La cité du sang

Discusses the involvement of the butchers of La Villette, the slaughterhouse district in Paris, in the nationalist and antisemitic agitation which began in the 1890s and culminated in the Dreyfus Affair. As witnesses to Jewish ritual slaughter, which took place in the the same area, the non-Jewish butchers were easily influenced by antisemitic propaganda. The most violent of them were mobilized into nationalist shock troops by the Marquis de Morès, an underworld paladin, and Jules Guérin, head of the Ligue antisémitique de France. The butchers' visceral antisemitism likened the Jews to animals, mainly to pigs. In 1898 almost all of La Villette's 2,000 butchers took to the streeets and led the most violent antisemitic riots connected with the Dreyfus Affair. They were opposed and ridiculed by the anarchists and Sébastien Faure, who played an important role in the reactions on the streets.