Parliamentarians were silenced by smear tactics linking them to scandals.

Evidence

To what extent the hands of members of Parliament were tied is shown by the case of Scheurer-Kestner, one of their better elements and vice-president of the senate. No sooner had he entered his protest against the trial than Libre Parole proclaimed the fact that his son-in-law had been involved in the Panama scandal. See Herzog, op. cit., under date of November, 1897. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2153

Categorization

• XREF: Mechanism of political silencing via scandal association — carries forward into how Arendt describes the Dreyfus Affair breaking the Republic’s parliamentary resistance.