conspiracy theories in French society as a whole, established the foundations for the appearance of the Jewish Conspiracy at the start of the

Dreyfus Affair when, in 1894, La Libre Parole spoke out against a Jewish plot with the goal to deliver France into enemy hands.157

The Jewish Conspiracy and Intimidation: Contradictions in Antisemitic Thought and Action

The Dreyfus Affair provided antisemites with the occasion to promote the myth of the

Jewish Conspiracy by blaming the Conspiracy for attempting to undermine national defense and to discredit the army.158 On September 4, 1896, La Libre Parole asserted that the Syndicate, despite its attempts to use blackmail, fear and intimidation, would fail because Minister of War

Mercier “resolved to do his duty and do it against all odds.”159 In 1898, La Libre Parole accused the Syndicate of profiting from the Affair by provoking and demoralizing the army and frightening France.160 What is ironic about these statements is that in 1894, at the beginning of the Affair, antisemites carried out the same type of actions for which they later vilified

Dreyfusards and the Syndicate. La Libre Parole railed against Mercier for keeping Dreyfus’s arrest and investigation secret, repeatedly accusing him, in November 1894, of allowing Dreyfus, a Jew, a confidential position in the Ministry of War.161 By pressuring Mercier in the press, La

Libre Parole influenced Mercier’s decision to arrest Dreyfus and his endeavors to ensure

Dreyfus’s conviction.162 By pressuring and criticizing Mercier as an individual, La Libre Parole

45 criticized the army as a whole, contradicting antisemitic ideology, which glorified the army at all costs. By expressing disappointment in the army, La Libre Parole expressed disappointment in the institution which they considered the most capable of expressing and consolidating nationalist vitality.163 Focusing on the Syndicate as the reason for weakness in the army allowed antisemites to remain confident in their own national beliefs and institutions.

On November 5, 1894, La Libre Parole published an article by Gaston Méry which stated that the Jewish Conspiracy had united with Dreyfus in order to bring down the government through intimidation.164 On January 15, Jean Froissard wrote that “all the tribes of Israel…make plans against national security and work to ruin France.”165 These articles presented the inconsistencies of the antisemitic argument. Antisemites accused the Jews of compromising the government when in actuality they themselves disliked the government, especially its secularization and Republican ideals. Many antisemites, like Maurice Barrès, supported General

Boulanger in the 1880s in a movement to replace the incompetency and weakness of the Third

Republic with a capable, strong, government based on populist ideals. Drumont had originally criticized Boulangism as having been created by the Jewish syndicate. However, Drumont voted for Boulanger in 1889, blamed the movement’s failure on the Jews, rather than on Boulanger’s own incompetence, and praised the Boulangists for their patriotism.166 On January 14, 1898, La

Libre Parole published an article stating that Henri Brisson, a French politician, accused the right of using the Syndicate for profit by exciting the army against civil authority.167 Brisson’s accusations are correct in that the nationalist leader of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, Paul

Déroulède, staged a coup d’état in 1899 in order to restore the integrity of France through a new government. Déroulède’s coup failed because General Roget, although an anti-Dreyfusard like

Déroulède, refused to assist Déroulède with military aid. Roget believed Déroulède’s coup

46 threatened to bring down France and, wanting to maintain French greatness against decline, supported the Republic because he saw no other alternative.168 Antisemites criticized the Jews for attempting to undermine the Republic when the political manifestations and actions of right- wing, nationalist and antisemitic leaders often displayed the same desire to undermine and replace the Republic.

The accusation that the Syndicate used intimidation as its main weapon was exceedingly contradictory when compared with antisemitic practice. In 1892, in response to articles slandering Jews in the army, André Crémieu-Foa, a Jewish captain in the Eighth Dragoon

Regiment, claimed that “by insulting the Jewish faith, you insult me personally,” and challenged

Drumont to a duel. Both men left the duel with minor injuries. Three weeks later, the Marquis de

Morès, a notorious antisemite, dueled and killed another Jewish Captain and professor at the

Ecole Polytechnique, Armand Mayer.169 In addition to dueling, Drumont asserted that the Jews were afraid of him and maintained a reputation of personal invincibility as a means of fortifying his public influence. Drumont was often depicted as a lion tamer or an armored knight, using physical prowess to protect himself against swarms of Jews.170 In 1886, Le Courrier français published an image [fig. 7] depicting Drumont as a medieval crusader trampling Moses.171 The portrait, drawn by the viciously antisemitic artist Adolphe Willette, acted as an advertisement for the newly published La France Juive, promoting the intimidating figure of Drumont as well as illustrating the nostalgia antisemites expressed for the Middle Ages and the ancien régime, a period representative of “valiant morals, of social order and Church power.”172

Antisemites also used intimidation through the formation of Leagues. Members of the

Leagues could “fairly be regarded as the chief militants on either side of the conflict” and their leaders were often “thuggish and corrupt, even criminal.”173 Jules Guérin, the leader of the Ligue

Antisémitique Française, organized around the theme of economic antisemitism and accused

Jews of controlling money and credit. He opposed department stores and encouraged boycotts and attacks on Jewish shops and businesses.174 This league was more extreme than the others and did not hesitate to use violence to enforce its views.175 During Zola’s trial, members of the

League threatened to throw Dreyfusards into the Seine River and shouted, “Death to the

Jews!”176 The Ligue Antisémitique Française exemplified the contradictory nature of antisemitic thought because Guérin, thanks to funding from royalists, purchased and created a headquarters for the League modeled on the Freemasonic Lodges. Antisemites criticized Jews and Freemasons as working together or being one and the same. Jewish financial corruption was often linked with the influence of Freemasonry on French political culture.177 Modeling the headquarters of an antisemitic league on a Freemasonic Lodge was incoherent with the belief that Jews and

Freemasons corrupted French society through the Judeo-Masonic Syndicate. Drumont, along with other notable French antisemites such as Jacques de Biez, Albert Millot and the Marquis de

Morès, founded La Ligue Nationale Antisémitique de France, the primary goal of which was to combat the Jewish-Financial Oligarchy.178 Drumont and his associates formed a group similar to that of the Jews which they criticized, attempting to influence the public by holding public meetings in which they advocated political candidates and manifested general antisemitic sentiment, attacking the Rothschilds and calling for the extermination of the Jewish population.179 La Ligue des Patriotes, organized around the leadership of Paul Déroulède, primarily took part in street agitation.180 Most leagues overestimated their numbers (for example,

La Ligue de la Patrie Française claimed to have between 400,000 and 500,000 members in 1900, but really had around 40,000 members), perhaps in order to intimidate the Dreyfusard Ligue de

Défense des Droits de l’Homme et de Citoyen. The leagues were also ineffective in stirring up

48 public opinion. The attempts of the Ligue Antisémitique Française to stir up the public by demonstrating during Zola’s first trial, boycotting Jewish shops and encouraging Catholic establishments to advertise antisemitism, did not work.181 The public also reacted with hostility towards the Leagues. They immediately tore down posters advertising the Ligue Nationale

Antisémitique de France and boycotted their writings. The public began to lose patience with the

Leagues after anti-Dreyfusard demonstrations in 1899 resulted in violence on the streets of

Paris.182

According to La Libre Parole, the Syndicate created and sustained the intrigue surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. In the article “High Treason,” Gaston Méry accused Joseph

Reinach, who many antisemites viewed as the personification of the Syndicate, of personally sustaining the intrigue around Dreyfus’s arrest.183 On January 14, 1898, Raphaël Viau stated,

“The Dreyfus Syndicate doesn’t want to reenter into the shade.”184 These two articles exemplified the hypocrisy of antisemitic accusations. La Libre Parole was the first newspaper to publish any information on the Affair, beginning in October 1894, when it printed the brief but direct article, “A Question,” demanding whether or not an officer had been arrested for treason.

