The five hundred years between the time of Charlemagne and the 1st Crusade saw a progressive deterioration of Jewish liberty, status and security. Under the early Carolingian rulers, Jews were teachers, physicians, soldiers, traders in costly silks and spices, and councillors to kings and noblemen. Over the centuries, the Catholic Church succeeded in reducing the social and economic options of the Jews to the barest minimum. By the time of the Crusades, in France a Jew could not own land, could not bear arms let alone become an officer, could not leave his locale without permission. He could not marry a Christian on pain of death and, in most times and places, he could not have a Christian servant. He was barred from even entering, let alone residing in, major cities. It is true he was not quite a serf, but was frequently treated legally as royal property. To earn a living, he was reduced to money lending, to peddling, to trade in used goods and to little else.

Thus the Church succeeded in marginalizing the Jew to the extreme periphery of French society. If this were the sum of clerical anti-Semitism, it would be merely horrible. The gravamen lies in the fantasies about Jews to which the Church clung steadfastly until well into the 20th Century and acted on, every where and in every place, directly or through her agents.

To the Church, the Jews were deicides - they had conspired in, or in some legends, actually forced the Crucifixion of Jesus. In further legend they are portrayed as dancing around the Cross in celebration. For one or the other of these Jewish "atrocities," they were punished - the Temple was destroyed and the Jews were condemned to be a people without a Land.

To the Church, the Jews were allies of the Devil. As such they were the enemies of God. Over the years, these clerical fantasies metamorphosed into the belief that the Jews were allied with the Anti-Christ. Carried still further, the Anti-Christ became a Jew, born of a Jewish virgin. (This theme is one of non-economic bases of the Protocols of the Wise Elders of Zion). The rule of the Anti-Christ would also be the rule of the Jews according to the alleged wicked rules of the Talmud.

To the Church, the Jews were poisoners. They poisoned wells, food and cattle and, most particularly, people. This nefarious activity was sometimes supposedly accomplished with the help of the lepers, who, like the Jews, were outcasts from society.

"One report has it that a Hebrew letter found in Parthenay in 1321 and 'translated' by a converted Jew was said to reveal a huge plot of the Jews, the lepers and the Saracens of Spain to destroy the whole Christian population of Europe by poisoning the wells." (Marcus, p. 43)

During the Bubonic Plague in France in 1348, the "Jew Poisoner" was of course seen as the major vector if not the only vector of the disease. Jewish mortality approximated that of the general population, but this did nothing to disabuse the Church or the populace of their conviction that the Jew was the spreader of the plague. The plague in 1348 and the next year devastated all of Western Europe. The effect on the Jews was rapid and widespread - thousands of Jews were massacred and thousands more expelled from their localities. On St. Valentine's Day, 1349, in Strassbourg, for example, all the Jews of the town were brought together on a huge platform and collectively burned alive. It is said that some of the Jewish children escaped death because they were forcibly baptized. The men of Strassbourg, violent anti-Semites until well into the 20th century, took care to profit from the burning. All indebtedness to the Jews was cancelled. Cash was removed prior to burning and distributed among the working men of the city. Marcus provides additional details for those who can bear to read them. (Marcus, pp. 45-48)

Despite the Catholic rule against Jewish doctors, Jews were often physicians to royalty, noblemen and higher clerics. As Trachtenberg points out:

"We know of many of them [Jewish doctors] only because their names have been preserved in Christian documents, recording their services to Christian rulers and prelates, their receipt or loss of privileges, or the occasional tragic rewards of their efforts. For if the patient risked his life when he called in a Jewish doctor, the doctor risked his too when he rolled up his sleeves and set to work. If his ministrations were successful he was likely to be considered a magician and could expect to be treated as such, with fear and respect and active animosity. If he failed he was all the more a sorcerer and deserved nothing better than to pay promptly for his crime." (Trachtenberg, p. 95)

The Jew was a magician, and had the weapon of the evil eye at his disposal. The Church held the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the consecrated wafer was the body of Jesus. The Jews were believed to injure it, and thus injure God, by pricking it with needles, breaking it, or otherwise treating it in a degrading manner. (That hosts were planted by Christians to incriminate Jews has been repeatedly confirmed.) Poorly-stored hosts became infected with Micrococcus prodigiosus, which produces a deep red pigment. People believed these consecrated hosts bled because the wicked Jews maltreated them. Crucifixes and images of the Virgin Mary were also suspected of being mistreated, fouled or corrupted by Jews as part of their magic or from pure malevolence.

With such an extensive set of indictments, it is not surprising that Jews were expelled from France at least 6 and possibly 7 times. And recalled. The recalls, alas, were not because the Church or the secular ruler had a simple change of heart. Marcus exposes the more "practical" bases of two of these medieval one-sided population exchanges.

"The Jews had already been settled in France for over a thousand years when Phillip Augustus came to power in 1179. This brilliant but unscrupulous ruler, then about fifteen years of age, needed money and help to strengthen his hold on the throne and to fight the powerful feudal barons. He gained these objectives, in part, by confiscating Jewish wealth; thus he secured not only money but also the goodwill of the Church and of the Christian debtors. That he himself actually believed that Jews committed ritual murders is difficult to determine. It is sufficient to say that, in taking drastic action against his Jewish subjects, he had recourse to such accusations. Four months after taking over the reigns of government he imprisoned all the Jews in his lands and released them only after a heavy ransom had been paid (1180). The next year (1181) he annulled all loans made to Christians by Jews, taking instead a comfortable twenty per cent for himself. A year later (1182) he confiscated all the lands and buildings of the Jews and drove them out of the lands governed by himself directly. It is difficult to determine if his decree affected the Jews in the baronial lands. Several years later (1198) Phillip Augustus readmitted the Jews and carefully regulated their banking business so as to reserve large profits to himself through a variety of taxes and duties. He made of this taxation a lucrative income for himself." (Marcus, p. 24)

In the later portion of the Middle Ages the Jew became subject to one of the most deadly of all accusations: the blood libel. Jews had been accused of occasional "sacrifices" of non-Jews for religious purposes for several centuries before. Now, he became the killer of young children, who were bled to death to obtain blood for Passover matzoth.

The construction of this myth, like so many of those associated with the communion wafer, is based on Christian belief rather than on Jewish practice. It is Christian belief that baptism frees one of sin. Therefore, in the logic of magic, the blood of an innocent child, preferably one recently baptized, would be a more potent component of any magical potion or Passover matzoth than the blood of a sin-laden adult. Each of the "niceties," such as preliminary crucifixion of the victim head downward, are invocations of Christian themes to enhance the magic being generated. Almost every detail in these horrific stories is the opposite of Jewish practice. Avoiding the consumption of blood in food is a biblical commandment.

Father Flannery in his account of the Simon of Trent incident twists in the wind of inherent contradictions. As a proper believing Catholic (his book bears the imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman), he cannot avoid defending a canonized saint. But his knowledge of the falsity of the blood-libel must have made him uncomfortable. The contradiction is reflected in his account.

"One of the most famous of all such accusations occurred in Holy Week of 1473 in Trent where St [sic] Bernardinus of Feltre was finishing a Lenten series of of sermons. The body of a three-year-old boy named Simon was found in the Adige river. An outcry immediately went up against the Jews.

