Jews planned to ‘take over the means of controlling public opinion . . . Journalism and public education are like the two wings that carry the Israelite dragon, so that it might corrupt and plunder all over Europe . . . The Jews buy the press, over half the newspapers are in their power, and they use it’ to promote pornography and irreligion. The Jews ‘tear down the crucifixes from the walls of the Paris schools, breaking them and giving orders to throw them into the sewers, and they defend sword in hand, children’s obligatory attendance of secular schools, that is of those without and against the Christian God’.
3: The Army
In the view of the authors of this series of articles in Civiltà Cattolica, Jews might be taking over French journalism, the civil service, the judiciary, the schools and the universities, but there was one French institution where the conservative, Catholic Frenchman had reason to believe that he was still in control – the army. A Jew might be well equipped by inherited aptitudes to be a banker, a lawyer, a businessman, a doctor, a journalist, a teacher or a civil servant – but in a nation where the defence of the realm had historically been the prerogative of the aristocracy, and where Jews had been confined to civilian pursuits since the defeat of Simeon Ben Koseba in the second century ad, the French Jew was hardly credible as a soldier.
However, even here the pre-eminence of conservative Catholics was under threat. There was a new spirit of professionalism in the army and the introduction of universal conscription changed the nature of the rank and file from ‘middle-aged, illiterate sots’ to ‘fresh-faced, educated’ youths.19 The army was infected with the spirit of modernity that had brought new roads, railways, banks, business and literacy into every corner of France and there was a difference of opinion between the modernisers and the traditionalists – not on questions of weaponry, strategy and tactics but on the composition of the officer corps.
There were two routes to a commission. One was via the military academy at Saint-Cyr, the other via the École Polytechnique. The feeder schools for Saint-Cyr were often Catholic establishments run by Catholic religious orders, in particular the Jesuit school of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. The feeder schools for the École Polytechnique were the lycées or secular private schools such as the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. There was intense competition for all the Grandes Écoles of the University with ‘the examination for entrance to the École Polytechnique being the most revered of these tests’. As a result, the officers who joined the army from the École Polytechnique were from a wide range of backgrounds, and were very clever.
Graduates from Saint-Cyr had, since 1871, come increasingly ‘from the aristocracy and the conservative and Catholic bourgeoisie. In 1868, the yearbook of Saint-Cyr counted among its graduates 89 names “with the noble particle”* out of 284. Ten years later, there were 102 aristocrats out of a class of 365.’20 This was partly because income from land had declined, but also because ‘the practical exclusion of the Conservative and Catholic classes from most branches of public life made the Army more than ever the natural career of the sons of these classes’.21 Republicans had gradually displaced the older monarchist and Bonapartist cadres in the civil service and government bureaucracy. This displacement entailed a change in social class as well, from aristocrats to bourgeoisie, and in religion from Catholic to Protestant or non-believer – or Jew. In short, a new governing class began to come to power in France.
Catholics ascribed this to prejudice, but the politician and journalist Yves Guyot thought that all too often ‘people of Catholic origin, but now more or less agnostic’, blamed discrimination rather than their own shortcomings for their failure in life.
They don’t want to take the trouble to learn a foreign language; they don’t want to submit themselves to the tedium of hard work; they don’t want to strain themselves by mastering the complexities of high finance; they want jobs and positions to come to them without effort in the traditional way. They are thus very jealous of the Jews who demonstrate in these jobs and positions the qualities of perseverance and know-how that they lack; and, like good protectionists . . . they demand that their rivals be removed; they pretend that they are persecuted, while in fact, it is they who want to persecute those whom they blame for their own lack of success.22
Whether they were excluded from the civil service as a result of incompetence or discrimination, many of those from a conservative Catholic background turned to the one major area of employment by the state that remained open to them, the army.23 This increased representation in the officer corps of men of questionable loyalty to the Republic and revived ‘myths about power-mad Jesuits’ who were said to have ‘packed the General Staff with their pupils’. In fact, ‘in 1898, only a dozen General Staff officers out of 180 had attended their schools’.24 However, the myths were potent and in 1888 the first civilian Minister of War, Charles Louis de Freycinet – himself a Polytechnicien – instituted a number of reforms. The École Militaire Supérieure was renamed the École Supérieure de Guerre and, in October 1890, Freycinet created the post of Chief of the General Staff, appointing to fill it General François de Miribel, also a Polytechnicien – indeed, ‘the son, brother, and father of Polytechniciens’ and ‘a reformer by temperament and conviction’.
