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caste, great monetary wealth evoked only weakness and inferiority. But
with his typical lucidity, Tocqueville recognized that, in the nineteenth
century, the role ofland was in flux. Impoverished nobles could become
wealthier by selling their land and investing their capital; poor people
could make money by cultivating the land; and men who had made im–
mense fortunes could enjoy their financial success by withdrawing their
money from commerce and purchasing the ultimate luxury item, land.
Land had become an integral part of the system of commerce, and
Tocqueville was pleased to see the stage set for political, social and eco–
nomic development.
But despite Tocqueville's realistic appraisal, the mythic aura
surrounding the notion of the French soil did not disappear. During the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-Dreyfusards and right–
wing nationalists, such as Edouard Drumont, Paul Bourget, Maurice
Barres, Charles Maurras, Georges Bernanos, and many others, would
continue to galvanize patriotic sentiment by portraying the Jews in France
as a fifth column, hostile to the land itself, subverting the attachment of
the French to their own soil.
Hannah Arendt offered a different hypothesis for late nineteenth–
century anti-Semitism. She believed that its resurgence occurred at a time
when Jewish financial power was in decline and when the privileges Jews
enjoyed could no longer be justified by the role they played in society.
Raymond Aron generously called this explanation, which compares the
situation of the late nineteenth-century French Jews to that of eighteenth–
century French nobles, "too subtle." Instead, he viewed anti-Semitism in
turn-of-the-century France as a product of nationalist myths based on a
nostalgia for the Old France. Maurice Barres and his cohorts were, for
Aron, revolting "against the triumph of money, against the rise on the
social ladder of the Jews who had
no roots in the land [deracinesj."
This was
traditional, reactionary French anti-Semitism. Ugly, but a far cry from the
murderous, imperialist anti-Semitism of the Germans, although Aron
cautions that the antecedent of the monstrous crime of the deaths of six
million Jews lay in
all
theories that posited differences between the Jews
and others.
And yet many people are convinced that the real racist version of
anti-Semitism that took hold in Germany had little influence in France.
Even though this appealing interpretation would have been of little
comfort to the Jews deported from France, I also tend to think that the
French, or at least most of them, never adopted the implacable view that
Jews were inherently, irredeemably bad. As the historian David Landes
suggests, the French shared a national conviction that
la civilisation franfaise
could redeem anyone, of any color or religion. The Jew could become a
