Mitchel Abidor
Tablet, Oct. 15, 2021
“It is one of the great ironies of the Saint-Simonist movement that Drumont, a man elected to the Chamber of Deputies on an antisemitic ticket; who most loudly proclaimed the guilt of Dreyfus; who held the Jews responsible for almost everything, from the flooding of the Seine to an accidental fire at a charity event, should have, in that final phrase so well summed up the Saint-Simonian vision.”
The Blanquist movement, the most intransigent of fighters against the established order, became a center for the expansion of Toussenel’s ideas. Gustave Tridon, a Blanquist and former member of the Paris Commune, published Du Molochisme juif, a book that openly proclaimed hatred of the Jews and their supposed misdeeds, which included human sacrifice. Despite Tridon’s revolutionary socialist politics, he focuses not on Jewish capitalism but on the Jewish religion. “The God of the Semites,” Tridon wrote, “incarnates the destructive principle, honored by Destruction, the god of pride and jealousy, the wicked and deceitful god, enemy of life and nature.” Tridon was followed in his Jew-hatred by other disciples of Blanqui, a man who hated Saint-Simonsm but never wrote a word attacking the Jews.
Much of the antisemitism of the late 19th century in France was based largely on anti-capitalism, which doesn’t mean it was socialist. Some of it was what a French fascist and collaborator called “national anti-capitalism.” The dislocations of French society, the abandonment of the countryside, the growth of large-scale industry, the power of banks, the corruption of the Third Republic, all were put on the backs of the Jews, giving both left-wing and right-wing critics of the dominant capitalist order a common rhetoric of hate.
No one dedicated as much of his life to antisemitism as Edouard Drumont, editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole and author of volumes with titles like “Confessions of an Anti-Semite. “His “masterpiece” was the summation of French antisemitism, La France Juive—a compendium of over a thousand pages of the horrors of the Jewish presence in France, indeed, on Earth. Originally published in 1886, it went through 140 printings in its first two years of publication.….SOURCE