St. Bernardinus connection with the affair has been questioned. The mystically minded Franciscan was a spiritual disciple of St. Bernardinus of Siena, a firm believer that Jews plotted the destruction of Christianity through their usuries and their physicians. Bernardinus...inherited the outlook of his mentor, actually describing himself as a dog 'who barks for Christ' against the Jews. He is recorded as having stated in his Lenten sermons in Trent--apparently to an audience unimpressed by his warning against Jews--that the 'feast of Easter will not pass before you will find something out.' ...

Whether the death of little Simon was a Jewish crime rather than a libel seems to some degree answered by the investigation of the affair by the papal legate of the time who discouraged the cult grown about the boy's grave, which was fostered by the religious orders and clergy. For all this, at the behest of the Bishop of Trent, Jews were arrested, tried and under torture confessed--all except one who persisted in retracting his confession when off the rack. At the end, all Jews of Trent were burned...A second investigation of the affair three years later exculpated the Bishop, and the pope accepted the verdict of Jewish guilt..." (Flannery, pp. 115-116)

Probably no other single accusation was more capable of eliciting mob violence against the Jews than the blood libel. It was effective in initiating and promoting European pogroms well into the 20th Century. It was also the source of the present-day blood libel propagated by the Arabs.

It has often been asserted that the Church as represented by the Papacy did not hold with the myths of the blood libel and ritual murder. This is contradicted, for example, by the letter of Innocent III (Regi Francorum, Jan 16, 1205):

"The Jews, likewise, abuse the royal patience, when they remain living among the Christians, they take advantage of every wicked opportunity to kill in secret their Christian hosts. Thus it has recently been reported that a certain poor scholar had been found murdered in their latrine." (Grayzel, p. 109)

Several religious orders, the Jesuits in particular, never ceased propagating the blood libel to the end of the 19th century and later. The Jesuits were the repeated source for blood libel stories in France through their publications, all the way up to the Dreyfus affair.

At the beginning of the Renaissance, around 1400, France was almost "juden rein." The expulsion of the Jews in 1394 had been widely enforced. The French Humanists - Bodin, Lipsius and above all Montaigne - were unswerving in their questioning of the basis of religious beliefs, but did not as a result become anti-Semitic. They argued against Erasmus' nasty anti-Semitism. For most of this period, despite the horrors wreaked on the Jews by Catholic and Protestant anti-Semites on the other side of the Rhine, France was relatively undisturbed by overt anti-Semitic violence.

In nearby western Germany, Martin Luther initially looked for Jewish adherence to the new Protestantism. When his expectations were disappointed, Luther became virulently anti-Semitic, a shift that adversely affected Jews in eastern France. John Calvin, the founder of the other major Protestant branch, was much less openly anti-Semitic.

"During the final third of the 16th century, both Reformation and Counter-Reformation lost their former momentum and the hitherto universal Christian foundations of western culture began to crack and contract. It was now that Christianity embarked on that age-long retreat which has since become its familiar role in western culture--no longer the all-embracing, universal whole but what, to all appearances, has been a shrinking force compelled to compete with a host of rival outlooks and attitudes and, in particular, a rising tide of doubt, deism and atheism." (Israel, p. 36)

The historian may see the retreat of Christianity as of primary intellectual concern, but certainly the Catholic Church never acknowledged the change of state. The writings of its enemies were combatted with the aid of philosophers, friars and committed believers whenever and whereever the opportunity presented itself.

It was at this time that a few "Conversos" (Jews who had converted to Christianity and later secretly returned to Jewish observance) crossed the Pyrenees into southwestern France. Most of this group settled in the west around Bordeaux and Bayonne. After 1580 they were joined by Jews fleeing from the Portuguese Inquisition. These Marranos, numbering in the thousands, settled in Western France and in Paris, Nantes and Rouen. Initially, native French merchants protested their admission but the French Kings, notably Henri IV, ignored their complaints and issued royal writs granting permission to reside in France. Gradually they became merchants of significance, and as their importance to the economy grew, they felt secure enough to cast off their pseudo-Christianity practices. As we shall see, by the time of the Revolution nearly 200 years later, this group of Jews had almost all the rights of ordinary Frenchmen. They only required confirmation of the legality of their continued presence in the kingdom.

In eastern France at the start of the 17th century, groups of Jews entered Alsace-Lorraine. Some of them became important and privileged as purveyors of horses and provisions for the French armies. Alsace became a part of the French kingdom at the end of the Thirty Years war. After the War (1648) large numbers of Ashkenazic Jews fled the devastation in the Germanies. They settled mostly on the outskirts of medium to larger towns. From the beginning, they were forbidden settlement within the major cities. Their entry was marked by riot and small-scale pogroms, which reflected the hair-trigger, almost permanent, anti-Semitism of the native French of the area.

The Enlightenment And The Philosophes

The Humanist movement of the 15th and 16th centuries supplanted the values of medieval Scholasticism. Initially, the study of Hebrew was included along with Greek and Latin (purified of its medievalisms) in the Humanist program. The study of Hebrew, however, quickly passed from a straightforward intellectual pursuit to a tool for promoting the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Scholars delighted in the newly-available Classic works, the recovered ancient works of art. But the burgeoning questioning by Humanists of received authority did little to alter the essential anti-Semitism persisting in the Church: Catholics and Lutheran reformers maintained the tradition of knee-jerk Jew hate and Jew fear. Humanism did not meliorate either.

"...the towering exponent of Christian humanist anti-Semitism was Erasmus himself. Indeed, Erasmus may be regarded as having preceded both Luther and the Papacy in enunciating the new, more ideological anti-Semitism of the sixteenth century. In his letters to Wolfgang Capito, a Reformer with Hebraist leanings, Erasmus expressed his disapproval of the new Hebraism, fearing that, whatever the intentions of its practitioners, Christian Hebraism would in some way lead to a Jewish revival. He felt in his bones that study of the Talmud, cabbala, and rabbinic books, even too much interest in the Old Testament, could only deflect the Christian scholar from Christ, not draw him nearer. Greatly though he detested the medieval schoolmen, Erasmus felt closer to them on this issue than to his Hebraist colleagues. He saw Jewish learning and Jewish interpretations as more dangerous to Christian truth than any medieval obscurantism..." (Israel, p. 14)

The Enlightenment is regarded as a movement in which reason replaced revelation as the director of men's intellectual efforts. In contrast to the Humanists who preceded them, they followed many different callings. Some were scientists, some ministers, some clergymen, but all were interested in applying unencumbered Reason to man and the nature in which he finds himself. The Enlightenment is really an omnibus term, designating a very wide range of interests and attitudes. Bacon's pragmatic views on the nature and boundaries of scientific investigation fathered a British school of Enlightenment philosophers who for the most part were interested in pursuing the physiologic, psychologic and philosophic aspects of man in his relation to the external world. With a few notable exceptions, such as Hobbes, they largely avoided declarations as to what society should be like, and they formulated few schemes to attain such ends. The French Enlightenment, on the other hand, is concerned with society, social structures, and immediate "logical" and a priori plans for its reform and restructure. Some patterns of human behaviour were, to the philosophes, "good " at all times and places. Modifiers due to time, place, population, resources, geography, etc., had little if any role in the design of the societies which were to replace that of the Old Regime.

Philosophic and scientific communication was still mostly by letter. Often, however, letters were circulated and were included in books, Many such letters were edited and, conciously or unconciously, their slant was altered. It is difficult therefore to find broad, uniting principles in the group as a whole. However, an almost common denominator was either an outright atheism or at best an uncritical deism.

