Revolution and the Republic
Page 94
sufficiently vague as to appeal to all sides in any future debate about the meaning
of France. Nevertheless, not everyone was prepared to go along with this definition
of the nation. For example, 1886 saw the creation of the anarchist-inspired Ligue
des Antipatriotes and later this anti-patriotic message was continued by firebrand
Gustave Hervé, editor of La Guerre sociale. Writing in Leur patrie, published in
1906, he affirmed that a nation was no more than a means of organizing ‘the
shameful exploitation’ of a people by ‘a privileged class’. Annexation by Germany,
therefore, had made little difference to the people of Alsace: the large manufacturers
remained large manufacturers and the beggars remained beggars. Our country,
Hervé proclaimed, is our class. As the head of the Confédération Générale du
Travail Georges Yvetot likewise remarked, for the workers of France the lost
provinces were not called Alsace and Lorraine but Life and Liberty.20 Although
disputed by the powerful figure of Jean Jaurès21––whose internationalism was
combined with a deep sense of France’s mission as the land of democracy and for
whom the proletariat quite definitely did possess a homeland––such a reluctance to
attach any significance to the fact of being French or any meaning to France’s
imagined vocation as a nation remained a powerful strand of opinion up to and
beyond the union sacrée of 1914–18.
Of an altogether different hue was the charge that the very spiritual principle that
defined France was being eaten away from the inside. France was suffering from
internal decomposition and a loss of physical and moral vitality. One long-standing
and soon to be familiar version of this argument attributed France’s military defeat
to the moral corrosion of her governing elite and her current malaise to the political
corruption and disorder of the Third Republic.22 Successive scandals at the heart of
government––combining sex, nepotism, and money in equal measure––only
served to heighten distaste for the present regime and popular nostalgia for the
strong leaders of the past. At the end of the 1880s hopes of political renewal settled
briefly upon the charismatic figure of General Georges Boulanger and his
programme of republican ‘revision’, the elections of 1889 returning forty-eight
boulangiste deputies to parliament. Although this colourful episode came to an
ignominious end with the enigmatic general’s suicide upon the grave of his
mistress, in the immediate years that followed there was to be no diminution of
18 Qu’est-ce que la nation? (1882), 903.
19 Ibid. 904.
20 Ma Pensée libre (1913).
21 L’Armée nouvelle (1911), 545.
22 See e.g. Arthur de Gobineau, La Troisième République Française et ce qu’elle vaut (1877).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
445
anti-parliamentary sentiment and no shortage of enthusiastic patriots willing to
threaten to topple the fraudsters and crooks of the Republic.
The same fetid climate of greed and corruption also gave rise to a reinvigorated
and strident anti-Semitism.23 As a body of ideas, anti-Semitism drew strength from
many of the fears and anxieties of the period, most especially the sense of both
cultural and demographic decline typical of the prevailing fin-de-siècle mood. So too
anti-Semitism flourished in an atmosphere where fashionable ‘scientific’ theories
about race and blood (for example, those associated with Gobineau, Gustave Le
Bon, and Vacher de Lapouge) appeared to justify the distinction between ‘inferior’
and ‘superior’ peoples.24 Such theories only served to strengthen the already-rich
vein of Christian anti-Semitism and to give greater weight to the concerns of a
Catholic France growing ever more fearful of her future de-Christianization. To
this could be added the potent equation of Jews with the world of finance, thereby
facilitating the picture of the Jew as the itinerant foreigner heading an international
conspiracy in the name of all that represented ‘anti-France’: Protestants, Free-
masons, the ‘two-hundred families’, England, and whatever else could be drawn
into this fertile terrain. Jews were nomads, speculators, agents of physical and moral
decay. Paradoxically, the very assimilation of French Jews and their consequent
entry into positions of political and economic prominence only encouraged the
myth that the Republic was itself controlled by Jews.25
By the 1880s such anti-Semitic views had become something of a commonplace
to be found right across the political spectrum. The left, for example, was only too
ready to exploit resentment against the fortune amassed by such Jewish families as
the Rothschilds to further their campaign against capitalism.26 Nevertheless, it was
on the right that anti-Semitism came to the fore and nowhere was this more evident
than in Edouard Drumont’s La France Juive.27 No stone was left unturned in this
compendium of anti-Semitism: the Jews engaged in child sacrifice as part of their
religious rituals; they were permanently diseased and suffered from ‘a corruption of
the blood’; they were cowards and robbers; they readily consigned their daughters
to prostitution and did so with a view to dishonouring the sons of the French
aristocracy; and so on and so on. None of this was remotely original but to these
familiar cries of denigration and vilification Drumont added the late nineteenth-
century theme of a war between races––‘From the very beginning of time’,
Drumont wrote, ‘the Aryan has been in conflict with the Semite’28––as well as
the claim that it had been the Jews who had been responsible for the collapse of
the ancien régime. ‘The only person to have benefited from the Revolution’, he
23 Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair
(Rutherford, NJ, 1982) and Vicki Caron, ‘The Jewish Question from Dreyfus to Vichy’, in Martin
Alexander (ed.), French History since Napoleon (London, 1999), 172–202.
