Edouard Drumont. The Dreyfus Affair 1898
Source: Edouard Drumont, Les Juifs Contre la France. Paris, Librairie Antisemite, 1898;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
Edouard Drumont was perhaps the most notable and virulent of anti-Semites in late 19th century France. Drumont’s anti-Semitism approached psychosis, and his best selling book, “La France Juive,” is two volumes of delirium, attacking the Jews for every ill imaginable. It was to be expected that a man who in his writings held the Jews responsible for floods would lead the attack on a Jewish officer accused of treason.
What is the exact meaning of the frenzied campaign organized by world Jewry to panic France, dishonor the French army and, in so doing, put it in no condition to play a role in Europe?
This campaign simply means that the totality of interests of which Jewry is composed has taken a position against France and finds it advantageous that France cease to be a great European power.
It seems pointless to me in these articles, which are written from a philosophical and social point of view, to give myself over to puerile indignation and vain declamations on this subject.
If the circumstances were such that I was invested with an authority that would permit me to save my country I would turn the big Jews and their accomplices over to a court martial that would have them executed. But in the theoretical and speculative domains I find it quite natural and logical that the Jews do what they do. To think otherwise would mean falling into the mania common among Frenchmen, who find themselves so lovable that they imagine that the whole world should love them.
The Jews formerly had a nationality. They lost it because of their divisions and their absolute lack of any instinct of hierarchy and order. Thanks to their genius as conspirators and traffickers they reconstituted a money power that is formidable, not only though the force that money itself possesses, but because the Jews have diminished or destroyed the other powers so that only theirs remain, because they have modeled, fashioned, molded a society where money is the true master of all.
This money power, like all powers, is only inspired by its own interests. It goes in the direction that seems most profitable to it. At the time of the Revolution it was for us; it then supported Bonaparte; in 1815 it was clearly against him and, at the time of Waterloo it fought with Rothschild as energetically as did Wellington.
It was for the Second Empire at the beginning, and was against it at the end. It worked for Germany. It provided funds for republican newspapers of the Ferry tendency just as today it supports internationalist and anarchist newspapers. It prepared our destruction then as it prepares it today.
After our disasters this power came back over to us. It gave us an appearance or an illusion of revival and prosperity through financial movement, and it profited from this by making France a prey upon which all the Jews of the world fell. Financiers have grabbed all our savings, the others have invaded the posts and great worldly situations and shared honors and decorations among themselves.
Today the Jews think that there is nothing else they can get from us, aside from the last honorary baubles from the World’s Fair. They know our cashboxes are empty, that the savings banks will be unable to reimburse the billions that were confided to them. They know the depths of the abyss hidden by the false décor of our budgets. They are preparing to liquidate France the same way they liquidated Spain.
If the anti-Semites don’t manage to save France by the means used by Danton this liquidation will be carried out in the blink of an eye.
Never has there been a more serious moment. We are going to witness: we already are witnessing a new sharing out of the world. The question is: are we going to intervene in this sharing out or will we be excluded. When the Russian alliance was concluded it was decided that we would take part in this; today they no longer see the necessity of giving us our share.
The true goal of the campaign organized by the Jews, and for which Dreyfus was only ever a pretext, was to destroy the might, or the appearance of might, that was given by an army that only a few years ago seemed to be an element which Europe had to take into account.
An autocratic government like that of the Tsar had to pass through many prejudices and hesitations in bringing about a rapprochement with a government as unstable and bizarre as ours. What decided the Tsar was obviously not the sympathy inspired in him by our politicians, it was that still imposing and solid mass that was the French army barely three years ago.
The Jews said to Russia:
“You believe this? You are naïve. We are going to make a consortium, add a few million to those that Germany will give us, group together all the frothers of the press, all the worm-eaten crooks of Panama and the Chemins de fer du Sud. After all this you’ll see what’s left of the army.
“Every day you’ll be able to read in the newspapers in huge print that General Mercier, who had pushed his audacity so far as to arrest a wretched Jew who had turned French military secrets over to Germany, should be sent to a prison camp. As for Boisdeffre, he who we believed would play the role of Moltke, the high chief of the General Staff, the general who placed his name at the bottom of the Franco-Russian military accord, he will piously disappear without even trying to defend himself before a handful of rogues who all would have joined Baihaut at Mazas [prison] if Loubet hadn’t committed a veritable crime by hiding the list of Panamists from justice...Incidentally, for this act Loubet was unanimously condemned by the Chamber before being acclaimed by it after been booed at Auteuil by the people of Paris.”
The Jews have done what they announced, and we must recognize that they have proceeded to this moral destruction of the French army with unequalled virtuosity.