The enthronement of Reason led most men of the Enlightenment to become progressively anti-Christian. Revelation in their eyes was always the enemy of Reason. The works of the Church Fathers and then eventually the New Testament were rejected as sources of Truth. Further their content was not only denied as fact, but the inherent methodology of medieval theologic works was rejected as a mechanism for seeking truth.

From there it was but a short step to condemning both the Old and New Testaments as the source of error. Jews became responsible for the obscurantism and the hobbling of men's minds, because, after all, they were the creators of the Old Testament, on which the New was based. The facile condemnation of the Jews for the uses to which their creations were put did not seem at all illogical to the worshipers of Reason. So, in addition to the crushing burden of medieval anti-Semitism, the men of the Enlightenment added a more intellectualized, seemingly higher, form of Jewish denigration.

No superstition remains simple - myths accrete parts or wholes of other myths and very soon mid-18th century intellectual anti-Semitism included many of the old accusations of insularity and usury. For a while the blood libel remained quiescent but, as we shall see, it would wake with devastating effect in the next century.

The philosophes believed in progress. They believed the discoveries in the physical sciences of the 17th and early 18th centuries would be followed by advances of a similar scope in the social "sciences." These would lead to a restructuring of society along ideal (but poorly defined and unproven) lines.

The mid-18th Century philosophes who most directly influenced the thinking of the first wave of revolutionaries in 1789 were for the most part French and anti-Semitic: Voltaire, Diderot and d'Holbach, in particular.

"Overwhelming evidence shows that both Jews and gentiles, whether 'enlightened' or not, unanimously regarded Voltaire as the enemy not only of biblical Judaism but of the struggling Jews of his own day. Everyone understood him to mean more than that the Jew was the most difficult of all peoples to enlighten and regenerate. He, Diderot and d'Holbach were understood to be teaching that the Jew was hopelessly and irretrievably alien." (Hertzberg, p. 286)

"...proved that all the anti-Jewish pamphleteers in the last two decades before the Revolution and especially in Alsace, invariably based their arguments not primarily on inherited Christian prejudices but on post-Christian anti-Semitism that was defined for them by Voltaire. They usualy invoked his authority directly." (Hertzberg, p. 287)

Voltaire's own words support the accusation. In his Philosophical Dictionary in the article on Natural Law he states:

"It was forbidden to marry one's sister in Rome. It was allowed among the Egyptians, the Athenians and even among the Jews, to marry one's sister on the father's side. It is but with regret that I cite that wretched little Jewish people, who should assuredly not serve as a rule for anyone, and who (putting religion aside) was never anything but a race of ignorant and fanatic brigands." (http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volnatra.htm)

Jean-Jaques Rousseau's political pessimism set him apart from the other philosophes. Enlightenment philosophers were almost uniformly optimists. This was manifested in their belief in progress. Rousseau, in his obstinate contrariness, was politically pessimistic. He retained a vague, romantic religiosity and an overemphasis on "Sensibility." This set him off from both the French and English Enlightenment figures. He was rejected, initially, by almost all of his fellow intellectuals because of a quarrel with Diderot and Grimm, followed by a denunciatory letter to D'Alembert, which included an attack on Voltaire. David Hume, almost alone among the philosophes, provided him with a sanctuary in England. But he quarreled with Hume as well, blaming him for the delay in the promised English royal pension.

To Rousseau, Sensibility, which he saw as the innate capacity for an emotional response, was essential for morality. For him, spontaneity, emotion, and innocence and child-like love were necessary for "good" behavior. These criteria for the citizen of the future coupled with such doctrines from his "Social Contract" as the "General Will" (click here for details) provided the French Revolutionaries with a set of templates for the remaking of France and as much of the rest of mankind that they could encompass by conquest.

The Revolution

The newly successful French revolution tried to accomplish in days or weeks societal restructurings that took decades to a century or more to evolve in Britain, the American Colonies, the Dutch Netherlands and in Zionist Israel.

When the Bastille fell to the mob, most of the Jews of France had minimal civic rights. Little had changed from their status a century before. On the other hand, as observant Jews, they could follow the Law. They had their mikvahs, their Torah scrolls, their synagogues, and kosher meat. Disputes within the community could be resolved, if mutually agreeable, by a Beth Din. They had their own study houses and cemeteries. The thoughtless application of Enlightenment principles to Jewish emancipation would change it all.

The members of the National Assembly - nobility, clergy and bourgeoisie - had absorbed the message of the philosophes. They

"...had the same fondness for broad generalizations, cut-and-dried legislative systems, and a pedantic symmetry; the same contempt for hard facts; the same taste for reshaping institutions on novel, ingenious, original lines; the same desire to reconstruct the entire constitution according to the rules of logic and a preconceived system instead of trying to rectify its faulty parts.

Even the politicians' phraseology was borrowed largely from the books they read; it was cluttered up with abstract words, gaudy flowers of speech, sonorous cliches, and literary turns of phrase. Fostered by the political passions that it voiced, this style made its way into all classes, being adopted with remarkable facility even by the lowest..." (de Tocqueville, p. 147)

If we add a generous dose of Rousseau's Sensibility, his exaltation of spontaneity, emotion and innocence, to de Tocqueville's characterization, we have a composite model for the men of the National Assembly. They really did think they could solve the Jewish Problem - and any other for that matter - by emancipation at the stroke of a pen. Click here for an extract from The Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The Jews in France formed only a minuscule portion of the population, Despite its small size, Jewish society, with its "nation-within-a-nation" characteristics, was offensive to Enlightenment theory. Each special pattern of Jewish behaviour and observance, based on Jewish law, was a challenge to the idea that all men were created equal and should be treated equally. The complexity of Jewish teaching and belief was simply incompatible with the simplistic idea that religion was merely and purely a matter of mind.

Even before the Revolution, a Royal Commission under Malesherbes had looked into the question of extending to Jews the toleration given to Protestants. Six months after the fall of the Bastille, the National Assembly was occupied in implementing the 'principles' of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In the debates there was no doubt at all that the native Protestants were Frenchmen. But were the Jews Frenchmen? It rapidly developed that the Jews could not be incorporated in the hodge-podge category of "non-Catholics," which included tinkers, gypsies, public executioners, as well as members of the various Protestant sects.

The Count de Clermont-Tonnerre argued against mere toleration. He invoked the principles of the philosophes, proposing some facile, abstract solutions to the Jewish problem. Because to his uninformed eyes, religion was a private affair and

"...so long as religious obligations were compatible with the law of the state and contravened it in no particular it was wrong to deprive a person, whose conscience required him to assume such religious obligations, of those rights which it was the duty of all citizens qua citizens to assume. One either imposed a national religion by main force, so erasing the relevant clause[s] of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to which all now subscribed. Or else one allowed everyone the freedom to profess the religious opinion of his choice. Mere tolerance was unacceptable." (Vital, p.43)

The abbe Gregoire supported this "liberal view," but it was clear that he saw emancipation as a prelude to the real objective: Jewish apostasy and conversion to Christianity.

To Clermont-Tonnerre, there was no problem in granting Jews the status of active citizens. To the Jews (at least the majority at the time) there were innumerable problems in accepting the grant. It becomes clearer when we examine what the Count considered the consequences of citizenship for the Jews.