24 See Pierre-André Taguieff, La Couleur et le sang: Doctrines racistes à la française (1998).
25 See Pierre Birnbaum, Un mythe politique: ‘La République juive’ (1995).
26 See also Michel Dreyfus, L’Antisémitisme à gauche: Histoire d’un paradoxe de 1830 à nos jours
(2009).
27 See Grégoire Kauffmann, Edouard Drumont (2008).
28 La France Juive (1886), i. 7.
446
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
announced, ‘is the Jew. Everything comes from the Jew and everything comes back
to the Jew.’29 The violent invasion of the Carthaginian and the Saracen, Drumont
concluded, had given way to the ‘silent, progressive, and slow’ advance of the
cunning Jew, the armed hordes of the past being replaced by ‘single individuals,
gradually forming themselves into little groups, working sporadically, quietly taking
possession of all the posts and of all the functions in the land, from the lowest to the
highest’.30 Drumont’s message was crystal clear: unless the French rediscovered
their love of their country and of God there would be no alternative but to watch
‘the painful agony’ of a ‘generous nation’ brought to the edge of extinct
ion by a
foreign invader.
Published in 1886, Drumont’s ‘essay in contemporary history’ enjoyed a phe-
nomenal commercial success. Despite the fact that it ran to two volumes and a
daunting 1200 pages, it sold 70,000 copies within two months and an estimated
150,000 copies by the end of its first year. In the following year there appeared an
illustrated edition and then, in 1888, a popular edition. By 1889 La France Juive
was in its sixty-fifth edition. Building on this success Drumont published a series of
anti-Semitic tracts in rapid succession and then, in April 1892, launched a newspa-
per, La Libre Parole, dedicated to purveying the anti-Semitic message. As part of
this strategy, in October 1895 the latter launched a competition to find the best
‘practical means of eliminating Jewish power in France’. The winning entry (there
were 145 in total) was published, along with the jury’s 50-page report and a lengthy
‘exposé historique’ by Émile Rouyer. The front cover carried an illustration of ‘the
Aryan breaking the chains which held him captive to the Jew and the Freemason’.31
As the success of Drumont’s enterprise shows, anti-Semitism was big business. Not
only did it have a ready audience in wide sections of the French population but it
also found expression in novels, on the stage, in literary periodicals, and in the
Catholic press (most notably, La Croix).
Anti-Semitism was also not entirely unknown among Jews. One such was a
journalist and writer named Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard, born in Nîmes in
1865 and who from 1888 chose to style himself simply as Bernard Lazare.32
Bernard Lazare was a flamboyant and intriguing figure. Drawn to the literary
avant-garde, he had strong anarchist sympathies and firmly believed that the artist
should be an educator. He was also hostile to all religion, including that of his
forefathers, believing that Judaism had declined into an arid rationalism. In 1890
he published two articles in a review entitled Entretiens politiques et littéraires
in which he effectively blamed the Jews for bringing anti-Semitism upon them-
selves.33 ‘In summary’, Bernard Lazare wrote, ‘Jews are those for whom integrity,
benevolence, self-sacrifice are only words and virtues that can be cashed in, those for
29 La France Juive (1886),, p. vi.
30 Ibid. 8.
31 La République plébiscitaire (1897).
32 See Nelly Wilson, Bernard-Lazare: Antisemitism and the Problem of Jewish Identity in Late
Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1978) and Jean-Denis Bredin, Bernard Lazare (1992).
33 ‘Juifs et Israélites’, Entretiens politiques et littéraires, 6 (1890), 174–9, and ‘La Solidarité juive’,
Entretiens politiques et littéraires, 7 (1890), 222–32.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
447
whom money is the end of life and the centre of the world.’34 Then, in 1894,
Bernard Lazare brought out a 400-page study devoted to anti-Semitism.35 In very
brief outline, the force of Bernard Lazare’s argument was that the causes of anti-
Semitism lay in Jewish separatism and exclusiveness and therefore that it would
only disappear if the Jews were to assimilate into the society in which they lived.
Throughout all of these texts Bernard Lazare was utterly dismissive of any sense of
solidarity with his fellow Jews. An Israelite such as himself, he declared, had
nothing in common with ‘money changers from Frankfurt, Russian usurers, Polish
tavern keepers, Galician pawnbrokers’.36
Among those who praised Bernard Lazare’s work was none other than Édouard
Drumont and thus it was that the young anarchist found himself a member of
La Libre Parole’s jury to decide the winner of its prize competition on practical
solutions to Jewish power. The experience was to prove a brief one as, on 18 June
1897, Bernard Lazare and Drumont were to fight a duel.37 As luck would have it,
neither man was injured! What made this incident all the more curious and
incongruous, however, was that in February 1895 Bernard Lazare had had his
first meeting with the brother-in-law of the now-imprisoned Captain Alfred
Dreyfus and that, despite some initial hesitation about becoming involved, he
had become convinced of the latter’s innocence. He also quickly concluded that
Dreyfus had been found guilty principally because he was a Jew. Dreyfus, he was to
write in 1897, ‘is a soldier but he is a Jew, and it is as a Jew that he was prosecuted.
