2023-07-17 17:52:49
We often receive words from readers. To stimulate us, thank us, even yell at us. But that day, the letter on my desk had some unusual content. In the envelope, an old number of The cross. From June 15, 1892. With this word: “We found it in our attic. Friendly ». I unfold the old pages, yellowed and fragile. The cross, with a Sulpician crucifix on the left. The price, 5 cents. The subject of one, a massacre of missionaries in Uganda. Left column, briefs.
After the announcement of a pilgrimage to Marseilles, slips a little information on a minister who wants to sanction the bosses who “dare to be Catholics” and don’t read “Jewish Organs” Press. “Jewish Organs”apparently, means anything that is not The cross. Another brief, on the expulsion of 25,000 Jews from Tsarist Russia: “Poor country they are about to invade. » Invaders, those expelled? I check the date: 1892, long before the Dreyfus Affair broke out. I knew that The cross had been a profoundly anti-Dreyfus newspaper. But I didn’t know he was an anti-Semite long before the “Affair”…
Living with the Republic
The old copy sat in my drawer for a long time. I thought about it often. Also, when it was announced that in 2023 we would mark the 140th anniversary of The crossI made up my mind: wasn’t this an opportunity to look into this anti-Semitism that seems to stick to the skin of the title at the time? The cross was and still is a Catholic newspaper. This is our story. Anti-Semitic roots are part of our past. I am a journalist at The cross, Catholic. Going in search of these roots, and seeing how, in one hundred and forty years, the newspaper has evolved in its relationship with Judaism is therefore essential. To better understand “this past that does not pass”.
One of La Croix from June 16, 1888, with the crucifix as an emblem.
In this trip, a historian holds a special place, Pierre Sorlin. Today, an elderly gentleman, whose intellectual vivacity has not aged a bit. He wrote a book “The Cross” and the Jews, in 1967, which had a certain success at the time, and then it was almost forgotten. Too bad, because the work is remarkable. The cover is taken from a caricature of The cross : on the left, a crucifix, in the background the steeple of a small village. And in front, two bad men, with big noses. Everything is said: the Jews against deep France, that of the villages and Calvaries… Pierre Sorlin tells me how he carefully studied the worst period, from 1883 to the end of the Dreyfus affair, 1898. He made pioneering work because, in 1967, we were just beginning to study anti-Semitism.
But back to the start. In 1883, year of the creation of The crossby the Assumptionists, whose small group, La Bonne Presse, already has a weekly, Pilgrim. The disappearance of the Count of Chambord that same year marks the end of the monarchist hypothesis. We will have to live with the Republic. There is no question of giving up the fight for God!
A popular newspaper to re-Christianize the masses
Behind the company Croix, two men, two religious from the Assumption, Father Picard and Father Bailly. Two “soldier monks” as they call themselves. From Father Bailly, this engraving: the man, white beard, stern gaze, dressed as a monk, leaning on the press table covered with a jumble of papers. At his belt, a big key. The keys to writing? The cross as a standard, the crucifix on the front page as if to defy a secular Republic which dispossessed them of their rights, our crusaders began their war. That of the Catholic Church, sounded by the French Revolution. The Old Christian Regime is replaced by a Republic which multiplies the vexatious laws for the Church, poses the threat of expulsion of the congregations.
Writing of La Croix in 1897, at 5 rue Bayard in Paris. Seated in the center: Father Bailly. / Archives The Good press.
Our two priests belong to the new Congregation of the Assumption, created by Father Emmanuel d’Alzon. Their training is very basic: they are there to carry the sword, not theology! On the other hand, they are good journalists. With their pen saber drawn, in the service of their Truth, they demonstrate journalistic flair and a keen sense of their audience. They have this brilliant intuition of a popular newspaper, simply written, to reach the masses, and re-Christianize them. Everything is good: miscellaneous facts, serial novels, images… and caricatures, alas. The tone is direct, punchy. Even if it means twisting the facts, but for the good of the Church. Today, we would speak of a populist newspaper, which divides the world in two: the good – the Church –, the bad – everything else, including the Republic, in the service of a plot led by the Freemasons , Protestants and, increasingly, Jews.