To open up access to officers with talent but no connections, General de Miribel ruled that each year the top twelve graduates of the École Supérieure de Guerre should serve as interns on the General Staff. This would not necessarily lead to a permanent appointment but it would make it more difficult for graduates of Saint-Cyr to advance through the old-boy network. However, Miribel himself was considered to be a poor judge of men. He appointed as his deputy General Raoul François Charles le Mouton de Boisdeffre, later described by General Edmond Legrand-Girard in his memoirs as ‘refined, cunning but a lazy slug who directed things in a dilettante way’. Miribel promoted to the General Staff General Charles-Arthur Gonse, characterised in the same memoirs as ‘a nullity made man’.25 These republican officers were denigrated by their enemies as ‘drawing-room intriguers’, and appointments were made, according to Legrand-Girard, for ‘their name or their connections’. General Félix Saussier, who was esteemed by republicans because he had seen off the potential putschist General Georges Boulanger, remained the Military Governor of Paris despite his louche private life.
Miribel’s appointment of General de Boisdeffre as his deputy was, according to the first historian of the Dreyfus Affair, Joseph Reinach, made precisely because of his indolence. ‘Miribel appointed him to the General Staff not because of his positive qualities but because of his nonchalance. This great worker, jealous of his work, wanted to do everything himself. De Boisdeffre’s laziness didn’t annoy him.’ However, Miribel died suddenly of an apoplectic fit on 8 September 1893, and, wrote Reinach, ‘the ignorance of Republicans about the armed forces allowed Boisdeffre to succeed him. He was installed like a prebendary, spending at most a few hours in his office, leaving his work to his subordinates, immersing himself rather in worldly affairs, indulging in expensive pleasures, and representing the army at various functions – something at which he excelled with his height, his having the manner of a military and diplomatic gentleman, his decorative quality, with something deep and serious in his expression which made him seem profound.’26 The death of Miribel ‘unquestionably weakened the position of the interns at the General Staff, particularly the Polytechniciens’,27 because Boisdeffre reverted to the old system of co-option.
* This was from fear of infiltration by Spanish Moriscos or Marranos, insincere converts from Islam and Judaism. The ban was not lifted until 1946. An exception seems to have been made for Leo Naphta in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
* Those who look upon nature as the sole source of all that exists and seek to explain everything in terms of nature.
† A term from the Book of Revelations (2: 9) used to refer to those Jews who maligned the early Christians.
* That is, ‘de’.
3
> Édouard Drumont
1: La France juive
The champion of those who were, or imagined themselves to be, disadvantaged by the rise of the Jews was Édouard Drumont, who in 1888 published an anti-Semitic polemic, La France juive (Jewish France). Drumont, though born in Paris, came from a family of porcelain painters in Lille. His father died when he was seventeen. After graduating from a lycée, he worked for a while as a civil servant in the Prefecture of the Seine, but soon left to try his hand at journalism. The growth of literacy under the Third Republic, the absence of censorship, the volatility of politics and the relatively lax laws of libel had created a flourishing newspaper industry. Drumont wrote for a number of papers, including Le Gaulois, Le Petit Journal and Liberté, the last owned by the Péreires, Sephardic Jewish rivals of the Rothschilds. In 1886, irked by the predominance and power of Jewish press proprietors, Drumont resigned from the staff of Liberté and started work on his book, La France juive. He was by now a widower, shy and self-effacing, a closed personality, set in his ways, very old-fashioned, rather eccentric, excessively introspective, contemplative, scholarly – ‘a kind of secular monk’.
