The Assumptionists and the Dreyfus Affair

Abstract

On 22 January 1900, a dozen members of the Assumptionist Order were tried before the Paris Correctional Tribunal. Unlike the crooks and prostitutes who normally sat on the defence benches, these twelve ‘apostles’ were a picture of piety. They wore long black soutanes belted at the waist with leather strings and hooded capes, and the younger among them had tonsured heads, a sign of humility that associated them with medieval monks. Their leaders had sumptuous beards, a sign of worldly vanity within the Roman Catholic tradition but a symbol of priestly vocation in the Orthodox ‘Orient’ where they were missionaries. Seemingly oblivious to the mores of the secular court, they prayed with arms outstretched in the crucifixion pose and told their rosary beads, daring the public to distract them from their religious devotions. Despite their clerical demeanour and spiritual devotions, these men were ‘made to fight in life, and, when necessary, to show their muscles [biceps] on the squares of the town on election day’. 1 In the previous few years they had more than earned the description because of their role as right-wing propagandists during the Dreyfus Affair. The Jewish captain had been arrested for treason in 1894 and had been sent to solitary confinement on Devil's Island the following year. The campaign on his behalf was a low-level affair until November 1897, when Émile Zola expressed his doubts concerning the safety of Dreyfus's conviction. He followed up this article with an open letter in January 1898 in which he accused the army of hiding the truth of Dreyfus's innocence. Zola's trial for defamation in 1898 turned the Case into an Affair, with left- and right-wing coalitions battling each other in the press and in the streets. From this moment onwards, the Assumptionists took on a key role, deploying anti-Semitic invective to oppose a judicial revision of the verdict.

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