À l'origine de la caricature antisémite en France : le dessinateur Adolphe Willette (1857-1926)

Abstract

We generally consider the caricature as a “major figure of antisemitic discourse” by focusing on periods during which the hatred against Jews was at a peak. One must, however, insist upon an important fact : until the 1880s in France, caricatures almost never depicted Jews. Iconography hostile to the “Sons of Israel” only developed with of rise of Judeophobic publications. It was Adolphe Willette, one of the major illustrators of the late XIXth century who developed, between 1885 and 1889, the vocabulary of the antisemitic caricature in France, joining together Christian antisemitism, anti-capitalism and racial characterization in a nationalistic logic that opposed the hated figure of the ugly Jew with that of the idealized Gallic.