La France juive was a call to arms. France was a conquered nation, wrote Drumont, and was ruled by an alien minority, the Jews. Just as the Saxons in England had been enslaved ‘by sixty thousand Normans under William the Conqueror’, so the French had been enslaved by half a million Jews.* However, rather than conquer courageously with the sword, the Jews had worked deviously to establish themselves as a ruling caste – ‘Nothing brutal . . . but a sort of gentle occupation, an insinuating way of evicting the indigenous population from their houses, from their jobs, a smooth way of depriving them first of their goods, then of their traditions, their morals and finally their religion.’1
The subtitle of La France juive was Essai d’histoire contemporaine – an essay on contemporary history – and Drumont presented his work as scholarly, reaching back far into the past to clarify the present, illustrating his theme with innumerable anecdotes and case histories which were described by Jean-Paul Sartre sixty years later as ‘a collection of ignoble and obscene stories’.2 The Jew’s compulsion to dominate and exploit non-Jewish peoples, wrote Drumont, had been drummed into him over generations of studying the Torah and Talmud. Contempt for the gentile and a hatred of Christianity were unalterable features of his genetic make-up. ‘This hereditary transmission of religious hatred and anti-social instincts is one of the things which has most struck us in the course of writing this book. Without giving to heredity the fatal character which is attributed to it by modern science, one must admit that it plays a considerable role in the make up of a people.’3
The Jews, wrote Drumont, took full advantage of the Enlightenment. ‘To succeed in their attack against Christian civilisation, the Jews in France have had to be clever, to lie and disguise themselves as free-thinkers . . . For a long time they remained in a vague condition, working through Freemasonry, and hiding behind fine phrases: emancipation, enfranchisement, the struggle against superstition and prejudices of another age.’4 Given full rights as citizens at the time of the French Revolution of 1789, they established an ascendancy through banking, trade and commerce, creating monopolies ‘over all basic necessities, not only of industry, but of life itself’ – wheat, sugar, coffee, copper, the press, the publishing industry and the new department stores – and, with the collusion of French Protestants, crushing any competition from French Catholics.
The collapse of the Union Générale bank in 1882 had been a case in point. The initial success of this financial conglomerate had been precisely because its founder Paul Eugène Bontoux had presented it as a vehicle for the savings and investments of Catholics that was not run by Protestants or Jews. ‘Its operations were followed with blind faith by all classes of Catholics; its stock soared to fantastic heights and its activities had a great deal to do with the boom of 1880 and 1881 . . . Within a year the decline had set in and it turned into a collapse, whose consequences spread to every part of the French financial system.’5 Drumont maintained that this collapse had been deliberately engineered by Jewish bankers such as the Rothschilds.
The name Dreyfus frequently crops up in Drumont’s polemics. Among his bêtes noires were not just Auguste Dreyfus, who had made a great fortune importing guano from Peru and embroiled the French state in his enterprises, but also the Radical journalist and Deputy Camille Dreyfus – at one time editor of the anti-clerical La Lanterne and founder of Le Matin – and the proprietors of Dreyfus Frères, a Jewish meat supplier, whom he accused of supplying rotten meat to the army, a charge for which he was sued for libel and condemned to three months in gaol.
