• 2018 : Fighting Antisemitism: The Dreyfus Experience

    2018 : Fighting Antisemitism: The Dreyfus Experience

    Paper given at the London Historical Materialism Conference in November 2018.

    Antisemitism is a vile and murderous practice, and fighting it remains a vital task for the left. [I would add in parentheses that I do not find the IHRA definition remotely helpful – and you can't expel me from the Labour Party, because I left it in 1968 and have no intention of ever returning.] My aim here is simply to make a few observations about the role of the left during the Dreyfus Affair, which may have possible lessons for today.

    The basic story of Dreyfus is well-known and does not need elaboration. At the end of 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was found guilty of spying for Germany after a trial held behind closed doors and on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence. He was sent to Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana. When new evidence came to light prominent figures in the government and army did their best to suppress it. Eventually the “Affair” became a matter of public debate which bitterly divided French society before Dreyfus was eventually pardoned and then exonerated and readmitted to the army.

    Dreyfus’s ordeal came at a time of virulent antisemitism in France. Antisemitism has been with us for centuries, but it does not always take the same form. Sometimes it is expressed in personal and cultural hostility which may be profoundly offensive but remains latent. At other times it becomes aggressively and physically threatening. (There was undoubtedly antisemitism in Germany in 1919, but it took very different forms from those it acquired by 1933).

    Traditionally antisemitism has had both economic and religious roots. In addition there were a number of factors in the France of the 1880s and 1890s which brought antisemitism to the fore. The country was still suffering from the humiliating military defeat of 1870 and the social tensions produced by the Paris Commune were very much alive; the 1880s also experienced an economic depression. The Third Republic was still fragile, with a threatened coup by General Boulanger.

    In addition the 1880s saw two major turning-points in the evolution of French society. Firstly the period saw the beginnings of the French colonial empire, which for nearly a century would be the second biggest – and second most brutal – in the world, notably with the conquest of Indochina, masterminded by Jules Ferry, often seen as a hero of the left because of his role in establishing secular education. The links between imperialism and racism are close. Of course colonial racism, which insists that the colonial populations are fit only for harsh manual labour, differs from the discourse of antisemitism, which grudgingly admits Jewish intelligence and indeed tends to see Jews as being “too clever by half”. But the dawning era of colonialism gave prominence to the theme of race.

    The second factor was the emergence of laïcité, still a site of conflict in today’s France. The laws of 1881-82 weakened the position of the Catholic Church in education, making the state directly responsible for the content of schooling.1 Now in one sense laïcité and antisemitism were diametrically opposed. Many of the most fervent antisemites were Catholics bitterly opposed to the educational reforms, who blamed the changes on the undue influence of Jews and the allegedly closely associated Freemasons. As Édouard Drumont put it, they “have succeeded in making Christians pay for schools where children are taught to hate Christ”.2

    Yet in another sense laïcité and antisemitism were, in Marx’s phrase, “hostile brothers”. Both were deeply rooted in nationalism. Since the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, another war with Germany loomed over France. If France were to fight effectively this time round, it needed to establish a sense of national identity, in Eugen Weber’s words, to make peasants into Frenchmen.3 Hence religious instruction in schools gave way to textbooks which instilled the virtues of patriotism, and even to military training.4 At the same time a central theme of antisemitism was that Jews were not really French, that their loyalties were to a race and a religion which transcended national boundaries. So laïcité and antisemitism competed with each other in the framework of French nationalism. Antisemitism and laïcité were both manifestations of a rising tide of French nationalism which would culminate in the disaster of 1914. The only alternative was the emergent internationalism of the working-class movement.

    The antisemitism of the 1880s and 1890s was not shamefaced or apologetic. There was no need of learned adjudicators to determine whether or not a particular remark was or was not antisemitic. The antisemites hated Jews and they were proud of it. One newspaper on public sale, selling over a hundred thousand copies a week, was simply entitled Antijuif [Anti-Jew].