“If this news is true, why the silence?”185 This four-sentence article began a mass media campaign which contributed to the “decisive role” of the press during the Affair. The press played a dual role, both giving information to the public but also distorting it. The press

“legitimized popular views and fears” and was not constrained to legal restrictions. As a result, it possessed great power to influence public opinion.186 Journals were effective because they took pre-existing notions about the Jews in France, exaggerated them and adapted them to the modern age. The belief in the Jewish Conspiracy’s financial control of the Third Republic, for example, was a belief taken from the Middle Ages, exaggerated by indicating a few prominent Jews in a

49 specific field, like the Rothschild family in the banking industry, and adapted to scapegoat Jews for negative developments resulting from modernization. However, public opinion could also influence the publications of the journals. Le Figaro, a conservative paper which had originally published articles written by Zola concerning the Affair, stopped publishing Zola’s articles and changed its opinion after its readers began to abandon it. Christophe Charle states, “The economic fragility of the independence of a journal compared with its readership is here perceivable.”187 By asserting that the Syndicate caused the intrigue around the scandal, antisemites ignored their own role in the continuation of the Affair. Antisemites needed the

Dreyfus Affair to maintain their own popularity. With no scandals to exploit, antisemites lacked a real cause around which to gather. The antisemitic press especially needed the Dreyfus Affair to continue to sell papers. The papers would not have exploited the Affair in the same way if

Esterhazy, and not Dreyfus, had been found guilty. Drumont exploited the Affair not only as a chance to express and legitimize his antisemitic views, but in order to compete with other newspapers. Journals competed with each other for readers and editors were often afraid that they would not be up-to-date with the latest scandals.188 The Affair came at a good time for antisemitic newspapers, which benefited from the development of sensational journalism.189 The

Affair helped boost sales and circulation of La Libre Parole, which had been rapidly declining after the shock of the Panama Affair in 1892 had worn off.190 Not only were antisemitic papers in competition with each other, they were members of a dying breed. In fin-de-siècle France, papers providing “mass” information began to threaten the existence of the “opinion” press, to which antisemitic newspapers belonged. Although a readership for right-wing newspapers like La Libre

Parole did exist, the paper was competing for readers against other right-wing journals like La

Croix, L’Intransigeant, Le Matin and L’Echo de Paris and, as a result, was not financially

50 secure. “It has been suggested with reason that the Dreyfus Affair was blown up by a press that was involved in a fundamental crisis and a circulation war, and antisemitism was certainly used deliberately in an attempt to boost circulations.”191

The Henry Subscription: Intimidation and Financial Conspiracy on the Side of the Antisemites

On September 4, 1896, La Libre Parole published that the “Princes of the High Bank and the princes of the Synagogue united together. They reunited millions.”192 The paper accused the

Jewish Syndicate of using money as a means of achieving its goals of domination and control of

French society. On August 30, 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Henry committed suicide in his cell at Mont-Valérien prison, where he was being held under arrest for the forgery of documents which had secured the conviction of Dreyfus in 1894.193 Henry was an important figure during the Dreyfus Affair because he had worked with the officers investigating Dreyfus, dramatically testified against Dreyfus in 1894 and committed forgeries to convict Dreyfus and maintain his guilt throughout the Affair.194 After Henry’s suicide, La Libre Parole began a national fund drive to pay for the legal defense of Henry’s widow, Berthe Henry, who wanted to sue Joseph Reinach for printing libel against her husband in Le Siècle. Reinach claimed that Henry had acted as “an accomplice in the cover-up of Dreyfus’s innocence.”195 Known as the Henry Subscription, the fund was an example of verbal antisemitic intimidation as well as a form of financial scheme much like those of the imagined Jewish financial conspiracy. The Henry Subscription began in

December 1898 and by the time it closed in January 1899, over 130,000 francs from 25,000 subscriptions, often with comments expressing antisemitic and nationalist opinions, had been received.196

In addition to collecting money and acting as its own financial strategy, the Henry

Subscription provided an outlet for antisemites to anonymously project their sentiments.

Antisemites submitted comments ranging from, “Long live France! Down with the kikes and the freemasons who insult the army! 5 fr.” to “An inhabitant of Baccarat who would like to see all the yids, yiddesses and their brats in the locality burned in the glass furnaces here.”197 These comments illustrated the use of intimidation through print. La Libre Parole also used verbal polemic in order to intimidate other newspapers. For example, La Libre Parole criticized the feminist, Dreyfusard newspaper, La Fronde, for failing to contribute to the Henry Subscription.

Gaston Méry entered into a polemical battle with journalists of La Fronde such as Jeanne

Brémontier, and accused the paper of being financed by Jews, specifically by the Jewish

Syndicate. Historians have widely accepted the accuracy of this accusation. The editor of La

Fronde, Marguerite Durand, did have frequent meetings with the prominent Jewish bankers

Alphonse and Gustave de Rothschild. Because Durand did not have an independent fortune and managing a newspaper like La Fronde cost about 500,000 francs a year, the conclusion can be made that Durand accepted funding from an outside source.198

The Subscription also showed that a gap existed between ideological and popular antisemitism. Popular antisemitism, exemplified in the subscription comments, was often less coherent and more extreme than the ideological antisemitism found in the articles and publications of La Libre Parole.199 The Henry Subscription served as an attempt to reunite anti-

Dreyfusards after the discovery of Henry’s forgeries and his suicide placed the anti-Dreyfusard cause in a problematic and awkward position.200 The Subscription also showed how antisemitism placed itself in a larger group of values.201 The Henry Subscription was, to an extent, an expression of support for the army and for the anti-Dreyfusard cause, rather than exclusively an expression of antisemitic sentiment. Students, members of the liberal professions and the

Catholic clergy, workers, industrialists and military officers, despite the army’s policy of

52 political neutrality contributed to the Henry Subscription.202 The Henry Subscription “thrived on these fears concerning the Jew as a degenerate outsider whose threat could only be met by the invocation of ‘a stable social order, stable moral values, immutable and absolute categories,’ as well as allegiance to such eternal institutions as army, family, and Church.”203