A news where the hand of God is expressed
With these recipes, The cross quickly established itself in a competitive landscape. There are over 90 titles in Paris alone. All shots are allowed. The press, at the time, can be compared to the social networks of today: combat newspapers, in which the Truth, at least the one in which we believe, allows all exaggerations. Our Assumptionists do not hesitate to do so, for better and, often, for worse.
The cross is a very modern newspaper, serving a reactionary, or at least restorative, ideology. No pious or apologetic tone, the key word here is topicality. But a news where the hand of God is expressed: a torrential rain which devastates the cultures of a department? The prefect is a Jew. A successful timber sale? The seller went to mass… This can make you laugh. But much less when one undertakes the review of all the articles against the Jews… I admit that I sometimes had to force myself to continue reading the old copies, so much the hatred, the violence are unimaginable on the part of a newspaper bearing high the crucifix.
“The anti-Semitism of Catholics has been nourished by their feeling of being attacked by the Republic”
With the Dreyfus affair, a violent and vulgar anti-Semitism
The cross however, did not wait for Édouard Drumont to criticize the Jews. She does it first with arguments ” religious “. Jews are a “fallen people”, but who remain the people of the religious promise. From 1886, The cross makes Drumont. Without Drumont. “The” Jew is no longer just the punishment for the sin of Christians, the accusation takes on its own autonomy. The Jews become a people apart: “Let them have their nationality, and deny them ours. » They ruin the national economy, and in particular the small peasantry. They “colonize” administration. They prevent Catholics from governing.
When a sexual affair is discovered at the monastery of Cîteaux, neither one nor two: the Jews have certainly engineered it. The Jews are gradually pushed out of the nation, with a replay of history: “In 1789, in the name of human rights which take no account of the rights of Christians and the rights of God, the invasion of modern nations by the Jew was proclaimed. » Note that we move from “the” to “the” Jew. A form of essentialism that makes me think of certain treatments, today, of “the” Muslim.
The “most anti-Jewish newspaper in France”
In August 1890, The cross proclaims himself the “the most anti-Jewish newspaper in France, the one that carries Christ, a sign of horror to the Jews”. Sentence to sinister posterity. Anti-Semitism is disseminated in all sections. Social unrest? The Jews who pay their workers badly. The repressions of the same workers? The Jews again. Individually perverse, socially dangerous, the Jews constitute a real national danger…
La Bonne Presse, however, differs from other anti-Semitic papers by the solution to the Jewish question, which is not in violence, she explains, but banishment, even the creation of a huge ghetto. On September 6, 1893, The cross publishes under the name “La octopus” a map of the world. In place of Great Britain, an octopus, whose tentacles surround most countries. Behind the animal appears a man, the Jew.
When the Dreyfus affair happened in 1894, Father Bailly saw it as a sign from heaven. Anti-Semitism takes a violent, vulgar turn. “Jewry has rotted everything”, elle “constitutes an octopus, a dreadful canker”. We throw names into the food. The cross, in 1898, is a basely anti-Semitic sheet. On July 21, a full page in large print on “Judas Dreyfus sold France: the Jews took everything, dirtied everything, destroyed everything. The Jews are in the process of upsetting France for the greater benefit of universal youtrerie. Let’s unite to upset Jewish omnipotence and kick the Jews out of France.… Hard to read that.
Cartoon published in La Croix during the Dreyfus Affair. / Archives The Good Press
Curiously, from August 1898, the newspaper remained anti-Semitic but ceased to make it its main business. Are the editors-in-chief worried about the violence of the crowd movements caused by the Dreyfus affair, which they themselves largely stoked? However, a first conclusion is in order: the “Good Press”, and The cross first, distilled high-dose anti-Jewish sentiment. It contributed to the formation of Catholic anti-Semitism at the end of the 19th century. What are its components? This is what we need to see now.
(1) Source : Deconstructing Christian Anti-JudaismConference of Bishops of France, Cerf, 2023.
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