10/12/2012

October 12: Antisemitic Apocalypticists of La Belle Époque

Edouard Drumont, a founder of The Antisemitic League of France, operated a newspaper in Paris in the 1890s called La Libre Parole (The Free Word). The periodical took a prominent role in the notorious Dreyfus Affair by attacking the innocent, imprisoned, and Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus for acts of treason which he had never committed.

In Drumont's spare time, he was also a occult-obsessed apocalypticist, authoring a book called La fin d'un monde (The End of the World) and promoting in his newspaper a faddish seeress named Henriette Couedon, who claimed to channel the Archangel Gabriel. Drumont's editor Gaston Mery published Couedon's journals of end-times visions, and went so far as to fight a duel on the woman's behalf.


Incidentally, the defenders of Alfred Dreyfus included the journalist Theodor Herzl, who was inspired in part by the Antisemitism he saw in the Dreyfus Affair to found the World Zionist Organization: the movement which eventually led to an independent state of Israel (see Aug. 29).