Edouard Drumont published an article on July 13, 1898 in which he asserted that the

Syndicate did not have as much power as it seemed. He explained that the Dreyfusard movement

“has not found an echo in the French soul. There is no worker who says to himself: ‘If one of us had been in the case of Dreyfus, we would not have reunited millions, founded journals and made everyone feel upside down to continue the affair of this poor devil.’ ”204 Drumont’s assertions reveal another contradiction between antisemitic rhetoric and practice. After Henry’s suicide, antisemites worshipped Henry as a martyr and a patriotic hero. Charles Maurras, Henri

Rochefort and Edouard Drumont all discussed Henry and his wife as “saintly figures” in their right-wing newspapers. Rochefort perceived Henry as a patriot and a devoted husband but also hinted at secrets which would justify his actions had they been known.205 Maurras blamed

Henry’s suicide on the “syndicate of treason” and asserted that Henry committed forgeries in order to protect the army against German threats.206 Drumont began the Henry Subscription in

La Libre Parole. The actions of antisemites, exemplified in the publications of the leading right- wing newspapers, illustrated the contradictions between antisemitic thought and practice.

Antisemites reacted the same way to Henry’s arrest and suicide as Dreyfusards reacted to

Dreyfus’s conviction and exile. The emphasis on sentiments after Henry’s suicide played on central themes of anti-Dreyfusard and antisemitic ideology, urging “Christian France to defend itself against Jewish aggression” while also strengthening the anti-Dreyfusard cause made vulnerable by Henry’s suicide.207

The antisemitic policy of intimidation may indeed have worked, as the Jewish response to the Dreyfus Affair was often one of silence and neutrality. Mathieu Dreyfus tried to avoid situations which would have confirmed, in the eyes of his opponents, his leadership of a syndicate or establish him as part of a conspiracy. Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, Vice President of the Senate and a Dreyfusard, attempted to disassociate himself from the Jews during the Affair, warning Reinach not to “jewify” it. Despite his attempts to remain outside of the realm of conspiracy accusations, the press published articles denouncing Scheurer-Kestner as a Prussian, a Jew and as an agent of the syndicate.208 On January 15, 1898, A. de Boisandré asked, “…what will you make of Mathieu Dreyfus, of Scheurer-Kestner, of Leblois, of Reinach, of all those who unify together and plan against the security of the State, to trouble the nation, discredit the army, to stir up unruliness, revolt, civil war and, if need be, foreign war?” and, a day later, demanded,

“You preferred to leave the Syndicate of treason the time to injure the army…to throw this already divided land into new ferments of hate, to bring us a hair’s breadth away from civil war?”209 The paper exemplified the antisemitic campaign during the Dreyfus Affair to contribute to social unrest. Antisemites blamed the Jews and their associates for trying to cause civil war, when in reality the antisemitic, anti-Dreyfusard campaign greatly contributed to the civil unrest and social divide which occurred during the Affair. In fact, without the Dreyfusard campaign, the antisemites and anti-Dreyfusards would have had nothing to rally against. Antisemites blamed the Syndicate for provoking fear and hate in society but without this social division, antisemites would have been unable to function and their ideology would have become obsolete.

They needed the Jews and the Dreyfusards to maintain beliefs in their own superiority and truth, so they created and sustained social division by creating enemies in Jews, Dreyfusards and the

Syndicate, which they held responsible for all the problems they saw in society.

The myth of the Jewish conspiracy provided antisemites with an imagined institution which they could hold accountable as the cause of social unrest, division, scandal and decadence.

However, antisemitic polemic and actions did not always match up and often contradicted each other. Antisemites accused the Jewish Syndicate of controlling finances and financially supporting specific members of society, an action La Libre Parole also carried out with the

Henry Subscription. Antisemites believed the Jewish Syndicate wanted to bring down their opponents through fear and intimidation. Antisemites overlooked the fact that the Leagues which they organized often threatened and intimidated their opponents and that the polemic they published in the press acted as a form of verbal intimidation and instilled a sense of fear in the public. Antisemites needed the Jewish Syndicate in order to validate their own existence in society–without it, antisemitic ideology would be illegitimate and irrelevant. The creation of the

Jewish Syndicate allowed the antisemite to place himself at the center of society in the role of patriotic defender instead of social malcontent.

VI. Les Juifs sont nos maitresV: Jewish Dominance in French Society

On November 10, 1894, La Libre Parole asserted, “the author of la France Juive is right: the land doesn’t belong to the French, but to the cosmopolitan Jews.”210 For centuries, antisemites criticized Jews for overrepresentation in certain trades and professions. In the nineteenth century, especially after 1879, antisemites stressed the belief that Jews wanted to obtain both national and international power. Accusations of Jewish control of the French state abounded, emphasizing that Jews were more concerned with international interests rather than

French national interests.211 For nationalist antisemites, the rise of the Third Republic meant that society was changing away from religious emphasis and tradition and towards secularization, rationalization and democracy. Economic and social changes such as immigration, urbanization and the development of mass media contributed to the antisemitic notion that the French people did not control France, the Jews did.212 In 1905, Charles Maurras said, “[A]ntisemitism exists only because French people are reduced to asking themselves if they are still the masters in their own country.”213 Popular antisemitism began to form a new ideology hostile to “big merchants, big landowners, big bankers, and speculative capitalism in general.” A new form of popular conservatism developed from this hostility in which conservatives expressed nationalism without threatening their own economic or social interests. This allowed antisemites to achieve political goals without actually forming a political party. It also allowed conservatives to create an imaginary link between nationalists, radicals and peasants, with whom they would not share many similarities without antisemitism.214 Antisemitism manifested itself greatly among workers and artisans, in the military, among students, in the liberal professions and among the Catholic clergy. Antisemitism especially stands out among the middle- and upper-classes. Jews were

V Edouard Drumont, “Les Juifs dans l’Armée,” La Libre Parole, November 6, 1894. “The Jews are our masters.” 56 accused of invading branches of government employment, the civil service, the magistracy, the army, universities, the press, journalism, politics and the liberal professions.215

Edouard Drumont was not the first or the last antisemite to criticize the Jews for their visibility in certain professions and believed Jews had a drive for world domination. He asserted that Jews, despite their racial inferiority, were the masters of France.216 Drumont stated that

Jews, more specifically the German Jew, controlled the economy, high society, the political system, the magistracy and the press. In La Libre Parole he wrote of:

“the horde of German Jews who introduce themselves on our land to

enrich themselves of our spoils, who rob us, exploit us, and corrupt us in

all ways, who had nothing when they arrived and who spread today an

insolent luxury conquered by blows from the stock exchange and from

financial fraud.”217

In 1889, he wrote that the amount of Jewish people in French society had risen to such an extent that if the French population didn’t soon realize it, they would end up giving way to Jewish invasion. Not only was the phenomenon of Jewish invasion and dominance of society a physical threat, it was a moral threat. The sense of being invaded coincided with a high amount of immigration into France and hostile attitudes towards these immigrants, regardless of whether or not they were Jewish.218

