Of course, any analysis of political overtones to Pissarro’s paintings requires a careful examination of the Dreyfus Affair, which Leon Blum, a later French political leader, described as “a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution” (qtd. Adler 110-111). Blum’s apt comparison to a civil war illustrates the political divisiveness of the scandal and its violent aftermath. During the crisis, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was wrongly accused and found guilty in a court-martial in 1894 for betraying secrets to the Germans. Yet after he was convicted, evidence surfaced that Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, another army officer, was the actual culprit (Derfler 85). This galvanized a campaign to exonerate Dreyfus among the French public. Rather than admit wrongdoing however, in 1896, Commandant Hubert-Joseph Henry of the espionage office planted forged documents to frame Dreyfus in an attempt to save face (Burns 70). The divisive issue split France into two camps: the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards.
As an anarchist and Jew, Pissarro was a Dreyfusard: he disliked the reactionary Army and the Church, which he thought were prejudiced and authoritarian. In his correspondence, Pissarro referred to the Dreyfusards as “free men” fighting against an unholy alliance of “generals and sprinklers of holy water” (qtd. Nord 102). Such an unsavory picture of Catholic priests plotting with the Army as part of an institution-wide conspiracy stems from his views about the organized Catholic Church. Besides having anti-Semitic outbursts, the Catholic Church was perceived as a threat to justice as it attempted to regain power. According to Leslie Drefler in The Dreyfus Affair, Pissarro’s friend and fellow Dreyfusard, Zola, “believed that Catholic fanatics were eager to promote religious war, recreate a medieval theocracy, and repudiate the revolutionary tradition of liberty and equality” (Drefler 113). Consequently, Pissarro joined the Dreyfusard side, passionately believing in justice for the wrongly accused Jew (Brettell 80).