The Dreyfus Affair (6 page)

*
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 Interocéanique
– 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.

The price for Baïhaut's complicity in raising money from the public on a false prospectus, and throwing good money after bad, was to be one million francs. The raising of such large sums to pay off the politicians required expert attention. The company's first financier, a banker called Lévy-Crémieux, was replaced by Baron Jacques de Reinach – a German Jew with an Italian title, now a naturalised Frenchman, who had made his fortune with investments in French and Canadian railways. He had a chateau in Picardy and, like the guano-king, Dreyfus and the grain millionaires, the Ephrussis, a mansion overlooking the Parc Monceau in Paris. He was thought to be the model for Baron Duvillard, a character in Émile Zola's novel
Paris
.

Reinach had a nephew, Joseph Reinach, who sat in the Chamber of Deputies for the Seine et Oise, had been a close associate of Gambetta's and retained good contacts with the majoritarian Opportunists.
*
Jacques de Reinach himself had his own friends among politicians such as Camille Dreyfus and Léon Say. He ‘spent lavishly in splendid hospitality, in fostering the arts, especially those arts which, like the opera and the ballet, brought him into contact with young women'.
13

In oiling the wheels for the Panama Canal Company, Jacques de Reinach enlisted the help first of a fellow German Jew, Émile Arton, ‘who looked after those aspects of the financing of Panama that would look oddest on the balance sheet', and next, to win over Radical deputies, of a French Jew from the Franche-Comté, Cornelius Herz, who had spent some of his life in the United States, as had his close friend the French Socialist politician Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau had worked as a teacher in Greenwich, Connecticut, and had married a pupil, Mary Plummer, but by the time of the Panama Canal crisis he had run through her money
*
and was in need of cash to pay for his newspaper and a mistress whose previous lover had been a multi-millionaire and prince of the blood, the Duc d'Aumale.