(Author: Michel Levine, Vol. 80, #2, Summer 2025)
During World War I, antisemitic nationalist movements largely suspended their usual rhetoric in the name of the “Sacred Union” declared at the war’s outset. Following Action Française’s example, they redirected their hostility from Jews to Germans—shifting from denigrating the “Yid” to denouncing the “boche.” Even Maurice Barrès, Action Française’s champion whom Georges Bernanos aptly nicknamed “the nightingale of carnage”, began honoring Jewish soldiers who died for France [1]. This wartime truce, which extended to the frontline trenches, found its most poignant embodiment in an image that graced countless French homes: Rabbi-Chaplain Abraham Bloch offering a crucifix to a dying Christian soldier shortly before being mortally wounded himself [2].
Revival of Hatred
After the war, the November 1919 legislative elections ushered in a wave of political newcomers, many fresh from military service – earning this assembly the nickname “Horizon Blue” Chamber after the color of French military uniforms. These political novices, allied with deeply conservative forces and wavering radicals, formed the National Bloc – a disparate coalition manipulated by Georges Clemenceau and Action Française.
For the first time in its history Charles Maurras’ movement, inspired by Mussolini’s electoral victory whose doctrine Maurras considered “twin” to his own, overcame its contempt for the Republic’s electoral process. Action Française successfully promoted candidates steeped in its inherent antisemitism, now enhanced with racialist theory. The architects of this doctrine, Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Gustave le Bon – worthy successors to Arthur de Gobineau – claimed humanity was divided into races, classified according to physical determinism such as skull shape. At the hierarchy’s pinnacle stood the blond, blue-eyed Aryan, while at its base languished the supposed inferiors: “Asiatics,” “Negroids,” and Jews, all accused of corrupting Aryan racial purity and strength.
Who were these maligned people who had arrived in waves since the previous century? Their common thread was flight from misery and persecution to reach idealized France – the homeland of human rights that had emancipated Jews and promised life as free citizens, “happy as God in France”[3]. This population, which its enemies viewed as an undifferentiated mass, actually encompassed diverse, sometimes opposing intellectual movements – as the Yiddish proverb notes, “two Jews, three synagogues.”
The “Judeo-Bolsheviks”
From the 1920s onward, these immigrants fell victim to a new strain of antisemitism [4]. At the war’s outset, French public opinion had confidently anticipated the “Russian steamroller” crushing German forces. The sudden Brest-Litovsk peace treaty between these nations was therefore experienced as betrayal, while the atheist Soviets’ rise to power alarmed Catholic and conservative circles. The “reds” further damaged their standing by repudiating the Tsarist loan, financially devastating 1 600 000 small French investors.
The National Bloc exploited this climate to launch an anti-Bolshevik crusade, during which the l’Union des intérêts économiques (Union of Economic Interests) – a powerful business lobby – plastered walls with posters depicting a menacing supposed muzhik with a bloody knife clenched between his teeth. This new antisemitism essentially recycled nineteenth-century tropes that had blamed Jews and Freemasons for instigating the 1789 Revolution.
As Moscow’s agitators became the suspected orchestrators behind all social movements and strikes, the trials of the Black Sea mutineers – soldiers Clemenceau had sent to support Denikin’s White armies—provoked outrage when socialist factions celebrated their leader André Marty and his compatriots as heroes. Action Française asserted that all Russian revolutionary leaders were Jewish—when in reality Trotsky stood virtually alone—and denounced a new enemy of eternal France: the “Judeo-Bolshevik” or “Judeo-Marxist.”
The glaring contradiction of simultaneously casting Jews as capitalist “plutocrats” and “Bolshevik hydras” dedicated to capitalism’s destruction somehow escaped the Maurrassian movement, despite its self-proclaimed title as the “party of intelligence.” Under the Vichy regime, the Judeo-Bolshevik concept would flourish with the creation of the LVF or Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchevisme (Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism). By 1944, the infamous “red poster” condemning a group of FTP-MOI[5] resistance fighters would deliberately highlight the Jewish origins of seven executed members.
The Protocols
The 1920 publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion provided pseudo-historical validation for anti-Jewish campaigns. This fabricated compendium, detailing an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, was crafted in 1901 by the Russian secret police (Okhrana) as a weapon against revolutionary forces while simultaneously giving the masses a pretext for organizing pogroms [6].
