The infamous Dreyfus Affair, which divided France and much of the world at the turn of the 20th century, became a metaphor for antisemitism, and, in one of the most unlikely and ironic sequence of events in Jewish history, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a wholly assimilated Jew, played a critical, if unintended, role in the rebirth of the State of Israel.
After French Intelligence had intercepted a secret military document sent to the German military attaché (1894), Eduard Drumont, founder of the antisemitic daily La Libre Parole, published a report accusing Dreyfus, the only Jewish member of the French General Staff, of spying for Germany. Major Joseph Henry forged documents implicating Dreyfus, and, after a secret trial, Dreyfus was convicted of treason on December 21, 1894 and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. He was paraded through the streets of Paris to mob jeers of “Death to the Jews” and was stripped of his sword in a humiliating public ceremony. Intelligence later seized a letter written by Major Ferdinand Esterhazy which clearly established that Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, was the German agent, but the French government squelched this evidence and Esterhazy was acquitted.
On January 13, 1898, Emile Zola (1840-1902), perhaps the most famous 19th century French author, published his famous J’Accuse!, which he addressed to Félix Faure, the President of France, in which he accused the government and the military with conspiracy and malicious libel against Dreyfus. (Zola escaped to England after he was convicted of libel for writing J’Accuse!) In 1898, the case was re-opened and Henry’s forgeries were detected; nevertheless, Dreyfus was again found guilty on September 9, 1899 and was sentenced to five years in prison. This second miscarriage of justice evoked international condemnation and, finally, Dreyfus was pardoned (1906).
The Dreyfus Affair made a powerful impact on the outlook of world Jewry. In particular, Herzl’s confidence in liberalism, badly shaken when he personally witnessed Dreyfus’s disgrace, led him to the Zionist Idea. Jews everywhere realized that if such hatred of Jews in general – and against a wholly assimilated Jew in particular – could occur in France, the “homeland of liberty,” then Jews could not be safe anywhere and assimilation was no defense against antisemitism.
While these basic facts of the Dreyfus Affair are well known, few are aware of the Affair’s fundamental role in creating the seismic split amongst the French impressionist painters that led to the unhappy decline of the impressionist movement.
The impressionists differed in their political and social opinions well before the Affair, and their varying attitudes toward France’s Jewish population proved to be one of the most divisive issues. Starting our discussion with the preeminent Jewish impressionist of his time, Jacob Abraham (Camille) Pissarro. Best known for his impressionist works, which generally involved landscapes and the transcription of natural effects by impressionist means, he never painted a Jewish subject and, the descendant of a Sephardic family, there is no known record of his Jewish consciousness, except for earning his parents’ disdain for marrying their Catholic maid. With his flowing white beard, Pissarro had what was commonly described as a biblical appearance; people often shouted at him, “Here comes Moses bearing the Tablets of the Law.”
Nonetheless, he became the victim of antisemitic attacks, particularly from other impressionist artists, including, in some instances, bitter criticisms of his art. However, many art historians contend that the violent attacks against his work at the time were not based upon legitimate artistic criticism but, rather, were actually manifestations of antisemitism. Moreover, his vociferous public sympathy for Dreyfus’s plight cost him the friendship of some of his closest friends, especially of Cezanne, Renoir and Degas, who never again spoke to him.
Pissarro was first drawn to the Dreyfus cause through two books he received from Bernard Lazare, a Jewish French literary critic, political journalist, polemicist, and renowned anarchist who was known as “the first Dreyfusard.” First, in 1895, Lazare sent him a copy of L’Antisémitisme (1894), a careful and eloquent analysis of antisemitic prejudice he had written, which deeply impressed Pissarro. A year later, Lazare sent him a copy of Une erreur judiciaire: La vérité sur l’affaire Dreyfus (“A Miscarriage of Justice: the truth about the Dreyfus Affair”). His position as a strong Dreyfusard became resolute after Zola’s J’Accuse! was published in L’Aurore, in response to which he wrote a letter of deep admiration to Zola.
