Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (80 page)

But the organizers of the Jewish plan know well what they are doing ... This is how the Israelite financiers, so adroit at ruining France ... with clever phrases, are trying to persuade a naive people that Jesus was condemned according to the law of the people...

The subtle alliance of all the makers of the anti-Christian laws, with the powerful Dreyfus syndicate, leaves no room for doubt. They are all of a piece. Destroy the army, destroy the religious orders and let the Jew reign! That is the goal.
⁴⁰

In Drumont's phrase, "The Jew is behind it all."
⁴¹
As has been discovered again and again by tyrants of all stripes, the great usefulness of mass antisemitism is its efficiency in offering an explanation for everything that people hate about their situations, if not their lives. In this
La Croix
diatribe, the nineteenth-century's masterly illogic is on display. The Jew is the revolution
and
the bank; the Jew is the trade union movement
and
the owner; the Jew is the solitary betrayer
and
the international conspirator. As if all this weren't enough, the Jew is also, and still, the manipulator of an innocent Pontius Pilate, the fooler of naive crowds, the crucifier of Jesus.
La Croix
referred to the Jews as "the deicide people,"
⁴²
and the invective of this newspaper, as well as that of many anti-Dreyfusards, shows that the judicial charge of murder, lodged against Jews, provided the electric jolt to awaken this Jew hatred. Even in a nonreligious context, the religious lie is at the heart of the loathing. Thus, in protesting the enactment of secular education laws, Drumont brought in the Blood Libel: "In the past, [the Jew] attacked the body of children; today, it is their souls which he is after by teaching them atheism."
⁴³
Reflecting a resentment that had been festering since the Paris Commune,
La
Croix,
in January 1899, described French Catholicism itself as having been "betrayed, sold, jeered at, beaten, covered with spittle, and crucified by the Jews."
⁴⁴

At the time this was happening,
La Croix
was the most widely read Catholic publication in France.
⁴⁵
It counted more than twenty-five thousand Catholic clergy among its readers.
⁴⁶
It had been founded in 1880 as a vehicle for the new fervor that had taken hold in French Catholicism amid the traumas of social upheaval.
⁴⁷
For example, in this period the pious had been flocking to Lourdes, a town in southwestern France where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared in 1858. We will see more of such devotions later. Suffice to note here that they were encouraged by a clergy anxious to reconnect with an alienated populace.

The most visible manifestation of this essentially defensive fervor was the basilica of Sacré-Coeur, on Montmartre. The piety of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, emphasizing Christ's Passion, with an image of his heart pierced by his enemies, seemed to capture the mood of buffeted Catholics. Though the devotion originated during the Counter-Reformation, only now, beginning in France, were images of the Sacred Heart displayed in the homes of the pious—an indication of the assault under which Catholics felt themselves to be. Among the most active proponents of this cult were the Assumptionists, publishers of
La Croix.

Sacré-Coeur is a white, neo-Byzantine, multitowered church that features a huge central cupola and, as acolytes, four smaller domes. Construction was begun in 1876, a monument to the defeat of the Commune, which had murdered the archbishop. The church would not be finally consecrated until after World War I, but during the Dreyfus affair it already loomed above the city like a chastising apparition, making its rebuke felt by being visible from everywhere, except, of course, from the peak of Montmartre itself. Wags say that is why the hill became the haunt of bohemians. Pablo Picasso would distort the lines of the church in one of his earliest cubist works, which had to seem to the pious like a rebuttal. On the skyline, Sacré-Coeur rivaled the Eiffel Tower, a monument to the other France, built for the 1889 centenary of the Revolution. Today the two structures still compete for the eye, but the Parisians who hated or loved the sight of the church during the affair were not responding to the lines of its architecture.

The priest then in charge of Sacré-Coeur was Père Dehon, a member of antisemitic organizations and a writer of wide influence. "The Church has no hostility against Jews individually," he wrote. "She prays for them and desires their conversion, but she cannot mitigate her basic suspicion of them."
⁴⁸
Such suspicion was reduced to the question of the crucifix on classroom walls in the debate over the secularization of education. "Who was the first to throw the crucifix out into the street?"
La Croix
asked, then answered, "Hérold the Jew," referring to a Third Republic legislator.
⁴⁹
Crucifixes were being removed from municipal buildings, but not from those controlled by the army. Both times that Dreyfus was found guilty, he heard the verdict while standing at attention, staring straight ahead, his eyes necessarily on the crucifix that adorned the front walls of military courtrooms.
⁵⁰
At the announcement of the verdict at his first trial, the captain, ever the patriot, cried out, "
Vive la France!
" In the next day's edition,
La Croix
called this act the "last kiss of Judas."
⁵¹

Such knee-jerk antisemitism was more than an expression of the racial hatred of Jews, and more than the traditional religious antagonism—though one priest claimed that Jesus himself was the first anti-Semite, since "He had driven out the Jews of his time."
⁵²
Catholic antisemitism had now also become an affirmative catechetical tool. By the last decade of a century in which the Church had been rocked by one blow after another, not only in France but even in Rome, the cultivation in society at large of such prejudice served the purposes of Catholic restoration. Hundreds of thousands of people read
La Croix
and similar papers.
⁵³
More than a hundred thousand had purchased Drumont's
La France Juive.
The powerful psychological revulsion these publications stirred against Jews simultaneously served to rekindle in a previously indifferent population feelings of attachment to the Church.
⁵⁴
As the Dreyfus case dragged on into the new century, the furies it engendered did not dissipate. As French citizens chose between the general and the Jew, they also chose—because
La Croix
and
La Libre Parole
ingeniously defined the debate this way—between the Catholic Church and the enemies of France. This is why even Church leaders who might have disapproved of the vulgar antisemitism of the most vocal anti-Dreyfusards chose not to denounce it.
La Croix
expertly used, in Stephen Wilson's words, "antisemitism as a weapon in a campaign to re-Christianize the masses."
⁵⁵
Furthermore,
La Croix's
anti-semitism proved to the many non-Catholic Frenchmen who stood with the army against Dreyfus that heretofore suspect Catholics were as loyal to France as they. From an institutional point of view, in other words, there were good reasons for the bishops not to muzzle
La Croix,
no matter how rabid it grew. The bishops of the French Church were silent in the Dreyfus affair, as we saw, but they were also silent on
La Croix's
campaign of hate, which went on for years.
⁵⁶
"Ordinary, human words are quite inadequate," Léon Bloy wrote of the religious order that published the newspaper, "to assess and appreciate the degradation of the priestly office represented by these terrible monks."
⁵⁷

