This paper examines the collapse of liberal politics in late-19th-century Europe and the rise of populist, nationalist, and anti-Semitic mass movements in Austria and France. Drawing on Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and Michael Burns's documentary history of the Dreyfus Affair, the paper traces the careers of figures such as Georg von Schoenerer, Karl Lueger, Eduard Drumont, and Maurice Barrès to explain how widespread anti-Semitism drove Theodor Herzl to abandon assimilationist liberalism and found Zionism. The paper argues that Herzl's nationalist response mirrored the emotional, symbolic mass politics of his opponents, and concludes by drawing parallels between that era of institutional decay and contemporary political conditions.
The paper demonstrates effective use of secondary sources as interpretive frameworks. Rather than simply summarizing Schorske and Burns, the writer uses their analyses to construct a causal argument: declining liberalism created fertile ground for anti-Semitism, which in turn made Herzl's Zionist project both necessary and ideologically coherent as a counter-movement that borrowed the emotional vocabulary of its opponents.
The paper opens with a broad overview of late-19th-century European mass politics, then narrows geographically into Austria-Hungary before shifting to France and the Dreyfus Affair. The middle sections profile key anti-Semitic figures. The paper then synthesizes these threads through Herzl's biography and ideological evolution, before closing with a comparative reflection on contemporary relevance. This funnel-then-widen structure is well suited to a historically grounded argument essay.
Mass politics in Europe at the end of the 19th century had turned away from the liberalism of the intellectual and capitalist elites in the direction of populist movements that described themselves as socialist, social democratic, or nationalist. Frequently they rejected liberal rationalism and science in favor of emotion, mystical symbols, charismatic leaders, and demagogues. Among these were the Christian Social Party of Karl Lueger in Austria, which Adolf Hitler admired as a young man and later imitated, and the Action Française in France, led by Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, and Eduard Drumont. This early fascist movement thrived in the aftermath of the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army who was falsely convicted of espionage and sentenced to prison on Devil's Island. For Émile Zola and the French Left, overturning this unjust conviction was the most important cause of the era, but for the nationalist and anti-Semitic Right it was yet more evidence of an alleged Jewish conspiracy to enslave the Christian people of France.
In reaction to the upsurge of racism and anti-Semitism he observed in Austria, Theodor Herzl abandoned liberalism and Jewish assimilation in favor of his own type of nationalist mass movement — Zionism. Given the direction that European mass politics was taking in the 1890s, in which calls for the expulsion or destruction of the Jews were already becoming commonplace, Herzl reasoned that the only hope for Jewish survival would be found in creating a new national state in Palestine.
In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as in the rest of Western Europe, liberalism had once considered itself to be the wave of the future after the abolition of feudalism, but by the late 19th century this confidence was undermined. In the new democratic mass politics, peasant and working-class voters in Europe were breaking with a liberal ideology they regarded as elitist and capitalist, in favor of more populist movements of the Right and Left. Nationalism among the Germans and Slavs undermined liberal cosmopolitanism, while laissez-faire economics "called forth the Marxist revolutionaries of the future," and political Catholicism and anti-Semitism became the new "ideology of the artisan and peasant, for whom liberalism meant capitalism and capitalism meant Jews" (Schorske, p. 118). Jews began to gravitate toward Zionism in response, as the Austrian parliament became paralyzed by nationalist and economic conflicts. In echoes of the later Weimar Republic, Emperor Francis Joseph had to rule by decree because parliament no longer functioned. Even Victor Adler's version of Social Democracy was strongly populist (völkisch), nationalistic, and Wagnerian rather than rational.
Georg von Schoenerer, a former liberal and member of the upper bourgeoisie, became an extreme anti-Semite and Pan-German nationalist whom Hitler also admired. As a "total nationalist" he wished to destroy the imperial Habsburg state and unite the Germans with the Prussian-dominated Reich, a feat that Hitler finally accomplished in 1938 (Schorske, p. 129). Like Hitler, he was also hostile to Slavic nationalism, wished to destroy liberalism, and believed that the Jews controlled capitalism. In parliament, he was infamous for his regular diatribes against "Jew peddlers, press Jews, Jew swindlers," although he was finally sentenced to prison and lost his parliamentary seat and title of nobility when he led his gang in beating up a Jewish editor in Vienna (Schorske, p. 130). For obvious reasons, Hitler found much in his ideology, personal character, and political activities with which to identify.
Theodor Herzl had begun his political life as a liberal, assimilated Jew and cosmopolitan, until the rising tide of mass anti-Semitism caused him to change his views completely. He concluded that the ghetto had degraded the Jewish people physically and psychologically, and that their only hope of redemption lay in a national Jewish state (Schorske, p. 151). As a journalist in France, he had once imagined the country as "the font of liberty and civilization," but he soon discovered this was no longer the case by the 1890s. Instead, he witnessed and reported on "aristocratic decadence, parliamentary corruption, socialist class warfare, anarchist terror, and anti-Semitic barbarism" (Schorske, p. 153).
He was present in 1895 when Dreyfus was formally degraded from the French Army, and he witnessed the mob screaming "Judas! Traitor!" and "Kill the Jews!" (Burns, p. 54). Eduard Drumont's newspaper Free Speech proclaimed "France for the French" beneath its title and routinely attacked Jews, foreigners, and immigrants, claiming that Jews controlled the country even though they were far less than 1% of the population (Burns, p. 8). Drumont, like Hitler, believed that all of history was a struggle between "Aryans and Semites," and called for the "retraction of emancipation and expropriation of Jewish capital" (Schorske, p. 157). Maurice Barrès made a campaign speech for Action Française in 1898 stating that "I come to you again with those national and social ideas which you have praised before and will not reject today," calling the Jews "parasites" and "vermin" and accusing them of controlling the government and the economy with their corrupt money power (Burns, p. 7).
You’re 54% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 3 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.