“White” Russians deployed the Protocols to justify their numerous massacres of Jewish populations and to claim that the imperial family’s execution in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918, constituted a “Jewish ritual.” After their defeat, these White Russian émigrés in France continued circulating the original version until Bishop Ernest Jouin – a fervent admirer of Italian fascism and highly regarded by the Vatican, which appointed him apostolic protonotary – published a French translation in his Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes. The prominent antisemitic pamphleteer Urbain Gohier quickly followed suit, publishing it as Protocole des Sages d’Israël (Protocols of the Elders of Israel). A modified edition then appeared from publisher Bernard Grasset, who would later become a major purveyor of collaborationist literature under the Vichy regime.
Distributed worldwide in millions of copies and numerous translations, the Protocols were frequently weaponized by leaders who fully recognized their fraudulent nature. Joseph Goebbels confessed in his diary: “I think that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a fraud . . . I believe in the intrinsic truth, but not in the factual truth of the Protocols.” In 1925, Adolf Hitler devoted eighteen lines to this text in Mein Kampf, the bible of Nazism and antisemitism. After his 1933 rise to power, the Protocols became required indoctrination material in German schools.
As denunciations of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” threat reached fever pitch, 1920 also witnessed the emergence of yet another strain of antisemitism.
The Jewish Plague
In Spring 1920, plague cases emerged in the sprawling “zone” encircling Paris. The epidemic spread among fifty thousand social outcasts, including eight thousand recent immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and the Maghreb, who existed in squalid conditions – packed into shacks, trailers, and slums. Parisian health authorities quickly identified the epidemic’s source: rats carrying plague-infected fleas had escaped from a barge delivering British coal near Paris, initially infecting nearby rag-picker communities whose cases went unreported.
To prevent public panic, authorities designated the outbreak “disease No. 9” – plague’s designation in the national registry of contagious diseases – while the public soon dubbed it the “rag-pickers’ plague.” Containment efforts included the Paris Prefecture reorganizing waste collection while mobile health teams worked throughout the capital and surrounding communities of Pantin, Saint-Ouen, Bagnolet, and Clichy to identify infection clusters and perform disinfections.
Treatment relied on serotherapy, developed in 1896 by Dr. Alexandre Yersin, who had discovered the plague bacterium, later supplemented by phage therapy pioneered by his Pasteur Institute colleague, Dr. Félix d’Hérelle. Medical authorities soon confirmed this was bubonic plague – which, though serious, was significantly less lethal than pulmonary plague and far less devastating than the “Spanish Flu” that had claimed fifty million lives during the war and continued to produce occasional “aftershocks”[7]. This “rag-pickers’ plague,” the last such infection to strike the capital, caused only 34 deaths before subsiding, only to resurface in Corsica in 1945.
The Rumor
Initially, public opinion remained largely indifferent to a disease affecting society’s “invisible” members: the destitute, foreigners, outcasts, and other marginalized people crowded into unsanitary dwellings—as if they were somehow responsible for their misfortune. But soon, newspapers began amplifying alarming rumors circulating throughout the capital.
Le Petit Bleu de Paris, financially backed by the Comité des Forges [8], explicitly identified the culprits in its 3 November 1920 edition: “The epidemics that have devastated, over time, certain regions of Europe were due to the introduction, by Orientals, of Yersin’s bacillus. The danger that threatens us today acknowledges the same origin.” These mysterious Asian disease carriers were allegedly spreading an even more contemporary evil: “These undesirables do not only spread microbes, but spread, among the lower classes with whom they come into contact, the doctrines of defeatist Bolshevism.”
In the October 9 issue of Le Rappel, a vehemently anti-government daily, antisemitic columnist Octave du Mesnil condemned the supposed “laxity” of public authorities: “While waiting for Mr. Rothschild or Mr. Reinach to open their mansions to them, these miserable wretches crowd into lodgings that they transform into permanent sources of infection. How were they allowed to enter France? Why are they tolerated in Paris? . . . Everywhere, it’s a system of indifference under a regime of irresponsibility. When the epidemic breaks out, they will put up white posters, give speeches in Parliament, present reports to the Academies; the profiteers and the newly rich will flee to the French Riviera, and the good fellows to the turnip field [9].
