DESCRIPTION

Caran d'Ache (pen name of Emmanuel Poire) and Jean-Louis Forain founded the weekly anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfusard illustrated journal in February 1898, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. The Dreyfus Affair began as a military scandal in 1894, when the General Staff of the French military wrongfully convicted the French Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus for selling military secrets to Germany. The incident divided France into two key camps: the Dreyfusards, who believed in Dreyfus’s innocence, and the anti-Dreyfusards, who did not. Both camps formed their own social clubs, newspapers, bookstores, publishing houses, and political parties. The anti-Dreyfusards, in particular, developed a socially recognized language of rhetoric and images that advanced anti-Semitic thought in their publications. Caran d'Ache and Forain contributed to this campaign through Psst...!. For each edition, the illustrators produced on average four illustrations responding to developments in the Affair and denouncing a long list of anti-Dreyfusard enemies, including Jews, intellectuals, Germans, anarchists, Freemasons, Protestants, and magistrates. In response to Psst...!, the Dreyfusard camp created their own competing weekly illustrated journal, Le Sifflet. The two journals used visual imagery to promote their politics, creating a pictorial discourse between the two camps. Psst...! continued publication until September 1899, the time of Alfred Dreyfus's second conviction.

DATES

1898-1899