In public, Pierre-Auguste Renoir announced that, “People are either pro- or anti-Dreyfus. I would like to try to be simply a Frenchman.” In fact, he was a vicious antisemite and anti-Dreyfusard who caused the first defection from the Impressionist movement when he broke off all contact with Jews and ended his relationships with Jewish patrons. Rather than exhibit his work alongside the Jew Pissarro, Renoir refused to participate in the 1882 independent salon.
Although Renoir’s antisemitism manifested itself through the 1880s, it was not until the Dreyfus Affair a decade later that the “Jewish question” divided the rest of the country and, along with it, the broader impressionist movement. Ironically, Renoir had maintained a close relationship with Charles Ephrussi (1849-1905), a prominent Russian-Jewish art critic and collector who, as a member of the influential Ephrussi family, made a fortune in grain and later in banking. Ephrussi lived in Paris, where he began to collect and write about art in the 1870s, and his publication, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, made him an influential figure in the art world, whose patronage was sought-after by contemporary artists and galleries. Renoir introduced himself to Ephrussi in 1878 by inviting him to view his painting, Madame Charpentier and Her Children and, impressed with the portrait, Ephrussi subsequently introduced Renoir to number of wealthy Jewish patrons.
At around 1880, Ephrussi became interested in the Impressionists and subsequently amassed a collection of some 40 paintings by artists including Monet, Degas, and particularly Renoir. Renoir dedicated much of 1880 and 1881 to painting portraits of Ephrussi’s friends and family, and Ephrussi himself was memorialized in one of Renoir’s most brilliant and well-known paintings, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), now widely considered one of the most famous French paintings of modern times. (Ephrussi appears in it as the top-hatted man with his back to the viewer, talking with Jules Laforgue, a poet, critic, and Ephrussi’s personal secretary.)
By the end of 1881, however, Renoir and Ephrussi had a falling out, ironically over one of his most popular paintings, Pink and Blue, a portrait of two young girls that had been commissioned by Ephrussi’s mistress, Louise Cahen d’Anvers. Although Louise liked Renoir’s other portraits of children, she disliked the portrait of her own daughters, and, when she made Renoir aware of her negative feelings, the furious artist, already bitter about what he perceived to be a miserly sum for the commission, not only denounced Louise and Ephrussi, but also the entire world of Jewish art patrons in a series of vitriolic letters.
When the Dreyfus Affair hit, some sought to portray Renoir as trying to carefully walk the “middle ground” between the pro- and anti-Dreyfusards, but his antisemitism was unmistakable, as when he announced in 1882: “To continue with the Israelite Pissarro, that taints you with revolution.” Even his own son, Jean, regularly portrayed him as expressing overt anti-Jewish views, ascribing statements to his father such as “the peculiarity of the Jews is to cause disintegration.” In the diary of Julie Manet Rouart, a French painter, model, diarist, art collector, and the niece of Impressionist artist Edouard Manet, she quotes Renoir as saying in 1898:
…the Jews come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind a tree. There are so many in the army because the Jew likes to parade around in fancy uniforms. Every country chases them out, there is a reason for that, and we must not allow them to occupy such a position in France.
She further cites Renoir’s loathing for Pissarro, “a Jew whose sons are natives of no country and who do their military service nowhere… It’s tenacious the Jewish race. Pissarro’s wife isn’t one, yet all the children are, even more so than their father.” Much as the Nazis who followed him some forty years later, Renoir characterized art of which he disapproved as “Jew art.”
During the 19th century, Edgar Degas was one of the many artists who sought the company of Jewish artists and intellectuals. As such, he maintained an apparent public pro-Jewish stance and, in particular, he maintained a close professional relation with Pissarro, organized art exhibitions with him, and became one of the first Impressionist artists to purchase Pissarro’s paintings. He also joined a circle of Jewish artists including Ludovic Halévy, Geneviève Halévy (who was married to Georges Bizet), one of the Rothschilds’ lawyers, and Charles Ephrussi, and he frequently portrayed many Jewish friends and associates.
