IN 1878, WHEN the Sacré-Coeur had not yet risen much above its foundation, another ungainly Romano-Byzantine hulk materialized on the bluffs overlooking Paris’s Right Bank. This one, named the Palais du Trocadéro, commanded a World’s Fair grander than any of its predecessors, with international pavilions spread over sixty-six acres. The guidebook English visitors brought with them was titled Paris Herself Again. Across the Seine, on the Champ de Mars, where Eiffel was to build his tower a decade later, an immense hall displayed material evidence of France’s postwar recovery. Side by side under transverse arches in a long gallery stood machines large and small. On the Esplanade of the Invalides, an agricultural show featured every breed of French goat, cow, and sheep. Several hundred “indigenous people” spent six months in a human zoo called the Negro Village. Model houses illustrating the domestic architecture of countries the world over (except Germany, where a more fateful congress of nations took place in June, to carve up the Balkan peninsula) lined a central avenue lit after dark by electric streetlamps. Each continent exhibited its dress, its food, its art, its wares, its tools. And America was well represented at the groaning board. Thomas Edison’s phonograph and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone drew large crowds. Crowds also swirled around the disembodied head of Bartholdi’s statue of Liberty, which sat outside the Trocadéro Palace years before it crossed the Atlantic.
The newly triumphant Left, celebrating its ascendancy in conjunction with this kermis, declared June 30 a national holiday. The occasion was an unhappy one for antirepublicans. “I was surrounded all day long by the howling, hateful, stupid joy of the multitude demanding that Chinese lanterns and flags hang from all windows, and from mine in particular,” Edmond de Goncourt complained. “Unbelievably, flags were draped on hearses transporting their dead to the cemetery.” But Goncourt’s progressive compatriots saw Paris as the impresario of a new, intellectually adventurous community. Should not this World’s Fair dramatizing the victory of mind over matter enjoy even more prestige than the Olympic Games of antiquity? asked a newspaper columnist in Le Temps. “Every nation [wants] to relate its victories over the elements, to divulge the manner in which it has remade God’s work, to exhibit the instruments it has invented to correct our planet, to channel rivers, to pierce isthmuses, to displace seas, to create continents, to render the transmission of thought swifter than lightning, to project the human voice over prodigious distances, … to govern water, air, fire. …” Why not dig a tunnel beneath the English Channel (plans for which were on display, along with those for other, more imminent, public works)? He confidently assured his readers that on the whirligig of modern life, visionaries born “before their time,” who in slower times would have died unrecognized, could now expect to witness the accomplishment of their dreams.
Although Pius IX’s denunciations of gross materialism were still ringing loudly when the fair opened, on May 1, three months after his death, Catholic France did not shun the event. The archbishop of Algiers joined Victor Hugo in sponsoring a lecture by the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who had recently returned from Senegal. Exhibitions attested to the Church’s missionary work around the world. The faithful came in strength, for all the reasons that sixteen million people came: to revel, to learn, to buy. Above all, to buy. Like the Frenchmen who rejoiced in republican success, those who deplored it binged on exotic trophies. And their acquisitiveness was by no means limited to gala sprees at the fair. With their power waning in the National Assembly, the rich and the not-so-rich sought compensation outside parliament, in the financial world (just as many high-level administrations associated with MacMahon’s regime of Moral Order left government service for commerce). Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the rise and fall of the Union Générale.
The Palais du Trocadéro, built for the Exposition Universelle of 1878 (and demolished fifty-nine years later to make way for the Palais du Chaillot at the Exposition Internationale of 1937).
THE UNION GÉNÉRALE began as an investment fund launched during the summer of 1875 by two Parisian bankers in association with aristocratic sponsors and at least one deputy known for his allegiance to the Bourbon cause. A prospectus titled Appel aux catholiques announced that the founders had every intention of “consolidating the financial strength of Catholics, creating profitable returns for them, and thus enabling them to seize some of the power monopolized by opponents of their faith and of their interests.” At stake was the very survival of “religion” and “Society.” It behooved Catholics, the crusading prospectus went on, not to do business with Jewish and Protestant bankers. Should the fund prosper, its beneficiaries would be missions, convents, and parochial schools.
It did not really prosper until 1878, when an infusion of money from conservatives defeated in the recent elections gave it new life. Reorganized as a commercial bank, the Union Générale placed at its helm Eugène Bontoux, an entrepreneur with strong monarchist ties. Bontoux would one day acquire lasting fame outside high finance as the model for Zola’s character Aristide Saccard in L’Argent; but while Saccard’s dreams are all about a capitalist reconquest of the Holy Land, Bontoux’s centered on Eastern Europe. The Eden ripe for industrial exploitation, as he saw it, was Austria-Hungary, where he had already made his personal fortune.
