Antisemitism [see also Judaism]. The spectacular success of Drumont's La France juive (1886) marks the beginning of antisemitism as a modern mass movement in France. Much of its success is due to the rationalization of deeply embedded religious prejudices. Thus, Drumont's obsession with Jewry's fiendish power to destroy Christian/Aryan civilization by corrupting it belongs to a long anti-Judaic tradition which La France juive modernizes, presenting the Jewish peril, or judaization, in socio-economic and political terms.
Briefly summed up, the argument runs as follows: since Jewry's entry into French society, following the Emancipation Act of 1791, France has declined into Jewish materialism. Money is king and the king is Rothschild. Unlike his predecessors (Fourier and Toussenel as well as Marx), Drumont did not regard judaization merely as a matter of socio-economic forces favouring a mercantile ethos, but of religious vocation: the chosen race was pursuing its God-given mission of world conquest. The whole of post-Revolutionary French history, from ‘la Révolution juive’ (1789), itself possibly a Jewish (or Judeo-Masonic) plot, to ‘la République juive’ (the Third Republic), was seen as stages in that triumphant conquest to which corresponded France's degeneration. The widespread feeling of decadence was thus given a simple cause, a ‘Jewish explanation’, as was done in medieval times for plagues and other disasters.
Drumont's originality lay in stating unequivocally that the Jewish Question posed a racial problem requiring a racial solution. Conversion, acculturation, socialization were dismissed as dangerous fantasies of equality. The Dreyfus Affair (1894-9) provided an excellent opportunity for translating into politics theories of racial determinism, helped by a fanaticized public opinion. For this to succeed it was imperative not to allow the racial logic of Judas-Dreyfus-Jewry to be broken by rational discussion. The tactic, zealously pursued by the antisemitic press and eloquently supported by Barrès and Maurras (Action Française was born in 1898), came close to succeeding: both government and the liberal press were terrified into silence by smear campaigns and by an anti-Jewish mass hysteria unprecedented in modern Western European history. In the event, Captain Dreyfus was eventually rehabilitated (1906) and the Republic emerged stronger from the ordeal, rehabilitations not easily forgiven.
It was not until the 1930s that large-scale antisemitism reappeared, with a vengeance, fuelled by a variety of factors, above all by a flood of refugees and by Léon Blum's accession to the premiership in June 1936. It speaks well for the health of republican democracy that a Jew could head the French state at that time. Equally admirable is the sanity of the majority in the face of the demented propaganda unleashed against Blum and Jews.
And yet that same majority accepted without much protest the Vichy regime's statuts des Juifs (1940-1), which excluded French Jews, ‘racially’ defined in terms of number of Jewish grandparents, from all public office, imposed a quota system for the liberal professions and education, and aryanized property. The latest research suggests that Vichy's Jewish policy, including the handing-over of interned foreign Jews for ‘resettlement’ in the East, a measure to which there was growing public opposition, was not dictated by the occupying powers [see Occupation and Resistance]. To what extent the French government actually knew of the deportees' fate is less certain. However that may be, extermination had no part in the tortuous state antisemitism defended by Vallat, who as commissioner-general for Jewish Affairs envisaged his role as surgeon not butcher. The story was different in occupied Paris, which had its ethnologists teaching people how to recognize the Jewish type, its exhibition of ‘Le Juif et la France’, its notorious round-ups carried out by the French police, and its collaborationist writers (among them Brasillach, Châteaubriant, Céline, Drieu La Rochelle, Rebatet), looking forward to a new Franco-German Europe without Jews.
The following figures, very approximate, will help to put this dark chapter into perspective: over 75, 000 French Jews perished in German camps; an estimated 250, 000 survived the Occupation and Vichy, many thanks to the efforts of ordinary French people. How deep did racialism go in France? Deeper perhaps than good republicans, especially French Jewry, cared to admit. Nor were these ardent assimilationists aware of their own unwitting contribution by affirming that the Jewish Question did not exist, for in Republican France, One and Indivisible, there were no Jews.
The late 20th c. saw both a clearer acknowledgement of French responsibility for the fate of Jews in World War II, and the emergence of new tensions, now more related to the politics of the Middle East.
[Nelly Wilson]
Bibliography
- M. Winock, Édouard Drumont et Cie. Antisémitisme et fascisme en France (1982)
- M. R. Marrus and R. O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (1982)
- P. Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Present (tr. M. Kochan, 1992)