It is because he is a Jew that he was arrested, because he is a Jew that he was put on
trial, because he is a Jew that he was convicted, and because he is a Jew that the
voice of justice and of truth could not be heard in his favour.’38 By virtue of his
birth alone, Bernard Lazare affirmed, Dreyfus belonged to ‘a class of pariahs’.
Bernard Lazare had become the first of the Dreyfusards. No more would be
heard from him about the virtues of assimilation.
In December 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a General Staff officer of Alsatian-Jewish
origin, had been found guilty of passing military secrets to the Germans.39 For this
heinous crime (which he had not committed) he was court-martialled and sen-
tenced to life imprisonment and solitary confinement on Devil’s Island.40 The real
culprit was a minor crook by the name of Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. At first there
was little doubt among the public about Dreyfus’s guilt and his condemnation
unleashed a veritable torrent of anti-Semitic abuse in the press, the entire Jewish
people being implicated in Dreyfus’s guilt. No punishment was deemed too
severe for the captain’s venal treachery. Initially, therefore, Bernard Lazare and
34 ‘Juifs et Israélites’, 178.
35 Bernard Lazare, L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (1894).
36 ‘Juifs et Israélites’, 179.
37 For Bernard Lazare’s own account see Contre l’Antisémitisme (Histoire d’une polémique) (1896).
38 Une Erreur judiciaire: L’Affaire Dreyfus (Deuxième Mémoire avec des Expertises d’Ecritures)
(1897), 9.
39 See Jean-Denis Bredin, L’Affaire (1983), Michael Drouin, L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z (1994) and
two books by Vincent Duclert, L’Affaire Dreyfus (1994) and Alfred Dreyfus: L’Honneur d’un patriote
(2006). Most recently see Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island (London, 2010).
40 See Alfred Dreyfus, Cinq années de ma vie (1901).
448
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
the Dreyfus family had little success in winning over support for their call for a
retrial. Patiently and quietly they stated their case but then, in November 1896
and from the safety of Belgium, Bernard Lazare published Une Erreur Judiciaire:
La vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus.41 With meticulous attention to the evidence he
demonstrated the falsity of the charges made against Dreyfus. Two more brochures
followed, one in 1897 and another in early January 1898. The latter, Comment
on condamne un innocent,42 was published on the eve of the failed trial of Major
Esterhazy. If he protested about the fate of Dreyfus, Bernard Lazare wrote, it was
because ‘the law had been disregarded and justice violated’. ‘I spoke out’, he continued,
‘for the salvation of one man alone, but in t
he name of salvation for all.’43
Faced with the prospect of having to admit to a miscarriage of justice, the army
now resorted to forgery and perjury. For its part, nationalist opinion attributed the
campaign on behalf of Dreyfus to a vast conspiracy headed by a ‘Jewish syndicate’.
Across France and in French Algeria, popular violence was directed at Jewish shops
and synagogues. The stage was now set for the second, and more famous part, of
what ever since has been known simply as the ‘Affair’.
The curtain was raised on 13 January 1898 when novelist Émile Zola published
an open letter in Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper, L’Aurore, under the banner
headline ‘J’accuse’. Addressed to Félix Faure, president of the Republic, it de-
nounced the acquittal of Ferdinand Esterhazy two days earlier and all those in the
army who had been responsible for the wrongful imprisonment of Dreyfus. His act
of protest, Zola announced, was intended as ‘a revolutionary means of hastening
the explosion of truth and of justice’. The following day, the same newspaper
published the first instalment of a document which subsequently became known as
the manifesto of the intellectuals. Entitled ‘Une protestation’, it announced: ‘We,
the undersigned, protest against the violation of judicial procedure at [Dreyfus’s]
trial of 1894 and against the mystery surrounding the Esterhazy affair and persist in
demanding revision.’ Headed by Zola himself, with Anatole France in second place,
the undersigned comprised a significant proportion of France’s artistic and aca-
demic elite, many of whom proudly appended their institutional affiliation and
qualifications to their names. Among the 3,000 or so signatories were to be found
the names of novelist Marcel Proust and painter Claude Monet, as well as those of
Charles Andler, Émile Durkheim, Georges Sorel, and Célestin Bouglé. Also present
were a sizeable number of now-forgotten composers and musicians.44
The broader circumstances that gave rise to this dramatic ‘explosion of truth’ are
themselves significant. As Christophe Charle has shown, the intervention by Zola
marked the culmination of a long process which had seen the intellectual profes-
sions progressively disentangle themselves from the tutelage and patronage of, first,