[AFFAIRE DREYFUS] Musée des horreurs - Affiche originale lithographiée en couleurs - n°26 (exceptionnel) "Un bal à l'Elysée"

Musée des horreurs – Original colour lithographed poster – n° 26 (exceptionnel) “Un bal à l'Elysée”
Original colour lithographed poster depicting Émile Loubet as a bear holding a tambourine marked “Panama”, Émile Zola as a pig, Dreyfus as a hydra, Joseph Reinach as a monkey, the rabbi Kadoc Kahn as a donkey and Georges Picquart as a dromedary.

This imposing poster, featuring several people already caricatured in the previous issues, is a direct reference to the Panama Scandal. This large-scale corruption affair, which saw the resignation of Émile Loubet, then Minister of Finance, is re-referred to here because of the Judaism of some of is protagonists. It is Drumont, through his magazine La Libre Parole, who revealed the Panama Scandal, denouncing the alleged alliance between the secular Republic and the “Jewish high bank”, and thus contributing to the strengthening of the stereotype of the Jew eager for money:
“The deputy Joseph Reinach, cousin and son-in-law of the baron Jacques de Reinach, compromised in the scandal, focuses the hatred of the polemicist. A republican, close to the business world, a free thinker, Reinach is undoubtedly, with Alphonse de Rothschild, the man most attacked by the anti-Semites of the time. His wealth, the vast networks of influence available to him, his early involvement with Gambetta, the memory of his campaigns against Boulangism and his equivocal role in the Panama affair make him the man to slaughter in order to return “France to the French”.” (Grégoire Kauffmann, “Rothschild & C^ie. La bourgeoisie juive vue par Édouard Drumont” in Archives Juives, 2009)

As for Émile Zola, his novel L'Argent published in 1891, denounces the misappropriation of this financial scandal, but his support for Alfred Dreyfus earned him his place in this nightmarish animal circle.


Circulated between October 1899 and December 1900 in a France set ablaze by the Dreyfus Affair, these immense colour portraits are the work of Victor Lenepveu, who announced the publication of 150 and then 200 drawings, before finally producing only around fifty. Despite the 1881 law on the freedom of press allowing the dissemination of a politically subversive image, the publication of this nightmarish pantheon was interrupted by order of the Ministry of the Interior.
The fragility of the paper and the imposing size of these very violent posters, as well as their almost immediate seizure by the police, contributed to the disappearance of these caricatures which strongly left a mark on public opinion.
These horreurs were widely promoted by anti-Semitic newspapers that announced a fantasised print of 300,000 copies, thus insinuating the success of anti-Semitic ideas in the population.
On 1st October 1899, L'Intransigeant announced the publication of the Musée des horreurs in its columns: “Un dessinateur de beaucoup d'esprit, au coup de crayon d'un comique intense, M. V. Lenepveu, a eu l'heureuse idée d'inaugurer une série de portraits des vendus les plus célèbres de la tourbe dreyfusarde. Le titre de cette série « Musée des Horreurs » est suffisamment suggestif et indique bien ce qu'il promet. [...] C'est la maison Hayard qui mettra en vente, à partir d'aujourd'hui, le numéro 1 de cette désopilante série.” “An artist of great spirit, with an intense comical pencil stroke, M. V. Lenepveu, had the happy idea of inaugurating a series of portraits of the most famous sellouts of the Dreyfusard rabble. The title of this series “ Musée des Horreurs” is sufficiently suggestive and is a good indicator of what it promises. [...] It is Maison Hayard that will put up for sale, from today, issue number 1 of this hilarious series.” First a peddler then a bookseller-publisher, Napoléon Hayard (known as Léon Hayard) specialised in the marketing of anti-Dreyfusard and anti-Semitic ephemera and advertisements.
Today, however, copies in good condition of these pamphlet caricatures, which contributed to the social and political divide of France, are very rare. Published in the booming written press - at the same time as Émile Zola's famous “J'accuse !” - these propaganda materials had a significant impact on the younger generations and preceded the ideological violence of the 20th century.