    The antisemites’ chief “theoretician” was Édouard Drumont, whose book La France juive (1883) was a best-seller of its day. How many of its buyers actually read it, it is difficult to know – its turgid pages are scarcely an appealing prospect, but perhaps antisemites get their pleasure in a different way. It is a tedious accumulation of antisemitic tropes – and since antisemites are scarcely known for intellectual originality many of them are with us today. The whole narrative consists of anecdotes, gossip, lies, half-truths and pure fantasy.

    The text is strewn with glaring contradictions. Jews, we are told, are physically different from the nation they have invaded; they even have a distinctive and unpleasant smell.5 Yet at the same time Drumont exploits the “invisibility” of Jews in order to claim, with a distinct absence of evidence, that Marat and Napoleon were probably Jews. [The origin of the claim that Napoleon was Jewish seems to have been Disraeli.]6

    Drumont was an extreme conservative; his ideal was the medieval Christian society of France from which Jews were absent. He even believed that electric light was a dangerous and pernicious innovation.7 He was thus not on the side of history, and ultimately was far less dangerous than Adolf Hitler, financed by Henry Ford8 and advocate of mass car ownership.9

    Yet at the same time he affected a concern for the interests of the common people. While he vilified the Jew Karl Marx, he used a sub-Marxist concept of exploitation to argue that the Jews were profiting from the labour of honest French workers. He implied – quite falsely, as Lazare, Zola and others pointed out10 – that all Jews were rich like Rothschild; though he did acknowledge at one point that there were poor Jews – in order to claim that they prostituted their own daughters.11

    Drumont made it clear that his goal was a France without Jews; France, he claimed, had been prosperous from 1394 to 1789, when it had excluded Jews.12 Though if it were true that Jews were as deeply entrenched in the power structures of society as he claimed, the task would seem almost impossible. His preferred strategy seems to have been expulsion – but the cry “Death to the Jews” was common on anti-Dreyfus demonstrations. His followers’ day would come in fifty years time, when many French antisemites enthusiastically handed over Jews to the Nazi extermination machine.13

    It was not the Dreyfus affair which created antisemitism, but antisemitism which created the Dreyfus affair. The antisemitism rife among the officer class meant that Dreyfus could be convicted on such unreliable evidence and that when real evidence was unearthed his opponents would continue to insist on his guilt. Even in their own terms it was rampant stupidity, for it meant that the real “traitor”, Esterhazy, remained at liberty and was able to continue passing information, albeit rather ineffectively.

    Widespread antisemitism within the army meant that, although Dreyfus’s trial was in secret and protected from even elementary scrutiny, details of the accusations were leaked to the antisemitic press and there were mass demonstrations on the streets.

    One might have thought this would have given a clue to the left as to what was happening, and that there would have been a response to the antisemitic celebration of Dreyfus’s guilt and punishment. In fact at the time of the sentencing and for a couple of years thereafter the French left, socialists and syndicalists alike, were notable by their silence and abstention from involvement.

    It was certainly the case that, though Dreyfus himself protested his innocence, few people believed him outside the ranks of his immediate family, in particular his wife and his brother, and they could be dismissed as manifesting the “solidarity” (with other Jews) which Drumont believed was typical of Jews – Christians preferred “charity” (which was singularly lacking in the treatment of Dreyfus).14

    With the exception of one Catholic writer Cassagnac,15 no investigative journalist seems to have enquired why, if the evidence against Dreyfus was so compelling, it was necessary to maintain such secrecy about his trial. Dreyfus’s guilt was generally taken for granted, and writers in the left press referred to him as a “traitor”,16 though the whole concept of treachery depended on a highly questionable concept of national interest. And although the left were well aware of the dangers of an impending war with Germany, it does not seem to have occurred to them that the more either side knew of each other’s weaponry, the more they would have been likely to be deterred from engaging in a war that would be horrific beyond imagination.