"As a nation, the Jews must be denied everything, as individuals they must be granted everything; their judges [Rabbis] can no longer be recognized; their recourse must be to our own exclusively; legal protection for the doubtful laws by which Jewish Corporate existence is maintained must end; they cannot be allowed to create a political body or separate order within the state; it is necessary that they be citizens individually." (Clermont-Tonnerre Archives parlementairs, x 75-79, cited by Vital, p. 44)

As you would expect, Clermont Tonnerre and his allies, Abbe Gregoire Robespierre and Mirabeau, were opposed in the Assembly by churchmen such as the abbe Maury and the bishop of Nancy. Maury cited Voltaire on the seven historical expulsions and readmissions of French Jews. His stricture on the Jews (in effect, directed mainly against the Alsatians) is a strong echo of Voltaire:

"The Jews have passed seventeen centuries without mingling with the other nations. They have never engaged in anything but trade in money; they have been the plague of the agricultural provinces; not one of them has ever dignified his hands by driving a plough. Their laws leave them no time for agriculture; the Sabbath apart, they celebrate fifty-six more festivals than the Christians in each year. In Poland they possess an entire province. Well, then! while the sweat of Christian slaves waters the furrows in which the Jews' opulence germinates, they themselves, as their fields are cultivated, engage in weighing their ducats and calculating how much they can shave off the coinage without exposing themselves to legal problems." (Clermont-Tonnerre Archives parlementairs, x 755-6, cited by Vital, p. 44)

In what can only be regarded as a violation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, this first attempt to legislate emancipation drew sharp distinctions between the Jews of Bordeaux, Rouen, Paris and Avignon (essentially, the Western Sephardim) and the eastern Ashkenazic Jews. The former were granted emancipation. As a compromise (to end time-consuming debate and as a concession to the open anti-Semites), the case of the Ashkenazim was tabled. Emancipation for the Jews of Alsace was not enacted until 1791. Despite the excellent intentions of the Assemby, the terms of the emancipation of the Ashkenazim of Alsace were in effect an act of anti-Semitism. It had consequences not only for French Jews but for those of most of Western and Central Europe.

The 1791 Emancipation of the Alsatian Jews gave them no real alternatives. They could not be legally full French citizens and still remain observant Jews. It was more than just a dilemma. One could accept emancipation, exercise civic rights and indulge in productive labor and commerce - become a "useful" Jew. The price to the individual and to the Jewish people for all this "civicism" was to automatically embark on the downward path to assimilation. The supposed alternative - rejection of "active citizenship" - was not really an option. Continued observance (shekita, circumcision, submission to Bet Din, and so forth) would be bound to occasion conflict with authority. Conflict was even more likely because the prefect's attitude was most likely to be reinforced by the vicious popular anti-Semitism, particularly rampant in Alsace. Lapses from civic virtue, such as marriage under the huppah was, by revolutionary standards, a hostile act by one who thereby ceased to be a citizen of the patrie. The men of the National Assembly regarded their Jewish settlement as structured in the exactly the same way as society as a whole had to be organized - by the necessity of revolutionary equality. Any deviation would be suggestive of special treatment, and so give rise to that cardinal revolutionary sin: privilege.

In parts of Eastern France emancipation was the occasion for confiscation of Torah scrolls and their traditional ornaments, Talmuds and commentaries. Complaints were rife concerning the continuing ritual slaughter of animals and observation of the Sabbath. A district procurator (prefect) in Lorraine complained: "It is the inhumane law of these people that the new-born male infant is to be bloodily operated upon as if nature herself were imperfect. They wear long beards with ostentation, mimicing the patriarchs whose virtues they themselves have failed to inherit. They employ a language of which they are ignorant and which has long since fallen into disuse. In consequence I do require of the provisional commission that it forbid them such practices and arrange for an auto da fe [emphasis added] to Truth of all Hebrew books and of the Talmud most especially, the author of which was so mischievous as to permit them to make usurous loans to men who are not of their faith." (Vital, pp. 52-53)

The medieval Inquisitorial auto-da-fe's frequently included the prominent burning of the Talmud. Despite official "de-Christianization" of France during the revolution, churchly anti-Semitism remained in the minds of the "free," only to re-emerge openly in the Restoration.

The Napoleonic Era

The conquests of the French Revolutionary armies in the Germanies and Italy brought French style emancipation to the Jews of the extended Republic. Napoleon broadened the territorial application of Jewish emancipation to most of Western and Central Europe. This emancipation was temporary, because it was dependent on the presence of the revolutionary armies.

The Western- and Central European-wide tendency toward "statism" or "etatism" that began in the last half of the 17th century was fully developed in pre-revolutionary France. This pattern of government was directed toward a centralized, coherent, rationalized ordering of society. Effectively, it was the State rather than the individual monarch that was served by officials and to which long-term fealty was devoted. Among the philosophes, it was predominantly the school of the Economists who promoted the statist doctrine.

The First Empire was a proto-totalitarian state. It embodied fully developed statism, but incorporating the mythic figure of the Emperor to whom all loyalty and alliegance was owed. Napoleonic statism wrapped itself in the tricolor, proclaiming the principles of 1789. In reality it progressively constricted freedom of action and of thought. All power descended from the Emperor through his council to the "operatives in the field:"the prefects of each of the 80-odd departments. Operationally, the prefects were not new. Royal officials, the Intendants, had similar roles and duties in much of France before the revolution. The prefects were responsible for just about every administrative and judicial function in their departments. They were not merely agents of the government, they were its tools in maintaining it. The balloting in the multi-tiered electoral system was most easily manipulated in favor of the government by the prefects' role in designating electors and candidates who supported the central authority. Napoleon operated on the totalitarian myth that a central all-wise government is better able to care for the needs of all localities than each locality can for itself. For the the imperium, the prefects were the necessary and sufficient transmitters of information in both directions.

After Emancipation, the shifts and ups and downs of political power from the time of the National Assembly to the beginning of the first Empire produced little additional change in the practical status of the Jews. It was only after the Austrian campaign in 1806 that the anger of the Emperor was directed against the Jews of Alsace. They were accused of the usual usury and insularity and, in addition, theft. Rumors were spread of impending mass massacres of the Jews by the native French, unless the financial power of the Jews was reduced in favor of the gentiles. Perhaps this was due to his military perception of the strategic importance of Alsace as the guardian of the frontier. Or it may have been simply the explosion of Napoleon's inherent anti-Semitism. In any case his response was to institute an "Assembly of Jewish Notables."

Their mandate was to revive the civic morality of the Jews and to provide a structured picture of Jewish beliefs and practices in response to specific questions from governmental officials. By implication, the Jews were not as "useful" as they might be, and something had to be done about that. It was mainly the prefects, not the Jewish communities in general, who chose the members of the Notables. The Notables, some of whom were Rabbis, were queried about polygamy, intermarriage, the Jewish view of Frenchmen, the parameters of usury. In effect, what was the Jews' view of Frenchmen! The conflicts between Jewish law and answers that would be acceptable to the government were frequently in opposition. It was obvious that for the Jews to survive, the Notables would have to exercise considerable casuistry. Vital indicates the distortion which the Notables felt were necessary for Jewish survival.

"...Love of country is in the heart of Jews a sentiment so natural, so powerful, and so consonant with their religious opinions, that a French Jew considers himself in England as among strangers, although he may be among Jews; and the case is the same with English Jews in France. To such a pitch is this sentiment carried among them, that during the last war, French Jews were fighting desperately against other Jews, the subjects of countries then at war with France." (Vital, p. 57)

It was clear that the leaders of French Jewry had to kneel at the Imperial feet, but this distortion of reality as "religious opinions" went a bit further than was necessary.

