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No. 29. Vienna, 22 July 1898. 2nd Year.

France and Political Progress.

By S. Lublinski.

There is nothing more beautiful than the historical legend. Poetic imagination and a great mass of factual material come together here to fuse into a new whole, which belongs wholly and entirely to the third realm, to the region of the free creatures of fancy and of choice, unearthly feeling. From such sources flow enthusiasm and high-mindedness and a mighty energy which in the end overcomes the most monstrous obstacles.

But this intoxication can be salutary only for hours at a time, strengthening us and guiding us against the dullness of everyday life. If we surrender ourselves to this narcotic permanently, there follows a tolerably thorough morning-after misery, which can hardly be reckoned among the agreeable things of human existence.

In the year 1870 the French experienced such a morning-after misery, after they had for decades intoxicated and besotted themselves with the violet-blue German legend. For when Madame de Staël wrote her famous book de l'Allemagne, she did not see, in Heine's witty phrase, the German prisons and the German rogues — Heine ought to have added, nor the German non-commissioned officer either — but saw only the metaphysician Faust and the innocent Gretchen, only German lyric poetry and romanticism, the touchingly awkward and wonderfully profound German scholar, and finally the unearthly and unpolitical life of the finer spirits in the German petty States. As has been said, the French believed in this legend for many decades, and they were speechless with horror when all at once they made an unwelcome acquaintance with German non-commissioned officers and cannon. Since then they have invented a new legend of clock-robbers and sauerkraut-eaters, and the deeper their morning-after misery grew, the more disagreeable did intercourse with them become — witness the Jew Dreyfus.

Now, however, it appears that a mighty morning-after misery threatens to break over many a former friend of France as well. For almost a whole century countless enthusiasts saw only Voltaire and Rousseau and the Declaration of the Rights of Man — but not the French prisons and rogues, not the Albigensian murders of the Middle Ages, not the Night of St. Bartholomew, not the September massacres and the Reign of Terror of the Convention. The young Jewish students from the European East made a regular sport of exalting France to the skies at the expense of a reviled and slandered Germany. It was believed in all seriousness that in that perfect land all men were brothers, and that so medieval an atavism as Jew-hatred could never grow rank under the beams of this levelling sun. The disillusionment is therefore fearful, and amounts to a complete collapse. And already all manner of busy legend-makers are at work who would have us believe that the French people of to-day has not the least thing in common with the people of the age of the Revolution. And with that, well and good. The Dreyfus affair is explained, and the good man whose need of causality is satisfied in so easy a fashion can go to sleep, and need trouble his head no further about this evil business.

The Zionist, however, has a quite particular reason for rejecting brusquely these shallow explanations, which in any case do not satisfy the thinking man. The Assimilationist Jews, as is well known, have their legend too, according to which anti-Semitism is to be nothing more than a disease which will pass away as unexpectedly as it came. Unexpectedly, unhoped-for and inexplicably, the old France of the liberal legend has now vanished as well — just as unexpectedly it may return and make a fearful end of anti-Semitism. One sees that the Assimilants know how to help themselves. But a moment ago they held France to be immune, and had nothing but a superior smile for all who expected an incursion of anti-Semitism there also. Yet as soon as the facts had played this optimistic faith a fearful trick, the gentlemen were at once at hand with their old little consolation: a disease, it will pass! For that reason, and for that reason only, has the spirit of the old France laid itself down to sleep for a while — but it will awaken, and then Jew-hatred will be as if blown away ... Who believes it?

The Zionist assuredly does not believe it, and therefore he regards with mistrust the legends of the old and of the new France. Long before Dreyfus he knew that beyond the Vosges too there were prisons and