The tarnished gold of the Republic
On 2 December 1920, French Senate convened its second extraordinary session of the year addressing the plague affecting Paris and its environs. This session proved equally extraordinary for the torrent of hatred, prejudice, and profound ignorance unleashed by these supposed “wise men” of the Republic. The January election had seen right-wing representation nearly double while left-wing parties significantly declined, mirroring the rightward shift that had formed the “Bleu Horizon” chamber.
Jules-Louis Breton, appointed in January to head France’s first Ministry of Hygiene, Assistance and Social Welfare, faced the unenviable task of responding to the senators’ interpellations. This young minister—a former Dreyfusard classified as a “reformist socialist” and science enthusiast—struggled vainly to present factual information to an assembly inflamed by phantasms.
Adrien Gaudin de Villaine launched the attack. This political baron from La Manche department, known for his anti-republican positions and regular contributions to Drumont’s antisemitic La Libre Parole, challenged the minister: “I come to signal to the Government, which seems to ignore it or be disinterested, the danger resulting for the health of Paris from the invasion of certain districts of the capital by thousands of undesirables from the East . . . Paris and its suburbs are threatened, at this moment, with a contagion that doctors, by an elegant euphemism, call disease No. 9, undoubtedly because this disease was treated in pavilion No. 9 of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris”.
The distinguished senator, curiously ignorant of the designation No. 9’s actual meaning despite the raging epidemic, then recounts an “investigation” allegedly conducted by an associate in Paris’s 4th arrondissement, summarizing: “Everywhere people with strange appearances, in heterogeneous rags, speaking incomprehensible language, wandering the streets without apparent occupation, or crammed into sordid dwellings in shameful promiscuity, claiming to be Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, but in reality all Jews and all speaking ‘Yiddish,’ this Hebrew patois understood by all Jews in the universe . . . I add that the infant mortality that prevails in Paris is also a consequence in certain districts of this invasion of exotic people: they indeed monopolize the precious food supplies almost everywhere”.
This outrageous claim blaming Jews for Parisian infant mortality received enthusiastic support from much of the High Assembly, as the session minutes indicate (“Very good! very good! on the right”). The senator concluded with an explicit threat:
Many French people have had enough of being treated as outlaws in their own homeland and—I charitably warn them—the Jews are doing too much! They probably believe the hour predicted forty years ago by Dostoevsky has arrived; they might well, here as elsewhere, bring terrible reprisals upon themselves. Minister, in coming to this platform today to denounce the danger threatening Paris, I have, once again, done my duty; it’s up to you to do yours.
The minutes note: “Very good! and applause on the right—the speaker, returning to his seat, is congratulated by his friends.”
Louis Dausset, senator of the Seine and former secretary of the anti-Dreyfusard, antisemitic the Ligue de la patrie française (League of the French Homeland), subsequently voiced concerns about foreign Jews evading Republican laws: “Their civil status is extremely uncertain. Difficult to control! We have conducted investigation after investigation on this subject. Their papers are written in Greek, Hebrew, even Cyrillic characters, and the agents cannot, of course, decipher their identity (smiles). The minutes record: “Several senators: It’s all Hebrew to us! (laughter)”
The representative from Maine-et-Loire, Dominique Delahaye – a fervent crusader against Freemasonry – advocated for a “firm hand” policy: “Just now, the Minister of the Interior told me that he had expelled 11,523 foreigners. That’s good, but out of several hundred thousand, it’s not enough.” He then proposed what he clearly considered an innovative measure: “A first method of control would consist, since you cannot delouse them, of making them pay a certain sum upon entry; after which, they would be subjected to a continuous tribute.” The senator apparently failed to recognize he was proposing a return to a centuries-old discriminatory practice [10].
Confronted with this disturbing surge of “liberated speech,” Senator Fernand Merlin of the Loire region, classified as “democratic left,” attempted calmly and rationally to redirect the debate toward the actual issue—public health and disease prevention in the capital—carefully dissociating disease from the presence of foreigners. He responded to Gaudin de Villaine—with subtle irony regarding his “nuanced language”—noting that during the previous summer, plague had been reported not only in Paris but across Europe’s major capitals. He added diplomatically: “Mr. Gaudin de Villaine spoke of suspicious individuals. I believe, based on documents that do not always reflect reality, he exaggerated the role of contagion of these individuals.” Radical Senator François Albert similarly attempted to counter the toxic rumors: “I do not believe, I want to affirm this, that there has been any danger for Paris, given that the number of cases has been very limited and that fourteen deaths in such a large agglomeration is nothing to frighten us”.
