Edouard Drumont
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Édouard Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French journalist and writer, known for his antisemitic views.
Drumont's 1886 book La France Juive (Jewish France) attacked the role of Jews in France and argued for their exclusion from society. In 1892 Drumont founded the newspaper the La Libre Parole which became a platform for virulent antisemitism. This newspaper also came out against 'Diana Vaughan', an invention of Léo Taxil, before Taxil admitted that his anti-Masonic protégée did not exist in 1897. La Libre Parole preferred the 'seeress' Henriette Couedon.
Édouard Drumont was sued for accusing a parliamentary deputy of having taken a bribe from the prominent Jewish banker Edouard Alphonse de Rothschild to pass a piece of legislation the banker wanted. Drumont attracted many supporters and was one of the primary sources of antisemitic ideas that would later be embraced by Nazism. He exploited the Panama Company Scandal and reached the peak of his notoriety during the Dreyfus Affair, in which he was the most strident of Alfred Dreyfus' accusers.
Being superstitious, Drumont carried a mandrake root around with him and attacked Georges Boulanger on the basis of palmistry.