In the long run, several meetings of the Notables in 1807 produced a set of responses that satisfied Napoleon and his council. Napoleon established a hierarchy of consistories as the mechanism for Jewish local and general government. It was, as everything else in France, subject to the Emperor. As a step on the road to convert the Jews into useful citizen, French Jewry would now be regarded as a purely religious denomination. They were no longer officially Jews but "Israelites." The governance of the Jewish "church" had been made the equivalent of Rome's concordat. The Emperor then decided that the findings and decisions of the Notables would be rendered "official" by convening what he was pleased to call a Sanhedrin. With Rabbis holding the titles of nasi and av bet din, the seventy two members were seated in the ancient traditional semicircular arrangement. The Sanhedrin confirmed what the government wished, and sealed it with their assumed halachic authority. Thereafter, the Sanhedrin, having nothing much to do except to listen to speeches, rapidly passed into history. What it did provide was an existence proof, later seized on by the anti-Semites, that there really was a supreme Jewish court, that transcended local and even national borders - of, by, and for Jews.

It must have been clear to any seriously minded Frenchman of any persuasion, that government of "special people" by a special (for Jews only) hierarchy like the consistory system was in violent conflict with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the terms of the "emancipation" of 1791. Revolutionary principles of equality were brushed aside in favor of the fancied needs of administrative uniformity.

To the discomfiture of French Jewry, less than a year after the Sanhedrin, Napoleon completed the roll-back of the Emancipation. Napoleon's deep seated, visceral anti-Semitism is evidenced by his easy compliance with the complaints of the Alsatian bourgeoisie, the most virulently anti-Semitic of the French gentiles. He issued three decrees, the first of which outlined the role of the consistories in controlling Jewish religious and educational functions. The second decree prescribed procedures to be enforced for the moral rehabilitation of the Jews. The third decree was the attempt to eliminate what the Emperor perceived as usury and to reduce or even eliminate the debts of Alsatian peasants to the Jews. The return of other medievalisms in the decrees included restrictions on movement, on the immigration of Jews and the employment of Hebrew in business records. To top it off the decree imposed military service without the possibility of substitutes. It is obvious that it meant financial ruin for most Alsatian Jews. It has been known as the decret infame ever since. Most of the provisos of the decree have been reversed. Catholicism is no longer the official French church but the consistory system persists to the present day.

The Restoration And Orleanist Monarchies

During the period following Napoleon's fall, the Church in France was far more concerned with obtaining control of the educational system at all levels than it was in pursuing its ancient anti-Semitic course. There was a succession of a weak, then a foolish, and then a "liberal" monarch. None of them opposed the growth of Church power. Later in the century the Church returned to its role of propagating Jew hatred and Jew fear in France. A well known and respected historian, Jules Michelet (a trumpeter of French "gloire"), was outspokenly prejudiced against the Jews. His "Bible de Humanite" contained ex cathedra declarations of "unalterable" Jewish characteristics. It is a strong echo of Voltaire.

"The Jew has always been a man of peace, a man of business. His ideal is not the warrior, the labourer, or the farmer. A nomadic shepherd in days of yore, he later reverted to his nomadic life as pedler, as banker, as dealer in second-hand goods...The true Jew, the patriarch, is the shepherd-speculator who knows how to increase his flocks by careful and intelligent acquisition and calculation...The great and true glory of the Jews they owe to their wretchedness, namely that they alone among the peoples have given voice--a penetrating, eternal voice--to the sigh of the slave." (Michelet, cited by Vital, p. 199)

After the Restoration, the opposition to the Bourbon Monarchy was relatively small. Its leaders included a group of writers, who were intellectual successors of the pre-revolutionary philosophes and the revolutionary Girondists. Several of these writers (mostly of the left) gave rise to a new thread of French anti-Semitism which eventually became interwoven with the anticlerical prejudice of the revolutionaries.

French socialism stems as much from Fourier and Proudhon as from Marx. These progenitors of French Socialism were also the source of the new French anti-Semitism of the Left. In seeking explanations of the depressing state of the French worker, Fourier resorted to the Jews as the source of proletarian misery.

"France would be nothing more than one vast synagogue, for if the Jews held no more than a quarter of all properties they would, by reason of their being in secret and indissoluble league with each other, be in a position to wield the greatest influence. This particular day is only one of a thousand symptoms that attest to social degradation, the defective nature of the industrial system..." (Vital, p. 201)

Charles Fourier believed commerce, by which he understood as trade for profit, to be inherently evil - and the Jews were the embodiment of the commercial instincts. Commerce was the activity that sacrificed the "General Good" to the gain of the individual, and so the Jews were, in his eyes, "incorrigibly" evil.

"They will reform, say the philosphers. Not at all: They will pervert our morals without altering theirs. Besides, when will they reform? Will it take a century for them to do so?...The Jews, with their commercial morality, are they not the leprosy and perdition of the body politic?...Let the Jews remain in France for a century and they...will become in France what they are in Poland and end by taking commercial industry away from the nationals who have managed it without the Jews thus far...Whereever they are conspicuous, it is at the expense of the nationals...The Jew millionaire lives on potatoes. Squalidly avaricious, he will sell at 5 percent less than the Christian and increase his profit by the same amount. That is how the Jews crush the Christians."(Vital, p. 201, citing Fourier)

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon did not limit himself to Fourier's somewhat simplistic justifications for anti-Semitism. The sins of the Jews went back to their contribution to the major evil (to him) of Catholicism. This recollection of a major Enlightenment justification for anti-Semitism was however embedded in a socialism that was in many ways strongly based on a labor theory of value. Proudhon's very uneven scholarship was partially based on information gained during his work as a printer of manuscripts.

As a Socialist, one of his declared objectives was a uniform remuneration for all labor without regard to individual education or other accomplishments. Quality did not count. The factory owner and the iron puddler at Creussot were to be paid the same in the name of moral ideas of justice, liberty and equality. Of course it did not apply to the Jews, whom he regarded as parasites.

"There was good reason for the Christians to call them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. The race must either be sent back to Asia or exterminated...By the sword, by amalgamation, or by expulsion the Jew must be made to disappear...Those whom the peoples of the middle ages loathed by instinct, I loathe upon reflection, irrevocably. Hatred of the Jew, as of the Englishman, needs to be an article of our faith." (Vital, p. 203)

Notice how more vicious and violent Left anti-Semitism had grown from its Enlightenment origin. Proudhon condemned the Jews as irrevocably evil. But amalgamation was still an alternative to extermination. It is not yet a matter of "blood" or "race." But soon Joseph Gobineau would push the anti-Semitism of the French radical intellectuals a step further. His anti-Semitism was part of his theory of the superiority of the "Nordic Race." Again the the connection to the French philosophes of the previous century is clear; in this case the source is close to d'Holbach.

Alphonse Toussenel considered himself a disciple of Fourier. He believed France's emancipation of the Jews was a fundemental mistake. His anti-Semitism is suggestive of the Nationalist-racial anti-Semitism that was to come in the second half of the century. He was almost as violently anti-Protestant as he was anti-Semitic. Like Proudhon, he loathed the English. Perhaps because the Dutch were Protestant, he loathed them as well. They were part of the international commercial bourgeoisie and therefore enemies of the working class. Toussenel's thoughts are a precursor to Eduoard Droumont's and later to Adolf Hitler's. Because of Proudhon, Toussenel and Fourier, the French labor movement almost at its birth was irretrievably tainted by an anti-Semitism that has persisted to this day.