When Health Minister Jean-Louis Breton proposed measures to protect the destitute from health hazards at the session’s end, Senator Gaudin de Villaine, still fixated on border closure, immediately retorted: “You always talk about curing. It would be better to prevent. You are considering ways to cure the disease that is at our doors. You should have closed the door, that’s the whole issue!”
A Respectful Press
The mainstream press largely reported the remarks exchanged during this exceptional session without featuring them as front-page headlines or provoking particular outrage. Le Petit Parisien, ostensibly apolitical but later a supporter of Mussolini’s regime, emphasized the scope of Gaudin de Villaine’s interpellation, claiming that foreigners lived without being subject to any meaningful surveillance. Conversely, the anti-parliamentary newspaper Le Matin chose the voice of reason on 7 December by quoting bacteriologist Émile Roux from the Pasteur Institute: “In my opinion […] the explanation given [by Gaudin de Villaine] is completely false. Numerous proofs could be provided; notably the fact that the rare cases of bubonic plague observed did not occur among the immigrants accused in the Senate. According to investigations, it is highly probable that the disease, which I should emphasize is now almost contained, was brought to the northern suburbs of Paris by plague-infected rats arriving with barges delivering English coal.”
British rats… this revelation could undermine the fabricated image of a savage horde of wandering Jews emerging from dark Asian regions to spread the virus… yet the press generally overlooked this particular detail—only La Tribune juive on December 24 ventured to observe: “We are convinced that anti-Semites will lack the courage to admit their error and cease their campaign against allegedly plague-infected Jews. They face this dilemma: 1) Either declare that English rats are of Jewish origin, or 2) Announce that Professor Roux has Jewish associates. The microbe of anti-Semitism is unforgiving. The plague is more easily cured”.
The Political Swamp
Political parties as a whole showed minimal reaction. The National Bloc enthusiastically applauded the inflammatory remarks expressed in the Senate, undoubtedly influenced by the position of its leader, the “Father of Victory.” Since 1917, Clemenceau had indeed been consumed by an anti-Soviet fury that provoked his famous vitriolic outbursts. On 21 July 1917, following the Petrograd riots of 1917 suppressed by the Kerensky government, his newspaper L’Homme enchaîné denounced an alleged German-Leninist conspiracy orchestrated behind the scenes by Jews concealing their true surnames: “Here is how the principal Maximalists of the Petrograd Soviet are actually named: Zinoviev’s real name is Apfelbaum; Trotsky, Bronstein; Kamenev, Rosenfeld . . .” Parts of this list were borrowed from Drumont’s La Libre Parole, with whom the Tiger had nonetheless crossed swords during the Dreyfus affair…
Only the Socialists mounted a genuine response to this venomous wave. Their publication, Le Populaire, denounced an “odious calumny” that used disease No. 9 as a weapon against a population of proletarians vilified simply for being foreigners. As for the extreme left, still entangled in its institutional anti-capitalism, it generally disregarded the fate of the supposed plutocratic Jewish victims targeted by the senatorial attacks. It was primarily individuals and associations such as the League of Human Rights or that of Education who stood in opposition.
Happiness as a Firebreak
If the malignant rumor generated by “disease No. 9” did not fundamentally alter how “native” French people viewed their Jewish fellow citizens, it was likely because the social climate was not particularly receptive. The “all united” spirit binding citizens of all faiths before and during the war still permeated many minds, and the country was primarily focused on healing its wounds. The war had exacted such a toll in human lives, destruction, and deprivation that the euphoria of victory was tinged with the bitterness of mourning. Consequently, this barely lethal disease No. 9 was perceived as insignificant compared to the combined devastation of war and the “Spanish” flu, besides the fact that collective hatred was still directed for some time toward the “Boche.” There was also a subtle resistance of minds serving as a barrier against racist rumors. It wasn’t an organized refusal, but rather an instinctive rejection of this minor conflict added to the greater one. This period also marked the so-called “Roaring Twenties,” when a generation raised amid death and mourning expressed a fierce desire to escape the empty pride of victory and suffocating nationalism. They manifested an urgent yearning to breathe, to live, to discover other worlds, to experience something different through pleasures and arts, far from the overheated internal hatreds stirred by this demanding homeland to which they were still expected to sacrifice themselves. Women whom the war had transformed into heroines, including the celebrated munitionnettes (female munitions workers), found peace relegating them back to their kitchens while the National Bloc criminalized their freedom to terminate pregnancies. Many subsequently emancipated themselves by liberating their corseted bodies, cutting their hair, and living their lives in the image of the “garçonne,” the famous and controversial heroine of Victor Margueritte’s novel [11].