Drumont was one of the first antisemites to blame France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian

War on wealthy and politically influential Jews with German origins. Thus, the establishment of the Third Republic reinforced the theme of Jewish political power. La Libre Parole referred to

Jews as the “Kings of the Republic” and asserted, “[T]he Jews, masters of all the important systems, disposing of all the greatest agencies, had in the land a real suggestive power.”219

Drumont believed Jews exerted political power by holding government positions and indirectly by controlling members of the Senate, National Assembly and ministries.220 On January 15,

1898, La Libre Parole accused Joseph Reinach of entering the “Assemblies that represent the sovereign People, and doing his Jewish job there. He traffics in State secrets; he organizes for

Germany an injurious campaign against our army…”221 These phrases illustrated the belief in

Jewish political dominance. Not only did La Libre Parole assert that Reinach infiltrated the

French political system, the paper heightened the assertion by accusing Reinach of committing the same treasonous acts as Dreyfus. Thus, Dreyfus was not the only Jewish threat to French society. Antisemites expanded the idea of the Jewish threat to French society by illustrating that not just one or two Jews, but all Jews, threatened France. Antisemites also reiterated that Jews were sinful and treasonous by nature as well as foreign. Reinach clearly did not have French national interests at heart because he sold secrets to Germany, France’s greatest enemy. By accusing Reinach of campaigning against the army, antisemites confirmed the position of the

Jews as treasonous foreigners as well as their own position as patriotic citizens. This expression of patriotism escalated the antisemite to a superior place in society and plummeted the Jew to an inferior position. The antisemite, because of his patriotism, was to be respected and applauded whereas the Jew, because of his disloyalty and foreignness, was to be doubted and despised.

Jewish Dominance of the Press

Antisemites asserted that the Jews controlled the press thanks to their tremendous financial means and accused the Jews of beginning a press campaign in which they attempted to bribe the public to support the Dreyfusard cause.222 This theme reinforced the antisemitic notion that the Jewish Conspiracy achieved its goals through financial means and also supported the antisemitic claim that the Jews dominated parts of French society, such as the press. Drumont

58 wrote in La France Juive that the newspapers and the publishing industry were controlled by the

Jews. He believed that “whoever controls money, controls the press; whoever controls the money and the press, controls politics; and whoever controls politics determines the whole orientation of a country.” Scholars have argued that the antisemitic belief that Jews controlled the press resulted from a change in the formation and development of the press. Leading up to the twentieth century, the “mass” press began to replace the “opinion” press to which the antisemitic newspapers belonged.223 Drumont asserted that the Syndicate attempted to “remove thus from the public all possibility of knowing a word of truth” concerning the Affair. “One will kill the journals which will persist in remaining independent.”224 By accusing the Jews of controlling the press and keeping the truth from the public, antisemites rejected the idea that they might not be publishing the truth. Ironically, there were plenty of articles printed in La Libre Parole full of ambiguity and false information in the Dreyfus case.225

Competition provided another factor in determining why antisemites accused Jews of controlling the press. The opinion press, the press of the antisemites, was becoming obsolete as a new form as mass media developed.226 Christophe Charle in Le Siècle de la Presse argues that the primary goal of journals was to achieve the highest amount of circulation possible, not to support certain opinions. A journal’s success depended on a sufficient and regular circulation.227

In an effort to explain the financial insecurity of the paper, antisemites struck out against the

Jews. If Jews dominated the press, antisemites did not have to admit that their form of publication was outdated, retaining their own relevance and status as central to society. Accusing

Jews of controlling the press also provided La Libre Parole with a way to condemn other newspapers against which they competed. La Libre Parole labeled papers like La Fronde and

L’Intransigeant as financed and controlled by Jews.228 La Libre Parole targeted L’Intransigeant

59 due to circulation competition, since La Libre Parole had a smaller circulation than

L’Intransigeant. Both journals also competed against at least four other right-wing journals.229

These journals attracted readers from urban and educated social groups, primarily from the

Catholic and radical right, as well as workers and artisans, military officials, students and those from the liberal professions. White collar workers, servants and those from the rural professions, for the most part, did not express antisemitic sentiment.230 La Fronde was a staunchly

Dreyfusard paper ever since its establishment in December 1897. La Libre Parole and La Fronde often entered into polemical battles. In addition to its Dreyfusard stance, La Fronde was a feminist newspaper with an all-female staff. By connecting La Fronde with Jews, La Libre

Parole lashed out against changing gender norms and connected the feminist paper with the notions of sexual promiscuity and corruption often associated with Jewish women. Sexual purity symbolized ideological values, including national integrity. Targeting La Fronde illustrated the attempt of La Libre Parole in the struggle against the effeminacy and degeneracy of France.

Antisemites also blamed Jews for feminism and perceived the rise of the New Woman as proof of weak social masculinity.231 La Libre Parole compared La Fronde to Jewish women, questioning their sexual purity and accusing them of being controlled by Jews in order to decrease the integrity of the newspaper, something La Libre Parole would have wanted to do in order to do harm to the placement of La Fronde in the fluid publishing industry.232

L’Eclair, a right-wing, antisemitic, anti-Dreyfusard newspaper published, on September 9 and September 14 (dated 15), 1896, two articles which revealed the contents of the secret dossier, a file with forged and manipulated documents which played a significant role as evidence in Dreyfus’s 1894 conviction. L’Eclair declared that the judges had seen this dossier during Dreyfus’s trial in 1894. The purpose of the articles was to influence the government into

60 releasing the contents of the dossier, hoping to end questions about Dreyfus’s guilt as well as any expressions of pity for him. The government failed to release the contents.233 The article printed on September 15 in La Libre Parole affirming Dreyfus’s guilt was a response to the article in

L’Eclair and the government’s lack of response to these articles. La Libre Parole made up for the government’s failure to release the contents of the dossier by asserting their own beliefs on why Dreyfus had been convicted.

On January 21, 1898 La Libre Parole published an article, “Dreyfus and the Belgian

Press,” which claimed that Belgian newspapers were controlled by the Jewish Syndicate. The article criticized Belgian journals for “interfering in an absolutely, exclusively national affair…about which anyone who is not French must…carefully abstain from formulating any opinion.”234 For foreign newspapers, France was on trial as much as Dreyfus. The presence of foreign reporters in the courtrooms augmented the drama of the trials. Anti-Dreyfusards became indignant about foreign criticism.235 This article shows that La Libre Parole wanted foreigners to remain outside of the Affair. Not only did they accuse foreign newspapers of involving themselves, they connected these newspapers with Jews, who they also believed were foreign.