Bontoux came with a checkered past. Having studied civil engineering at France’s élite technical institute, the École Polytechnique, he found himself in 1846, at age twenty-six, posted to Roanne as the director of public works in the upper Loire valley and, while there, published a pamphlet urging the construction of a railroad line between the Loire and the Rhône rivers. Written in the language of technocratic enthusiasm, his argument impressed Paulin Talabot, an older alumnus of Polytechnique, who had grasped the future of rail transportation years earlier, after watching George Stephenson’s locomotive ply between Manchester and Liverpool. What Stephenson had done in the Midlands Talabot accomplished in the Midi, with a railroad that linked the coal fields near Alès to a Rhône River port at Beaucaire. Although rebuffed by government ministers, most of whom, like their counterparts in England, took a dim view of the new technology, he obtained financial backing from venturesome financiers, above all James de Rothschild, and during the 1840s proceeded to build the line that would ultimately connect Paris, Lyon, and Marseille: the PLM. It was well under way when Eugène Bontoux became his protégé.
By 1857 Bontoux had moved from Roanne to Vienna as a high-level employee of the Austrian State Railroad, or Staatsbahn (whose principal investors were French). What led to his expatriation remains unclear. It is thought that he launched an enterprise of his own upon leaving government service, that he failed, and would have suffered grievously if Talabot had not intervened. We know that Talabot himself played a decisive role in his subsequent career. In 1860, Bontoux left the Staatsbahn for the Südbahn (the Southern or Lombard Line), joining a company owned by the Rothschilds and directed by Talabot; he eventually succeeded Talabot as chief executive and stayed with the Südbahn until 1877.
Like his mentor, Bontoux—a stooped, gaunt, rumpled man—lived and breathed mines and railroads, and the thought of their proliferation generated inexhaustible energy in him. Space was there to be conquered: for the thrill of conquest, for the love of money, and for the sake of Christ. “Something of a promoter” is how the Crédit Lyon-nais’s informant pictured him. “Highly intelligent but feverishly imaginative.” His showmanship propelled him beyond the Südbahn into a sphere of grand enterprise governed by his commitment to conservative ideals. Modern technology and the social order of yesteryear had equal claims upon Bontoux’s imagination. In an article on the Carpathian basin he declared that Austria-Hungary, with what strength it still retained, needed to develop its commerce and industry, this being “the only way open for empires in our day to achieve greater wealth and power.” Empires included his own imperial ego.
The Gallery of French Machines at the Exposition Universelle of 1878.
Bontoux did not leave the Südbahn in 1877 of his own accord. His private ventures, undertaken with backing from financiers in Lyon, encroached upon the Rothschilds’ sphere of influence. It is known, for example, that he curried favor with compatriots by attempting to have the Crédit Lyonnais replace the Rothschild bank as Hungary’s principal loan contractor.
If such flagrant disloyalty offended his employer, so, no doubt, did his controversial participation in French politics. When still executive director of the Southern railroad, Bontoux had presented himself as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies from his native town of Gap, near Lyon, in the elections that followed MacMahon’s quasi-coup d’état. Republicans scored a decisive victory and afterward accused several elected conservatives of peddling influence. One of these was Bontoux, who had in fact donated liberally to Catholic charities. The right-wing newspaper L’Union declared that his munificence expressed the promptings of a conscience unacquainted with paltry political considerations. Bontoux, in defending himself before the Assembly, pleaded innocent of clericalism. “During the thirty years [it had been only twenty] I’ve lived outside France, the dictionary has undergone several modifications. … No one could define [the word clericalism] for me, so I have defined it as it applies to me, and it is this, gentlemen: I can’t imagine human society doing without the faith that makes its unjustifiable sufferings and frightful inequities endurable. … I also can’t imagine civil society functioning under church rule. To each its own domain.” Neither his well-publicized advocacy of the pope’s temporal power nor his overt courtship of Chambord, the would-be king in his castle near Vienna, signified hostility to the secular Republic, he protested. Rather, he “awaited” the restoration of the pope’s temporal authority as Jews await the Messiah, without expecting it to occur in historical time. A liberal newspaper, Le Rappel, doubted that “clericals” less profitably employed than he were quite so “patient and platonic.” In the end, Bontoux’s self-defense did him no good anywhere. At Versailles his election was invalidated, and in Austria the government bridled at his insistence to the National Assembly that during his years abroad French interests had always been his foremost concern.