    Why was the left so slow? It is sometimes claimed that antisemitism flourishes in a left-wing milieu; the Dreyfus experience does not confirm this. Thus it is often claimed – notably by the historian Zeev Sternhell17 – that the left was complicit in the antisemitism so pervasive on the right. It is certainly true that the left was not free of antisemitism – thus Émile Pouget, one of the main theoreticians of revolutionary syndicalism and a pioneer of the CGT quite shamelessly referred to Dreyfus as a “youpin” (Yid). An inspection of the left press of the time reveals some unfortunate lapses into racist language – for example the claim that France risked being invaded by “Chinese sodomites”.18

    Yet overall the socialist press was relatively free of antisemitism. Robert Stuart has made an exhaustive study of the press of the followers of Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue in the Parti ouvrier français (POF) and concludes that, while in their extensive publications there were some “very occasional, usually ambiguous, and always unrepresentative ‘anti-Semitic’ asides”, in general “Guesdists were not racists, and were consistently anti-anti-Semitic”.19

    He comes closer to identifying the real problem when he argues:

    In the Parti Ouvrier’s ideological paradigm, “blood” explained nothing. Guesdists reduced racial identities to insignificant epiphenomena of class, as they so reduced national identities, while discounting anti-Semitism as a distorted manifestation of class conflict, as they so discounted nationalism. According to the Parti Ouvrier’s Marxist theory, racial identity, like national identity, lurked throughout history as treacherous but trivial “false consciousness”. It had to be exposed, opposed, and extirpated, but, overall, was not to be taken very seriously.20

    The leader of the POF was Jules Guesde, but the real brains were those of Paul and Laura Lafargue. [I name Laura although she wrote no books, but worked on translations with her husband; her correspondence revealed a sharp political intelligence,21 and she must have made a significant input to her husband's writings.] Paul Lafargue was of mixed race – part Jewish, part black, part American Indian. He was married to the daughter of Karl Marx (who, as Drumont noted, was like “all the leaders of the cosmopolitan revolution”, a Jew22), and had to endure some highly offensive teasing from Engels, who doubtless never imagined that his tasteless comments would be in the public domain a century later.23

    Lafargue was the first serious and original Marxist thinker in France and made an important contribution, notably in studies of language [he was criticised by Stalin himself24] and literature, where he argued that the socialist movement must make a clear break with the traditions of left republicanism as embodied in the work of such as Victor Hugo.25 But he never really developed a Marxist approach to racism or antisemitism. As Maurice Dommanget has shown, the introduction of Marxism into France before 1914 was largely based on Marx’s strictly economic works.26

    If the French left had been looking for a symbolic figure to defend, Alfred Dreyfus would not have been its first choice. He was a man of conservative principles and attitudes; moreover, while not being Rothschild, he was quite rich, allegedly owning an expensive house.27 He was a wealthy man and did not need to sell secrets to the Germans for money – though the antisemites would have responded that Jews were obsessed with money and always wanted more. Esterhazy, on the other hand, had massive debts.

    Moreover, Dreyfus was an army officer. The army was not popular with the left; in recent years its main task had seemed to be breaking strikes and repressing civil disorder. In 1891 at Fourmies in the industrial region of the Nord, troops had opened fire on unarmed demonstrators on May Day and had killed nine people, six under the age of twenty, one a boy of eleven. Paul Lafargue, though not at Fourmies, had been jailed for incitement. Drumont had written a pamphlet blaming the whole thing on the Jewish sous-préfet.28 Though Dreyfus was not personally involved, there is no indication that he disapproved of the action or of the role of the army in imposing “order”.

    So all too often the French left collapsed into what can be called “ultraclassism”, focussing exclusively on Dreyfus’s class position, neglecting the fact that the sentence was an attack on all Jews, not just one wealthy army officer. (A more recent parallel would be those who considered it permissible to make sexist jokes about Margaret Thatcher, not recognising that such jokes were an attack on all women.) The French left showed a lamentable failure to integrate anti-racism into a militant, class-based socialist strategy. It was a failure for which it paid the price in the ensuing years.

    Thus leading syndicalist Émile Pouget wrote:

    The patriots are furious.

    One of their richest officers, an Alsatian Yid called Dreyfus, a big cheese in the Ministry of War, has flogged a whole bundle of secrets to Germany.

    O ho, bourgeois, don’t be so shocked; the military have that in their blood.

