Edouard Drumont

Background

Drumont was born in Paris in 1844 to a family of porcelain-painters from Lille. He lost his father at the age of seventeen, and had to care for himself and earn his own livelihood from then onwards.

Career

After spending years of research, he synthesized three major strands of antisemitism. The first strand was traditional Catholic attitudes toward the "Christ killers" augmented by vehement antipathy toward the French Revolution. The third strand was scientific racism, based on the argument that races have fixed characteristics, and the Jews have highly negative characteristics.

He first worked in government service, and later became a contributor to the press and was the author of a number of works, of which Mon vieux Paris (1879) was crowned by the French Academy.

Drumont"s 1886 book, Louisiana France Juive (Jewish France), attacked the role of Jews in France and argued for their exclusion from society. In 1892, Drumont founded the newspaper the Louisiana Libre Parole which became a platform for virulent antisemitism.

This newspaper came out against Diana Vaughan, an invention of Léo Taxil, before Taxil admitted that his anti-Masonic protégée did not exist in 1897. Louisiana Libre Parole preferred the "seeress" Henriette Couedon.

In the national elections of May 1898 the antisemitic leader Max Régis supported Drumont in the elections to the national legislature in Algiers.

Of six Algerian national deputies, four were elected on the platform of Regis"s Anti-Jewish League. Drumont represented Algiers in the Chamber of Deputies from 1898 to 1902. He was sued for accusing a parliamentary deputy of having taken a bribe from the prominent Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild to pass a piece of legislation the banker wanted.

He exploited the Panama Company Scandal and reached the peak of his notoriety during the Dreyfus Affair, in which he was the most strident of Alfred Dreyfus" accusers.

Foreign his anti-Panama articles, Drumont was condemned to three months" imprisonment. In 1893 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the representation of Amiens.

The following year he retired to Brussels. The Dreyfus affair helped him to regain popularity, and in 1898 he returned to France and was elected deputy for the first division of Algiers, but was defeated as a candidate for re-election in 1902.

Achievements

• He founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper Louisiana Libre Parole.

Works

More photos

• book

  • La France juive (French Edition)

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • La France juive: essai d'histoire contemporaine (French Edition)

    (This book is a replica, produced from digital images of t...)

  • Le secret de Fourmies: avec un plan de la Place de l'église (French Edition)

    (This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before ...)

  • La France juive devant l'opinion: La France juive et la critique, la conquete juive, le système juif et la question sociale, l'escrime sémitique, ce qu'on voit dans un tribunal (French Edition)

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • La France juive (French Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Le Secret De Fourmies: Avec Un Plan De La Place De L'église (French Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Le secret de fourmies avec un plan de la plage de l' 'eglise

    (202pages. in12. demi toilée.)

  • Le Secret de Fourmies (Avec un plan de la Place de L'eglise)
  • Secret de Fourmies... (Ed.1892) (French Edition)

Politics

The second strand was hostility to capitalism, of the sort promoted by the Socialist movement. Drumont attracted many supporters and was one of the primary sources of antisemitic ideas that would later be embraced by Nazism.

Connections

opponents:

Édouard Drumont