Thus, if the Belgians should refrain from participating in the Affair because they were not

French, and Jews were also considered to be foreign, they, too, should stay out of the Affair. By asking the Belgian press, run by Jews, to stay out the Affair, La Libre Parole demanded that all

Jews stay out of the Affair. This accusation also illustrated the threat which Jewish participants in the Affair posed to the anti-Dreyfusard cause. Without the actions of certain Jewish people, the Affair certainly would not have had such an immense impact on France. Without Mathieu

Dreyfus, the brother of Alfred, the Dreyfusard cause would not have come into being. Mathieu never stopped attempting to convince the public of his brother’s innocence throughout the Affair.

As the leader of the Dreyfusard movement, Mathieu played a crucial role in creating the opposition to the results of the 1894 trial and to the anti-Dreyfusard cause. Lucie Dreyfus,

Alfred’s wife, played a significant role in the Affair by repeatedly appealing to have her husband’s original conviction retried. On September 18, 1896, only three days after the publication in La Libre Parole asserting Dreyfus’s guilt, Lucie appealed to the Chamber of

Deputies for a judicial review of the 1894 conviction. This appeal was rejected. Again on

September 3, 1898, Lucie appealed to the government for a judicial review. This appeal was accepted and a full investigation of the 1894 judgment began. Bernard Lazare was one of the first to join the Dreyfusard cause and to express his views in print. Lazare’s pamphlet Une

Erreur judiciaire: La Vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus (A Judicial Error: The Truth About the

Dreyfus Affair) was published on November 6, 1896.236 The pamphlet was one of the first printed works to defend Dreyfus and asserted that Dreyfus was targeted solely because of his

Jewish background, stating:

“He [Dreyfus] is a soldier, but he is a Jew, and it is as a Jew that he was

prosecuted. Because he was a Jew, he was arrested; because he was a Jew,

he was tried; because he was a Jew, he was convicted; because he was a

Jew, the voice of justice and truth could not be heard in his favor, and the

responsibility for the condemnation of that innocent man falls entirely on

those who provoked it by their vile excitations, lies, and slander.”237

During the Dreyfus Affair, antisemites asserted that Jews dominated French society.

They believed Jews controlled and infiltrated the government, politics, the military and the press.

Antisemites used this notion to express that all Jews threatened society, not just a minor group of

Jews. Accusing Jews of dominating French society also confirmed their position, in the eyes of

62 antisemites, as treasonous foreigners. The Jew dominated French society in order to achieve his own international goals with no regard for the national goals of the French people. This accusation also confirmed the position of the antisemite as a patriotic citizen, placing the antisemite in a superior social position in comparison to the inferior Jew. The notion of Jewish domination of French society also allowed antisemites to place blame on a specific group of people for French corruption and weakness. This corruption was not the fault of the French people but the fault of the Jews, who dominated the government, the military and other professions. Antisemites accused Jews of dominating French society to reject the idea that their beliefs and opinions, as expressed in the press, were becoming obsolete. They also used the notion as a form of economic competition. Thus, antisemites used the notion that Jews dominated French society to explain or reject entirely their own failures and weaknesses in society.

VII. Conclusion

The Dreyfus Affair significantly impacted French society, especially concerning antisemitism and the way the antisemite saw his own placement in the Third Republic. The

Affair provided an event which antisemites used to legitimize their rhetoric. Before the Affair, antisemitic notions centered on imaginary, invented Jews, whereas with the Dreyfus Affair, antisemitism became focused on one specific Jewish man, Alfred Dreyfus, as well as on his

Jewish and non-Jewish supporters. Antisemitic notions which had existed for centuries became modernized and reinvented during the Dreyfus Affair. Antisemites focused on a few prominent

Jewish figures to solidify their ideals about Jewish dominance of French society or the existence of a Jewish Syndicate.

The Affair was one of the first events in modern history in which the press played a crucial role. La Libre Parole, under the leadership of Edouard Drumont, played one of the most important roles in the Affair. Not only did it begin the media campaign in October 1894 when it published an article demanding to know the details regarding Dreyfus’s arrest, it continued to exploit the resulting trial and events to sell papers, to maintain a high circulation and to compete against other right-wing newspapers. The Affair received “blanket coverage” ever since La Libre

Parole published the first accusations against Dreyfus.238 La Libre Parole is an excellent source of antisemitic rhetoric, for the paper insisted upon the inferiority of the Jews, their treasonous nature, the existence of a Jewish Syndicate, the dominance of French society by Jews, the foreign nature of Jews and the purity of the French nation. The publications of La Libre Parole exemplified antisemitic attempts to create and maintain an elite, superior placement in society.

By labeling others as treasonous, foreign, disloyal and corrupt, antisemites solidified their own superior status as pure, patriotic and loyal citizens.

The theme of nationalism was pertinent in the Affair, especially in the antisemitic press.

Antisemites continuously asserted their own patriotism by downplaying the patriotic acts of the

Jewish community. They exploited xenophobic tendencies in French society, building upon antisemitic and anti-German sentiment to justify their accusations. They claimed that all Jews were treasonous and that their loyalties rested with Germany, given the Jews were even capable of expressing any sense of nationalism. Antisemites also exploited the Affair to maintain their own belief in the purity of the French military, which they saw as the last symbol of national grandeur. By emphasizing Dreyfus’s Jewish, and therefore treasonous, character, antisemites rejected the idea that their military was corrupt and weak. They also solidified their own patriotic position by insisting upon the existence of a Jewish Syndicate. The Syndicate, they believed, controlled France because of its large financial means and use of intimidation. The rejection of

French responsibility for social degeneracy and corruption once again appeared. Because France was not controlled by the French people, but was under the influence of the Jewish Syndicate, national weakness was not the fault of the French people. By attacking the Jews in their newspapers and at public meetings held by Leagues, antisemites asserted their own placement as patriotic defenders of their homeland. Antisemitic accusations against the Jewish Syndicate illustrated the contradictions in antisemitic rhetoric. Antisemites believed the Syndicate used intimidation to achieve its goals when antisemites also used intimidation to influence public opinion. The Henry Subscription, Leagues and verbal and visual polemic all served to intimidate those opposed to the antisemitic, anti-Dreyfusard campaign. Antisemites also used their ideals to cover up their own dissatisfaction with society. They wished for a society much like that of the ancien régime, a desire which potentially could have labeled them as revolutionaries. Focusing

65 on the Jewish threat to France allowed antisemites to ignore their own dissatisfaction and to distract their opponents from seeing through the antisemites’ patriotic mask.

The hype surrounding the Dreyfus Affair largely subsided in the early twentieth century.

