Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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71 To this group, led by Charles Péguy, belonged the youthful Romain Rolland, Suarez, Georges Sorel, Daniel Halévy, and Bernard Lazare.
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72 Cf. M. Barrés, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, Paris, 1899.
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73 See Yves Simon, op. cit., pp. 54–55.
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74 The faculty rooms of Rennes University were wrecKed after five professors had declared themselves in favor of a retrial. After the appearance of Zola’s first article Royalist students demonstrated outside the offices of Figaro, after which tne paper desisted from further articles of the same type. The publisher of the pro-Dreyfus la Bataille was beaten up on the street. The judges of the Court of Cassation, which finally set aside the verdict of 1894, reported unanimously that they had been threatened with “unlawful assault.” Examples could be multiplied.
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75 On January 18, 1898, antisemitic demonstrations took place at Bordeaux, Marseille, Clermont-Ferrant, Nantes. Rouen, and Lyon. On the following day student riots broke out in Rouen, Toulouse, and Nantes.
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76 The crudest instance was that of the police prefect of Rennes, who advised Professor Victor Basch, when the latter’s house was stormed by a mob 2,000 strong, that he ought to hand in his resignation, as he could no longer guarantee his safety.
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77 Cf. Bernanos, op. cit., p. 346.
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78 For these theories see especially Charles Maurras, Au Signe de Flore; souvenirs de la vie politique; l’Affaire Dreyfus et la fondation de l’Action Française, Paris, 1931; M. Barrés, op. cit.; Léon Daudet, Panorama de la Troisième République, Paris, 1936.
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79 Cf. Clemenceau, “A la dérive,” in op. cit.
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80 It was precisely this which so greatly disillusioned the champions of Dreyfus, especially the circle around Charles Péguy. This disturbing similarity between Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards is the subject matter of the instructive novel by Martin du Gard, Jean Barois, 1913.
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81 Preface to Contre la Justice, 1900.
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82 Clemenceau, in a speech before the Senate several years later; cf. Weil, op. cit., pp. 112–13.
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83 See Herzog, op. cit., under date of October 10, 1898.
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84 “K.V.T.,” op. cit., p. 608.
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85 Gallifet, minister of war, wrote to Waldeck: “Let us not forget that the great majority of people in France are antisemitic. Our position would be, therefore, that on the one side we would have the entire army and the majority of Frenchmen, not to speak of the civil service and the senators;...”’ cf. J. Reinach, op. cit., V, 579.
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86 The best known of such attempts is that of Déroulède who sought, while attending the funeral of President Paul Faure, in February, 1899, to incite General Roget to mutiny. The German ambassadors and chargés d’affaires in Paris reported such attempts every few months. The situation is well summed up by Barres, op. cit., p. 4: “In Rennes we have found our battlefield. All we need is soldiers or, more precisely, generals—or, still more precisely, a general.” Only it was no accident that this general was non-existent.
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87 Brogan goes so far as to blame the Assumptionists for the entire clerical agitation.
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88 “K.V.T.,” op. cit., p. 597.
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89 “The initial stimulus in the Affair very probably came from London, where the Congo-Nile mission of 1896–1898 was causing some degree of disquietude”; thus Maurras in Action Française (July 14, 1935). The Catholic press of London defended the Jesuits; see “The Jesuits and the Dreyfus Case,” in The Month, Vol. XVIII (1899).
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90 Civiltà Cattolica, February 5, 1898.
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91 See the particularly characteristic article of Rev. George McDermot, C.S.P., “Mr. Chamberlain’s Foreign Policy and the Dreyfus Case,” in the American monthly Catholic World, Vol. LXVII (September, 1898).
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92 Cf. Lecanuet, op. cit., p. 188.
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93 Cf. Rose A. Halperin, op. cit., pp. 59, 77 if.
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94 Bernard Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, New York 1948. p. 97.
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95 Cf. Fernand Labori, “Le mal politique et les partis,” in La Grande Revue (October-December, 1901): “From the moment at Rennes when the accused pleaded guilty and the defendant renounced recourse to a retrial in the hope of gaining a pardon, the Dreyfus case as a great, universal human issue was definitely closed.” In his article entitled “Le Spectacle du jour,” Clemenceau speaks of the Jews of Algiers “in whose behalf Rothschild will not voice the least protest.”
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96 See Clemenceau’s articles entitled “Le Spectacle du jour,” “Et les Juifs!” “La Farce du syndicat,” and “Encore les juifs!” in L’Iniquité.
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97 Cf. Zola’s letter dated September 13, 1899, in Correspondance: lettres â Maître Labori.
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98 Cf. Herzog, op. cit., p. 97.
