Édouard Adolphe Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French journalist and writer. He founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole.
Contents |
Drumont was born in Paris on 3 May 1844 to a family of porcelain-painters from Lille. At the age of seventeen his father died, and left him to earn his own livelihood.[2]
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.
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 La Libre Parole (fr) which became a platform for virulent antisemitism. This newspaper also came out against 'Diana Vaughan', an invention of Léo Taxil, 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 in the Chamber of Deputies. He was sued for accusing a parliamentary deputy of having taken a bribe from the prominent Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild 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.[3] He exploited the Panama Company Scandal[4] and reached the peak of his notoriety during the Dreyfus Affair, in which he was the most strident of Alfred Dreyfus' accusers.[2]
For his anti-Panama articles, Drumont was condemned to three months' imprisonment. In 1893 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the representation of Amiens; the following year he retired to Brussels. 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.[2]
Being superstitious, Drumont carried a mandrake root around with him and attacked Georges Boulanger on the basis of palmistry.
La France juive (fr) (1886) This book saw 200 reprints until 1945.