    The instinct for treachery is a bloody sight more common in their knapsacks than marshals’ batons.29

    And even in 1897, when evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence was brought to light, Pouget refused to reconsider his position. In November 1897, he obstinately repeated his ultra-classist formulation: “Whether he’s innocent or guilty… all I find in him is the officer.”30 He thus provided a mirror-image of those antisemites who insisted that Dreyfus was guilty, not because of the facts, but because he was a Jew.

    Jean Jaurès was certainly no antisemite (he was one of the few socialists who refused to have any dealings with Drumont31) and he used more genteel language than Pouget, but speaking in the National Assembly after the verdict on Dreyfus, he made a legitimate point about the difference in the way military law affected officers and private soldiers:

    Captain Dreyfus, convicted of treason by a unanimous judgement, has not been sentenced to death. In contrast, the country observes that private soldiers, guilty of a moment’s aberration or violence, are shot without mercy or pity.

    His primary aim was to propose a resolution in favour of abolishing the death penalty in the army; as a result the Prime Minister accused him of “attacking the hierarchy and discipline of the army … in the name of a group which prides itself on its internationalism”. He was suspended from parliament.32 Yet his comments could be interpreted as implying that he would have approved the death penalty for Dreyfus.

    Even later, when the affair became a massive public issue, some socialists were reluctant to get involved. Léon Blum, then a young Jewish socialist radicalised by the Dreyfus case, tried many years after to explain why socialist leaders like Guesde had acted as they did:

    You commonly hear it repeated: “Jaurès and his friends were dreyfusards, while Guesde and Vaillant were not”, and people try to see this disagreement as one of the causes of the difference between them. The truth is quite different. Vaillant was a dreyfusard and Guesde, just like Vaillant, had no hesitations as to the innocence of Dreyfus. Neither of them was suspect of the slightest indulgence towards the antisemitic, Boulangist and nationalist tendencies which permeated the Resistance. Their difference of opinion related solely to socialist tactics. They were afraid that Jaurès, entirely preoccupied and seemingly obsessed by the work he had undertaken, might draw behind him the mass of worker militants, and thus concentrate and absorb his propaganda into a task whose significance and importance they did not fail to recognise, but which nonetheless was not the appropriate and specific mission of socialism. They were opposed to a drifting that could become a diversion. 33

    Blum made a valid point in defence of ultraclassism, yet it was a misguided one. Certainly it was the task of socialists to present a specifically socialist perspective on events – but they should have been presenting that perspective from within the dreyfusard movement, seeking to win over those radicalised by the manifestation of gross injustice.

    In a sense, the problem facing the French left was that of what later came to known as the “united front”. How could socialists work to achieve the broadest possible unity in pursuit of a limited objective, yet at the same time maintain their own distinctive position and try to win others to it? At this point in history the socialist movement had little experience of the united front; twenty or more years later the newly founded Communist International would have great difficulty in applying the united front strategy effectively,34 so it is perhaps scarcely surprising that their predecessors in the 1890s had such problems. Indeed, even today the united front tactic is often handled clumsily, so we should show some humility in learning from our predecessors’ mistakes.

    However it was not impossible to find a healthier response on the French left. The followers of Jean Allemane, a veteran of the Commune, had refused to join the POF (though they later merged into the united socialist party, the SFIO, in 1905). While identifying as Marxist socialists, they had some sympathies with the syndicalists and supported the general strike strategy.

    Just a couple of days after Dreyfus was sentenced Maurice Charnay published an article in the Allemanist paper Le Parti ouvrier. Under the headline “Suppose he was telling the truth?”, he argued:

    But if it were true that Dreyfus were innocent, if he hadn’t passed over anything to Germany, if he were the victim of fate, of an accident or of a terrible plot? If they had decided to persecute the Jew in him … If the government had invented a travesty of treason, manufactured documents, – sacrificing Dreyfus, as its choice could have fallen on anybody else – political motives know no law – in order to whip up chauvinism, to make a useful diversion at a time when socialism is beginning to penetrate into the army! …