The man who took command of the Union Générale in 1878 brought with him a provision of anger that only nourished his grandiose dreams. Seventeen years earlier Bontoux had published an article in the influential monthly La Revue des deux mondes enumerating the benefits to be reaped from a rail connection between Trieste and Budapest. With an outlet to the sea, Hungary’s Pannonian wheat fields would feed Europe, eclipsing Ukraine, and enrich the Hapsburg monarchy* Since then his horizons had broadened. By 1878 he envisioned trains traversing southeastern Europe from Vienna and Budapest to Salonika and Constantinople. Nothing could then impede the industrialization of the Balkans. Capital would flow from France—through the Union Générale—and eventually yield huge dividends. To be sure, profit was not the whole of Bontoux’s vision. Joined to a regenerated Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Balkans would fortify European Christendom against Russia. The whole Danube basin would serve as Europe’s barbican, keeping Asia outside the continent.
Bontoux embraced the Union Générale’s chartered goals—of pooling the financial resources of Catholics and challenging the power wielded by “opponents of their faith and their interests.” The reconstituted joint-stock bank opened a branch in Rome, where high prelates (including Cardinal Jacobini, secretary to the pope) and rich princes invested substantial sums. Paris and Lyon attracted the same clientele. Bishops, archbishops, curates, aristocrats—among them, Henri, Comte de Chambord—crowded the list of shareholders. Surrounding Bontoux on the Union’s board were Prince Bandini, Francesco Borghese, the Marquis de Ploeuc (a former director of the Imperial Ottoman Bank), the Vicomte Mayol de Luppé (four of whose six daughters were nuns), the Count Hennequin de Villermont, a dozen more active legitimists, and Eugène Veuillot—whose famous brother, Louis Veuillot, noted at this time, “In Italy, in Germany, in Austria, Jews are really leading the attack against Christianity. They take too much satisfaction in being ‘kings of the age.’ Never has a big Jew loomed as large as he does today.”*
To strenuously apostolic colleagues, Bontoux did not seem enough of a crusader. His restraint, however, was no doubt calculated. Why flaunt the scepter and the cross when everyone knew what the Union Générale stood for? Emblems over the front door might needlessly scare away non-Catholic investors and depositors. With the accomplishment of his visions always in mind, Bontoux offered hospitality to anyone who could afford it.
Between 1878 and 1881, the Union Générale repaid its shareholders sixfold. Those three years were prosperous ones in France. Under prime minister Charles de Freycinet, the Republic initiated a program of public works aimed at revitalizing an economy laid waste by the Franco-Prussian War. Industrial production increased, foreign trade expanded, railway lines reached across the provinces, goods sped to their destinations. An age of plenty had dawned, and plenty begot an appetite for more, even among petit-bourgeois schooled in thrift. The result was a fever of speculation. Traders at the Paris Bourse made more noise than had been heard there since the get-rich-quick days of the Second Empire as stock issues multiplied and the value of shares soared.
The value of Union Générale shares soared higher than most, with a portfolio reflecting its president’s aggressiveness and ubiquity. When insurance was all the rage, Bontoux launched half a dozen insurance companies. After gaining control of the Bank of Milan, he acquired real estate and water resources in Italy through affiliates of his own creation. He was instrumental in forming the company that built railroads in Brazil. He invested in Russian factories, in Roman tramways, in Romania’s natural gas fields, in French breweries, in the Paris-New York Telegraph Society, in the French Electric Power company. To some extent, a wave of general prosperity was floating all boats; but when he addressed his shareholders, Bontoux credited divine providence with the Union’s successful debut.
Divine providence smiled widest farther east, where Bontoux still situated his most tenacious dreams of entrepreneurial conquest. Having concluded that those dreams were not likely to be realized without a base in Vienna, he invented an Austrian sibling for the Union Générale: the Österreichische Länderbank. This new arrival could only be seen as an interloper in the territory of the credit bank established by Anselm von Rothschild in 1855, when Austria desperately needed capital to bail itself out of debt and regenerate industry. After twenty-five years, the Rothschild consortium was so well entrenched that Bontoux would have thought it impossible to find purchase in the Hapsburg Empire had political events not favored his intrusion. When the Liberal Party fell from power in 1879, the new prime minister, a half-Irish aristocrat named Eduard Graf Taaffe, formed a coalition government encompassing the court, the clergy, Czech and Polish militants demanding a federalist constitution, and Viennese burghers resentful of capitalism and Jews.* Taaffe wanted to oust German banking interests—particularly the Rothschilds, who had long been bedfellows of the Liberal Party. He found a natural ally in Bontoux, and thus the Länderbank enjoyed direct government patronage from the first, with clear results. No sooner had he assumed power than he set in motion a scheme for binding the newly independent kingdom of Serbia to Austria-Hungary economically and thus staving off Russia.† His Balkan policy hinged on a rail connection with the Ottoman port of Salonika, via Belgrade; building and controlling this Serbian link became Bontoux’s mandate, and his prize.