Drumont believed that he was championing Catholicism in France, and described in La France juive his own reconversion – how, after having ‘denied the divine aspect’ of Catholic dogmas and lived outside the Church, ‘it had pleased God, in his infinite mercy, to call the poor writer by his name, to exercise on him a sweet and irresistible pressure which one does not resist, to tap him fraternally on the shoulder . . .’ and call him back to the practice of his faith. He talks of Jesus of Nazareth as ‘the most faithful of friends’,6 but, as John McManners points out, ‘no one could mistake his tirades for over-flowings of Christian charity’.7 Drumont himself seems to have found no incongruity between his abusive stereotyping of Jews and his Catholic beliefs. In old age, he rebuked God for the loss of his sight – ‘after all that I have done for him!’; and he frequently complained that in his struggle he was given no support by the Church. ‘I am not the intimate of any cardinal, bishop or Jesuit . . . On the contrary, the members of the upper clergy are hostile rather than friendly towards our ideas. They are servants of the Jews like many of our magistrates and our politicians.’ He could not understand why, ‘when he presented himself as an antisemitic candidate in the municipal elections in Paris in 1890, Catholic leaders had organized to oppose him: “all the Catholics [voted] against a man who defended the Church . . .”’.8
There were certainly Catholics who accepted that element of Drumont’s conspiracy theory which matched the attack on Jewish influence in the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica in 1889, and the anti-semitic polemic of the Assumptionist paper La Croix. And Drumont had his admirers among the lower clergy: almost a third of the anti-semitic books published in France between 1870 and 1894 were written by Catholic priests.9 But there is a distinction to be made between theological anti-Semitism on the one hand and the pseudo-scientific theories found in Drumont; and there was friction at the interface as when, for example, the influential Jesuit priest Père du Lac rebuked one of Drumont’s friends, Jules Guérin, for attacking a Catholic convert called Dreyfus, while another, Jacques de Biez, ‘went about asking priests if it were really true that “Jesus Christ was a Jew? Drumont doesn’t seem to mind, but I can’t swallow it.”’10
La France juive was a phenomenal success, selling over a million copies and going through 200 printings in twenty-five years. Some, like Léon Bloy, thought that Drumont deliberately exploited popular prejudice to make money and further a political career. He had ‘found the goose that lays the golden egg’ and realised that ‘by far the easiest way to influence and to please people is to fill their bellies with their favourite swill’.11 But ‘what Drumont did have was great skill as a propagandist and an uncanny rapport with his public’. As he himself put it, his only merit was to have ‘committed to print what everyone was thinking’.
2: La Libre Parole
In 1891, encouraged by the success of La France juive, Édouard Drumont founded a daily newspaper, La Libre Parole (Free Speech) to promote the ideology of anti-Semitism and expose the corruption and disloyalty of Jews. Soon after the publication of the first issue it had a scoop of spectacular proportions: the paper received a list of members of the Chamber of Deputies who had been bribed to vote in favour of a national lottery to bail out the bankrupt Panama Canal Company.
The Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocé
anique – the Panama Canal Company – had been founded by the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, who thirty years or so earlier had built the Suez Canal. Now aged seventy-four, de Lesseps remained a man of prodigious energy and drive.* He was also an ‘incurable optimist’: as Ernest Renan, the author of La Vie de Jésus, said when receiving de Lesseps into the French Academy – quoting scripture as befitted the former seminarian – he had the faith to move mountains. But it took more than faith to move the mountains of the isthmus of Panama. De Lesseps’s determination to do without locks and build a sea-level canal, ‘a new Bosphorous’, was thwarted by the mountainous terrain. Moreover, the tropical conditions made it a death-trap for the labourers and engineers. ‘Yellow fever killed Europeans as fast as they could be sent out. The boast of the chief engineer, Dingler, that Panama was really healthy, was refuted by the loss of his own family,’ despite their being housed in a large villa built at the shareholders’ expense known as ‘Dingler’s Folly’.
But what threatened the Panama Canal project was not so much loss of life as a lack of money. De Lesseps had grossly underestimated the cost of the canal, and the company was obliged to raise new capital, thereby diluting the holdings of the original investors. Increasingly, a portion of the funds raised was used not to pay for the canal but to buy the silence of French journalists. A report written for the French government by an engineer called Rousseau was delivered to the Minister of Public Works, Charles Baïhaut, also an engineer and, as an officer of the Society for the Promotion of Good, a high priest of the new secular morality. Predictably, in the eyes of anti-republicans, the minister did not practise what he preached, first ‘seducing the wife of an old friend who was not of a forgiving temper and then by allowing himself to be tempted by the opportunities open to a Minister of Public Works to get his share of the spoils of Panama’.12 Since no more money could be obtained from investors, a lottery was proposed of the kind that had raised funds for the completion of the Suez Canal under the Second Empire.