Édouard Adolphe Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 and writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

. He founded the Antisemitic League of France

Antisemitic League of France

The Antisemitic League of France was founded in 1889 by the journalist Edouard Drumont. First known under the name of Ligue nationale antisémitique de France or Ligue antisémite française , this nationalist league was created in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair...

 in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole.

Early life

Drumont was born in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 on 3 May 1844 to a family of porcelain-painters from Lille

Lille

Lille is a city in northern France . It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country behind those of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Lille is situated on the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium...

. At the age of seventeen his father died, and left him to earn his own livelihood.

Public career

He was at first in government service, but later became a contributor to the press and was the author of a number of miscellaneous works, of which Mon vieux Paris (1879) was crowned by the Academy

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

.

Drumont's 1886 book La France Juive (Jewish France) attacked the role of Jews in France and argued for their exclusion from society. In 1892 Drumont founded the newspaper the which became a platform for virulent antisemitism. This newspaper also came out against 'Diana Vaughan', an invention of Léo Taxil

Léo Taxil

Léo Taxil, originally Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès , was a French writer and journalist who became known for his strong anti-Catholic and anti-clerical views....

, before Taxil admitted that his anti-Masonic protégée did not exist in 1897. La Libre Parole preferred the 'seeress' Henriette Couedon.

From 1898 to 1902 Édouard Drumont represented Algiers

Algiers

' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000...

 in the Chamber of Deputies

Chamber of Deputies of France

Chamber of Deputies was the name given to several parliamentary bodies in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:* 1814–1848 during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, the Chamber of Deputies was the Lower chamber of the French Parliament, elected by census suffrage.*...

. He was sued for accusing a parliamentary deputy of having taken a bribe from the prominent Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild

Edouard Alphonse de Rothschild

Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild was a French financier and a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family of France....

 to pass a piece of legislation the banker wanted.
Drumont attracted many supporters and was one of the primary sources of antisemitic ideas that would later be embraced by Nazism

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

. He exploited the Panama Company Scandal

Panama scandals

The Panama scandals was a corruption affair that broke out in the French Third Republic in 1892, linked to the building of the Panama Canal...

 and reached the peak of his notoriety during the Dreyfus Affair

Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...

, in which he was the most strident of Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history...

' accusers.

For his anti-Panama articles, Drumont was condemned to three months' imprisonment. In 1893 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the representation of Amiens

Amiens

Amiens is a city and commune in northern France, north of Paris and south-west of Lille. It is the capital of the Somme department in Picardy...

; the following year he retired to Brussels

Brussels

Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...

. The Dreyfus affair helped him to regain popularity, and in 1898 he returned to France and was elected deputy for the first division of Algiers, but was defeated as a candidate for reelection in 1902.

Being superstitious

Superstition

Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any process in the physical world linking the two events....

, Drumont carried a mandrake

Mandrake (plant)

Mandrake is the common name for members of the plant genus Mandragora, particularly the species Mandragora officinarum, belonging to the nightshades family...

 root around with him and attacked Georges Boulanger

Georges Boulanger

Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger was a French general and reactionary politician. At the apogee of his popularity in January 1889 many republicans including Georges Clemenceau feared the threat of a coup d'état by Boulanger and the establishment of a dictatorship.- Early life and career :Born...

 on the basis of palmistry.

Works

• La fin d'un monde (1888)
• Dernière battaille (1890)
• Testament d'un antisémite (1891)
• Secret de fourmies (1892)
• De l'or, de la boue, du sang - Du Panama á l'anarchie (1896), dealing with the Panama scandals
• Les Juifs et l'affaire Dreyfus (1899)
• Vieux portraits, vieux cadres (1900)

External link

Dreyfus Rehabilitated