Édouard Drumont

Édouard Adolphe Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French journalist and writer. He initiated the Antisemitic League of France during 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole. After spending years of research, he synthesized three major types of antisemitism. The first type was traditional Catholic attitudes toward the alien "Christ killers" augmented by vehement antipathy toward the French Revolution. The second type was hostility to capitalism, of the sort promoted by the Socialists. The third type was so-called scientific racism, based on the argument that races have fixed characteristics, and asserting that the Jews have negative characteristics.

Drumont was born in Paris during 1844 to a family of porcelain-painters from Lille. He lost his father at the age of seventeen, and had to care for himself and earn his own livelihood from then onwards.

He first worked in government service, and later became a contributor to the press and was the author of a number of works, of which Mon vieux Paris (1879) was awarded by the French Academy.

Drumont's 1886 book, La France juive (Jewish France), attacked the role of Jews in France and argued for their exclusion from society. During 1892, Drumont initiated the newspaper the La Libre Parole which became known for intense antisemitism. This newspaper was skeptical of Léo Taxil's anti-Catholic Diana Vaughan hoax before Taxil admitted it during 1897.

For the French legislative election of May 1898, the antisemitic activist Max Régis endorsed Drumont before this election from Algiers. On 8 May 1898 Édouard Drumont was elected triumphantly with 11,557 votes against 2,328 and 1,741 for his opponents. Of six Algerian national deputies, four were elected on the platform of Regis's Anti-Jewish League. Drumont represented Algiers in the Chamber of Deputies from 1898 to 1902. He was sued for accusing a parliamentary deputy of having accepted a bribe from the wealthy Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild to pass a piece of legislation the banker wanted.

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