The Damascus Affair

In the 1840's, Syria (which included what is now Israel) was still part of the Ottoman Empire and was administratively under the Pasha of Egypt. A French consular presence in Damascus was required because of the extensive pilgrimage traffic and trade activity centered in the city. Besides, for almost 700 years, the French had considered Syria as of particular national interest. France had assumed the role of protector of the Middle Eastern Roman Catholics and maintained a sort of "extra-territorial" influence in the region. Further, the French regarded themselves as an essential civilizing and educating influence among the pagans of Syria.

As we have seen, the blood libel was a 13th century invention of Catholic Christianity. Perhaps because there was no mass or other such sanguinary symbolism in Moslem religious ceremonial, the blood libel was never a part of Arab/Turkish anti-Semitism. That is until suddenly, in February 1840, the Jews of Damascus were accused of murdering Father Thomas, the superior of the Capuchins, a Catholic monastic order, slaughtering him and his accolyte to obtain blood for the Passover matzoth.

It is not clear just how the rumors that gave rise to the accusation started. The only confirmation was provided by the confession extracted by torture from a Jew who survived the ordeal. Some of his co-religionists died in the process. The French consul, Count Ratti-Menton, was active in transmitting the rumors, and undiplomatically was involved in the prosecution of the Jews. He imprisoned one of the accused and personally "interrogated" him inside the French Consulate.

In his diplomatic correspondence, Ratti-Menton had sent back to Paris allegations that the murder was based on 'fiendish sacrifices' ... an 'outrage to human society' and "...a deliberate challenge by the Jews to the tutelary action of the French Government...it was therefore advisable to impose a salutary terror upon the Jews..." (Vital, p. 237)

It is interesting that in Paris - the city of the Revolution in the land of liberty, equality and fraternity - that no one in the government had any quarrel with the medieval ravings of their consul.

Ratti-Menton went further. He personally helped to draw up the charges againt his chosen victim, Isaac Picciotto, a notable of the Jewish community. Picciotto's father, unfortunately for Ratti-Menton, had once been the Austrian Consul in Aleppo. This placed Picciotto under Austrian protection. The Dual-Monarchy was joined by the British in support of the Jews.

In the Middle East, the alignment of the Great Powers has never been based on simple humanity, justice or decency. At the time, the French were involved with Mehemet Ali, a rebel against the Pasha of Egypt, while the British and the Austrians were Mehemet Ali's antagonists. While the diminished number of surviving Jews languished in prison for months, complex diplomatic games were played.

The French Government continued to support Mehemet Ali, and as a factor in that support, the French foreign service denied that there was anything out of order in the behavior of their Syrian consul, or for that matter, in the validity of the charges themselves. A sample response to governmental stone-walling was the declaration in the Chamber that:

"The disappearance of the cleric becomes an occasion for deliberate religious persecution. The consul of France incites to torture: at a time when the French nation offers an example of not only of equality before the law, but of religious equality, it is a Frenchman who instigates exceptional police measures, who has recourse to torture, who upholds arbitrary measures and the executioners of the Pasha..." (Vital, p. 240, citing speech of Benoit Fould in the Chamber of Deputies, 2 June 1840)

The effect on the Jews and Christians of Western Europe was devastating. Despite overt French obstruction, the efforts of Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Cremieux to liberate Picciotto and the few surviving Jews was eventually successful. But this had no permanent effect on stopping the growth of anti-Semitism in France and in its dependencies in North Africa. The case has never really been closed.

"Successive governments of France would continue to stick to their guns. No countervailing evidence adduced then or later on the substance of the charges against the Jews of Damascus was ever deemed acceptable. The consular service closed ranks and held together in the face of repeated accusations of misconduct levelled against their colleague in Damascus. When, very reluctantly, a French official was finally sent out to Syria to make further inquiries, he reported back that there could be no doubt at all that 'The circumstances of the murder of Father Thomas and his servant, in so far as may be learned from the Egyptian procedure...seem only too real and, taken together, tend to demonstrate that this double murder, which cannot be explained in terms of hatred or vengeance, was an act of fanaticism...the condemned of Damascus, they and their coreligionists, boast of the impunity they enjoy'" (Vital, p. 241)

Incidently, the Foreign Office remained "juden rein" until well after the Dreyfus Affair.

The French Government has always refused to declassify the files bearing on the Damascus affair, specifically, those entitled "Affaire du Pere Thomas assasine par les Israelites indigenes." Perhaps the title says why.

From Second Empire To The Dreyfus Affair

The year 1848 was the year of revolution throughout Western Europe. The barricades in Paris of 1848 did not permanently disturb the economic privilege of the bourgeoisie. This plutocracy indigenous to the Orleanist monarchy, so tellingly condemned by Balzac, flourished even more under Louis Napoleon. There were many more Christian plutocrats than Jewish, but in the popular view, Rothschild continued as the leading hated symbol of materialism and international banking.

Under the Second Empire, after 1852, the Church was presented with yet another regime under which it might pursue control of French education and social services in general. It happily cooperated with the prefects and mayors in returning plebicites overwhelmingly in favor of the government. In general, Catholic prelates continued to grow closer to the Army. And the army officer corps continued to become more and more Catholic.

The most infamous anti-Semite of the second half of the 19th Century was Edmond Drumont. Anything and everything was grist for the mill of his anti-Semitism. His best selling book La France Juive (1886) portrayed the Jew as the opponent of everything that was good about France. He saw an inverse relationship between the good fortune and status of the Jews and the status of the French nation. Truths were distorted and facts were invented in a relentless effort to discredit all things Jewish. Further, any misfortune, private or natural, was attributed to Jewish malevolence. For example, when local flooding damaged Drumont's house, he is said to have asserted that the cause was Jewish overharvesting of woodlands and fields which they controlled. He was certain this Jewish anti-environmentalism was directed against him and against the other inhabitants of the Paris basin. The Jews' objective was to progressively degrade the "virtue" of the French and gain control of French Society.

"The only one who has benefitted from the Revolution [of 1789] is the Jew. Everything comes from the Jew; everything returns to the Jew. We have here a veritable conquest, an entire nation returned to serfdom by a minute but cohesive minority, just as the Saxons were forced into serfdom by William the Conqueror's 60,000 Normans. The methods are different, the result is the same. One can recognize all the characteristics of a conquest: an entire population working for another population, which appropriates, through a vast system of financial exploitation, all of the profits of the other. Immense Jewish fortunes, castles, Jewish townhouses, are not the fruit of any actual labor, of any production: they are the booty taken from an enslaved race by a dominant race. (http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/core/hss3/e_drumont.html)

There is no more intellectual content to be found in Drumont's work than there is in Mein Kampf. Yet, in Drumont's hands, by means of his book and his scandal sheet, La Libre Parole, anti-Semitism flourished and grew rapidly. It became an issue of national concern. He also founded the AntiSemitic League, where French anti-Semitism found an organizational home until it evolved into the Action Francaise movement at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Over the years until 1869, the Second Empire acquired a bit of territory here, a colony there. It continued to lag far behind both Britain and Germany in population, commerce, but even more significantly, in the quality of its education. The disasterous Franco-Prussian War would highlight this. That war was essentially a suicidal act by an ailing and depressed emperor, placing greater importance on French prestige than on European realpolitik. Bismarck with practiced cunning made sure that the French would declare the war that he was sure they could not win. He also made sure that any help from Russia, Austria or Britain (which the French fondly hoped for) would not materialize. A German army manned by technically relatively sophisticated soldiers rapidly overcame the French mass army of soldiers educated for the most part by nuns and parish priests.