Claiming the prize meant groping through a labyrinth of peninsular politics. There were several proposals for a trans-Balkan railroad, the competition was fierce, and the players all had much to gain and something to skirt. Count Taaffe wanted a north-south line. Russia, which relied on its pan-Slavic lobby, sought independence of the Turkish straits with a line running west from Odessa to the Adriatic. Impoverished Serbia wanted any money it could borrow. And in Austria-Hungary, the Staatsbahn, Bontoux’s original employer, proposed to loop around Serbia altogether by extending its track along the Danube east to Craiova in Romania, then south across Bulgaria to a junction with Baron de Hirsch’s Constantinople line. The Staatsbahn fought Bontoux tooth and nail. Largely owned and administered by French banks, it put pressure on France’s foreign minister, who immediately cautioned his ambassador in Constantinople about “the drawbacks of the monopoly that a powerful firm subservient to the Austro-Hungarian government may obtain.” Turkey should communicate with the outside world by as many openings as possible, he believed, the better to hinder the “exclusive action” of any one power.
Within Serbia itself, Bontoux won out. Under military threat from Austria, Serbia signed customs and commercial treaties, one of which included a one-hundred-million-franc bond issue managed by the Bontoux group for construction of a trans-Serbian railroad extending 365 kilometers from Vranje near the country’s southern border with the Ottoman Empire to Belgrade, near its northern border with Austria-Hungary. The terms of the concession, which was calculated to place Serbia squarely within Austria’s sphere of influence, were more than favorable. Vienna offered to pay as much as 225,000 francs per kilometer, or 75,000 more than Bontoux’s estimated costs. Bontoux would receive further subsidies (7 percent of the total value of materials used) and 2 percent of gross receipts. The Chemins de Fer de l’État Serbe would be Austrian-and Länderbank-owned in everything but name.
The French press played fanfares. Bontoux was seen not as a robber baron but as an agent of civilization. “Gathering over centuries the produce of their fields and livestock, Serbs have amassed veritable treasures, which awaited only the opportunity to emerge from the burrows in which they had been secreted,” one publicist declaimed in La Revue des deux mondes. “Wrapped in their rustic goatskins, they rushed forward and, opening their valiant hands, hands full of gold, said to rich financial groups: ‘Here, take this, and reattach our dear country to the most civilized nations.’” In truth, the valiant hands that dispensed contracts, then and after the accession of King Milan I in Serbia in 1882, held no gold but the bribes offered by predatory aspirants. One informed observer described French activity in Serbia as systematic despoliation.
Railroads and the coal mines that fueled them were kindred enterprises, and while negotiating the Serbian line Bontoux set about acquiring the region’s mineral wealth. Beginning with Styrian coalfields south of Graz, he extended his reach around the Adriatic to fields near Trieste, and in 1881, presided over the creation of the Trifail-Carpano Society.
Bontoux had not forgotten the Church. He sent the pope an annual tithe of two hundred thousand francs. He gave the Jesuits of Lyon their headquarters. Under his sponsorship, all necessary arrangements were made to find the Dominicans a home in Austria. If divine providence had continued to smile upon him, how much more might have been accomplished? His original goal, he later wrote, had been to shelter the Church from political turmoil and render it impervious to the “covetous maneuvers of civil society.” He lived in a world where “Catholics are threatened in the exercise of their rights by a foe who strives ever more relentlessly to starve their most essential institutions. They have suffered blows to head and heart: the Papacy has been despoiled; Catholic charity mutilated. The temporal realm of the former is no more; the patrimony of the latter diminishes day by day.” Bontoux’s endowment would let everyone know that the Holy See need never go begging. Plans for an impregnable shelter had been laid in the form of two funds—the Treasure of Saint Peter and the Treasure of Catholic Charities—but neither would ever come to fruition. Nor would Bontoux’s plans to create a chain of newspapers combating Freemasonry in Italy and abroad.