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99 Lazare’s position in the Dreyfus Affair is best described by Charles Péguy, “Notre Jeunesse,” in Cahiers de la quinzaine, Paris, 1910. Regarding him as the true representative of Jewish interests, Péguy formulates Lazare’s demands as follows: “He was a partisan of the impartiality of the law. Impartiality of law in the Dreyfus case, impartial law in the case of the religious orders. This seems like a trifle; this can lead far. This led him to isolation in death.” (Translation quoted from Introduction to Lazare’s Job’s Dungheap.) Lazare was one of the first Dreyfusards to protest against the law governing congregations.
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1 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, London, 1905, 1938, p. 19: “Though, for convenience, the year 1870 has been taken as indicative of the beginning of a conscious policy of Imperialism, it will be evident that the movement did not attain its full impetus until the middle of the eighties ...from about 1884.”
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2 S. Gertrude Millin, Rhodes, London, 1933, p. 138.
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3 These figures are quoted by Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, New York, 1941, p. 237, and cover the period from 1871–1900.—See also Hobson, op. cit., p. 19: “Within 15 years some 3¾ millions of square miles were added to the British Empire, 1 million square miles with 14 millions inhabitants to the German, 3½ millions square miles with 37 millions inhabitants to the French.”
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4 See Ernst Hasse, Deutsche Weltpolitik, Flugschriften des Alldeutschen Verbandes, No. 5, 1897, p. 1.
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5 Ernest Renan in his classical essay Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Paris, 1882, stressed “the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down” as the chief elements which keep the members of a people together in such a way that they form, a nation. Translation quoted from The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and other Studies, London, 1896.
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6 Hobson, op. cit.
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7 This bad conscience springing from the belief in consent as the basis of all political organization is very well described by Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925, Boston-New York, 1934, in the discussion of British policy in Egypt: “The justification of our presence in Egypt remains based, not upon the defensible right of conquest, or on force, butt upon our own belief in the element of consent. That element, in 1919, did not in any articulate form exist. It was dramatically challenged by the Egyptian outburst of March 1919.”
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8 As Lord Salisbury put it, rejoicing over the defeat of Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill. During the following twenty years of Conservative—and that was at that time imperialist—rule (1885–1905), the English-Irish conflict was not only not solved but became much more acute. See also Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Crimes of England, 1915, pp. 57 ff.
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9 Why in the initial stages of national development the Tudors did not succeed in incorporating Ireland into Great Britain as the Valois had succeeded in incorporating Brittany and Burgundy into France, is still a riddle. It may be, however, that a similar process was brutally interrupted by the Cromwell regime, which treated Ireland as one great piece of booty to be divided among its servants. After the Cromwell revolution, at any rate, which was as crucial for the formation of the British nation as the French Revolution became for the French, the United Kingdom had already reached that stage of maturity that is always accompanied by a loss of the power of assimilation and integration which the body politic of the nation possesses only in its initial stages. What then followed was, indeed, one long sad story of “coercion [that] was not imposed that the people might live quietly but that people might die quietly” (Chesterton, op. cit., p. 60).
For a historical survey of the Irish question that includes the latest developments, compare the excellent unbiased study of Nicholas Mansergh, Britain and Ireland (in Longman’s Pamphlets on the British Commonwealth, London, 1942).
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10 very characteristic is the following statement of J. A. Froude made shortly before the beginning of the imperialist era: “Let it be once established that an Englishman emigrating to Canada or the Cape, or Australia, or New Zealand did not forfeit his nationality, that he was still on English soil as much as if he was in Devonshire or Yorkshire, and would remain an Englishman while the English Empire lasted; and if we spent a quarter of the sums which were sunk in the morasses at Balaclava in sending out and establishing two millions of our people in those colonies, it would contribute more to the essential strength of the country than all the wars in which we have been entangled from Agincourt to Waterloo.” Quoted from Robert Livingston Schuyler, The Fall of the Old Colonial System, New York, 1945, pp. 280–81.
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11 The eminent South African writer, Jan Disselboom, expressed very bluntly the attitude of the Commonwealth peoples on this question: “Great Britain is merely a partner in the concern ...all descended from the same closely allied stock.... Those parts of the Empire which are not inhabited by races of which this is true, were never partners in the concern. They were the private property of the predominant partner.... You can have the white dominion, or you can have the Dominion of India, but you cannot have both.” (Quoted from A. Carthill, The Lost Dominion, 1924.)
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12 Ernest Barker, Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1941, p. 4.
See also the very good introductory remarks on the foundations of the French Empire in The French Colonial Empire (in Information Department Papers No. 25, published by The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1941), pp. 9 ff. “The aim is to assimilate colonial peoples to the French people, or, where this is not possible in more primitive communities, to ‘associate’ them, so that more and more the difference between la France métropole and la France d’outremer shall be a geographical difference and not a fundamental one,”
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13 See Gabriel Hanotaux, “Le Général Mangin” in Revue des Deux Mondes (1925), Tome 27.
