The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

  All this belongs typically to the nineteenth century and by itself would never have survived two World Wars. The old-time enthusiasm of the mob for Esterhazy, like its hatred of Zola, have long since died down to embers, but so too has that fiery passion against aristocracy and clergy which had once inflamed Jaurès and which had alone secured die final release of Dreyfus. As the Cagoulard affair was to show, officers of the General Staff no longer had to fear the wrath of the people when they hatched their plots for a coup d’état. Since the separation of Church and State, France, though certainly no longer clerical-minded, had lost a great deal of her anticlerical feeling, just as the Catholic Church had itself lost much of its political aspiration. Pétain’s attempt to convert the republic into a Catholic state was blocked by the utter indifference of the people and by the lower clergy’s hostility to clerico-fascism.

  The Dreyfus Affair in its political implications could survive because two of its elements grew in importance during the twentieth century. The first is hatred of the Jews; the second, suspicion of the republic itself, of Parliament, and the state machine. The larger section of the public could still go on thinking the latter, rightly or wrongly, under the influence of the Jews and the power of the banks. Down to our times the term Anti-Dreyfusard can still serve as a recognized name for all that is antirepublican, antidemocratic, and antisemitic. A few years ago it still comprised everything, from the monarchism of the Action Française to the National Bolshevism of Doriot and the social Fascism of Déat. It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.9 At long last the republic fell like overripe fruit into the lap of that old Anti-Dreyfusard clique10 which had always formed the kernel of her army, and this at a time when she had few enemies but almost no friends. How little the Pétain clique was a product of German Fascism was shown clearly by its slavish adherence to the old formulas of forty years before.

  While Germany shrewdly truncated her and ruined her entire economy through the demarcation line, France’s leaders in Vichy tinkered with the old Barrés formula of “autonomous provinces,” thereby crippling her all the more. They introduced anti-Jewish legislation more promptly than any Quisling, boasting all the while that they had no need to import antisemitism from Germany and that their law governing the Jews differed in essential points from that of the Reich.11 They sought to mobilize the Catholic clergy against the Jews, only to give proof that the priests have not only lost their political influence but are not actually antisemites. On the contrary, it was the very bishops and synods which the Vichy regime wanted to turn once more into political powers who voiced the most emphastic protest against the persecution of the Jews.

  Not the Dreyfus case with its trials but the Dreyfus Affair in its entirety offers a foregleam of the twentieth century. As Bernanos pointed out in 1931,12 “The Dreyfus affair already belongs to that tragic era which certainly was not ended by the last war. The affair reveals the same inhuman character, preserving amid the welter of unbridled passions and the flames of hate an inconceivably cold and callous heart.” Certainly it was not in France that the true sequel to the affair was to be found, but the reason why France fell an easy prey to Nazi aggression is not far to seek. Hitler’s propaganda spoke a language long familiar and never quite forgotten. That the “Caesarism”13 of the Action Française and the nihilistic nationalism of Barrés and Maurras never succeeded in their original form is due to a variety of causes, all of them negative. They lacked social vision and were unable to translate into popular terms those mental phantasmagoria which their contempt for the intellect had engendered.

  We are here concerned essentially with the political bearings of the Dreyfus Affair and not with the legal aspects of the case. Sharply outlined in it are a number of traits characteristic of the twentieth century. Faint and barely distinguishable during the early decades of the century, they have at last emerged into full daylight and stand revealed as belonging to the main trends of modern times. After thirty years of a mild, purely social form of and-Jewish discrimination, it had become a little difficult to remember that the cry, “Death to the Jews,” had echoed through the length and breadth of a modern state once before when its domestic policy was crystallized in the issue of antisemitism. For thirty years the old legends of world conspiracy had been no more than the conventional stand-by of the tabloid press and the dime novel and the world did not easily remember that not long ago, but at a time when the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were still unknown, a whole nation had been racking its brains trying to determine whether “secret Rome” or “secret Judah” held the reins of world politics.14

  Similarly, the vehement and nihilistic philosophy of spiritual self-hatred15 suffered something of an eclipse when a world at temporary peace with itself yielded no crop of outstanding criminals to justify the exaltation of brutality and unscrupulousness. The Jules Guérins had to wait nearly forty years before the atmosphere was ripe again for quasi-military storm troops. The déclassés, produced through nineteenth-century economy, had to grow numerically until they were strong minorities of the nations, before that coup d’état, which had remained but a grotesque plot16 in France, could achieve reality in Germany almost without effort. The prelude to Nazism was played over the entire European stage. The Dreyfus case, therefore, is more than a bizarre, imperfectly solved “crime,”17 an affair of staff officers disguised by false beards and dark glasses, peddling their stupid forgeries by night in the streets of Paris. Its hero is not Dreyfus but Clemenceau and it begins not with the arrest of a Jewish staff officer but with the Panama scandal.