The Union Générale lived only three hectic years. By mid-1881, playing the stock market in Lyon had become a collective delirium. Brokers invited all and sundry to open accounts. Purchases on credit were rampant. Outside the major banks, clerks chalked market quotations on blackboards every half hour, and large crowds gathered to watch. The Bourse was Grand Opera for ladies with lorgnettes perched in a gallery above the trading floor. Special trains brought speculators in from the suburbs on settlement dates. “All of Lyon,” one journalist reported, “is at the Union Générale: silk merchants, textile manufacturers, grocers, concierges, shoemakers, pensioners, haberdashers.” The Chamber of Commerce noted that money normally invested in the city’s principal industry, silk manufacture, was being diverted to securities. “Many of our manufacturers curtailed their production and restricted their purchases of raw material to the bare minimum.” Union Générale stock rose from 500 francs to 3,000. There were warnings that this overvalued, unregulated market would, like a fat man running harum-scarum on spindly legs, crash to earth once it stumbled. Léon Say, a distinguished economist who served several administrations as minister of finance, expressed grave concern. Nonetheless, in November Bontoux prevailed upon his colleagues at the Union to issue one hundred thousand new shares. His Balkan proj ects required more capital, he insisted, and, given the vastly enlarged scale of economic activity throughout Europe, it behooved the bank to enlarge itself accordingly.
The arrest, in 1882, of the two principals in the Crash of the Union Générale, Bontoux and Feder.
The crash—which heralded an economic recession from which the country would not fully recover for years—came in January 1882. When, during that month, investors began to pull back, the market, lacking an appropriate clearinghouse and daily margin settlements, could not handle their withdrawal. As values plunged and money drained away, one calamity led to another. The turmoil at Lyon, France’s most important financial center after Paris, had immediate repercussions on every French exchange. Suez shares trading at 3,440 francs on January 7 were down to 2,000 by the end of the month.
During that same interval the Union Générale fell from 3,040 back to 500 despite Bontoux’s efforts to shore it up against market forces. On January 19, 1882, the firm suspended operations. In early February it was declared bankrupt.
The bank’s books reflected badly on a director who fancied himself a knight pledged to king and Christ; the state-appointed auditor discovered pervasive malfeasance. Under examination, Bontoux blamed others. “I departed for Vienna at the beginning of January, leaving the bank in glowing health,” he declared. “I returned to find a corpse. Irregular operations had been conducted during my absence.” Company records were confiscated and Bontoux himself jailed in the Conciergerie (a suitable prison for a champion of the Bourbon pretender, as it was in this medieval fortress that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had spent their last hours). There he awaited trial on charges of fiduciary irresponsibility, violation of laws governing joint-stock companies, and fraud, until released on bail.
Investors were still reeling from news of Bontoux’s imprisonment when his champions in the right-wing press declared irately that he had fallen victim to rival bankers. A malevolent syndicate, which Bontoux later dubbed “the Sanhedrin,” had brought down the Union Générale by shouting fire and inciting a rush for the exit. Major shareholders planned to meet on February 3 and might have saved it at the eleventh hour, but minister of justice Gustave Humbert—portrayed as a Rothschild valet—delivered the fatal blow before they convened. Le Salut public, a Lyon newspaper, denounced the “maneuvers of a group of German Jews” on January 22. Four days later, another Lyon newspaper, the Moniteur universel, alluded darkly to a “plot hatched by German Jewish bankers.” It asserted that “the Union Générale, stunned by an association of short sellers, faced death at its most vital moment. … Timely measures might have saved everything, and indeed, shareholders would have taken them. The abrupt intervention of the government destroyed all hopes.” Arresting Bontoux two days before the shareholders met could have had only one motive.
Evidence did not support rumors of a conspiracy. To be sure, Albert Salomon von Rothschild, head of Austrian Rothschild interests, attempted to rein in a wildly exuberant horse by buying and dumping Union stock, but his maneuver was not what doomed the bank. Liberal newspapers agreed that Bontoux had only himself to blame. The Union Générale functioned as a “machine for speculating,” one reporter observed. “The principle on which [it] rested is this: ‘I buy all I can sell.’ M. Bontoux never considered the real value of enterprises in which he invested, nor their probable revenue, but simply the prospect of being able to place their stock and create an immediate, necessarily factitious appreciation. He clearly excelled in such deals [and] had a numerous clientele … who regarded him as a financial messiah. They will now be ruined along with him.” The false messiah was described as a true successor to John Law, the Scottish financial genius responsible for the eighteenth century’s most notorious bubble, the Mississippi Scheme.*
At his trial in December 1882, Bontoux was found guilty of all charges (hiking the value of the Union Générale shares “by fraudulent ways and means,” distributing fictitious dividends, falsifying stock subscriptions in a quarterly report) and sentenced to five years in prison. The following March an Appeals Court upheld the verdict but reduced the sentence to two years. In June, the High Court, or Cour de Cassation, decided not to quash previous rulings, whereupon Bontoux fled from France. He lived abroad until 1888, mostly in Saragossa, Spain, making money from a silver mine, and returned only when the statute of limitations expired. Certain that the judgment against him had been dictated before the trial ever took place, he compared it to “the practice of law under arbitrary, tyrannical regimes.”