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14 W. P. Crozier, “France and her ‘Black Empire’” in New Republic, January 23, 1924.
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15 David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, New Haven, 1939, I, 362 ff.
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16 A similar attempt at brutal exploitation of overseas possessions for the sake of the nation was made by the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies after the defeat of Napoleon had restored the Dutch colonies to the much impoverished mother country. By means of compulsory cultivation the natives were reduced to slavery for the benefit of the government in Holland. Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, first published in the sixties of the last century, was aimed at the government at home and not at the services abroad. (See de Kat Angelino, Colonial Policy, Vol. II, The Dutch East Indies, Chicago, 1931, p. 45.)
This system was quickly abandoned and the Netherlands Indies, for a while, became “the admiration of all colonizing nations.” (Sir Hesketh Bell, former Governor of Uganda, Northern Nigeria, etc., Foreign Colonial Administration in the Far East, 1928, Part I). The Dutch methods have many similarities with the French: the granting of European status to deserving natives, introduction of a European school system, and other devices of gradual assimilation. The Dutch thereby achieved the same result: a strong national independence movement among the subject people.
In the present study Dutch and Belgian imperialism are being neglected. The first is a curious and changing mixture of French and English methods; the second is the story not of the expansion of the Belgian nation or even the Belgian bourgeoisie, but of the expansion of the Belgian king personally, unchecked by any government, unconnected with any other institution. Both the Dutch and the Belgian forms of imperialism are atypical. The Netherlands did not expand during the eighties, but only consolidated and modernized their old possessions. The unequalled atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo, on the other hand, would offer too unfair an example for what was generally happening in overseas possessions.
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17 Ernest Barker, op. cit., p. 69.
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18 Selwyn James, South of the Congo, New York, 1943, p. 326.
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19 About these boyhood ideals and their role in British imperialism, see chapter vii. How they were developed and cultivated is described in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Company.
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20 Ernest Barker, op. cit., p. 150.
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21 Lord Cromer, “The Government of Subject Races,” in Edinburgh Review, January, 1908.
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22 Ibid.
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23 The first scholar to use the term imperialism to differentiate clearly between the “Empire” and the “Commonwealth” was J. A Hobson. But the essential difference was always well known. The principle of “colonial freedom” for instance, cherished by all liberal British statesmen after the American Revolution, was held valid only insofar as the colony was “formed of the British people or ...such admixture of the British population as to make it safe to introduce representative institutions.” See Robert Livingston Schuyler, op. cit., pp. 236 ff.
In the nineteenth century, we must distinguish three types of overseas possessions Within the British Empire: the settlements or plantations or colonies, like Australia and other dominions; the trade stations and possessions like India; and the maritime and military stations like the Cape of Good Hope, which were held for the sake of the former. All these possessions underwent a change in government and political significance in the era of imperialism.
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24 Ernest Barker, op. cit.
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25 Millin, op. cit., p. 175.
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26 The origin of this misnomer probably lies in the history of British rule in South Africa, and goes back to the times when the local governors, Cecil Rhodes and Jameson, involved the “Imperial Government” in London, much against its intentions, in the war against the Boers. “In fact Rhodes, or rather Jameson, was absolute ruler of a territory three times the size of England, which could be administered ‘without waiting for the grudging assent or polite censure of the High Commissioner’” who was the representative of an Imperial Government that retained only “nominal control.” (Reginal Ivan Lovell, The Struggle for South Africa, 1875–1899, New York, 1934, p. 194.) And what happens in territories in which the British government has resigned its jurisdiction to the local European population that lacks all traditional and constitutional restraint of nation-states, can best be seen in the tragic story of the South African Union since its independence, that is, since the time when the “Imperial Government” no longer had any right to interfere.
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27 The discussion in the House of Commons in May, 1908, between Charles Dilke and the Colonial Secretary is interesting in this respect. Dilke warned against giving self-government to the Crown colonies because this would result in rule of the white planters over their colored workers. He was told that the natives too had a representation in the English House of Commons. See G. Zoepfl, “Kolonien und Kolonialpolitik” in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften.
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28 Lawrence J. Zetland, Lord Cromer, 1923, p. 224.
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29 A. Carthill, The Lost Dominion, 1924, pp. 41–42, 93.
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30 An instance of “pacification” in the Near East was described at great length by T. E. Lawrence in an article “France, Britain and the Arabs” written for The Observer (1920): “There is a preliminary Arab success, the British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way ...to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats. Finally perhaps a village is burnt and the district pacified. It is odd that we don’t use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children....By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.” See his Letters, edited by David Garnett, New York, 1939, pp. 311 ff.