In 1899, Dreyfus’s trial was reopened. This trial, known as the Rennes trial, began on August 7,

1899 and ended on September 9, 1899, resulting in a conviction with extenuating circumstances for Dreyfus. On September 19, the president of the Republic pardoned Dreyfus and, after five years of suffering, he was allowed to go free. In July 1906, Dreyfus was rehabilitated into the army and awarded the Legion of Honor, accepting the award in a ceremony in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, the same place he had been degraded eleven years earlier. Dreyfus fought for the French military during World War I and died in 1935.239 The end of the Dreyfus Affair marked the end of the influence of Drumont and his ideas as expressed in La Libre Parole.240

The Dreyfus Affair ended in 1906 but the issues brought up during the Affair were far from resolution. Racism and anti-republicanism have remained apparent in France throughout the twentieth century.241 Although antisemitism in French society subsided after the end of the

Affair, it did not disappear. L’Action Française, a French royalist and Catholic political group, began a campaign between 1899 and 1939 which stressed that the Jews could never become

French citizens and would always remain foreigners, not only because of their religion, but because of their ethnic identity.242 The establishment of the Vichy regime, with its harsh definition of a Jew and its collaboration with the Nazis, illustrated that issues which existed during the Affair had not yet found closure.243 Ruth Harris states, “…French citizens will continue to face the problem of living comfortably with multiple identities. This tension is one of the many aspects of French political culture that were strengthened, and in some measure created, by the Dreyfus Affair.”244 Although antisemitism may have subsided in France, many of

66 the same issues that arose during the Dreyfus Affair regarding nationalism, patriotism and citizenship, are reappearing today concerning Muslim populations in France. Recently, racism and religious prejudice appeared in violent acts committed in the suburbs of French cities. These acts were often carried out by black or Muslim populations responding to a society which viewed them as foreigners.245 The aftermath of the Affair and more recent events illustrate that although the Dreyfus Affair occurred over a century ago, the issues surrounding the Affair are timeless.

Appendix

Figure 1 Caran d’Ache, “Un bronze d’occasion,” Psst…! March 12, 1898.

Figure 2 J. Chanteclair, “A Propos de Judas Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, November 10, 1894.

Figure 3 “Judas défendu par ses frères,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, November 14, 1896.

Figure 4 J. Chanteclair, “C’est nous qui sont les nobles,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, April 13, 1895.

Figure 5 J. Chanteclair, “Savonnage infructueux,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, November 17, 1894.

Figure 6 Caran d’Ache, “Page d’histoire: Maison Alfred Dreyfus, Judas and Co.,” Psst…! February 5, 1898.

Figure 7 Adolphe Willette, “Édouard Drumont, l’auteur de la France Juive,” Le Courrier français, May 16, 1886.

Title Image Félix Vallotton, “L’age du papier,” Le cri de Paris¸ January 23, 1898.

Notes

1 Thomas P. Anderson, “Édouard Drumont and the Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism,” The Catholic Historical Review 53, no. 1 (1967): 30-31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25017912. 2 Ibid. 30-31. 3 Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University, 1982), xvi. 4 Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 172; Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 125. 5 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), x-xi, 5, 12, 15. The letter between Fustel de Coulange and Mommsen is taken from Suzanne Basdevant, “Le principe des nationalités dans la doctrine,” in La nationalité dans la science sociale et dans le droit contemporain, ed. Benjamin Akzin (Paris: Sirey, 1933), 90. 6 Ibid. 6, 8, 11. 7 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 427, 430-431. 8 Albert Monniot, “L’Affaire Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, September 15, 1896. All translations from La Libre Parole and from other French sources, both primary and secondary, were done myself unless otherwise noted. 9 Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 9, 15. 10 Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1999) 21, 43. 11 Ibid. viii. 12 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 66-67. 13 Ibid. xvi-xvii. 14 William I. Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), i, xii. 15 Christophe Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 1830-1939 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), 12. 16 Burns, A Documentary History, viii. 17 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 14, 19, 82, 129, 136. 18 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 387. 19 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 31, 47-48. 20 Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, la France, entre nationalisme et fascisme: les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 18. 21 Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation? et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1996), 230, 231, 233, 234, 239, 240, 242. 22 Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 20. 23 Zeev Sternhell, “Maurice Barrès,” in L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z, ed. Michel Drouin (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 121; Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 211, 306. 24 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 380; Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 210. 25 Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 24, 60. 26 Sternhell, “Maurice Barres,” 123. 27 Ibid. 123. 28 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 266, 284. 29 Ibid. 95. 30 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 152. 31 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 95, 97-98, 100, 117. 32 Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 117. 33 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 210. 34 Sternhell, “Maurice Barres,” 121; Frederick Busi, “ « La Libre Parole » de Drumont et les affaires Dreyfus,” in L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z, ed. Michel Drouin (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 397. 35 Busi, “« La Libre Parole » de Drumont,” 398, 401; Anderson, “Édouard Drumont,” 28. 36 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 120. 37 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 51, 64; Burns, A Documentary History, 8; Busi, “« La Libre Parole » de Drumont,” 398; Brustein, Roots of Hate, 120.

38 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 117, 140. 39 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 64, 173-174; Busi, “« La Libre Parole » de Drumont,” 398-99. 40 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 174-75. 41 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 59, 119, 279. 42 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 390. Wilson, translating himself, quotes from Edouard Drumont, “Le Drame juif,” in De l’Or, de la boue, du sang: du Panama à l’anarchie (Paris, 1896), 77. 43 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 174-75. 44 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 59, 119, 279; Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 413. 45 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 394; Brustein, Roots of Hate, 59, 119, 279. 46 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 64-65. 47 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 59, 119, 279. 48 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 117. 49 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 390. Wilson, translating himself, quotes from Edouard Drumont, La France Juive: Essai d’histoire contemporaine (Paris, 1886), I: 312. 50 Burns, A Documentary History, 6-7. 51 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 380-381. Barrès is quoted from a reply to an “enquête” of the Action Française, May 15, 1900. 52 Burns, A Documentary History, 7. This quote provided and translated by Michael Burns from Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Félix Juven, 1902), 432-434. 53 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 117, 141. 54 Burns, A Documentary History, 9-10. 55 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, ix, x, 8, 29, 35, 36, 39, 47. 56 Ibid. 98, 99, 101. 57 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 95, 96, 98, 99, 117. 58 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 106. 59 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 13, 114, 117. 60 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 380. 61 Ibid. 379. For examples of this expression used in La Libre Parole, see the following articles: Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894; A. Nangis, “La Condamnation de Juif Dreyfus et la Presse,” La Libre Parole, December 24, 1894; Ct. Z., “La Parade d’Exécution,” La Libre Parole, January 4, 1895. 62 Edouard Drumont, “L’Espionnage Juif,” La Libre Parole, November 3, 1894. 63 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894. 64 Edouard Drumont, “L’Espionnage Juif,” La Libre Parole, November 3, 1894. 65 “Une Interview d’Edouard Drumont,” La Libre Parole, November 7, 1894. 66 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 3, 1894. 67 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 119. 68 L.W., “Les Juifs et la Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 12, 1894. This idea is also reiterated in Ct. Z., “La Parade d’Exécution,” La Libre Parole, January 4, 1895. 69 Edouard Drumont, “Lettre à M. Félix Faure: Président de la République,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 70 Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 5. 71 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894. 72 Jean Froissard, “Tradition Républicaine,” La Libre Parole, January, 15, 1898. Froissard is referring to the French Revolution, in which the Constituent Assembly replaced the Estates General. The revolutionaries created a new calendar in which 1792 became Year I. 73 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894. 74 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 408. 75 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 121; Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 380. See also Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894. 76 Ross Steele, Susan St. Onge, Ronald St. Onge, La civilisation française en évolution I: Institutions et culture avant la Ve République (Heinle, 1996), 130-131. 77 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 408. 78 Caran d’Ache, “Un bronze d’occasion,” Psst…! March 12, 1898. 79 Zeev Sternhell, “Paul Deroulede and the Origins of Modern French Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 6, no. 4 (1971): 52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/259686. 73