Édouard Drumont, author of La France juive and founder of the daily La Libre parole, photographed by Nadar. Drumont railed obsessively against Jews during the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus Affair. He did not object to being called “the pope of anti-Semitism.”
As for the Church, an ecclesiastic from Lyon who taught theology at the community of Chartreux, Father Fleury Deville, offered Bontoux doctrinal absolution in a book written shortly after his well-publicized flight, Stock Exchange Operations in the Court of Conscience: Moral and Juridical Studies. While the court of conscience—that is, the voice of God—did not sanction “agiotage,” or gambling, it found “spéculation” entirely acceptable and, indeed, had nothing but praise for “laborious and intelligent financiers who study and work.” A secular court might sometimes be harsher than the court of conscience, observed Deville, echoing John Calvin’s justification of capitalist finance on the grounds that “if all usury is condemned, tighter fetters are imposed on the conscience than the Lord himself would wish.” Should one always feel compelled, then, to respect a secular court’s judgment? “We do not believe so. … One may in good conscience, by roundabout means, elude the often implacable decisions of tribunals,” wrote Deville. In a preface, Cardinal Caverot, archbishop of Lyon, thanked Father Deville for guiding the reader so expertly through a minefield where “justice,” presumably the justice Bontoux did not receive, “often comes out second best.”
FOR TRUE BELIEVERS, the idea that one of their own had beguiled them proved intolerable. A scapegoat was needed, not only to preserve Bontoux’s honor but to immunize his victims against the realization that their own greed had made them easy prey, and the scapegoat was found where it had always been sought: in the Jew. Bontoux, a Catholic financier, having providentially appeared to restore all that mattered most in public life—the pope’s well-being, the Church’s Italian estates, the king’s crown, France’s stature—had been crucified by Rothschild and his coreligionists. This legend, which the right-wing press lost no time in disseminating, soon established itself as fact in two books, La France juive and La France juive devant l’opinion, by Édouard Drumont, a journalist of modest attainments, who gained fame and fortune with a conspiratorial worldview that foreshadowed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.*
In every particular Drumont parroted Bontoux’s trial testimony. He laid blame for all that had gone wrong at the doorstep of a colleague secretly beholden to “hostile interests,” which encompassed the republican government as well as a fraternity of Jewish banks. Indeed, the two were held to be inseparable. “Today, the entire might of the State is placed at the service of the Jewish monopoly,” he wrote. “The government, which supposedly represents everyone, uses the formidable resources conferred upon it by the collective citizenry to benefit a few at the expense of the many.”
In Drumont’s narrative, what had happened at the end of January 1882 proved that there was a conspiracy. The Union Générale scheduled a meeting of shareholders for February 3. The likelihood that enough money would be raised to save the bank alarmed Rothschild, who immediately conferred with his “lackeys,” the ministers of finance and justice. Their hope, Drumont continued, was to build a case against Bontoux before February 3. On February 1 the public prosecutor investigating Bontoux’s affairs, Louis Loew, was approached by a merchant named Lejeune, who alleged that the bank had pilfered 240,000 francs from his account in order to acquire its own stock through a straw man. Loew gave Lejeune a pen, dictated a deposition, and thus produced the document “that would cause the ruin of so many families and the suicide of so many unfortunates.” Did this Jewish prosecutor (Loew was, in fact, an Alsatian Protestant) believe for a moment that he had behaved incorrectly? Not at all:
Son of our innate enemy, he served his race and helped to crush ours. He has his own code and he applies it. Refer here to the passage in my France juive that contains Talmudic prescriptions governing trials between Jews and Goyim. Rabbi Ismael, in a chapter of the Baba-Kamina entitled “The Thief,” declares that where no law supports a ruling in favor of the Jewish litigant, “fraud and guile are permissible.” … Loew received his reward for services rendered to Israel. A simple prosecutor of the Republic at the time of the Union’s crash, he was named attorney general in Paris on April 12, 1883, and appointed president of the High Court on May 16, 1886.
