''La France juive'' ("Jewish France"), subtitled ''Essai d'histoire contemporaine'' ("Essay on Contemporary History"), is an antisemitic tract published by

Édouard Drumont 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''. ...

in 1886.Michael Curtis ''Verdict on Vichy: power and prejudice in the Vichy France regime'' 2002 p. 39 "The most widely read of the three writers was Drumont (1844–1917), Catholic and royalist, who in 1886 published his vitriolic La France Juive, arguing that Jews had virtually conquered France. As a premature national-socialist appealing to ..."

Publication and success

A work of 1,200 pages, released in two volumes, it ran to 140 printings during the two years following its initial publication. In 1888 an abridged version of one volume was published. The book was reissued by the publisher Flammarion in 1938, then by Éditions du Trident in 1986. In 2012, it was reissued by the publishing house KontreKulture, run by the nationalist Equality and Reconciliation political group. ''La France juive'' became a major success and achieved great fame. Its success was due in part to the inclusion of a list of names of famous people against whom the author made accusations in the book. Many buyers were inspired by curiosity to see if anyone they knew appeared on the list.

Themes

''La France juive'' developed three strands of antisemitism. One was

racial A race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 1500s, when it was used to refer to groups of variou ...

, proposing an opposition between non-Jewish ”Aryans" and Jewish ”Semites". Another was

financial Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of f ...

. The author argued that finance and capitalism were controlled by the Jews, even though some notable Jews, like

Nissim de Camondo Nissim de Camondo (23 August 1892 – 5 September 1917) was a French military officer and a member of the prominent Camondo family. Born in Boulogne-Billancourt and named for his grandfather, he was the son of Moïse de Camondo, a wealthy Jewi ...

some 30 years after the book had been published, shared their heritage with Parisian citizens. A third was

religious Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...

, referring to the Jews' supposed complicity in the death of Jesus.

Context

The book appeared in France during a period of turmoil that followed the country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The years after the war saw a religious crisis, as the Third Republic followed a policy of

secularisation In sociology, secularization (or secularisation) is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward non-religious values and secular institutions. The ''secularization thesis'' expresses the ...

. The emergence of

economic liberalism Economic liberalism is a political and economic ideology that supports a market economy based on individualism and private property in the means of production. Adam Smith is considered one of the primary initial writers on economic libera ...

during this period led to malaise and social tension. The crash of the Catholic Union General bank occurred in 1882, and Drumont blamed the disaster on the

Rothschild family The Rothschild family ( , ) is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish family originally from Frankfurt that rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a court factor to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Fr ...

Publication and success

Themes

Context

See also

References

Further reading