Richard Harvey has recently posted (1 February 2016) an interesting blog post on the subject of antisemitism in the French Catholic newspaper La Croix in February 1882 (see below for his blog post). Significantly, La Croix, which was owned and run by the Assumptionist Fathers in France, frequently expressed extreme hostility towards Jews and Freemasons; this hostility was not confined to 1882, but extended throughout the 1880s and 1890s. For example, La Croix claimed in 1886 that Drumont’s “La France Juive”, and Léo Taxil’s “Frères trois points”, had “‘laid bare the two social evils which grow like gangrene in France,’ two social evils, ‘so united up to this time.’” Furthermore, according to La Croix, “the Declaration of the Rights of Man” was the work of “Jewish Freemasonry,” and was intended to give “land, influence, government, and press” to “the enemy.” (La Croix: 19 May 1886, 1; 12 August 1890, 1; originally cited and translated by Norman James Clary, “French Antisemitism During the Years of Drumont and Dreyfus 1886-1906,” PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1970, pp. 177-178, 215).

This hostility was also manifest in La Croix during the 1890s. Léo Taxil (formerly Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès), a French writer and ex-Freemason, whose writings frequently contained anti-Catholicism and anti-Masonry, constructed the character of Diana Vaughan as a fictitious female apostate from so-called “Palladian” Freemasonry. According to Diana Vaughan’s so-called memories (fabricated by Taxil in a series of instalments from July 1895 through to April 1897), she was a noble-minded lady who abandoned the misguided worship of Lucifer, converted to Roman Catholicism, and revealed the secret satanic inner workings of Freemasonry. In addition to Diana Vaughan’s extravagant memoirs, Taxil also wrote other elaborate stories about devil worship and sinister rituals in Masonic lodges, some of which were published under pseudonyms. These tales included bizarre accounts of Host desecration, Satanic magic, murder, the Antichrist, and the manifestations of Lucifer and Asmodeus. Whilst Taxil was the original inventor of Diana Vaughan, his construction took on a life of its own in a number of French and English Catholic discourses outside of his immediate control. In some of these discourses, the Jews were depicted as in league with the Freemasons, and as helping the Freemasons to undermine the evidence of Diana Vaughan’s existence. Among the admirers of his writings were various French bishops and the editors of La Croix. (Link for English Catholic responses to the Diana Vaughan hoax)

In the months following the end of the Diana Vaughan hoax, the Dreyfus Affair began in earnest. In 1897, La Croix claimed (without the slightest evidence) that a Dreyfusard Syndicate “disposes of not less than 2 million francs, for the purpose of paying secret agents.” The Dreyfusard syndicate, the paper suggested, was behind an “antipatriotic campaign,” which “in order to save the honour of a Dreyfus, puts in peril the security of the country and threatens the honour of our whole army.” (La Croix: ‘L’Affaire Dreyfus’, 18 November 1897, 2; and ‘L’Affaire Dreyfus’, 24 November 1897, 4; originally cited and translated by Clary, “French Antisemitism During the Years of Drumont and Dreyfus 1886-1906,” pp. 177-178, 215).

Significantly, the reports and articles in the Tablet, the then semi-official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Westminster in England, were similar in tone to those found in La Croix. For example, according to the Tablet, the Jews in France were “the declared and open enemies of the Christian religion; using their wealth and talents to obtain official positions, and the power with which these latter endow them to strike every blow that chance may afford at the Catholic faith; and they never miss a chance.” The Tablet also argued that “the Jews, in France, Italy, and Austria, the three principal Catholic nations of the continent, exercise a political influence entirely disproportioned to their numbers, and that this influence is always exercised against the religion of the country. In close alliance with the Freemasons, … they form the backbone of the party of aggressive liberalism, with war to the knife against the Church as the sum and aim of its policy.” Conveniently forgetting its own articles about the Jews during the Dreyfus Affair, which at the most generous could be described as ambivalent, and at times as antisemitic as La Croix, the Tablet on 16 September 1899 (i.e. when the injustice of the Dreyfus trials was no longer easy to ignore) described La Croix as an “irresponsible rag” because of its role in agitating against Jews during the Dreyfus Affair. Two weeks later it expressed sympathy for La Croix now that it was the turn of the Assumptionist Fathers to be harassed. The Tablet argued that “some words of La Croix which are less unreasonable than the quotations which have been going the round of the English press may be quoted, not as condoning its faults but in the spirit of giving it its due.” According to the Tablet, La Croix stated that: “the Dreyfus affair was a source of division and suffering. Let it be closed and let silence follow the vicious agitation which has been aroused amongst us by our worst enemies, the Freemasons and foreign Jews.” The Tablet concluded that whilst these comments by La Croix were perhaps not all that could be desired, they provide a counter-balance to the savage attacks against the Church that have appeared in various newspapers. See “Notes from Paris,” Tablet, 12 January 1895, 58; “Antisemitism in the Austrian Election,” Tablet, 27 March 1897, 481-482; “Captain Dreyfus and His Champions,” Tablet, 12 February 1898, 238; “Opinions on the Dreyfus Judgement,” News From France, Tablet, 16 September 1899, 454; “La Croix and the Pardon of Dreyfus,” News From France, Tablet, 30 September 1899, 535.

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Blog post by Richard Harvey (“1 February 1882; French Catholic Paper Complains against the Jews”):