Dorian Bell BEYOND THE BOURSE: ZOLA, EMPIRE, AND THE JEWS Puis, apercevant du monde à sa gauche, deux hommes et une femme, il eut l'idée de les questionner. Mais, à son approche, la femme s'enfuit, les hommes l'écartèrent du geste, menaçants; et il en vit d'autres, et tous l'évitaient, filaient entre les broussailles, comme des bêtes rampantes et sournoises, vêtus sordidement, d'une saleté sans nom, avec des faces louches de bandits. Alors, en remarquant que les morts, derrière ce vilain monde, n'avaient plus de souliers, les pieds nus et blêmes, il finit par comprendre que c'étaient là de ces rôdeurs qui suivaient les armées allemandes, des détrousseurs de cadavres, toute une basse juiverie de proie, venue à la suite de l'invasion. I n 1892 when it was published, this forbidding literary tableau depict- ing the corpse-strewn aftermath of France's 1870 defeat by the Germans would have felt famihar in more ways than one. The apocalyptic tenor of the description suited the hand-wringing with which the loss that cost France its provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been received. To readers of Edouard Drumont's best-selling 1886 anti-Semitic treatise La France juive, the passage also inevitably recalled a central argument of Drumont's polemic, one he had not invented but that he probably did more than anyone to propagate: namely, that the Franco-Prussian War had unleashed on France a hoard of German Jews bent on exploiting their host country. Spurious though it was, this narra- tive could draw reinforcement from the very real emigration toward the center of France of the approximately 10,000 Jews who chose French citizenship upon Germany's 1871 annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Settling primarily in Paris, these displaced French Jews keyed resentment among their new neigh- bors (Lindemann 209). The resulting myth of Judeo-Germanic invasion gained sufficient currency that even Emile Zola gave it some measure of credence—a fact evinced by the passage above, drawn from his novel La Débâcle chroni- cling the final collapse of the Second Empire in the mud of Sedan (742-43). Such an occasional brush by Zola with Drumontian conspiracy theory explains why Theodor Adorno could once remark that "no matter how ener- getically Zola, the defender of Captain Dreyfus, fought against hatred of the Jews, elements can be found in his own works which could be classed as The Romanic Review Volume 102 Numbers 3-4 © The Trustees of Columbia University