  II: The Third Republic and French Jewry

  BETWEEN 1880 and 1888 the Panama Company, under the leadership of de Lesseps, who had constructed the Suez Canal, was able to make but little practical progress. Nevertheless, within France itself it succeeded during this period in raising no less than 1,335,538,454 francs in private loans.18 This success is the more significant when one considers the carefulness of the French middle class in money matters. The secret of the company’s success lies in the fact that its several public loans were invariably backed by Parliament. The building of the Canal was generally regarded as a public and national service rather than as a private enterprise. When the company went bankrupt, therefore, it was the foreign policy of the republic that really suffered the blow. Only after a few years did it become clear that even more important was the ruination of some half-million middle-class Frenchmen. Both the press and the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry came to roughly the same conclusion: the company had already been bankrupt for several years. De Lesseps, they contended, had been living in hopes of a miracle, cherishing the dream that new funds would be somehow forthcoming to push on with the work. In order to win sanction for the new loans he had been obliged to bribe the press, half of Parliament, and all of the higher officials. This, however, had called for the employment of middlemen and these in turn had commanded exorbitant commissions. Thus, the very thing which had originally inspired public confidence in the enterprise, namely, Parliament’s backing of the loans, proved in the end the factor which converted a not too sound private business into a colossal racket.

  There were no Jews either among the bribed members of Parliament or on the board of the company. Jacques Reinach and Cornélius Herz, however, vied for the honor of distributing the baksheesh among the members of the Chamber, the former working on the right wing of the bourgeois parties and the latter on the radicals (the anticlerical parties of the petty bourgeoisie).19 Reinach was the secret financial counsellor of the government during the eighties20 and therefore handled its relations with the Panama Com
pany, while Here’s role was a double one. On the one hand he served Reinach as liaison with the radical wings of Parliament, to which Reinach himself had no access; on the other this office gave him such a good insight into the extent of the corruption that he was able constantly to blackmail his boss and to involve him ever deeper in the mess.21

  Naturally there were quite a number of smaller Jewish businessmen working for both Herz and Reinach. Their names, however, may well repose in the oblivion into which they have deservedly fallen. The more uncertain the situation of the company, the higher, naturally, was the rate of commission, until in the end the company itself received but little of the moneys advanced to it. Shortly before the crash Herz received for a single intra-parliamentary transaction an advance of no less than 600,000 francs. The advance, however, was premature. The loan was not taken up and the shareholders were simply 600,000 francs out of pocket.22 The whole ugly racket ended disastrously for Reinach. Harassed by the blackmail of Herz he finally committed suicide.23

  Shortly before his death, however, he had taken a step the consequences of which for French Jewry can scarcely be exaggerated. He had given the Libre Parole, Edouard Drumont’s antisemitic daily, his list of suborned members of Parliament, the so-called “remittance men,” imposing as the sole condition that the paper should cover up for him personally when it published its exposure. The Libre Parole was transformed overnight from a small and politically insignificant sheet into one of the most influential papers in the country, with 300,000 circulation. The golden opportunity proffered by Reinach was handled with consummate care and skill. The list of culprits was published in small installments so that hundreds of politicians had to live on tenterhooks morning after morning. Drumont’s journal, and with it the entire antisemitic press and movement, emerged at last as a dangerous force in the Third Republic.

  The Panama scandal, which, in Drumont’s phrase, rendered the invisible visible, brought with it two revelations. First, it disclosed that the members of Parliament and civil servants had become businessmen. Secondly, it showed that the intermediaries between private enterprise (in this case, the company) and the machinery of the state were almost exclusively Jews.24 What was most surprising was that all these Jews who worked in such an intimate relationship with the state machinery were newcomers. Up to the establishment of the Third Republic, the handling of the finances of the state had been pretty well monopolized by the Rothschilds. An attempt by their rivals, Péreires Brothers, to wrest part of it from their hands by establishing the Credit Mobilier had ended in a compromise. And in 1882, the Rothschild group was still powerful enough to drive into bankruptcy the Catholic Union Générale, the real purpose of which had been to ruin Jewish bankers.25 Immediately after the conclusion of the peace treaty of 1871, whose financial provisions had been handled on the French side by Rothschild and on the German side by Bleichroeder, a former agent of the house, the Rothschilds embarked on an unprecedented policy: they came out openly for the monarchists and against the republic.26 What was new in this was not the monarchist trend but the fact that for the first time an important Jewish financial power set itself in opposition to the current regime. Up to that time the Rothschilds had accommodated themselves to whatever political system was in power. It seemed, therefore, that the republic was the first form of government that really had no use for them.

