The voice of Action Française, the polemicist who pushed a scandal from the page into the street day after day
Through January 1934 his columns called out the implicated deputies one by one, and on the morning of 6 February the paper urged its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. At the front of the columns that filled the square that night were the Camelots du Roi, the action squads of Action Française
The son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet, a medical student turned polemicist, who founded the daily Action Française with Maurras and set its tone. He sat as a deputy for Paris from 1919 to 1924, and his method of personal attack and denunciation left its mark on a generation of French political language. After losing a libel case brought over his claim that the police had killed his son Philippe in 1923, he fled to Belgium in 1927 and returned under an amnesty in 1930. In January 1934 he printed the names of the politicians touched by the Stavisky affair day after day, building the picture of a 'republic of thieves' that carried the paper's readers to the square on 6 February.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1867–1890Born in Paris, son of Alphonse Daudet; studies medicine
- 1900–1908Turns royalist and joins Action Française
- 1908–1942Co-founder and leading writer of the daily Action Française
- 1919–1924Deputy for Paris
- 1923–1927The lawsuits over his son Philippe's death; convicted of libel and flees to Belgium
- 1930Returns under an amnesty
- 1934.01–02The press offensive over the Stavisky affair that produced the demonstration of 6 February
- 1942Dies at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
Related historical events
Antisemitic propaganda and the fabricated dossier
Daudet's antisemitism began with his reading of Édouard Drumont's La France juive in 1886; he rated Drumont a "genial historian and critic of social phenomena" and followed in that lineage. On 5 January 1895, reporting the degradation of Captain Dreyfus for Le Figaro alongside Maurice Barrès, he described Dreyfus as one who "has no more age, no more name; he is the colour of treason", and he remained convinced of Dreyfus's guilt for the rest of his life.
In the spring of 1903 he joined the executive committee of Drumont's Fédération nationale antijuive. From 1912 he ran a campaign alleging that German-paid agents had infiltrated French business and political circles, for which he produced forged documents. His 1913 book L'Avant-Guerre, on supposed Jewish-German espionage since the Dreyfus affair, saw its sales rise from 12,000 to 20,000 copies at the outbreak of war and by a further 50,000 between late 1914 and early 1916. The campaign earned him a defamation conviction in 1920, yet he kept making accusations against figures including Miguel Almereyda, Louis Malvy and Joseph Caillaux, and his allegations contributed to Almereyda's arrest.
Writing in exile in Brussels in 1929, however, he stated in Paris vécu, rive droite that he had "long since detached" himself from antisemitism in every way, and that in "this whole affair of the decomposition and the Judaization of the French state, it is democracy that is guilty, not the Jew". Even alongside this self-declaration, his journalism's habit of singling out Jews and Dreyfusards as primary targets persisted into his memoir writing.