80 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 124. 81 Neil McWilliam, “Conflicting Manifestations: Parisian Commemoration of Joan of Arc and Etienne Dolet in the Early Third Republic,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 384. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/french_historical_studies/v027/27.2mcwilliam.html; Laura Morowitz, “Anti-Semitism, Medievalism and the Art of the Fin-de-Siècle,” Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 1 (1997): 35, 36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360714. 82 Encycloædia Britannica, s.v. “Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcelin, baron de Marbot,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/364032/Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcelin-baron-de-Marbot. 83 Jewish foreignness expressed in language also appears in Jean Forain, “Le verre de Dreyfusine,” Psst…! May 6, 1899. 84 E. Cravolsier, “Dreyfus s’est-il évadé?” La Libre Parole, September 4, 1896. This idea is also emphasized in A. de Boisandré, “L’Exécution de Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, January 6, 1895. 85 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, December 24, 1894. 86 Jean Drault, “Le Dictateur,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 87Emile Zola, “J’Accuse…!,” L’Aurore, January 13, 1898. 88 E. Cravolsier, “Autour du Complot,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 89 Burns, A Documentary History, 107. Accusations of Zola’s unpatriotic attributes appear in M. Daumazy, “La Défense de Zola,” La Libre Parole, January 16, 1898. 90 Edouard Drumont, “Lettre à M. Félix Faure: Président de la République,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 91 Caron, Between France and Germany, 20, 35, 128. 92 Burns, A Documentary History, 9, 10, 11. 93 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 210, 217, 299-300; E. Cravolsier, “Autour du Complot,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 94 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 3, 1894. 95 Edouard Drumont, “Le Ministère de la Guerre,” La Libre Parole, November 5, 1894. 96 Ibid. This idea is also supported in E. Cravolsier, “Autour du Complot,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 97 William Serman, “L’Armée française,” in L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z, ed. Michel Drouin (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 309-310. 98 Caron, Between France and Germany, 20-21. 99 Edouard Drumont, “Dreyfus et Turpin,” La Libre Parole, November 12, 1894; Albert Monniot, “Les Complices de Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, September 18, 1896. 100 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 66. 101 Allan Mitchell, “The Xenophobic Style: French Counter-Espionage and the Emergence of the Dreyfus Affair,” Journal of Modern History 52, no. 3 (1980): 415-421. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1876926. 102 Ibid. 417, 418. Edouard Drumont, “Les Juifs dans l’Armée,” La Libre Parole, November 6, 1894. 103 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 223. 104 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 389, 391. 105 Jean Drault, “Le Dictateur,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 106 Edouard Drumont, “Calvin sous les Tentes de Sem,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 107 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 12, 1894. 108 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, December 24, 1894. 109 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 404-405. 110 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 62-63. 111 Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, 58-59. 112 Serman, “L’Armée Française,” 310. 113 Jean-Paul Sartre, Ant-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1948), 22, 27. 114 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 56, 60, 280. 115 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 391, 424. 116 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 56, 60, 280. 117 Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 103. 118 Edouard Drumont, “L’Espionnage Juif,” La Libre Parole, November 3, 1894. 119 “Une interview d’Edouard Drumont,” La Libre Parole, November 7, 1894. Dreyfus was also connected to Judas in the following articles: A. de Boisandré, “A Propos d’un Traitre,” La Libre Parole, November 7, 1894; A. de Boisandré, “Le Traitre Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, December 23, 1894. 74

120 Caron, Between France and Germany, 135. 121 Gaston Méry, “La Dégradation de Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, January 6, 1895; Burns, A Documentary History, 51, 54. Burns quotes Barrès, Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme, 134. 122 Burns, A Documentary History, 77. Burns quotes from Bernard Lazare, Une erreur judiciaire : L’affaire Dreyfus (Paris : Stock, 1897), 8-9. 123 Paula Hyman, “The Dreyfus Affair: The Visual and the Historical,” The Journal of Modern History 61, no. 1 (Mar. 1989), 91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1880968. 124 J. Chanteclair, “A Propos de Judas Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, November 10, 1894; Martin P. Johnson, The Dreyfus Affair: Honor and Politics in the Belle Époque (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 54-55. 125 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 13. 126 “Judas défendu par ses frères,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, November 14, 1896. 127Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 4, 1894. 128 J. Chanteclair, “C’est nous qui sont les nobles,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, April 13, 1895. 129 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 189. 130 J. Chanteclair, “Savonnage infructueux,” La Libre Parole Illustrée, November 17, 1894; Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice, 104. 131 Caran d’Ache, “Page d’histoire: Maison Alfred Dreyfus, Judas, and Co.,” Psst…! February 5, 1898. 132 Burns, A Documentary History, 25-26. 133 Edouard Drumont, “Lettre à M. Félix Faure: Président de la République,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 134 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 55, 265, 266. 135 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 117. 136 Ibid. 114, 117. 137 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 177, 178, 180. 138 Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 94, 105. 139 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 410. 140 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 66, 67. 141 Anderson, “Édouard Drumont,” 36. Anderson quotes from Édouard Drumont, La France Juive, Essai d’histoire contemporaine (new ed.), I: 21; II: 59. 142 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 181, 184, 189, 279. 143 Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, 18. 144 Edouard Drumont, “Les Juifs dans l’Armée,” La Libre Parole, November 6, 1894. 145 “Ap…,” “Le Juif Dreyfus Devant le Conseil de Guerre,” La Libre Parole, December 20, 1894. 146 Frederick de Luna, “France: Constitution of 1848,” Encyclopedia of Revolutions of 1848, James Chastain, http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/dh/frconst.htm. 147 R.D. Anderson, France 1870-1914: Politics and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1977), 108; Brustein, Roots of Hate, 185, 192. 148 Burns, A Documentary History, 6. 149 James McMillan, “Consolidating the Republic: Politics 1880-1914,” in The Short Oxford History of France: Modern France, ed. James McMillan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21. 150 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 65. 151 McMillan, “Consolidating the Republic,” 21, 22. 152 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 65. 153 Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 203. 154 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 65, 222. 155 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 193. 156 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 427. 157 Ibid. 409, 410, 411. 158 Ibid. 411. 159 E. Cravolsier, “Dreyfus s’est-il evade?” La Libre Parole, September 4, 1896. 160 Edouard Drumont, “Lettre à M. Félix Faure: Président de la République,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898; Jean Drault, “Le Dictateur,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 161 The following articles provide examples: Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 3, 1894; Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 5, 1894; Edouard Drumont, “Les Juifs dans l’Armée,” La Libre Parole, November 6, 1894; Edouard Drumont, “Dreyfus et Turpin,” La Libre Parole, November 12, 1894; Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 12, 1894. 75

