Edgar Degas, a savage and cold-blooded anti-Semite, not only severed all his friendships with Jews (“that terrible race”) – in particular, with Pissarro, who had been one of Degas’s great supporters – he even broke off all contact with non-Jews who happened to be Dreyfus supporters, including his lifelong friend Ludovic Halevy (even though Halevy had converted to Catholicism) and Mary Cassatt. He refused to employ Jewish models, railed against Jews to the point of tears of fury, and lent his name to The League of the French Fatherland, a group instituted in response to J’Accuse! to facilitate the assembly and coordination of the anti-Dreyfusard effort.
Auguste Rodin refused to accept funding from a Dreyfusard group to build his monument to Balzac and, as a result, the monument remained unbuilt for 30 years. Paul Cezanne, a close friend of Zola’s who, ironically, had always referred to himself as Pissarro’s pupil, cut off all relations with Pissaro; publicly denounced Zola, complaining that he “had been taken in” by the Dreyfusards; and ostracized him and attacked his supporters. For the anti-Dreyfusards, the passions of the affair overwhelmed both their friendship and their artistic integrity.
But decorative artist Emile Galle, a fiery Dreyfusard, designed tables and vases embellished with inscriptions referring to Dreyfus’s sad fate, including a notable table he decorated with the beautiful verse from Isaiah 61:11: “As the garden brings forth its seed, so God will bring forth justice.”
Edouard Vuillard was also a passionate Dreyfusard and Toulouse Lautrec, a Dreyfus supporter, produced The Dreyfus Affair, an oil painting on canvas, and designed the cover and 13 illustrations to accompany Clemenceau’s At the Foot of Sinai (1898), a collection of stories about Jewish history.
Paul Signac, also a Dreyfusard, was among the signers of the Manifesto of the Intellectuals, a pro-Dreyfus petition circulated by Marcel Proust marking the first modern mobilization of scholars, writers, and artists as a force for shaping public opinion.
Zola, though best known as a novelist, was also a well-regarded art critic who shared the impressionists’ social circle, and his J’Accuse! spurred many of them to action. In particular, Claude Monet, one of the most prominent Dreyfusards, rushed to support Zola and became a Manifesto signer. He presented his painting Le Bloc (1889) to Clemenceau, a leading Dreyfusard who was later elected prime minister of France, as a token of his gratitude and support for Clemenceau’s gutsy publication of J’Accuse!
When Dreyfus was finally cleared and Zola returned to France, Monet sank into a deep depression over the sordid and disgraceful affair. Many critics attribute Monet’s abandonment of his quintessential French landscape subjects in the late 1890s in favor of painting within the confines of his own and local gardens to fallout from the Dreyfus Affair. (Interestingly, Monet created his renowned gardens at Rue aux Juifs in Giverny, the “Street of the Jews” which had historically been the hub of Jewish agricultural settlement.)
This is borne out by a March 6, 1917 letter (a portion of which is reproduced with this column, though the writing may be too light to be legible) written by Monet from Giverny to art critic, close friend, and fellow Drefusard Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926), during which time he was working on his monumental Water Lilies series:
…Like you, I was sorry not to see you again after those sad obsequies of our friend [Dreyfus]. I was so distraught that I let myself get carried away without knowing all that much what I was doing.As far as that’s concerned, would you be so kind as to send me your article on Dreyfus from Toulouse? [Two decades earlier, Geffroy had taken an active role in the efforts to secure Dreyfus’s release and Lautrec, as mentioned, was a strong Dreyfusard.] I’m coming to Paris often in this oblique moment of time to have recourse [to see] the dentist, but it’s always in haste and quite boring. I’ll drop you a note one of these days to have you come to lunch with me.
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