The empire fell at Sedan, and with it the hopes of the Church for continued growth of power over French society. While the Paris Commune was murderously overcome by the rightist Thiers, within a few years the Third Republic was governed by the left. Once again the Church lost control of education. A new element in the situation was the universal French bitterness of defeat. The French needed "revenge" and the return of the lost Alsace and Lorraine. The Church was horrified by the extreme left radicalism of the Commune and was always fearful of a partial recrudescence in the government of the Republic. Obviously, what had to be done was to cement the relationship with the army and slowly acquire adherents among the bourgeoisie.

What was important for French Jewry is that most Alsatian Jews, the Dreyfus family among them, elected to leave the lost provinces and remain French. This resulted in local increases in the Ashkenazic Jewish population in Paris and other major cities. In the despair of defeat, this relatively minor demographic adjustment did not provoke an anti-Semitic response. However, within a decade, events in Russia would precipitate far larger movements of Jews, which in this case would have an adverse effect on the Jews of France.

Until the 20th Century, French Jewry was rarely if ever as much as 1% of the total population. Further, it was proportionately less than the Jewish populations of England and Germany. Despite its diminutive size, the shock of influx of Russian and Roumanian Jews fleeing the pogroms of the 1880's produced significant anti-Semitic reactions in France. (The flow of Jews from the same source into England also produced Christian hostility, but not the violence of words and occasional violence of action seen in France.) This unexpected addition of "Ostjuden" helped to set the tone of the increased anti-Semitism of the 1890's.

The Dreyfus Affair

At the time of the Dreyfus Affair(1894-1906), the then French equivalent of our CIA was the Statistical Section of the War Office. It was headed by Major Henry, an extreme anti-Semite and a second rate, but prolific, forger. As head of section, it was he who received the evidence from an obscure French agent, working in the German Embassy, that indicated a spy in the French officer corps was selling information to the Germans. The first evidence of the existence of a French "mole" was the "bordereau," a document recovered from a German Embassy waste basket. The "bordereau" was a memorandum from the French spy to his German master that naively listed the information provided and the money received. Initially, there was no clue to the mole's identity. However, since the Statistical Section had the duty of unmasking espionage agents and traitors, the absence of evidence did not prevent them naming a likely (in the eyes of the anti-Semites at least) candidate for the charge of treason. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, assigned to the War Office was the only Jew attached to the General Staff. What decided Major Henry was simply the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew. Evidence against Dreyfus was non-existent. Almost from the beginning, Henry was aware that the handwriting on the "bordereau" was not Dreyfus'. Esterhazy, a spendthrift libertine officer, indirectly related to Hungarian nobility and the friend of German officers, was in fact the mole. Just when Henry realized that it was Esterhazy's handwriting is not certain, but this realization made him feel it was necessary to (1) protect Esterhazy and (2) further incriminate Dreyfus. (It was only after Col. Piquot, the heroic dreyfusard officer, succeeded to the head of the Statistical Section, that knowledge of Esterhazy's treason became public.) Major Henry presented his choice of victim to the War Minister, General Mercier.

Just how the newspapers got word of what was going on is not clear, but they were early on the scent. For years, Drumont in "La Libre Parole" had been inculcating the idea of Jews infiltrating the army. Drumont was not alone; dozens of anti-Semitic authors and newspaper men had helped lay the ground work for resuscitated Jew hatred and Jew fear. The guilt of Dreyfus, the Jew, was almost automatically accepted by the bourgeoisie in the center, by the right, and even by the majority of the left. The press, hearing that Dreyfus was the accused, wished to be sure that this rich "Jewish traitor" could not get or buy himself off. With this kind of press agitation, the War Office decided that the conviction of Dreyfus was a political necessity. The unspoken course was to table indefinitely the search for the real mole. General Mercier ordered Major Henry to proceed. Henry forged the necessary evidence. His crude productions were enough for a pre-convinced court martial to convict. Dreyfus was publically degraded and sentenced to solitary confinement for life on Devil's Island.

"...It is safe to say that had he [Dreyfus] not been a Jew, he would not immediately have been held suspect, let alone falsely and maliciously accused. Nor is it likely that a non-Jewish officer justly convicted of treason would have been so bitterly and publicly denounced and degraded. It is equally unlikely that a non-Jewish officer so placed would have found such ardent defenders. It is because what would otherwise have been regarded by all concerned as neither the first nor the last squalid instance of betrayal, best left in decent obscurity and forgotten as rapidly as possible, turned, as the truth began to seep out, into a blatant instance of prejudice and injustice run wild that it became an issue of recognizably high moral importance for great numbers of Frenchmen of other categories. The socialists, most notably, were disposed at first to dismiss the conflict between dreyfusards and anti-dreyfusards as no more than a quarrel between one segment of the bourgeoisie and another. In the end the majority admitted, although many held out, that the unjust pillorying and punishment of any individual--even one who, being wealthy, a career officer and a Jew, combined in his person almost everything they had long been taught to detest--was in some serious way incompatable with the principles with which any decent society needed to keep faith." (Vital, p. 542)

At first the dreyfusard ranks were pitifully small. Dreyfus' elder brother initiated and maintained a campaign to revise the sentence. Clemenceau, an opponent of the death penalty, was urging death for Dreyfus. He later along with Jaures and many other of the left and center became strongly dreyfusard. It is curious that these conversions are part of a train set in motion by a firm anti-Semite, one who succeeded Major Henry as chief of the Statistical Section. Whatever his beliefs about Jews, Major Picquart was a man of honor in a way unusual for the French officer corps. The Dreyfus case was closed, but documents continued to disappear from the War Office. Moreover, the wastebasket in the German embassy now gave forth a curious "petit bleu," an express letter. This incriminating letter was addressed to Esterhazy. Uniquely honest, Picquart went back to the original bordereau. He compared it to authentic handwriting samples from Dreyfus and Esterhazy. It was clear that the handwriting on the Dreyfus-convicting bordereau was not Dreyfus'. It was Esterhazy's.

Major Henry, still acting for General Mercier, proceded to manufacture some more evidence against Dreyfus. Cobban sums up this phase:

"...The War Office also became alarmed and before he could cause any more inconvenient discoveries, Picquart was removed from his position, sent to Tunisia, and subsequently ordered to the fighting area where there was at least a chance that his inconsiderate activities might be brought to an end." (Cobban, Part III, p. 52)

Picquart refused to shut up. His statement on these events reached a senator - Scheurer-Kestner - whose efforts to provoke a response from the government were unsuccessful. Within a month, this partial exposure of the coverup let to Zola's "J'accuse." The army and government were forced to reveal some of the "secret evidence" against Dreyfus, which was, of course, the recent work of Major Henry. They riposted by putting Zola on trial for libel and convicted him. He escaped imprisonment by fleeing to England.

By now several cats were out of the bag and the dreyfusards gained rapidly in numbers. The roster including Anatole France, the historian Seignobos, Marcel Proust and the Catholic Pequy. The revisionists formed a League for the Defence of the Rights of Man. As if Drumont's Anti Semitic League and its dozens of imitators were not enough, the antidrefusards formed their Laborum League of army officers. The press in general was predominantly antidreyfusard. There were many antidreyfusard Church publications such as La Croix. The Foreign Minister opposed revisionism as weakening the foreign perception of France. From 1898 onward, the integrity of the Third Republic was at stake. Efforts to restore Dreyfus were becoming confused and intertangled with the great fight to preserve French Jewry and the guarantees of the Declaration of the Rights of Man for all Frenchman.