162 Johnson, Honor and Politics in the Belle Époque, 13. 163 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 210. 164 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 5, 1894. 165 Jean Froissard, “Tradition Républicaine,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 166 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 384. 167 Jean Drault, “Le Dictateur,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 168 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 60, 360. 169 Burns, A Documentary History, 12. 170 Anderson, “Édouard Drumont,” 37. 171 Phillip Dennis Cate, “The Paris Cry: Graphic Artists and the Dreyfus Affair,” in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 66. 172 Cate, “The Paris Cry,” 66; Morowitz, “Art of the Fin-de-Siècle,” 35, 36. 173 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 53; Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 305. 174 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 198. 175 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 58. 176 Burns, A Documentary History, 104. 177 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 169, 298. 178 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 198, 199. 179 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 171, 172. 180 Ibid. 56, 57. 181 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 298. 182 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 25, 172. 183 Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 5, 1894; Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 184. 184 Raphaël Viau, “Sus aux Juifs! Les Tronçons du Serpent,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898. 185 Ad. P., “Une Question,” La Libre Parole, October 29, 1894. This article translated with the aid of Anderson, “Edouard Drumont,” 31. 186 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 87, 89. 187 Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 214. 188 Ibid. 203. 189 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 87. 190 Anderson, “Édouard Drumont,” 31. 191 Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 204; Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 397-98. 192 E. Cravolsier, “Dreyfus s’est-il evade?” La Libre Parole, September 4, 1896. Albert Monniot, “Les Complices de Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, September 22, 1896 also exemplifies this idea. 193 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 3. 194 Johnson, Honors and Politics in the Belle Époque, 23, 28. 195 Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, “Chronologie,” Alfred Dreyfus: Le Combat pour la Justice, http://dreyfus.mahj.org/docs/chronologie.php. This source will henceforth be referred to as MAHJ. Burns, A Documentary History, 129; Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 116. 196 Stephen Wilson, “Le Monument Henry: La structure de l’antisémitisme en France 1898-1899,” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 32, no. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1977), 265. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27580427. 197 Burns, A Documentary History, 130; Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 156. Both Burns and Wilson quote from Pierre Quillard, Le Monument Henry: Listes des souscripteurs classés méthodiquement et selon l’ordre alphabétique (Paris: Stock, 1899). 198 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121. 199 Wilson, “Le Monument Henry,” 266. 200 Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 216. 201 Wilson, “Le Monument Henry,” 266. 202 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 79, 126-127, 135. 203 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 117. 204 Edouard Drumont, “Les Poursuites Contre Picquart?” La Libre Parole, July 13, 1898. 205 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 3, 218, 241. 206 Burns, A Documentary History, 122; Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 215. 207 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 240, 243. 208 Ibid. 56, 97, 100. 76

209 A. de Boisandré, “Appel au Gendarme,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898; A. de Boisandré, “Dreyfus et le Capitaine Lebrun-Renaud,” La Libre Parole, January 16, 1898. 210 A. N., “Le Juif,” La Libre Parole, November 10, 1894. 211 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 59, 195, 266, 278. 212 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 116, 117. 213 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 395. Wilson quotes Charles Maurras, “De la Liberté suisse à l’Unité française,” in Quand les Français ne s’aimaient pas : Chronique d’une renaissance, 1895-1905 (Paris, 1926), 215. 214 Nancy Fitch, “Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Anti-Semitism: The Dreyfus Affair in Rural France,” American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (Feb. 1992): 84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2164539. 215 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 75, 135, 396; Edouard Drumont, “Le Ministère de la Guerre,” La Libre Parole, November 5, 1894; Edouard Drumont, “Le Traitre Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, December 24, 1894; Gaston Méry, “Au Jour le Jour,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 216 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 59, 195. 217 Edouard Drumont, “Calvin sous les Tentes de Sem,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 218 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 393, 394. 219 Edouard Drumont, “Autour d’un Procès,” La Libre Parole, December 19, 1894; A. de Boisandré, “Un Juif Sincère,” La Libre Parole, November 10, 1894. 220 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 279. 221 Edouard Drumont, “Calvin sous les Tentes de Sem,” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 222 Edouard Drumont, “Autour d’un Procès,” La Libre Parole, December 19, 1894; Gaston Méry, “L’Affaire de Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, December 19, 1894. 223 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 397, 398. Wilson quotes from Edmond Picard, Synthèse de l’antisémitisme (Paris and Brussels, 1892), 81, 87. Robert F. Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France (New Brunswick, 1950) and Pierre Sorlin, “La Croix” et les Juifs (1880-1899): Contribution à l’histoire de l’antisémitisme contemporain (Paris, 1967) present the argument that the antisemitic notion of Jewish control of the press resulted from a change in the development of the press. 224 Edouard Drumont, “Autour d’un Procès,” La Libre Parole, December 19, 1894. 225 The following articles provide examples of false information printed in La Libre Parole: Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 2, 1894; Albert Monniot, “L’Affaire Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, September 15, 1896; M. Daumazy, “La Cour de Cassation,” La Libre Parole, October 29, 1898. 226 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 397-398. 227 Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 15-16. 228 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 118; Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 397. 229 Charle, Le Siècle de la Presse, 161, 201. 230 Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 126, 135. 231 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 5, 112, 113, 118, 124. 232 La Libre Parole also targeted other newspapers in the following articles: Gaston Méry, “Haute Trahison,” La Libre Parole, November 8, 1894; Ct. Z., “Les Racontars du Temps,” La Libre Parole, January 14, 1898; Raphaël Viau, “Publiez la Lettre, Madame!” La Libre Parole, January 15, 1898. 233 Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, 89; MAHJ. 234 A. de Boisandré, “Dreyfus et la Presse Belge,” La Libre Parole, January 21, 1898. 235 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 315-316. 236 Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, 220, 221, 226; MAHJ. La Libre Parole attacked Lucie Dreyfus as an instrument of the Jewish Syndicate after her first appeal for revision: Albert Monniot, “Les Complices de Dreyfus,” La Libre Parole, September 19, 1896. 237 Burns, A Documentary History, 77. Burns quotes from Lazare, Une erreur judiciaire, 8-9. Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 56. 238 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 315. 239 MAHJ. 240 Anderson, “Édouard Drumont,” 41. 241 Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, 81. 242 Brustein, Roots of Hate, 123. 243 Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, 81. The Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Begley states that the regime’s definition of a Jew was “harsher even than the Nuremburg laws.” 77

244 Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 385. 245 Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, 81, 82.

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