#Alfred dreyfus descendants series#

“After the French Revolution, the nineteenth century was complicated…it was the impossibility of going back to a monarchy it was the end of a Christian regime and a secular republic,” de Gaulmyn said.

#Alfred dreyfus descendants series#

She ended up doing so in a four-part series that came out last month, based on conversations with historians-she built on the work of Pierre Sorlin, who, in 1967, published a book on La Croix ’s early years-and archival research, a task that was sometimes hard to stomach, so harsh was the hatred she found. The soldier who uses his sword to extend his homeland doesn’t apologize for it, he uses it.”ĭe Gaulmyn decided that, amid La Croix ’s anniversary celebrations, the time was right to wrestle, in greater depth, with the paper’s anti-Semitic past. La Croix was only joining it “because it’s the only way to reach the enemy on the ground that he’s ravaging. “In our opinion, the daily press is the plague of our age,” Picard wrote in an opening editorial. It was founded in 1883 by France’s Assumptionist congregation and two of its members in particular, Father Picard and Father Bailly- “soldier monks” who launched the paper into a crowded market to fight for Catholicism at a tumultuous moment in French history. Recently, La Croix marked its hundred and fortieth birthday in its current form. “I knew that La Croix had been against Dreyfus,” de Gaulmyn told me, “but I didn’t know that, from the start, really systematic anti-Semitism.” It, too, was notable for its anti-Semitism: the front page featured references to “Jewish organs” among the French press and characterized Jews who had been expelled from Russia as “invaders.” The edition dated to June 1892-two years before the Dreyfus affair began. Last year, Isabelle de Gaulmyn, La Croix ’s current editor in chief, received a copy of an old edition of the paper in the mail. “We have to remember,” Michel Kubler, La Croix ’s editor in chief in 1998, wrote, of the paper’s coverage of Dreyfus. The front page also acknowledged La Croix ’s own complicity in the episode, noting that it referred to Dreyfus as a “Jewish enemy” and issued a call to “gut” Zola for defending him.

The splash marked the hundredth anniversary of “J’Accuse…!,” an open letter that Zola published in a different newspaper, L’Aurore, in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who was wrongly convicted of selling secrets to the Germans in a case that triggered a wave of anti-Semitic sentiment in France. In 1998, La Croix, a Catholic daily in France, ran a front-page picture of Emile Zola, the celebrated French novelist.