conclusions

The journal Psst! was fiercely anti-dreyfusard, and called on caricature’s most fundamental device of physical exaggeration to remind its readers that Dreyfus was a Jew. By extension, the drawings proclaimed, anyone supportive of the traitor was either the dupe of a Jewish cabal, or—worse still—in the pay or employ of the Jews, and acting against the interests of France. Most chilling of these images: “Intellectual baptism” in the lower left on page one, in which average French people of all stripes are “converted” to the cause of Dreyfus when a star of David is affixed to their foreheads.