Édouard Drumont

Édouard Adolphe Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French anti-Semitic writer and activist. He wrote book, La France juive (Jewish France, 1886), on topics such as Jewish influence in France. He was also the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole and initiated the Antisemitic League of France. Drumont was influential during the Dreyfus affair.

Life

Drumont was born in Paris in 1844 to a family of porcelain-painters from Lille. At the age of seventeen his father died, and left him to earn his own livelihood. He was at first in government service, but later became a contributor to the press and was the author of a number of miscellaneous works, of which Mon vieux Paris (1879) was crowned by the Academy. Drumont's 1886 book La France Juive (Jewish France) attacked the role of Jews in France and argued for their exclusion from society. It was well received and sold 100,000 copies in its first year of publication. It went thru a hundred editions and had an index of over 300 names.

He founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. In 1892, Drumont founded the anti-Semitic newspaper the La Libre Parole. From 1898 to 1902, Édouard Drumont represented Algiers in the Chamber of Deputies. He was sued for accusing a parliamentary deputy of having taken a bribe from the prominent Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild to pass a piece of legislation the banker wanted. Drumont attracted many supporters and played a role in the Dreyfus Affair, in which he was the most strident of Alfred Dreyfus' accusers. For his anti-Panama articles, Drumont was condemned to three months' imprisonment. In 1893, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the representation of Amiens; the following year he retired to Brussels. The Dreyfus affair helped him to regain popularity, and in 1898 he returned to France and was elected deputy for the first division of Algiers, but was defeated as a candidate for reelection in 1902.

"In Jewish France, Drumont (1844–1917), a journalist and leader of the political anti-Semitic movement in France, employed his considerable investigative talent to present one of the most comprehensive and factual accounts of Jewish influence produced in the nineteenth century. The book went through one hundred printings in a single year, turning Drumont into one of the best known public figures in France. One of the texts great strengths was that it didn’t rely on a single approach or viewpoint. It wasn’t just academic or journalistic, and it didn’t focus purely on politics or culture. The work embraced references from sources as varied as Catholics and socialists, while also including substantial elements of history, economic statistics, race science, and social criticism. Perhaps its greatest quality, however, is its break from the pessimism of Toussenel and Marr. Drumont writes of “considerable obstacles,” but asserts that “they are not insurmountable.” In many respects the work is a bridge between older texts, and those of the twentieth century and later."

Quotes

• All Jewish fortunes have been built up in the same manner, through an appropriation of the work of others. Today, thanks to the Jew, money-to which the Christian world attached only a secondary importance and assigned only a subordinate role has become all powerful. Capitalist power concentrated in a tiny number of hands governs at will the entire economic life of the people, enslaves their labor, and feasts on iniquitous profits acquired without labor.

• To succeed in their attack against Christian civilization, the Jews of France had to use deceit, to lie, to disguise themselves as freethinkers. If they had said frankly: "We want to destroy that France of old, so glorious, so beautiful, and replace it with domination by a fistful of Hebrews from many lands," our fathers, less soft than ourselves, would not have let this happen. For a long time [the Jews] kept things vague, working with Freemasonry, hiding behind sonorous words: emancipation, enfranchisement, the struggle against superstition and the prejudices of another age.

• Thanks to the Jews' cunning exploitation of the principles of '89, France was collapsing into dissolution. Jews had monopolized all of the public wealth, had invaded everything, except the army. The representatives of the old [French] families, whether noble or bourgeois, had divided themselves into two camps. Some gave themselves up to pleasure, and were corrupted by the Jewish prostitutes they had taken as mistresses or were ruined by the horse-sellers and money-lenders, also Jews, who aided the prostitutes. The others obeyed the attraction exercised over the Aryan race by the infinite, the Hindu Nirvana, Odin's paradise. They became almost uninterested in contemporary life, they lost themselves in ecstasy, they barely had one foot still planted in the real world.

Works (excerpt)

• La fin d'un monde (1888)
• Dernière battaille (1890)
• Testament d'un antisémite (1891)
• Secret de fourmies (1892)
• De l'or, de la boue, du sang - Du Panama á l'anarchie (1896), dealing with the Panama scandals
• Les Juifs et l'affaire Dreyfus (1899)
• Vieux portraits, vieux cadres (1900)

La France juive

• La France juive (1886)

See also

• Jewish influence: France

External links

• The Jewish Question: Suggested Readings with Commentary Part Two of Three: The Nineteenth Century