La French Justification By Edouard Adolphe Drumont

Édouard Adolphe Drumont (1844 –1917) was a French, conservative journalist and author. He became a lead propagator of anti-Semitism during the Third Republic of France with an extreme influence over the country. Drumont was a strong supporter of Nationalistic views and the discipline of the authoritarian Catholic Church.
In 1886, Édouard Drumont published his book Jewish France (La France Juive), advertised as an essay on contemporary history. This became his most famous anti-Semitic writing and gathered enormous success. The book focused on anti-Semitism and why the Jews were at fault for everything bad in all of Europe. In this book, Drumont is very open about his prejudice towards the Jews and analyzes their race as, not only inferior, but as a “chef source of the contemporary degeneracy was the Jews” (Drumont, 32). The main arguments presented in La France Juive was that the Jewish race are lower class people and the reason for
all the bad in Europe.
The theme of Jewish France emphasizes that Jews are the ones responsible for France’s adversity, especially since 1870, and that they are the only major threat to the the humble and honest French. He blamed his anti-Semitism on the racial basis of the perfect, Christian Aryan versus the corrupt, Talmudic Jew. A large part of La France Juive was devoted to prove that the Aryan race believes in justice, all the good, and the idea of liberty, while the Jewish race were different from others ethnographically, physiologically, and psychologically. The author further describes the Jews ugly nose and the repulsive smell. The Jews, moreover, were by nature traitors, criminals, and carriers of disease, thriving only due to the tolerance of the Christian Aryans. He states that “the Semite is mercantile, greedy, scheming, subtle, crafty. The Aryan is enthusiastic, heroic, chivalrous disinterested, straight-forward…”(Drumont, 33).
In this book, Drumont developed three reasons of anti-Semitism. One is the racial difference, explaining the difference between non-Jewish ”Aryans” and Jewish ”Semites”. Another was financial. He argues that finance and capitalism were controlled by the Jews, as if they’re stealing away from the naïve and honest French. The third reason was their religion, referring to a difference in belief of the death of Jesus.
La France Juive was written as a way for Édouard Drumont to voice his opinion on the Jews and persuade the public that the Jews were “the cause of all evil” and the “cause of the ruin of Europe” (Drumont, 33). Stating ideas such as the myth that “Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes” (Drumont, 33) and that “Jews were in conspiracy to dominate France and the rest of Europe” (Drumont, 33), Drumont is openly trying to convince the public that the Jewish race is inferior and the cause of everything bad.
It is certainly not uncommon to encounter a document from this time period that argues the Aryans as a superior race.
The Aryan race was believed to be the first-class race throughout Europe. We see this in The Superior Anglo-Saxon Race by Cecil Rhodes as well as in The Importance of Race by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Although the specifics of each document may differ, Jewish France also reveals how anti-Semitic many people thought out Europe were around that time. It show that many people in France really believed that “the chief source of contemporary degeneracy was the Jews” (Drumont, 32). In his book he compares the Jews with the Aryans. Furthermore, page 33 of the passage about La France Juive, states how his book shaped the public opinion for the conviction of treason of the first Jewish officer of the General Staff of the French army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The evidence was all faked, yet the public was convinced otherwise, since he was a Jew. This only shows that Drumont’s effort to spread anti-Semitism were very
successful.