Anti-Jewish riots broke out in 1898 in Paris, Marseilles, Bordeaux, and many smaller towns. The Drumont wing pressed for a Judenrein France by driving the Jews out of the country. They did not rule out extermination as a last resort. "Moderate" antidreyfusards were willing to compromise on Jewish existence in France. They were willing to settle for the complete repeal of Jewish emancipation. French Catholic anti-Semitism was now openly backed by Rome. French bishops found themselves the bed-fellows of those of the radical left who revived the anti-Semitic strictures of Proudhon, which they coupled with the anti-Semitism of the Second International. Jew hatred and Jew fear united the Church and the godless.

Dreyfus was tried a second time and once again convicted. He was pardoned the next day, but his full rehabilitation did not take place until 1906. Dreyfus and his family were satisfied. However, the struggle of the dreyfusards for individual rights continued.

Major Henry was forced to confess his role in framing Dreyfus and protecting Esterhazy. He was imprisoned in the Mont Valerian fortress, where he committed suicide.

Esterhazy fled to England. Once there, he confessed that he had indeed had spied for Germany. He said that he had 'forged' the boudereau on the orders of a previous head of the Statistical Section. In England, he called himself a count and led a chequered existence. There are various accounts of his activities as a traveling salesman. Others assert that he was a brothel manager and drug addict. He died a suicide in 1923.

Apparently, the prejudices of French officers never die, they don't even fade away. The following article appeared in Time magazine on September 25, 1995.

"In sometimes surprising ways, the long reach of France's history still intrudes on the nation's conscience. How else to explain the scene on Sept. 7 when 1,700 people, invited by France's Central Consistory of Jews, turned out to hear General Jean-Louis Mourrut, head of the army's historical service. The subject was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who 101 years ago was sentenced by a military court to life imprisonment on notorious Devil's Island on trumped-up charges that he was a spy for the Germans. Mourrut's mission on this occasion was to acknowledge more than a century later, and for the first time publicly, that the French army had been wrong...Mourrut's appearance, in fact, was prompted by an article in the army historical journal last year that questioned Dreyfus' innocence, suggesting it was merely "the thesis generally accepted by historians." Such was the outcry in the French Jewish community that Mourrut's predecessor in charge of the history division was fired. Under Defense Minister Charles Millon, Mourrut quietly made amends, telling his audience that far from feeling nostalgia for the past, "the army is fighting for the values of our times, the values of truth, liberty and justice." The French never lack for new quarrels, but they never quite forget the old ones. (http://www.wfu.edu/~sinclair/dreyfus.htm)

Bibliography

• Burns, Michael, Dreyfus. A Family Affair, 1789-1945. NY:Harper Collins, 1991.
• Cobban, Alfred, A History of Modern France, NY:George Braziller, 1965.
• Derfler, Leslie, Ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Tragedy of Errors?, D.C Heath & Co., 1963.
• Flannery, Edward H., The Anguish of the Jews. Twenty-three Centuries of Anti-Semitism, NY:Macmillan, 1965.
• Grayzel, Solomon, The Church and the Jews in the XIII Century, NY:Hermon Press, 1966.
• Hertzberg, Arthur, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, NY:Columbia University Press, 1968.
• Israel, Jonathan I., European Jewry in the Age of Merchantilism 1550-1750, Oxford-Clarendon, 2nd ed., 1989.
• Marcus, Jacob R., The Jew in the Medieval World, Cleveland:Meridian Books, 1960.
• Stewart, John Hall, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, NY:Macmillan, 1951.
• Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime And The French Revolution, Translated by Stuart Gilbert, NY:Anchor Books, 1983.
• Trachtenberg, Joshua The Devil and the Jews, NY:Jewish Publication Society, 1961.
• Vital, David, A People Apart. A Political History of the Jews in Europe 1789-1939, NY:Oxford University Press, 1998.

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The General Will

To Rousseau, the General Will was, to his regret, a theoretical concept that was possibly applicable only to small social groups of men, groups so small that the members were more or less well known to each other. The role of the General Will was to govern society so as to free it from what Rousseau considered to be the most heinous of social sins, inequality, otherwise viewed as privilege. Rousseau's idea of the General Will should not be interpreted as merely the exercise of a franchise in a small group. To Rousseau, the General Will was meaningful as a set of mutual obligations constrained by equality and virtue leading to a truly just society - its justice residing solely in the absolute equality of all its members. No exceptions. No special cases. The esprit de corps of civic virtue was sufficient in Rousseau's eyes to maintain the society without much in the way of continuous legislation. Such societies can be representative democracies if and only if each legislator examines his feelings and decides on courses that do not benefit himself in any way, but express his perception of the good, the sensible and the just. Of course the ancient Greek polis, Sparta in particular, was the model society in which the General Will supposedly had been operative. Rousseau was willing to ignore the slaves and non-citizens who formed the major part of the population. As in most subjects on which he pontificated, he saw only those aspects which supported his thesis. Whatever his moral and interpersonal lapses, Rousseau was not a fool. He acknowledges that in the real world, a man behaves differently than in groups. In larger groups, the powerful in money and perquisites want more. The weak and poor are, in his view, coerced into providing (or allowing) more money and power to those who already have it. The weak are duped into accepting legal restraint on their own actions while the powerful can revel in their freedom to do as they please. There is no real exchange, and after each failure of each member of such societies to exercise his "true interest" - what the General Will would indicate is the way to liberty - the society becomes increasingly unjust, unequal and unfree. The problem for France, and particularly for the Jews, was that Rousseau was taken at more than his word by the men of the Constituent Assembly. In effect, they seemed to be saying: We have been told by St. Jean-Jaques what to do. The great legislators (like Solon of classic Greece) will liberate the French people by eliminating privilege and distinction of any kind. Since we have acquired the Rousseauan virtues of Sensibility, tenderness, love of children and motherhood, we are capable of expressing the General Will in a non-self-seeking way and thus will give all Frenchmen equality. Of course none of Rousseau's ideas had ever been tried. His kind of equality deprives society of many of the spurs to excellence in mind and body that had and do contribute to its continual development and maturation. Virtue and equality are so closely linked in the French Revolutionary derivation of Rousseau's thought that it is surprising that the conflict with the concept of progress was not more apparent. But then, after all, it was Rousseau who was the pessimist. His intellectual children of the Revolution were the blind, self assured optimists, certain in their belief that Natural Law applied with love and noble intentions by men of Sensibility to eliminate privilege would result in a Social Contract for the entire Patrie.

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Declaration of Rights of Man

"3.The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation: no group, no individual may exercise authority not emanating expressly therefrom. 4.Liberty consists of the power to do whatever is not injurious to others; thus the enjoyment of the natural rights of every man has for its limits only those that assure other members of society the enjoyment of those same rights; such limits may be determined only by law. 5. The law has the right to forbid only actions which are injurious to society. Whatever is not forbidden by law may not be prevented, and no one may be constrained to do what it does not prescribe. 6.Law is the expression of the general will; all citizens have the right to concur personally, or through their representatives, in its formation; it must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal before it, are equally admissible to all public offices, positions and employments, according to their capacity, and without other distinction than that of virtues and talents." (Stewart, pp. 113-114)

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