    It is not for socialists, who deride papal infallibility, a mere rallying symbol, to believe in the infallibility of soldiers judging with all their human passions and their professional prejudices; it is not for those who are targeted by all means of repression, including trial behind closed doors, reintroduced especially for them in political trials, to take as an act of faith a judgement delivered behind closed doors; it is not for those who have always been crushed by courts martial, those whom they still want to refer to courts martial using the hypocritical pretext of treason, to bow down before courts martial. That is why shouting with the crowd, whipped up by journalists and our rulers, would for socialists be the worst kind of cowardice.35

    Charnay’s article drew out the main themes around which a socialist defence of Dreyfus could have been based. Unfortunately the article seems to have been little noticed and its arguments were not followed up elsewhere on the left.

    In the absence of any active involvement by the socialist movement in the first years after Dreyfus was sentenced, it fell to isolated individuals to substitute themselves for a mass movement. The role of Émile Zola, whose “J’Accuse” transformed the debate, is well-known; Zola’s intervention did not spring from abstract humanitarianism, but resulted from a long history of anti-militarism, opposition to antisemitism and engagement with socialism in his work.36

    But before Zola came a less known figure, Bernard Lazare, who was persuaded by the Dreyfus family to take up the cause. Lazare’s complex evolution, from anarchism to Zionism, before his early death cannot be covered here. Initially he had shared the ultraclassist position; his first comment was: “I don’t know him, or his family. If it was some poor devil, I’d take it up immediately, but Dreyfus and his family are said to be very rich; they’ll be able to get by without me, especially if he is innocent.”37 But what was significant was that he was one of the few people on the left who regarded Drumont’s work as both significant and dangerous, and who replied to it at length in his 1894 book Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.38

    Lazare’s main argument was to undermine the whole of Drumont’s position by challenging the very notion of race:

    Race is, however, a fiction. No human group exists that can boast of having had two original ancestors and having descended from them without any adulteration of the primitive stock through mixture; human races are not pure, i.e., strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a race. …..39

    In particular, he argued, racial mixing had been so extensive that racial identity was impossible to establish:

    Throughout the Middle Ages Jewish blood was intermingling with Christian blood. Cases of wholesale conversion were exceedingly numerous …..,

    We have thus made answer to those who maintain the purity of the Aryan race; we have pointed out that this race, like all the others, was a product of countless mixtures.40

    As a Jew himself, Lazare was thus undermining notions of Jewish identity.

    A few years later in a pamphlet called Antisemitism and revolution41 Lazare set out his strategy for fighting antisemitism. This meant stressing class, but without advocating the abstentionism put forward by most of the socialist left:

    Do you think you will have got anywhere the day you’ll have chased from France — or massacred — little Jacob, the neighbour you know who is a rug worker and earns five francs a day when he’s not unemployed, which happens 100 days of the year? ….. of 8,000,000 Jews, there are 7,000,000 who are in Jacob’s situation, or worse. In Russia, in Galicia, in Romania, in Serbia, in Turkey, in London, in New York, in certain neighbourhoods in Paris their poverty is horrible. Most of them are artisans and as such they suffer from the social state.

    And if some Jews were wealthy capitalists they were no worse than their Christian counterparts. Was it the Jews, he asked, who:

    .. prepared the new law on unions and strikes? Are they the ones who cause unemployment, or the lowering of salaries? Is it only the Jews who refuse to accept the eight-hour day and systematically reject all our demands? You saw what happened when there weren’t any Jews. Take the children of Israel from the world and you’ll see if the financial associations, the employers’ associations, the trusts, and the capitalist syndicates won’t survive. You’ll see if, even so, whenever possible the “Sweating-system” — as the English call it — won’t be practised; that is, the art of making the proletarian sweat and killing him on the job.42

    So he urged workers to

    .. see in Drumont what he is; the mouthpiece of idiots who eat their daily Jew; of bourgeois who think of saving their safe deposit boxes; of social parasites who want to be named sub-prefect in M. Abraham’s place, or tax collector in M. Nephtari’s place. Finally, the agent of our worst enemies; that herd of sacristans who want to bring us into the bosom of the Roman Church, which we had so much difficulty escaping from.43

