Anti-libertarian sentiment in 1890s France prefigured twentieth-century disregard for democracy

Evidence

A distinctly modem note is struck in Zola’s Letter to France of 1898: “We hear on all sides that the concept of liberty has gone bankrupt. When the Dreyfus business cropped up, this prevalent hatred of liberty found a golden opportunity… Don’t you see that the only reason why Scheurer-Kestner has been attacked with such fury is that he belongs to a generation which believed in liberty and worked for it? Today one shrugs one’s shoulders at such things…‘Old greybeards,’ one laughs, ‘outmoded greathearts.’” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2102

Categorization

• XREF: This 1898 contempt for ‘outmoded greathearts’ of liberty is an early datum for the interwar collapse of belief in democratic values Arendt charts toward totalitarianism’s rise; connects to the modernity/decadence discourse in Islamophobia studies.