The French Press

In our own era of declining newspaper circulation, it is easy to overlook the enormous impact of the press during the Dreyfus Affair.

New high-speed press techniques allowed large numbers of papers to be quickly distributed among the population. French papers were often explicitly partisan, and a press war erupted, with different newspapers taking pro- or anti-Dreyfus positions. The first public news about the arrest of Dreyfus in 1894 came in Edouard Drumont’s antisemitic La Libre Parole—the cartoon, which appeared only nine days after Drumont declared Dreyfus a traitor, shows Drumont himself holding Dreyfus with a pair of pincers and announcing to his readers that his claims about the treachery of Jews have been proven right, as a French officer stands in the background. Editors often directly attacked or counterattacked rival papers; for example, one day after Emile Zola’s famous “J’Accuse . . .  !” was published in George Clemenceau’s L’Aurore, La Libre Parole published a satirical article of the same name that hammered Zola.

Clemenceau continued his vigorous publication campaign in support of Dreyfus, along with other newspapers like Le Siècle, edited by Yves Guyot and Joseph Reinach. Le Siècle’s 1899 issue on “The Lies of Photography” resembles a lesson in “Photoshopping”: it shows impossible pairings of characters in photographs that look “real” as a warning to beware the manipulative power of images and the ease with which they can be manipulated.

Press coverage reached its most intense during the Rennes trial; in this image of “lady journalists” at the trial, Séverine features prominently.