from French investors. This incident resonated with the anti-Semitic and
conspiratorial claims of La France juive, a popular book that had been pub-
lished by Eduard Drumont in 1886. By 1894, the disillusionment of the
military and conservatives after the Boulanger fiasco, combined with claims
of Jewish swindlers ruining France after the Panama scandal, set the stage for
the arrest of Albert Dreyfus.
In 1894, Dreyfus was accused of selling military secrets to Germany. In
retrospect, we know he was framed and that the dossier “of evidence” used
against him was forged. Circumstances, however, acted against him. He was
an acculturated Jewish republican – the embodiment of republican France
and Jewish emancipation at a time when anti-Semitism in France was peak-
ing. He was also Alsatian at a time when the military suspected Alsatians of
disloyalty and needed to find a scapegoat.
Dreyfus was tried by a military tribunal, convicted, and publicly stripped
of his rank. When he was convicted and sentenced in a public square, the
assembled crowd began to shout, “Death to the Jews!” Dreyfus responded
with the mantra of an acculturated Frenchman of the Jewish persuasion –
“Vive la France!” – before being sent to Devil’s Island. (Theodore Herzl and
Max Nordau, Budapest-born assimilated Jewish journalists covering this
event, would later recall this moment as integral in their embrace of
Zionism.) During the days that followed, anti-Semitic riots broke out all over
France. The French military and police quashed the riots and limited the
destructiveness, a tribute to the strength of the republic. Yet the incidents
themselves revealed a deep fissure within French society between republicans
and conservatives.
This fissure would widen in a struggle over the fate of Dreyfus. Following
his conviction, there was an outcry against this travesty of justice among sup-
porters of the republic. Emile Zola, the leading French writer of the time,
published a letter in a leading newspaper, L’Aurore, in which he accused the
French military and government of betraying the principles of the revolution
and the republic to bigotry and reaction. France divided into two camps:
Dreyfusards, who supported Dreyfus and the republic; and anti-Dreyfusards,
who defended Dreyfus’s conviction and opposed the republic. Dreyfus became
a cause célèbreand the central issue in the national election of 1898. The
Dreyfusards won, and in 1904 Dreyfus was retried, acquitted, and promoted
to major. The same year, the separation of church and state that had begun
decades earlier was consummated, a final blow to French conservatives and a
fitting end to the trial of a Jew that became a referendum on republican poli-
tics and values in France.
The vindication of Dreyfus meant a victory for the changes of the
nineteenth century in France. It also underscored the way that, in pre-
First World War western and central Europe, anti-Semitism was seemingly
ever-present but often not victorious. Moreover, the riots in France
notwithstanding, anti-Semitism tended to be minimally violent in western
Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914 183