The Dreyfus Affair

In my last summary post, I discussed the tendency of people to regard themselves as superior to other groups. Racism, of course, is a natural consequence of this, and Drumont's anti-semitic journalism and the Dreyfus affair provide good examples of racism. However, there is one other major factor that runs through this whole trend - when things are going badly, when you've just lost a Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when your Second Empire has just collapsed and been replaced with a Third Republic that already doesn't know what to do, when you're starting to feel like the chew toy in some kind of cosmic story of Europe, it's easy to just blame it all on the Jews, and that is what ended up happening.