    By its initial lethargy and abstentionism the French left passed up its chance to effectively intervene in the campaign to defend Dreyfus and to point that campaign in a socialist direction. This was first pointed out in a perceptive article by Robert Louzon. Louzon had been a dreyfusard and a member of the Allemanist organisation. He was to be a lifelong anti-racist and anti-fascist. In the 1920s he was involved with establishing the first Arabic-language Communist daily paper (promptly banned by the French authorities) in Tunisia; in the 1930s he fought in Spain and in 1960 he signed the Manifesto of 121 in support of those who gave practical support to the Algerian FLN.

    In 1906 he published an article in Le Mouvement socialiste, under the title “The bankruptcy of Dreyfusism or the Triumph of the Jewish Party”.44 Louzon believed that Dreyfus’s rehabilitation in 1906 was an evasion of the real issues; thus he argued that although the Dreyfus affair had brought the left to government, the working class should not identify with the Republic.

    Louzon argued that the French bourgeoisie was divided into two groups, one Catholic, one Jewish. While the working class had been right to support Dreyfus, he believed it should now make itself independent of both bourgeois currents; he added a footnote dissociating himself completely from any racist position.45 His pessimistic analysis reflected the weakness of a left which had come to the Dreyfus case too late and had failed to fight for its own distinctive position.

    The left’s failure with regard to Dreyfus meant that it was weakened over the succeeding decade, and, arguably, throughout the coming century. It was the mainstream republicans, the defenders of laïcité and the principles of 1789, who took the lead in defending Dreyfus and picked up the rewards. Chief among them was Georges Clemenceau. It is not to question Clemenceau’s sincerity in defending Dreyfus, or the risks he took in doing so, to note that it did his career absolutely no harm. In 1906, as the pendulum swung away from the antisemites, Clemenceau became prime minister. The results were summed up by a historian:

    For three years he presided over a government that arrested union leaders, fired protesting teachers, and used soldiers to break strikes from Paris to the wine-growing regions of the Midi. In the end twenty workers were killed and nearly seven hundred wounded.46

    Thus in Southern France in 1907 there was a revolt by winegrowers, protesting at falling wine prices and unfair competition; there were mass rallies and the threat of a tax strike. Clemenceau’s response was to send the army to repress the rising; seven people were killed.

    Georges Picquart played a courageous and significant role in revealing the evidence that showed Dreyfus to be innocent. He suffered imprisonment and risked his career and possibly even his life. [He is the hero of Robert Harris's interesting novel An Officer and a Spy47 and presumably will be the hero of Polanski's Dreyfus movie if it is ever made.48] But in the Clemenceau government he became minister of war, where he opposed an amnesty for deserters, took tough measures against antimilitarist activists, used troops against striking miners and put down mutinies.49

    And in 1914 the antisemites and the republicans came together to support the war. The upholders of laïcité now invoked the traditions of republicanism, once deployed against the antisemites, in order to draw the left behind the war and herd them into the trenches. The internationalist left, which had failed to extend its influence by defending Dreyfus, now found itself totally isolated.50 This is not to argue that the war could have been stopped, but at least the internationalist opposition might have been a bit stronger.

    And as Jim Wolfreys has argued, the failure of the left to build a socialist alternative to republicanism at the time of the Dreyfus case has affected the development of the left throughout the following century, notably making it less effective in opposing Islamophobia.51

    A hundred years on everyone knows Dreyfus was innocent. [Perhaps a few elderly supporters of Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement national still believe in his guilt, but they keep quiet about it.] President Macron has now admitted that the French state murdered Maurice Audin in Algeria in 1958.52 [I remember being in Paris in 1958 and seeing the stickers demanding the truth about Audin.] Time and again, from Vietnam to Algeria, from South Africa to gay rights, the far left has been proved correct – eventually and generally too late. The ultimate lesson of the Dreyfus Affair is not to miss opportunities.

    1See I Birchall, “From the Schoolroom to the Trenches” http://grimanddim.org/historical-writings/2015-from-the-schoolroom-to-the-trenches/

    2E Drumont, La France juive, Paris, 1883, p 156.

