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“How to Study” pamphlet, ca. 1943.
From the Wartime at Duke Collection, 1917-[ongoing]. -
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“Journaleux,” (Journalists)
Journalists played a crucial role in forming the public’s opinions, as the immediate response to Émile Zola’s “j’Accuse” demonstrates. However, the chorus of intellectuals defending Zola threatened anti-Dreyfusard writers and journalists whose livelihood depended on slandering the Captain and his supporters. In this sketch by the famous anti-Dreyfusard Caran d’Ache, the bohemian journalist of the Left is depicted as a dandy opportunist, riding the wave of opinion. He confides that his crisp new shirt was bought not with an inheritance, but thanks to his investment in this new cause. You too, he tells his friend, can look this good, and all it takes is peppering your prose with words like “innocent,” “martyr,” and “hero.” -
“Judas défendu par ses frères,” (Judas defended by his brethren)
At the Impressionists’ fourth exhibition in 1879, Edgar Degas displayed his À la bourse which depicted two stockbrokers whispering conspiratorially—an allusion to stock-in-trade representations of Jewish financiers rapaciously feasting on the spoils of capitalist speculation. Degas’s anti-Semitism crystallized during the Affair that transformed friend into foe. Of the Impressionists, Pissarro and Monet supported the Captain’s acquittal -
“La France aux Français,” (France for the French)
"Though in April 1895 Dreyfus had been sentenced to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island (where he remained until his September 1899 retrial), the Affair continued to incense La Libre Parole’s anti-Semitic staff. This cover represents Drumont’s daily paper, La Libre Parole, and its weekly supplement, La Libre Parole Illustré, as two strapping Gallic farmhands laboring to uproot Jewish evil from French lands.
On the left, the anthropomorphized La Libre Parole digs up scandals, depicted as deep-seeded weeds that threaten to taint the nation’s soil (Jean-Jacques Souligoux was implicated in the Panama scandal; Barney Barnato was involved in a diamond mine collapse). Meanwhile, the figure on the right renders this “valiant” work in his sketch-book. Working en plein-air, this anti-Semitic artist quickly sketches the “Dreyfus image” for which Drumont’s publications were best known. His bespectacled leafy vegetable undoubtedly represents Dreyfus. " -
“La prison militaire de Rennes,” (The Military Prison at Rennes)
After a lull in press coverage, Dreyfus re-entered the news in 1899. By then, his authorship of the bordereau had been undermined by mounting evidence against Esterhazy, and Dreyfus was permitted to return to France for retrial. In this image, Dreyfus enters the military prison in Rennes as curious bystanders look on. Though he was stripped of military rank, he salutes as he enters into a new imprisonment.
Dreyfus’s trial at Rennes ended, once more, in his conviction, though several days later, he accepted a presidential pardon. He and his supporters advocated for a review of the Rennes verdict and a complete annulment of the charges against him. In 1904, the Criminal Chamber agreed to their pleas, and in 1906, Dreyfus’s name was cleared. Nevertheless, French anti-Semitism raged on: in 1908, Dreyfus was shot and wounded by a journalist, Louis Gregori, at a public ceremony where Zola’s ashes were placed in the Pantheon. -
“Le Roi des Porcs,” (King of the Pigs)
Dreyfus defender Émile Zola is shown as king of the pigs, a reference to Kosher prohibitions against pork. Lenepveu attempts scatological humor, casting Zola’s “oeuvre” and his defense of Jews as “caca international” (international excrement) sullying the French map. -
“Le Traître,” (The Traitor)
A military sabre pins a notice of guilt into the body of a hydra which has sprouted the head of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The multi-headed beast, a symbol of indomitable evil, is just one of the many conventions used by Dreyfus’s anti-Semitic opponents to establish his inherent malevolence. -
“Le Traître,” (The Traitor)
Meyer’s image represents the moment prior to L’Illustration’s “Dégradation du Capitaine,” though Le Petit Journal’s title is more critical. On 5, January, 1895, between his trial and his departure to exile, Dreyfus was stripped of his honors and titles. In this scene, his military accoutrements are removed and destroyed in a public ceremony held in front of the Hôtel des Invalides, pictured in the background. His badges are strewn along the cobblestones, as we witness the moment in which his sword was broken in two. Le Petit Journal’s image attempts to give us a small window into Dreyfus’s emotions. Representing him in profile, we can discern that his eyebrows are knitted in a pained expression. -
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“Letters from Farwell, Reuben: To Walt Whitman,” 1875, Walt Whitman Papers, Box 17.
This affectionate letter shows how Whitman maintained friendships with the soldiers he met in the Civil War hospitals of Washington, D.C. Dated nearly ten years after the war, the letter opens “Dear Uncle Walt,” illustrating the closeness of these friendships. -
“Leur Patrie,” (Their Homeland)
Books like Eduard Drumont’s La France Juive and, of course, his weekly illustrated magazine updated the medieval trope of the “wandering Jew” to reference 19th century concerns about loyalty to one’s racial and cultural “patrie,” over abstract concepts of European and international identity. Reflecting the anti-Semite’s belief that the Jew’s national loyalty extends only so far as his personal finances, in this image the pan-national “embrace” of this caricatured rag-picker is a stifling one. Here the Jew with no country makes his mark world-wide, digging in his “claws” everywhere and anywhere money is to be had.
It is no small irony that at the time Esnault conjured this fiction, such a figure’s real-life analogue would have been the French Republic, which had at that point claimed a stake in almost every continent, draining the resources of over forty protectorates and colonies in Western and Equatorial Africa, Oceania, and South East Asia. -
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