For the Soul of France

Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented. Bear this truth well in mind: Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as

“So there exist fresh young brains and souls that this idiotic poison has already deranged? How very sad, and how ominous for the coming twentieth century!”

pride. Your science is beautiful, and necessary, and invincible; but you accomplish little by enlightening the mind if you do not cure the eternal wound of the heart.

De Lesseps’s grandiosity, or capacity for self-delusion, made him, like Eugène Bontoux, an exceptionally effective promoter.

Another paradoxical courtier, Arthur Meyer, saw only white, the color of French royalty. His paper, Le Gaulois, which circulated like a house organ among Paris’s upper crust, offered sufficient proof of his anti-Semitism to earn him forgiveness for having been born Jewish.

Everyone agreed that France faced a demographic crisis.

Several months later, in December 1892, the valiant, independent-minded Abbé Frémont noted regretfully in his journal, “Hatred of the Republic and of Jews is today the sustenance of French clergy. Drumont is their preceptor. Above all, don’t tear this choice morsel out of their mouths: if you try, you will immediately be smeared with ink and blacke

One witness thought that the scene might have been not much different at the Colosseum in Rome when frenzied spectators climbed the Vestals’ tribune to demand the execution of a gladiator, little realizing that France herself was the doomed combatant.

“I will not dwell on his shameless, intolerable associations with all that is worst on the extreme left, his absolute subordination to M. Clemenceau, his debasing intimacy with the men of La Lanterne.”