In May 1924, the legislative elections witnessed the defeat of the National Bloc and the rise to power of the Cartel des gauches (Left-Wing Coalition). Yet this represented only a brief respite in the mounting anti-Jewish sentiment. The 1930s would witness dictatorships seizing power across Europe and the flourishing of unspeakable racial hatreds culminating in the Holocaust.
Present Questions
One can imagine that today, a new epidemic similar to “disease No. 9” would trigger a surge of fear and hatred, amplified exponentially by “social networks,” reaching the heights of wild hysteria experienced during epidemics caused by AIDS and later COVID-19. Léon Poliakov, during an interview in September 2005 with Roger Droit [11], offered a lucid assessment of the situation:
The only certainty I have today regarding antisemitism and racism, in Russia as elsewhere, is that all this will continue. We cannot predict exactly in what form, nor can we specify precisely with what intensity. But we can be convinced that it will not cease.
Nor will cease, one can hope, the determined struggle of men and women of goodwill against the poisoning of consciences.
* Michel Levine is a human rights historian and the author of a book devoted to the major cases of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (Affaires non classées. Archives inédites de la Liguecdes Droits de l’Homme, Paris, Fayard, 1973). He has also published a historical investigation into the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (Les Ratonnades d’octobre. Un meurtre collectif àcParis en 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; republished by Jean-Claude Gawsewitch Éditeur, 2011). The above article originally appeared, in French, in the magazine “Témoigner” N°140 april 2025. published by the Auschwitz Foundation. Éditions du Centre d’études et de documentation de l’ASBL Mémoire d’Auschwitz.
NOTES
1 Particularly in his book Les Diverses Familles spirituelles de la France, Paris, Émile-Paul Frères, 1917
2 An event comparable to the French ‘sacred union’ occurred in Germany through the Burgfrieden (civic peace) proclaimed by the Kaiser, though this national solidarity quickly dissolved once the first shots were fired.
3 The Yiddish expression “leben ist azoy wie Gott in Frankreich” (one lives like God in France) was widely used in Ashkenazi communities and its positive connotation remained untarnished even through the Dreyfus affair. As the father of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas remarked, “A country where people tear each other apart over the fate of a little Jewish captain is a country where one must hurry to settle,” highlighting how even this controversial case paradoxically reinforced France’s reputation as a relatively hospitable place for Jews.
4 The term ‘antisemitism’ (Antisemitismus) was coined in 1879 in Germany by journalist Wilhelm Marr to cloak his racist hatred in a veneer of scientific legitimacy. He originally presented it as opposition to Semites broadly—encompassing Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Arabs, and Hebrews. However, the term rapidly evolved to target Jews exclusively, shedding its purported broader application while maintaining its pseudo-scientific pretense.
5 FTP-MOI: Abbreviation for ‘Francs-tireurs et partisans – main d’œuvre immigrée’ (Sharpshooters and Partisans – Immigrant Labor).
6 This term ‘pogrom’ was still unknown in France. Journalist Bernard Abraham Lecache would make it known to the general public through his book ‘When Israel Dies. In the Land of Pogroms,’ Paris, Éditions du progrès civique 1927. The following year, he would found the International League Against Pogroms, which would become in 1929 the International League Against Antisemitism (LICA).
7 The “Spanish” flu was actually first documented in the United States before being transported to Europe by the thousands of “Sammies” (American soldiers) who disembarked in France during World War I. Spain received this misleading geographical attribution simply because it provided more transparent and comprehensive reporting about the epidemic.
8 Organization of leaders of the French iron and steel industry from 1864 to 1940.
9 The French phrase Champ de Navets (Turnip Field) was used at the time to designate the cemetery.
10 Considered “serfs of the Empire”, Jews had to pay a special tax as early as 1234.
11 For writing this novel, published in 1922 by Ernest Flammarion, the author was stripped of his Légion d’honneur the following year.
