Most of the General Staff was “critical of his wealth, his conceit, and his religion” (Derfler 78), including Major Georges Picquart, Major Armand du Paty de Clam, Lieutenant Colonel Hubert Joseph Henry, and Colonel Sandherr. When Dreyfus was appointed to the General Staff in 1890, his superior officers were not too fond of him. Everything to Dreyfus is for the glory of France). (Later on it is interesting to note that throughout Dreyfus’ Five Years of My Life, he does not use the words Jew, Jewish, or Judaism once in any form or phrase. A French super-patriot, Dreyfus dreamed of becoming a general, but he had to overcome the barriers of religion, a perceived arrogance, and a lack of charisma and humor. By the age of thirty-four he was a captain and the youngest officer on the French General Staff (ibid). Dreyfus was an esteemed student and joined the French army as a second lieutenant. The war forced the Dreyfus family to move to Paris, and “his resentment of the Germans influenced his military career” (Derfler 77). Dreyfus was inclined to the tricolor as a boy and was determined to become a French soldier from the moment he saw the Prussians overrun his home at the tender age of eleven. The air of French-Catholic jingoism created by Drumont in the early 1890’s set the fuse of the bomb the Dreyfus Affair would be the spark that set the bomb off.Īlfred Dreyfus was born in 1859 into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Alsace. Drumont’s articles, written in boiling rage much of the time, touched on the French-Catholic connection and insisted that “Catholicism was essential to French identity, and Jews and Protestants were thus unassimilable interlopers (Hoffman 55). In league with the Jesuit mouthpiece La Croix, La Libre Parole turned French sentiment against the Jews dramatically and drove French opinion of the Jews to be even worse than that of their archnemesis, the Germans. Working with reckless abandon, Drumont established a Parisian newspaper, La Libre Parole, in April 1892. In 1889, he founded the “‘Ligue nationale anti-Semitique de France’, together with the Marquis de Mores and Jacques de Biez” (Herzog 30).
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The leftists would achieve their ascendancy under Georges Clemenceau, when the Dreyfus Affair was winding down.ĭrumont was a virulent anti-Semite, funded copiously by the Jesuits. On the left wing the radicals and in some cases, Socialists, fiercely opposed Catholic intervention in French law and education, and worked for a separation between church and state.
Drumont’s disciples, who consisted of a majority of the French army and the weight of the Catholic Church, held the momentum for most of the Affair. These ultra-nationalists despised anything not purely French and Catholic, and arose rapidly under the wing of Edouard Drumont, a “highly educated man, a gifted writer, and a dreaded journalist” (Herzog 25). On the right wing existed the nationalist monarchists, who wished for a return to a monarchical system with clerical influence from the Jesuits.
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Despite the fact that “France’s democratic institutions-universal suffrage for men, many political parties reflecting every shade of political opinion, and a free press” (Derfler 7) were the most liberal in the world at the time, France was to become a very confrontational place on the political stage. This was to change dramatically in the Third Republic period.
Through the Napoleonic period, the Revolutions of 18, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, anti-Semitism existed in France, but not on an organized scale. The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity drawn up in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 extended to the Jews in 1791 when they were emancipated. The court-martials and eventual pardon of Captain Dreyfus forced many Jews in Europe to reevaluate their position regarding assimilation into European society and brought the French into disrepute around the world.Ĭompared to Russia, Germany, and Poland, France was a fairly safe place for European Jewry for most of the 19th century. The Affair split France politically into two separate camps, fighting it out viciously for supremacy.
One of the pivotal historical events in 19th century Europe, the Dreyfus Affair brought anti-Semitism in France and Europe to the forefront of many political discussions.
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