umont's anti-Semitism, fully
justified his view of the prevailing corruption. Out of this condition
of things rose the Boulangist movement, which rallied all the
disaffected elements in the country, including Drumont's following of
anti-Semites. It was not, however, until the flight of General Boulanger
and the ruin of his party that anti-Semitism came forward as a political
movement.

The chief author of the rout of Boulangism was a Jewish politician and
journalist, Joseph Reinach (b. 1856), formerly private secretary to
Gambetta, and one of the ablest men in France. He was a Frenchman by
birth and education, but his father and uncles were Germans, who had
founded an important banking establishment in Paris. Hence he was held
to personify the alien Jewish domination in France, and the
ex-Boulangists turned against him and his co-religionists with fury. The
Boulangist agitation had for a second time involved the Legitimists in
heavy pecuniary losses, and under the leadership of the marquis de Mores
they now threw all their influence on the side of Drumont. An
anti-Semitic league was established, and with Royalist assistance
branches were organized all over the country. The Franco-Russian
alliance in 1891, when the persecutions of the Jews by Pobedonostsev
were attracting the attention of Europe, served to invest Drumont's
agitation with a fashionable and patriotic character. It was a sign of
the spiritual approximation of the two peoples. In 1892 Drumont founded
a daily anti-Semitic newspaper, _La Libre Parole_. With the organization
of this journal a regular campaign for the discovery of scandals was
instituted. At the same time a body of aristocratic swashbucklers, with
the marquis de Mores and the comte de Lamase at their head, set
themselves to terrorize the Jews and provoke them to duels. At a meeting
held at Neuilly in 1891, Jules Guerin, one of the marquis de Mores's
lieutenants, had demanded rhetorically _un cadavre de Juif_. He had not
long to wait. Anti-Semitism was most powerful in the army, which was the
only branch of the public service in which the reactionary classes were
fully represented. The republican law compelling the seminarists to
serve their term in the army had strengthened its Clerical and Royalist
elements, and the result was a movement against the Jewish officers, of
whom 500 held commissions. A series of articles in the _Libre Parole_
attacking these officers led to a number of ferocious due