In this telling of the story, Loew effectively destroyed Bontoux: by February 3, 1882, when Bontoux’s ship would have reached safe harbor, it was scuttled with all aboard, while Jews in Paris’s beaux quartiers exulted. “That is how the Rothschilds understand war,” wrote Drumont, “and no one should be astonished by the transports of joy with which La France juive has been received, a book that has afforded me the satisfaction of seeing victims dance in the street.” Lejeune withdrew his deposition on February 7, six days after entering it. From that, Drumont inferred that he had been pressured by Loew into bearing false witness and subsequently felt remorseful. But by February 7 Lejeune would have been satisfied that justice was being served and that the courts would eventually extract some compensation from the authors of his misfortune. In any event, the warrant to arrest Bontoux and the declaration of bankruptcy were based mainly on a preliminary audit of the Union Générale’s books rather than on Lejeune’s allegation. Most economic historians agree that nothing could have been done at a meeting on February 3 to save the bank, but for Drumont and Bontoux its thwarted salvation was an indispensable fantasy.
Not every victim danced to his tune. Drumont fulminated against cosmopolitan aristocrats who befriended the enemy. When titled residents of the Faubourg Saint-Germain should have been wearing black, they dressed as animals for the Princesse de Sagan’s costume ball and cavorted with rich Jews. When Alphonse de Rothschild should have been ostracized, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia accepted an invitation to his salon. It astonished Drumont that some otherwise enthusiastic readers of La France juive could reproach him for criticizing the duke. He had not called into question La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia’s “private virtues,” he protested, only his public deportment. An aristocrat of ancient lineage should have recognized that his elementary duty was to spurn those whose greed had ruined so many lives. “If, instead of worshipping at the humble parish of Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou, I had met La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia at Saint-Clotilde,” wrote Drumont,
I would have candidly said to him while offering him the holy water: “My brother, it will not do for a leader of the Catholic party to go dancing at the home of Jews when so many miserable victims of Israel are in tears over the loss of their savings or killing themselves out of despair. Your place is not at those balls where violins can’t quite muffle the distant rattle of the dying. Before entertaining yourself among the Rothschilds, wait until those of your brothers in Jesus Christ whom the Rothschilds condemned to death have stopped swaying at the end of their ropes.”
Among Christians, such language was entirely permissible, he insisted. “The Gospel says: Unicuique mandavit Deus de proximo suo.”*
Drumont considered the Crash one more baleful event in a cultural and racial war undermining France’s soul. Ironically, his screed comports with a myth, embraced by the Jacobins during the French Revolution, according to which noblemen and commoners sprang from different stock, commoners being Gauls and aristocrats descendants of the Germanic Franks.† In Drumont’s transposition, a Germanic tribe had again conquered France, but as “Jewish bankers from Frankfurt.”
According to La France juive devant l’ Opinion, the Crash had set in bolder relief than any previous catastrophe the opposition between the barbaric energy of Semites and the moral lassitude of civilized Frenchmen. Hun-like was the invader’s ruthlessness. If he worshipped a god other than the Golden Calf, it was not one who tempered the wind to the shorn lamb. “Nothing softens his heart, nothing humanizes him. He may mingle with gentlemen at the Jockey Club, but inside him is a savage Shylock.” Bred in the bone, like original sin, Jewish avidity was understandable only as a feral instinct exceeding material needs. Predators in the wild cease to hunt when their hunger is sated. Jews, on the other hand, are insatiable.
Of what use to the Rothschilds was booty from the Union Générale? They didn’t need more silver for their table, another painting for their gallery, one more horse for their stables. The men whom they set upon were the most distinguished representatives of a social world that had welcomed these Germans, had opened wide the doors to its salons, had initiated them into its life. … Many had bought stock with only one goal in mind: making more money to give away as charity.
So, Drumont concluded, a prouder nobleman than La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia would tell the “German” bankers who had wrecked Catholic France that “we are the sons of a different civilization and your ways are not ours;” that the anguish of destitute old priests, minor functionaries, and domestics was never to be forgotten; that Jews might have ministers, magistrates, and the press in their pay, but that his people had a homeland they would defend.
EUGèNE BONTOUX RETURNED from exile in 1888, bringing with him the manuscript of L’Union Générale: Sa Vie, Sa Mort, Son Programme. No one welcomed him as warmly as Édouard Drumont, who may have met the fugitive during his clandestine sojourns in Paris. Drumont had already proven himself Bontoux’s loyal advocate, and loyal he remained in La Libre parole, the daily newspaper he founded in 1892 to expose the machinations of Jews and Freemasons. As we shall see, the Dreyfus affair would be heaven-sent for the journalist standing on an anti-Semitic platform.
