History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

At the beginning of the Dreyfus case, the anti-Semites, as always in the past, held all the powerful cards, particularly in the world of print. By a significant irony, it was the liberal press law of 1881, lifting the previous ban on criticism of religious groups and designed to expose the Catholic Church to journalistic inquiry, which made Drumont’s vicious brand of anti-Semitism legal. Press freedom, at least initially, worked against Jewish interests (as it was later to do under the Weimar Republic). Until the Dreyfus affair, the only Jewish attempt to answer La Libre Parole, a journal called La Vrai Parole (1893), was an embarrassing failure. At its outset, the press was overwhelmingly anti-Dreyfusard, for in addition to the anti-Semitic papers, which had circulations of between 200,000 and 300,000, the popular papers, Le Petit Journal (1,100,000), Le Petit Parisien (750,000) and Le Journal (500,000), backed the established order.157