Religious leaders openly incited violence in the Dreyfus affair.

Evidence

The large majority of the Catholic clergy, deeply involved in political maneuvers, followed a policy of accommodation. In this, as the Dreyfus Affair makes clear, they were conspicuously successful. Thus, when Victor Basch took up the cause for a retrial his house at Rennes was stormed under the leadership of three priests, while no less distinguished a figure than the Dominican Father Didon called on the students of the Collège D’Arcueil to “draw the sword, terrorize, cut off heads and run amok.” Similar too was the outlook of the three hundred lesser clerics who immortalized themselves in the “Henry Memorial,” as the Libre Parole’s list of subscribers to a fund for the benefit of Madame Henry (widow of the Colonel who had committed suicide while in prison43) was called, and which certainly is a monument for all time to the shocking corruption of the upper classes of the French people at that date. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 300

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Documentation of clerical complicity in mob violence — grounds the toolkit’s claim that antisemitism was institutionally backed, not a fringe phenomenon.