We saw in the Dreyfus chronology that the officer was convicted for the second time in September 1899, and then almost immediately pardoned by the president of the Third Republic. The Dreyfusards in the government were no longer willing to tolerate the mischief of the extreme anti-Dreyfusards. After years of dispute, the French anticlericals were as gripped by irrational hatred as the Catholic anti-Semites. Now that they had the upper hand, the anticlericals played it. In November, police closed the offices of
La Croix.
The government ordered the Assumptionists dissolved. Most of the order went to the United States, where, among other things, they founded Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. As the historian Robert Hoffman sums up what then happened in France, "Several prelates and other clerics who openly expressed sympathy with the order were punished by suspension of their salaries, which ordinarily were paid by the state. However,
La Croix
continued publication, because timely Papal intervention had secured the transfer to laymen of its ownership and operation."
⁵⁸

Because of Pope Leo XIII's last-minute initiative,
La Croix
is still published as a Paris daily, with a circulation of nearly 100,000. Its offices are in a modern building in the Eighth Arrondissement, between the Champs- Élysées and the Seine, not far from the apartment Lucie Hadamard and Alfred Dreyfus shared as newlyweds. Catholic priests own
La Croix
again, although when I visited its offices in 1998, the bright halls bustled with attractive young laypeople, men and women. My request for back issues was greeted cheerfully, and a miniskirted Parisienne soon handed me photocopies of the editions I sought, some of which I have cited here. But the issue of
La Croix
that had brought me there was published on January 12, 1998, to mark the centenary of Zola's "
J'Accuse...
!" That edition reviewed the coverage that
La Croix
had given to the Dreyfus affair a hundred years before. "Down with the Jews!" the paper quoted itself as having proclaimed.

"Yes, we wrote that," the editors now confessed, striking a tone entirely unlike that of the French army in 1994. "We must remember that. We must repent for that." The editors remembered as well that
La Croix
had labeled Dreyfus as "the enemy Jew betraying France," and Jews themselves as "ferocious enemies" of Christ. "The men who wrote those deadly lines are our older brothers," the present-day editors acknowledged, a straightforward statement and a judgment. "Whether Assumptionists or laymen, the editors of
La Croix
had at the time an inexcusable attitude."
⁵⁹

45. The Uses of Antisemitism

H
ANNAH ARENDT,
quoted earlier, called the Dreyfus affair "a kind of dress rehearsal for the performance of our own time." She also called it "a foregleam of the twentieth century."
¹
Perhaps both of these images suggest rather too much discontinuity between the events that preoccupied France for the decade between 1894 and 1906, and the events that dominated Europe from 1933 to 1945. Instead of a dress rehearsal, is there a way the Dreyfus affair can be seen as a kind of first act? Did the broad, successful campaign to paint Jews in the most hideous colors have direct consequences on Jews a generation later? Arendt herself suggested something like this in writing, "Certainly it was not in France that the true sequel to the affair was to be found, but the reason why France fell an easy prey to Nazi aggression is not far to seek. Hitler's propaganda spoke a language long familiar and never quite forgotten."
²

In the great European social conflicts of the nineteenth century, the forces of reaction, especially when allied with the Catholic Church, not only in France, but also in Spain, Austria, and Rome itself, dusted off the "long familiar" language of Jew hatred. For reasons of its own ambition, the Church invested that language with new power. In the late nineteenth century, that is, antisemitism rose, like devotional piety, as a source of connection between Catholic clergy and people buffeted by modernity. They could reassert a Catholic identity, and take consolation in a new solidarity, by expressing love for Mary and/or hatred of Jews. The dynamic is clearer in France than anywhere else because of the peculiar circumstances of the Dreyfus case, but the emergence of the Roman ghetto as a last-ditch symbol of papal dominance makes visible the same invisible tragedy. The hatred of Jews, the restriction of Jews, the denigration of Jews, all of which had long served a religious purpose, had come now to serve a political purpose. And because the Church in its various organs—from publications to religious orders to the lower clergy—did so much to revivify vulgar and ignorant contempt for Jews as persons undeserving of basic human rights, and because it did so at the dawn of the new century, it bears a heretofore unacknowledged responsibility for the behavior less, in this instance, of Hitler than of his "willing" masses.
³
The Dreyfus affair stands, in other words, as a marker of the fact that Catholic antisemitism was alive and well, armed and dangerous, not just in the Crusades and the Inquisition, but at the crucial modern moment. An expressly Catholic antisemitism was a seedbed for the coming catastrophe.

France "fell an easy prey" to Nazi propaganda about Jews because many of the Vichy-era collaborators had themselves been prepared to see the Jew as the "ferocious enemy" by, among much else, reading those issues of
La Croix
which had so defined them.
⁴
When the editors apologize in 1998 for editorials written in 1898, they are not apologizing for an impropriety but for their newspaper's role in helping to prepare the way for heinous crimes.