Édouard Adolphe Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French antisemitic journalist, author and politician. He initiated the Antisemitic League of France in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole (founded in 1892). After spending years of research, he synthesised three major types of antisemitism. The first type was traditional Catholic attitudes toward the alien "Christ killers" augmented by vehement antipathy toward the French Revolution. The second type was hostility toward capitalism. The third type was so-called scientific racism, based on the argument that races have fixed characteristics, and asserting that Jews have negative characteristics.[1] His work played a key role in catalyzing the Dreyfus Affair.
Drumont's biographer, Grégoire Kauffmann, places Drumont within the counter-revolutionary tradition of Louis Veuillot, Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, and anti-modern Catholicism.[2] Socialist leader Jean Jaurès stated that "all the ideas and arguments of Drumont were taken from certain clerical opponents of the French Revolution.[3]
Drumont was born in Paris in 1844 to a family of porcelain-painters from Lille. His father died when he was seventeen, and had to care for himself and earn his own livelihood from then onwards.[4] He attended high school at Lycée Charlemagne.
He first worked in government service and at one point became a police spy for Napoleon III.[5] Later he became a contributor to the press and was the author of a number of works, of which Mon vieux Paris (1879) was awarded by the French Academy. He also worked for Louis Veuillot's L'Univers.[6]
Drumont's 1886 book, La France juive (Jewish France), attacked the role of Jews in France and argued for their exclusion from society. In 1892, Drumont initiated the newspaper the La Libre Parole which became known for intense antisemitism. Gaston Méry was soon made editor in chief due to his skill in exploiting scandalous affairs and his daring invective. The newspaper took "France for the French" as its motto.[8] The newspaper was skeptical of Léo Taxil's anti-Catholic Diana Vaughan hoax before Taxil admitted it in 1897. It was the first paper to publish news of Alfred Dreyfus's arrest, in an article titled “High Treason: The Jewish Traitor Alfred Dreyfus Arrested” in 1894.
Initially, Drumont was a supporter of Pope Leo XIII and his policy of ralliement in his encyclical of 1892, Au milieu des sollicitudes which called for French Catholics to embrace the Republic. He soon denounced this course and bitterly insulted the Pope, the Church, and any Catholic who supported it. In one editorial Drumont hoped for a "modern iron-fisted Nogaret for the modern Boniface VIII". In La Libre Parole Drumont's old friend Count Adrien Albert Marie de Mun and Papal Nuncio Cardinal Domenico Ferrata were denounced liked common criminals.[9]
For the French legislative election of May 1898, the antisemitic activist Max Régis endorsed Drumont before this election from Algiers.[10] On 8 May 1898, Édouard Drumont was elected triumphantly with 11,557 votes against 2,328 and 1,741 for his opponents.[11] Of six Algerian national deputies, four were elected on the platform of Regis's Anti-Jewish League.[12] Drumont represented Algiers in the Chamber of Deputies from 1898 to 1902. He was sued for accusing a parliamentary deputy of having accepted a bribe from the wealthy Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild to pass a piece of legislation the banker wanted.[citation needed]
Drumont had many devotees.[13] He exploited the Panama Company scandal[14] and reached the maximum of his notoriety during the Dreyfus Affair, in which he was the most strident of Alfred Dreyfus' accusers.[4]
For his anti-Panama articles, Drumont was condemned to three months' imprisonment. In 1893, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the representation of Amiens; the next 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 April–May 1902.[4]