    3E Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, London, 1979.

    4For details see Birchall, “From the Schoolroom to the Trenches”.

    5Drumont, La France juive, pp 104-5.

    6Drumont, La France juive, pp 292, 300.

    7R Stuart, Marxism and National Identity, New York, 2006, pp 121, 242, citing R Byrnes, Anti-Semitism in Modern France, New York, 1969, p 165.

    8 See AC Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of the Nazis, Sudbury, 1976, pp 91-93.

    9 “The car must not remain an object of luxury but must become an object of use.” Adolf Hitler at the 1934 Berlin Automobile Show.

    10B Lazare, Antisémitisme et revolution, Paris, 1898; Zola, Vérité, Paris, 1903.

    11Drumont, La France juive, p 89.

    12Drumont, La France juive, p 186.

    13See D Drake, Paris At War, Harvard, 2015.

    14Drumont, La France juive, p 53.

    15 L’Autorité, 8, 9, 19 December 1894.

    16Stuart, Marxism and National Identity, p 113.

    17 Z Sternhell, Ni Droite ni gauche, Paris, 2000 ; Z Sternhell. La Droite révolutionnaire, Paris, 2000.

    18Stuart, Marxism and National Identity, p 98, citing Le Socialiste, 7 November, 1892.

    19Stuart, Marxism and National Identity, p 133.

    20Stuart, Marxism and National Identity, p 133.

    21F Engels, P & L Lafargue, Correspondence 3 volumes, Moscow, 1959-63.

    22Drumont, La France juive, p 524.

    23K Marx & F Engels, Collected Works volume 48, London, 2001, pp 52-3.

    24See JV Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1950/jun/20.htm

     

    25P Lafargue, La Légende de Victor Hugo, 1885 https://www.marxists.org/francais/lafargue/works/1885/06/hugo.htm

    26M Dommanget, L’Introduction du marxisme en France, Lausanne, 1969.

    27C Vigouroux, Georges Picquart, dreyfusard, proscrit, ministre, Paris, p 43.

    28E Drumont, Le Secret de Fourmies, Paris, 1892.

    29 Le Père Peinard, No. 4, November 1894, cited in J. Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France, Paris, 1975, tome I, p. 331.

    30 Le Père Peinard, 21-28 November 1897.

    31 G Kauffmann, Édouard Drumont, Paris, 2008, p 333.

    32 P Miquel, Une énigme? L’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1972, pp 28-9; M. Auclair, La Vie de Jean Jaurès, Paris, 1954, pp. 301-3.

    33 L Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire, Paris, 1935, pp. 117-8.

    34 J Riddell (ed.), Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International 1922,Leiden, 2012; A Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow, Chicago, 2016.

    35 Le Parti ouvrier, 7-8 January 1895.

    36See I Birchall, “Zola, Dreyfus and Internationalism”, http://grimanddim.org/cultural-writings/1998-zola-dreyfus-and-internationalism/

    37 E Cahm, L’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1994, p. 61.

    38 B Lazare, L’Antisémitisme. Son histoire et ses causes, Paris, 1894.

    39Lazare, L’Antisémitisme, p 248.

    40Lazare, L’Antisémitisme, pp 260-61.

    41Antisémitisme et revolution, Paris, 1898.

    42Lazare, Antisémitisme et revolution, pp 11-12.

    43Lazare, Antisémitisme et revolution, p 15.

    44 R Louzon, “La Faillite du Dreyfusisme ou le triomphe du parti juif”, Le Mouvement socialiste, July 1906, pp 193-99.

    45See I Birchall, “La Vie ouvrière: A Beacon of Internationalism”, Socialist History No. 46 (2014).

    46 M Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, London, 1992, p. 322.

    47London, 2013.

    49Vigouroux, Georges Picquart, pp 201, 255-6.

    50See A Rosmer, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la guerre, Volume I, Paris, 1936.

    51J Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia, London, 2018, p 165, citing J Kergoat, Histoire du parti socialiste, Paris, 1997.