Last year the manager of the lectures
came hastening to me. “I am come,” he
said “to propose to you a subject of which the announcement will fill the
hall. You will see what returns there
will be!”
I trembled, for when he put forward a question
of returns I was sure that he was going to speak to me of a book of
disrepute. I was mistaken in my
apprehensions. M. Drumont had just
published his second book against the Jews.
It was this book that he begged me to have put upon the posters. “As good luck has it,” he said “you have lent
a hand to the Jewish cause in the papers.
They will all come in the evening.”
“If I should accept,” I said to him, “there
would certainly be in the hall, besides the five hundred Israelites of whom you
speak, four or five persons, my followers of old, in whose esteem I should be
lowered, and who would perhaps never come to see me again. They would rightly think that a pamphlet by
M. Drumont was not literature. I was not
acquainted with them. I only know their
faces; they are my conscience.”
“But you can say just what you please.”
I understand it thus,
indeed, but I have accustomed the public to expect only lessons in literature
from me. They will take it very ill if,
in order to attract people and gain a little more money, I should throw myself
into polemics.
And I refused.[1]
Originally
published in 1892 as Souvenirs d’âge mur, the above excerpt from Francisque Sarcey’s Recollections of Middle Life refers to
two books by the notorious French anti-Semite, Édouard Drumont,
La France juive (1886) an Testament d’un antisemite (1891), works which
appeared before the Dreyfus Affair fixated and transformed the nation.
Sarcey was France’s
most prominent drama critic in the last half of the nineteenth century, with writings
appearing in periodicals such as Le Figaro,
Le
Dix-neuvieme Siecle, and (from 1867 until his death in 1899) Le Temps, the newspaper of record. He was also a public intellectual giving Thursday
lectures at the Boulevard Des Capucines
over many years, some of which is recounted in his Recollections. Sarcey
belonged to the famous agrégé of 1848 at
the Ecole Normale Supérieure which
included historian Hippolyte Taine and author Edmond About, his lifelong friend
beginning as classmates at the Lycée Charlemagne,
and with whom he founded Le Dix-neuvième Siècle in 1872.
Another contemporary was Lucien Prévost-Paradol,
who committed suicide in 1870 – at the time of the Franco-Prussian War when Paris
was also besieged – while residing in Washington, DC as Emperor Napoleon III’s
ambassador to the USA.
Combatting anti-semitism at the earliest opportunity would have been the right thing to do, both in moral terms and from an historical point of view, assuming it was done effectively.[2] Sarcey’s failure is indicative of established liberalism’s dilemma when confronting fanaticism, and of classical culture’s problematic penchant for politeness and restraint– when the opposing tendency was not so. Inadequate to the task, Sarcey by his inaction thus contributed to the rise of proto-Fascism in France which emerged in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.
[1] Francisque Sarcey, Recollections of Middle Life, tr. Elisabeth Luther Cary (London: William Heinemann [Scholar Select Reprint], 1893, pp. 295,296.
[2] For further context see the more dogmatic (and a generation younger) Ferdinand Brunetière’s article, ”La France juive d’Édouard Drumont”, first published in May 1886 in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He writes that he has “no taste at all” for Jews but concedes: “Our tastes are one thing, our ideas are, or should be, another”. In other words, he demonstrates the ambiguous notion of rational tolerance but in his final sentence concludes with an appeal to humanity (quoting Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice): “hath not a Jew hands, organs, senses, affections, passions.” (The text of ”La France juive d’Édouard Drumont” is available as a reprint from Amazon and as an ebook). See also: Antoine Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière: enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis (Paris: Seuil, 1997), pp. 38-48. Also: Grégoire Kauffmann, Edouard Drumont (Paris: Perrin, 2008), and Ernest Renan, On the Nation and the ‘Jewish People‘, tr. Shlomo Sand (London: Verso, 2010).
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