However, Degas proved to be a great antisemite, xenophobe, and misogynist. With antisemitism becoming all the rage in France at the end of the 19th century into the 20th, he may have had additional “incentive” to join the Jew-haters because of his family’s entrepreneurial difficulties due to Jewish competitors. In the wake of the American Civil War, the Degas family sustained serious financial losses when its cotton brokerage, import-export business, and banking enterprise failed, for which Edgar blamed “big Jewish bankers” such as the Rothschilds.
Degas was not at all embarrassed about expressing his keen interest in “antisemitic reading and conversation” and he unabashedly declared, “I detest them, those Jews! An abominable race that ought to be shut up in Ghettos. Or even totally eradicated.” In one infamous instance, he entered an art gallery and joyfully announced that he was going to visit a Parisian court, not to attend a trial, but “to kill a Jew.” He would sometimes attend pro-Dreyfus rallies hoping to, in his words, “knock down a Dreyfusard.”
In the aforementioned Julie Manet’s diary, she reflects the extremes of Degas’s hate, which would sometimes reduce him to tears of fury. For example, she writes of one evening when she paid a visit to his studio to invite him to dinner but found him in a “state against the Jews,” so she felt obliged to withdraw, “without asking him a thing.” Degas’s violent antisemitism can be traced back over at least a decade before the Dreyfus affair began; he was known for discussing antisemitic and he was a regular reader of La Libre Parole, a well-known French antisemitic newspaper and perhaps the most vicious anti-Dreyfus rag.
In the autumn of 1897, his years-long friendship with Ludovic Halévy, a Jewish French author and playwright known particularly for his collaborations on the libretto for Bizet’s Carmen and various comic operas by Offenbach, suddenly ended. Even though they were assimilated Jews, the Halévy family, concerned about the growth of antisemitism in their beloved France, became Dreyfus defenders. In a diary entry, Daniel Halévy describes the reasons for the end of the friendship with Degas:
Tuesday, November 25, 1897. We had never raised the topic [of the Dreyfus case], but yesterday, talking late in the afternoon, Dad was very tense in front of Degas, a prominent antisemite. It was our last cordial conversation. Our friendship, which began in childhood, was suddenly and silently severed… Degas had dinner at home for the last time. He didn’t say anything the whole night… his lips seemed sealed… he kept his gaze serene, upwards, as if he wished to disconnect himself from the guests that surrounded him. For Degas, Ludovic said there was no doubts that Dreyfus wanted to defend the army, an army whose heritage he respected too much, and which was now offended by our intellectual theories. Degas didn’t open his mouth and, after dinner, he disappeared from the house, never to return.
Before the Dreyfus Affair, Degas had painted several Jewish subjects and had executed several gelatin silver prints of numerous members of the family of Ludovic Halévy, a close and lifelong friend for over 40 years who had been more like family to him. Nonetheless, even his friendship for Halévy could not overcome his antisemitic expression in Portrait of Friends in the Wings (1879), in which, consistent with his view that Jews are aliens in French cultural life (in this case, the opera), he depicts Halévy against a vivid and colorful background as a gloomy, haggard, and colorless character, complete with hooked nose and full beard, an unmistakable anti-Semitic stereotype recognizable to all.
Despite having been a great admirer of Degas, Pissarro called him a “savage antisemite.” Indeed, a savage and cold-blooded Jew-hater, Degas not only severed all his friendships with Jews (“that terrible race”) – including Pissarro, who had been one of his great supporters – but he even broke off all contact with non-Jews who happened to be Dreyfus supporters, including his lifelong friend, Ludovic Halevy, as discussed above (even though Halevy had converted to Catholicism), and Mary Cassatt. He refused to employ Jewish models, railed against Jews to the point of tears of fury, and lent his name to The League of the French Fatherland, a group instituted in response to J’Accuse! to facilitate the assembly and coordination of the anti-Dreyfusard effort.
Beginning in 1861, when Paul Cézanne reached out to Pissarro for guidance advice, the artists maintained a deep artistic and personal relationship to the point that Cézanne’s unabashedly referred to himself as “Pissarro’s pupil.” Nonetheless, Cézanne, who was also a close lifetime friend of Zola’s, cut off all relations with Pissarro and, convinced that Dreyfus was a traitor, he publicly denounced Zola, complaining that he “had been taken in” by the Dreyfusards. Although he was not as vehement a hater as Renoir and Degas, he ostracized his fellow Impressionist Dreyfusards and their supporters. For virtually all the anti-Dreyfusards, the passions of the Affair overwhelmed both their friendship and their artistic integrity.
