France: The Department of the Gers in the 1898 French General Elections

Much has been written about the Gersois’s fervent support of anti-Semitic candidates in the 1898 French National Legislative Elections. In no single French department did political anti-Semitism triumph more so than in Gers, where five out of five elected deputies to the French National Assembly either employed anti-Semitism in their successful campaign or joined the anti-Semitic parliamentary grouping that grew to 22 members with the 1898 election. Less often acknowledged, however, is that the anti-Semites of this southwestern French department, like their Saxon counterparts, had varying success across each of the department’s five electoral conscriptions. Joseph Lasies, a particularly virulent anti-Semite running in the arrondissement of Condom, commanded a clear majority of votes (69%) in the rural cantons (counties) of Bas-Armagnac but just 38% in the neighboring cantons of Tenarèze and Condomois. That Jews had no significant presence in any of these counties that bore similar rates of religiosity, urbanization, and isolation raises important questions. How can we make sense of anti-Semitism’s general popularity among the inhabitants of Gers while accounting for the department’s substantial divergence in support for Lasies’s clearly anti-Semitic campaign at the cantonal level? What might a careful examination of these counties during the 1898 elections tell us about the receptiveness by a population to anti-Semitism? Utilizing primary sources at the communal and cantonal levels drawn from the departmental archives of Gers, we show that anti-Semitic prejudice in Gers resulted principally from the hypervisibility of a perceived Jewish threat to the material interests of the majority population where Jews (an external enemy) were blamed for local misfortune. Prior to the 1898 election, both sets of Condomois cantons had suffered from poor harvests and declining prices of agricultural produce and fallen victim to the phylloxéra infestation that devasted the region’s wine production. However, we also show that regional variations in support for Lasies’s anti-Semitic campaign paired with variations in the predominant economic activities of the counties and thus the counties’ susceptibility to crises. The tendency of Bas-Armagnac farmers to devote a disproportionate share of their economic activity to intensive viticulture at the expense of a more balanced mix of viticulture, wheat cultivation, and livestock rearing made them more susceptible than their Tenarèze and Condomois counterparts to the economic crises exploited by Lasies and blamed on various phantom, Jewish enemies.