In 1902, two decades after “le Krach,” when the rage it fueled had been spent on Dreyfus, and when memories had begun to fade, a scandal gave Bontoux the perfect pretext to rehearse his story in La Libre parole. Brought to book that year was a swindler named Thérèse Humbert. Passing herself off as the illegitimate child of a great American tycoon and heiress to his fortune, she had defrauded people of millions. It so happened that Madame Humbert was the daughter-in-law of Gustave Humbert, who in 1882, as France’s minister of justice, had sponsored Bontoux’s indictment. Thérèse had apparently deceived him as well. But without the bona fides his name conferred upon her, her criminal career might not have been possible, and La Libre parole made much of this. “Amidst the enormous brouhaha over ‘the biggest fraud of the century,’ one suddenly hears voices evoking the juridical assassination of the Union Générale,” wrote Bontoux. Time had turned the accusations hurled at him twenty years earlier against the accusers. It had given truth the upper hand and shown a minister and a prosecutor for what they were: Humbert a fraud, Loew something even worse. Hadn’t Loew, after his appointment to a judgeship on the High Court, voted to grant Captain Dreyfus a new trial, “wrapping the traitor protectively in the folds of his red robe”?
Bontoux’s La Libre article (published as a pamphlet by Drumont) stops just short of explicitly declaring that Jews committed treason in 1882, when “the Sanhedrin” destroyed a bank whose success would have enlarged the power, prestige, and well-being of France. “We had laid the foundation for substantial enterprises, in which France, her men and industry, would have played an important role.” Napoléon never advanced beyond Moscow, but Bontoux, at the behest of General Annenkov, would have crossed Siberia. His would have been the hand controlling rail transportation between Europe and Asia, along three thousand kilometers of track in the Balkan peninsula. Through one of its companies, French Electric Power, the Union Générale would have illuminated France and strung telephone lines across the country. Defeated in war, France would have made good all its losses, and more, in economic conquest.
It did not suit Jews and Germans that France should prosper, in Bontoux’s view. Their conspiracy explained what may have seemed fortuitous. It was a key for understanding the apparent randomness of blows to national pride and financial well-being. On the one hand Rothschild wanted no competition from the Union Générale, on the other Bismarck regarded with dismay the prospect of a French company blocking his access to the Orient. “Because it had emerged as a powerful instrument of French expansion, because it served France everywhere and passionately, it was condemned by M. de Bismarck for Germany’s sake and by Jewish finance for Israel’s. Messieurs Humbert and Loew are secondary figures in a larger drama, that of ‘the Jewish jackal clearing a path for the German lion.’” * The “Krach,” which Jews and Germans orchestrated, Bontoux concluded, set the country back fifty years.
* During the last decades of the century, Budapest did in fact become the largest milling center in the world and remained the second largest when overtaken by Minneapolis.
* Les Juifs, rots de l’époque: Histoire de la féodalité financiére was the title of a book published in 1847 by Alphonse Toussenel.
* Their vituperation began in great earnest after the stock-market crash of 1873. More generally, anti-Semitism was fueled by economic problems that attended the institution of free enterprise. “Laissez-faire, devised to free the economy from the fetters of the past, called forth the Marxist revolutions of the future,” Carl Schorske noted in his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. “Catholicism, routed from the school and the courthouse as the handmaiden of aristocratic oppression, returned as the ideology of the peasant and artisan, for whom liberalism meant capitalism and capitalism meant Jew.”
† Serbia had been granted independence from the Ottoman Empire at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.
* Comparisons were also made with the Belgian financier Langrand-Dumonceau, who proposed, during the 1850s and 1860s, to establish a Catholic banking power. He arranged a large loan to the Vatican, was made a papal count by Pius IX, and touted himself with much the same flair as Bontoux. He, too, cast a spell on conservatives. Like stockholders in the Union Générale, investors in Langrand’s enterprise lost everything in a crash.
* La France juive devant l’opinion appeared in 1886, several months after the more ambitious La France juive. Neither one discriminated between fact and fable in its account of Jews clandestinely conquering France. La France juive, an encyclopedic, pseudoscholarly harangue, became one of the four or five best-selling books of the nineteenth century, appearing in several hundred editions.
* From the apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus: “And [God] taught each his duty towards his neighbor.” This cosmopolitan aristocracy, which enters Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the persons of Robert de Saint-Loup and the Prince and Princess de Guermantes, would enrage Drumont again in the 1890s, when members of it dared to side with Dreyfus.
† A line in the “Marseillaise” refers to this: “Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons” (May impure blood slake the furrows of our fields).
* As probative evidence of Bismarck’s involvement in the bank failure, Bontoux presents the following anecdote: “In October 1881, a great French lady who mixed in German court circles told one of my colleagues after returning from Berlin: ‘Beware! The Union Générale is doomed: M. de Bismarck has passed sentence on it.’ The remark seemed excessive to us at the time; it proved to be all too exact.”