Anticlerical illustrations and visual satire in ‘anti-Jewish affairs’

This thesis investigates the expression of anticlerical ideas in visual satire of ‘anti-Jewish’ political affairs in France between 1880 and 1906. Focusing predominantly on the Dreyfus polemic in Third Republican France, it responds to the following questions: what anticlerical ideas were articulated in the cartoons and illustrations? Why were they being expressed? How were these represented visually? The role of the Church and the religious press, secularisation and laicisation, notions of identity, leftist intellectual hubs, and how the clergy were represented are examined in the satirical art. Antimilitary ideas, a key theme in Dreyfusard protests, are also scrutinised in the art. Images from periodicals, newspapers, posters, postcards and book illustrations are examined from the period in question as well as material drawn from anti-Jewish controversies between 1840 and 1914. Henri-Gabriel Ibels’ work forms a major component of the data which incorporates Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard satirical art. The main pillar has a supplementary dimension in discerning whether a flow of ideas existed between Ibels’ work and leading Dreyfusard, Emile Zola. Zola’s open letters à la jeunesse and à la France are used as main sources to his thinking. A secondary pillar interrogates the polemical art to examine competing representations of the Jewish individual and Jewishness amidst the socio-political tensions of modernising Europe. The study decodes the visual tropes and narratives to ‘other’ the Jew at this formative moment in the history of the French nation-state.