Chanteclair’s caricature, the original of which appeared in Edmond Drumot’s virulently anti-Dreyfusard weekly La Libre Parole illustrée, was published shortly after Dreyfus’s original arrest for treason in October 1894. Since the publication of La France Juive in 1886, Drumont had kept up a barrage of anti-Semitic polemic, as the stack of volumes at his side here suggests. In 1889, Drumont founded the Ligue Nationale antisémitique de France and promoted caricaturist Adolphe Willette as a candidate for Montmartre in that year’s elections.
Chanteclair’s illustration represents Drumont as a colossus whose intellectual and physical prowess dwarfs the powerless Dreyfus. Rather than touch the Captain and so contaminate himself, Drumont uses pinchers to push Dreyfus, here a guttersnipe or piece of refuse wearing a German pickelhaube helmet, into the drain. Behind them stands a proud soldier bathed in sunlight: a symbol for the nation’s new dawn.
For this Psst…! cover, Jean-Louis Forain depicts a German military officer fastening a mask of Emile Zola, identified through his half-rim glasses and bulbous forehead, onto an anonymous Jew. Zola’s demands for checks and balances on the military should be understood, Forain seemingly suggests, as a cheap masquerade. Behind this flimsy charade, the public would discover an imposter, not a patriot, who concealed actual alliances with the Germans and the Jews. Psst…! issued this cover following Zola’s second conviction for his article “J’Accuse!”, which had been published in Georges Clemenceau’s daily L’Aurore. The homme de lettres fled to England shortly thereafter.
Forain resided in Montmartre where anti-Semitic sentiment flowed as freely as the watered-down alcohol in the district’s celebrated café-concerts. There, he consorted with caricaturists such as Caran d’Ache, who shared his anti-Semitism and his disdain for bourgeois hypocrisies nightly displayed at the cabarets. Both men collaborated on the anti-Dreyfusard weeky Psst…!
