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By Root 1033 0

unknown Edouard Drumont, who in the wake of the collapse of the Union Générale wrote a two-volume book, La France Juive, published in 1886 to instant success. It was a polemic compounded of Rothschilds and ritual murder, not a philosophical treatise like Gobineau’s earlier Essay in Racial Inequality, which had its greatest appeal across the Rhine where the inhabitants were engaged in constructing a theory of a master race. Drumont’s central theme was the evil power of Jewish finance. The book was widely read and reprinted and its author, a hearty, red-faced, thick-bodied man with a bushy black beard, thrived. In 1889 in association with the Marquis de Morès he founded the National Anti-Semitic League to fight “the clandestine and merciless conspiracy” of Jewish finance which “jeopardizes daily the welfare, honor and security of France.” At its first big public meeting the Duc d’Uzès, the Duc de Luynes, Prince Poniatowski, the Comte de Breteuil and other members of the aristocracy felt gratified at finding themselves seated next to real workmen from the butcher shops and slaughterhouses who in turn were delighted to find themselves sharing their opinions with noblemen.

After the success of the book and the League, Drumont’s next step was inevitably a newspaper. In 1892 he founded La Libre Parole, just at the time when the anger of bilked investors in the Panama loan fell upon its two leading promoters, Cornelius Herz and the Baron de Reinach, both Jews. Drumont’s paper in foaming philippics and raging pursuit of the evildoers, became a power. It undertook at the same time a campaign to drive Jewish officers out of the Army as a result of which two of them fought duels with Drumont and the Marquis de Morès. The Marquis went to the unusual length of killing his opponent and was charged with foul play but acquitted in court.

When Dreyfus was condemned, La Libre Parole explained his motive to the public: revenge for slights received and the desire of his race for the ruin of France. “A mort! A mort les juifs!” the crowd howled outside the railings of the parade ground where the ceremony of his degradation took place.

The cry was heard by the Paris correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl, who was standing amongst the crowd. “Where?” he wrote later. “In France. In republican, modern, civilised France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The shock clarified old problems in his mind. He went home and wrote Der Judenstaat, whose first sentence established its aim, “restoration of the Jewish state,” and within eighteen months he organized, out of the most disorganized and fractional community in the world, the first Zionist Congress of two hundred delegates from fifteen countries. Dreyfus gave the impulse to a new factor in world affairs which had waited for eighteen hundred years.

The first Dreyfusard was Bernard Lazare, a left-wing intellectual and journalist who edited a little review called Political and Literary Conversations while he earned a living on the staff of the Catholic and Conservative Echo de Paris. An Anarchist in politics, a Symbolist in literature, and a Jew, he wore bifocals over shortsighted eyes whose gaze, said his friend Péguy, “was lit by a flame fifty centuries old.” Suspecting the verdict from the start, he had learned from the commandant of the prison that Dreyfus, far from having confessed, had never ceased to declare his innocence. With the help of Mathieu Dreyfus, who was convinced of his brother’s innocence, and after a prolonged search for evidence, hampered by silence, obfuscation and closed doors, Lazare finally brought out a pamphlet entitled, A Judicial Error; the Truth About the Dreyfus Case. Although three thousand copies had been distributed to ministers, deputies, editors, journalists, and other opinion-makers, it had been ignored. Lazare’s and Mathieu Dreyfus’ visits to men of influence succeeded no better. “They bore us with their Jew,” said Clemenceau. Comte Albert de Mun, the eminent Catholic social reformer, refused to see them and the Socialist