Mornings on Horseback

by David McCullough

The subsequent career of the Marquis was one most people who had known him preferred to put out of their minds. Following a tiger hunt in India, he went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The Chicago beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He turned to politics, launched a crusade to save France, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and went parading about Paris at the head of a gang of toughs, all of them dressed in ten-gallon hats and cowboy shirts. With the collapse of the French effort at Panama, he joined with the unsavory Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite, in an attempt to blame that failure too on the Jews. It was this mania that led eventually to the Dreyfus Affair, and the Marquis, before he went storming off to Africa, kept himself in the forefront. His platform rantings set off riots, and in a series of duels with important Jewish army officers he became known as one of the most dangerous duelists in France.