  Both the political influence and the social status of the Jews had for centuries been due to the fact that they were a closed group who worked directly for the state and were directly protected by it on account of their special services. Their close and immediate connection with the machinery of government was possible only so long as the state remained at a distance from the people, while the ruling classes continued to be indifferent to its management. In such circumstances the Jews were, from the state’s point of view, the most dependable element in society just because they did not really belong to it. The parliamentary system allowed the liberal bourgeoisie to gain control of the state machine. To this bourgeoisie, however, the Jews had never belonged and they therefore regarded it with a not unwarranted suspicion. The regime no longer needed the Jews as much as before, since it was now possible to achieve through Parliament a financial expansion beyond the wildest dreams of the former more or less absolute or constitutional monarchs. Thus the leading Jewish houses gradually faded from the scene of finance politics and betook themselves more and more to the antisemitic salons of the aristocracy, there to dream of financing reactionary movements designed to restore the good old days.27 Meanwhile, however, other Jewish circles, newcomers among Jewish plutocrats, were beginning to take an increasing part in the commercial life of the Third Republic. What the Rothschilds had almost forgotten and what had nearly cost them their power was the simple fact that once they withdrew, even for a moment, from active interest in a regime, they immediately lost their influence not only upon cabinet circles but upon the Jews. The Jewish immigrants were the first to see their chance.28 They realized only too well that the republic, as it had developed, was not the logical sequel of a united people’s uprising. Out of the slaughter of some 20,000 Communards, out of military defeat and economic collapse, what had in fact emerged was a regime whose capacity for government had been doubtful from its inception. So much, indeed, was this the case that within three years a society brought to the brink of ruin was clamoring for a dictator. And when it got one in President General MacMahon (whose only claim to distinction was his defeat at Sedan), that individual had promptly turned out to be a parliamentarian of the old school and after a few years (1879) resigned. Meanwhile, however, the various elements in society, from the opportunists to the radicals and from the coalitionists to the extreme right, had made up their minds what kind of policies they required from their representatives and what methods they ought to employ. The right policy was defense of vested interests and the right method was corruption.29 After 1881, swindle (to quote Léon Say) became the only law.

  It has been justly observed that at this period of French history every political party had its Jew, in the same way that every royal household once had its court Jew.30 The difference, however, was profound. Investment of Jewish capital in the state had helped to give the Jews a productive role in the economy of Europe. Without their assistance the eighteenth-century development of the nation-state and its independent civil service would have been inconceivable. It was, after all, to these court Jews that Western Jewry owed its emancipation. The shady transactions of Reinach and his confederates did not even lead to permanent riches.31 All they did was to shroud in even deeper darkness the mysterious and scandalous relations between business and politics. These parasites upon a corrupt body served to provide a thoroughly decadent society with an exceedingly dangerous alibi. Since they were Jews it was possible to make scapegoats of them when public indignation had to be allayed. Afterwards things could go on the same old way. The antisemites could at once point to the Jewish parasites on a corrupt society in order to “prove” that all Jews everywhere were nothing but termites in the otherwise healthy body of the people. It did not matter to them that the corruption of the body politic had started without the help of Jews; that the policy of businessmen (in a bourgeois society to which Jews had not belonged) and their ideal of unlimited competition had led to the disintegration of the state in party politics; that the ruling classes had proved incapable any longer of protecting their own interests, let alone those of the country as a whole. The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.

  The Jews could remain a separate group outside of society only so long as a more or less homogeneous and stable state machine had a use for them and was interested in protecting them. The decay of the state machine brought about the dissolution of the closed ranks of Jewry, which had so long been bound up with it. The first sign of this appeared in the affairs conducted by newl
y naturalized French Jews over whom their native-born brethren had lost control in much the same way as occurred in the Germany of the inflation period. The newcomers filled the gaps between the commercial world and the state.

  Far more disastrous was another process which likewise began at this time and which was imposed from above. The dissolution of the state into factions, while it disrupted the closed society of the Jews, did not force them into a vacuum in which they could go on vegetating outside of state and society. For that the Jews were too rich and, at a time when money was one of the salient requisites of power, too powerful. Rather did they tend to become absorbed into the variety of social “sets,” in accordance with their political leanings or, more frequently, their social connections. This, however, did not lead to their disappearance. On the contrary, they maintained certain relations with the state machine and continued, albeit in a crucially different form, to manipulate the business of the state. Thus, despite their known opposition to the Third Republic, it was none other than the Rothschilds who undertook the placement of the Russian loan while Arthur Meyer, though baptized and an avowed monarchist, was among those involved in the Panama scandal. This meant that the newcomers in French Jewry who formed the principal links between private commerce and the machinery of government were followed by the native-born. But if the Jews had previously constituted a strong, close-knit group, whose usefulness for the state was obvious, they were now split up into cliques, mutually antagonistic but all bent on the same purpose of helping society to batten on the state.

  III: Army and Clergy Against the Republic

  SEEMINGLY REMOVED from all such factors, seemingly immune from all corruption, stood the army, a heritage from the Second Empire. The republic had never dared to dominate it, even when monarchistic sympathies and intrigues came to open expression in the Boulanger crisis. The officer class consisted then as before of the sons of those old aristocratic families whose ancestors, as émigrés, had fought against their fatherland during the revolutionary wars. These officers were strongly under the influence of the clergy who ever since the Revolution had made a point of supporting reactionary and antirepublican movements. Their influence was perhaps equally strong over those officers who were of somewhat lower birth but who hoped, as a result of the Church’s old practice of marking talent without regard to pedigree, to gain promotion with the help of the clergy.