Auguste Rodin refused to accept funding from a Dreyfusard group to build his monument to Balzac and, as a result, the monument remained unbuilt for thirty years.
On the other hand, decorative artist Emile Galle, a fiery Dreyfusard, designed tables and vases embellished with inscriptions referring to Dreyfus’s sad fate, including a notable table he decorated with the beautiful verse from Isaiah 61:11: “As the garden brings forth its seed, so G-d will bring forth justice.” Edouard Vuillard was also a passionate Dreyfusard and Toulouse Lautrec (see exhibit below), a Dreyfus supporter, produced The Dreyfus Affair, an oil painting on canvas, and designed the cover and 13 illustrations to accompany Clemenceau’s At the Foot of Sinai (1898), a collection of stories about Jewish history. Paul Signac, also a Dreyfusard, was among the signers of the Manifesto of the Intellectuals, a pro-Dreyfus petition circulated by Marcel Proust marking the first modern mobilization of scholars, writers, and artists as a force for shaping public opinion.
But the greatest Dreyfusard among the Impressionists was undoubtedly Claude Monet. Zola, though best known as a novelist, was also a well-regarded art critic who shared the Impressionists’ social circle, and his J’Accuse! spurred many of them to action. In particular, Monet rushed to support Zola and became a Manifesto signer. He presented his painting Le Bloc (1889) to Clemenceau, a leading Dreyfusard who was later elected Prime Minister of France, as a token of his gratitude and support for Clemenceau’s gutsy publication of J’Accuse! Monet’s pro-Dreyfus position was plain from the letters of congratulations written to Zola in December 1897 and January 1898. He had hoped to travel to Paris for Zola’s trial but was unable to do so because of illness among his close family members; instead, he kept informed of news in Paris through his close friends and fellow Dreyfusards.
When Dreyfus was finally cleared and Zola returned to France, Monet sank into a deep depression over the sordid and disgraceful Affair. Many critics attribute Monet’s abandonment of his quintessential French landscape subjects in the late 1890s in favor of painting within the confines of his own and local gardens to fallout from the Dreyfus Affair. (Interestingly, Monet created his renowned gardens at Rue aux Juifs in Giverny, the “Street of the Jews” which had historically been the hub of Jewish agricultural settlement.) This is borne out by a March 6, 1917 letter written by Monet from Giverny to art critic, close friend, and fellow Drefusard Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926), during which time he was working on his monumental Water Lilies series:
My Dear Friend
Mrs. Jean Monet has given me the task of thanking you for your amiable letter and I address to you the attached letter mailed the 18th, asking you to send me the next two volumes of the Captain Fracasse by [Théophile] Gautier and Gallery of Famous Women by St. Beuve.
If I need anything else, I will write to you. Like you, I was sorry not to see you again after those sad obsequies of our friend [Dreyfus]. I was so distraught that I let myself get carried away without knowing all that much what I was doing.
As far as that’s concerned, would you be so kind as to send me your article on Dreyfus from Toulouse?” [Two decades earlier, Geffroy had taken an active role in the efforts to secure Dreyfus’ release and Lautrec, as mentioned, was a strong Dreyfusard.] I’m coming to Paris often in this oblique moment of time to have recourse [to see] the dentist, but it’s always in haste and quite boring. I’ll drop you a note one of these days to have you come to lunch with me.
With all friendship,
Claude Monet
Monet had vested great affection and admiration for the French state, but, in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, he ceased painting French sites and instead looked elsewhere for inspiration and subject matter.
After twelve years of unrest, the Dreyfus Affair ended and France’s antisemitic fervor subsided, but the Impressionist movement was damaged beyond repair. The Affair polarized the Impressionists, forced old tensions to the surface, and incited new arguments such that political differences finally triumphed over shared aesthetics, forcing a change in artistic trends and ending the era of the impressionists.
