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5 CitationsThe Antisemitic Riots of 1898 in France
Abstract
Historians are only just beginning to take the study of what Georges Sorel called ‘la révolution dreyfusienne’ beyond the courtroom and the newspaper, and thus, despite the volume of literature devoted to ‘the Affair’, many of its main features as a socio-historical phenomenon have remained shrouded in the clouds of metaphysical drama. A prime example of diis conspiracy of silence is provided by die antisemitic riots of 1898. The historian Jules Isaac, himself the son of a Jewish army officer like Dreyfus, had reason to remember that year when, he recollected in old age,’ …la France semblait revenue au temps des guerres de religion; la possibilité d'une nouvelle Saint-Barthélémy - contre les Juifs et Protestants, bon gré mal gre associés dans la tourmente - n'était pas exclue’. However, if one turns to general histories of die period and of ‘ die Affair’, one finds litde or no mention of what was the main popular movement of the time in diis direction, indeed die high-point of active popular involvement, in the whole Dreyfus Affair: die riots of January and February 1898. From die administrative and police reports it is possible to redress die balance, and to establish how serious and how widespread diese riots really were, and to place diem in die wider perspective, not only of French antisemitism, but also of popular emeutes in general in nineteendi-century France. First it will be necessary to analyse die riots diemselves in some detail
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- [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: There have been moments when one individual has reshaped destiny’s patterns. In mid-January 1898 the case of the bordereau was over. Dreyfus had been convicted and Esterhazy acquitted. Picquart was arrested, Scheurer-Kestner defeated. Then Zola — that deeply flawed egotist with his novelist’s sense of the dramatic — transformed the landscape. ‘Mr President’, he wrote to Faure in L’Aurore on 13 January, I accuse Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical agent of a judicial error… I accuse General Mercier of having made himself an accomplice… I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands absolute proof that Dreyfus was innocent and of having suppressed it… I accuse General Boisdeffre and General Gonse of making themselves accomplices to the same crime… I accuse General de Pellieux and Commandant Ravary of having conducted a villainous inquiry… I accuse the Ministry of War of having led an abominable press campaign… I accuse, finally, the first court martial of having violated the law by condemning a suspect on the basis of a document unknown to him, and I accuse the second court of having covered up this illegality under orders by committing in its turn the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.
- [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: On Thursday 13 January 1898, the newspaper L’Aurore went on sale as usual. But the 13 January issue was rather special. Anticipating huge sales, the newspaper’s directeur Ernest Vaughan and its editor-in-chief Georges Clemenceau had organised an extensive publicity campaign and authorised the employment of hundreds of extra news vendors; within a few hours over 200,000 copies of the newspaper had been sold. The reason? Under the screaming headline ‘J’Accuse …! Lettre au Président de la République par Émile Zola’ (I Accuse …! Letter to the President of the Republic by Émile Zola) appeared an open letter to Félix Faure in which the internationally renowned novelist Émile Zola launched a blistering attack on named members of the military establishment accusing them of not only condemning, in 1894, an innocent fellow-officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, to be transported for life to Devil’s Island in French Guyana but also of participating in a carefully orchestrated cover-up of their activities.
- [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Anti-Jewish riots in Europe of the last 200 years show specific clusters in terms of the phases and regions, in which there were specific causes for the outbreaks of collective violence. In an historical analysis five phases are chosen as exemplary for escalations of the level of destruction: the phase from 1819 to 1880; the two Russian pogrom waves of 1881–1883 and 1903–1906; the pogrom wave that took place in the context of the founding of the Polish nation-state; and finally, the pogroms accompanying the beginning of the German military campaign against the Soviet Union in 1941. It can be shown that in crisis situations like revolutions, war, and regime change, which are characterized by how the status of groups change or threaten to change rapidly, violence is deployed as a means for reversing social status and affirming the dominant status of the majority group. In these situations, state control is either absent or weak, which opens up opportunities to act; in addition, the control authorities of the state itself may become actors in the violent actions. Thus forms a favorable opportunity structure for pogroms that also demonstrate a high level of violence.
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