The Jewish Conspiracy
The aftershocks of the Paris stock market collapse ignited a wave of anti-Semitism across France.
When people speak of French anti-Semitism they often begin with the Dreyfus Affair—but the soil that nourished that scandal was none other than the crash of the French markets.
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, an officer of Jewish descent, was wrongly convicted of treason for allegedly passing military secrets to Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Paul Bontoux, president of the Union Générale, sought to shift the blame for the market collapse his bank’s bankruptcy had triggered. He pinned everything on the Jews.
“This was all a carefully orchestrated crime hatched by German-Jewish banks and the international Freemason organization to bring France to its knees!”
The French stock market collapsed because of the Jews!
It wasn’t our fault!
Bontoux’s claims sounded entirely plausible to the right-wing factions that already despised Jews.
“Of course! Who else would it be but those Jewish moneylenders?”
“Exactly, exactly.”
Before long their rhetoric grew more extreme.
“Just when the French economy should have been prospering, we were stabbed in the back by the greedy Jews! Without those Jews blinded by profit, would great France ever have been shaken like this?”
It was the same direction as the stab-in-the-back myth that would later flourish in the Weimar Republic during the interwar years.
“Show those parasites devouring the Republic what for!”
The French expressed their rage by hurling stones and setting fire to banks and shops owned by the Rothschild family, the most visible face of Jewish finance. They responded so readily to anti-Semitism not only because the scale of this crash exceeded anything in the original timeline, but also because of fury over Jewish participation in the short selling.
Of course, a large portion of the short positions people attributed to Jews actually belonged to Waldemar, so the Jews were not entirely without cause for grievance.
Not that I’m about to take the fall for them.
Waldemar pretended to have seen nothing. From his early days shorting the Vienna market, he had been the one who deliberately shifted blame onto the Jews. He felt not the slightest pang of conscience now.
While Waldemar was happily tallying his profits from France, others were shedding tears of blood at the ruin of the Paris financial world.
Russia, for one.
“Your Majesty, raising capital on the Paris markets will be difficult, I’m afraid.”
“Offer them whatever rate they demand! And still they refuse?”
“French banks simply are in no position to lend right now.”
The Russian government was stunned to realize it would have to postpone every industrial development project essential to the empire’s stability. Borrowing from Britain was out of the question. Britain had always been the power that endlessly obstructed Russia’s dreams and ambitions.
“So that leaves only Germany?”
St. Petersburg had no desire to borrow from Berlin either. Every mark of German capital would make it harder for Russia to raise its voice in the Balkans.
“Regrettably, that does appear to be the case.”
Russia had no choice but to hold out its hand to Germany. The Russians found the situation deeply uncomfortable. Why should great Russia have to beg Germans for marks as if pleading for alms?
At that very moment pogroms were already underway in Russia, and when the conspiracy theories of anti-Semitism freshly imported from France were poured on top of them, the anti-Jewish movement gained a strength it had never known before.
A pogrom is a riot accompanied by plunder and massacre, directed primarily at Jews.
“This is all the fault of a conspiracy by German-Jewish bankers to destroy the existing order!”
As the scale of the pogroms steadily grew, the Jews could scarcely conceal their dismay.
“Have these Ivan bastards lost their minds? Do you really think you can keep the factories and banks running without us?”
“This country is better off without Jewish parasites!”
The Tsarist authorities, for their part, either tolerated or actively abetted the pogroms in order to keep the Jews suppressed.
“Frankly, we never liked you much either.”
“These people are insane.”
Many Jews had already fled with what property they could after the pogroms that began in 1881, choosing Western Europe or America. Now the exodus swelled several times over. Anyone with the means to leave the country at once began escaping Russia.
“Forget the family’s fortune, forget the foundations. This country is hopeless.”
The mass emigration of Jews dealt a further blow to an already fragile Russian economy.
“The ruble–mark exchange rate is fluctuating again?”
“What? Another speculative frenzy?”
Speculators who had been waiting for their chance in the ruble forward markets swarmed in once more like a black cloud.
“Two marks to the ruble? Isn’t that the price from when the ruble was a corpse last time?”
“It might drop even further soon.”
In the original timeline Russia had maintained a rate of 2.2 to 2.5 marks per ruble during this period. The current rate was catastrophic—calling it lethal would not have been an exaggeration.
“This is basically telling us to shut the economy down, isn’t it?”
What little oxygen still reached the Russian economy as capital flight choked it came from the cotton textile industry. Cheap cotton from Central Asia and cheap Russian labor somehow managed to earn a little foreign currency. But even that could not offset the capital outflow caused by Jewish emigration.
Germany, by contrast, reaped the windfall.
“Come to think of it, France is ranting about stab-in-the-back myths too.”
Britain or America required a sea voyage; the distance alone made them feel remote.
“Let’s just go somewhere close.”
Most Jewish Russians settled in neighboring Germany or Austria. The sudden flood of Jewish immigrants was nothing short of a gift from heaven for a Germany eager to ride the wave of the Second Industrial Revolution.
“We just sat here, and money and brains came pouring in for free?”
The German government did not refuse free benefits. Of course Germany was not free of anti-Semitism. There were people who simply parroted French anti-Semitic slogans.
“The Jews are rats gnawing away at Europe’s traditional order so they can build a world of their own! We must not fall for their schemes!”
But the decisive difference between Germany and France was that Berlin had made enormous profits from the Paris crash. As a result, people showed little enthusiasm for anti-Semitism.
“A Jewish conspiracy? That conspiracy ruined our enemy France—shouldn’t we be giving them a standing ovation?”
The German reaction only confirmed French suspicions.
“See? This whole affair was a conspiracy hatched by Germany in league with the Jews!”
To Germany the idea was absurd, but the French were ready to believe anything that blamed Jews and Germans.
“And this is why people say Germany and France can never be reconciled.”
Waldemar clicked his tongue.
“In any case, this business is likely to interfere with our operations in France.”
“Well, I suppose so.”
Waldemar was not particularly worried. The only assets he still held in France were vineyards and wine in the south. The wine could be shipped out if necessary, and the vineyards could simply be sold to the farmers.
“How is the immigration progressing?”
“Your Highness ordered us to select immigrants primarily from minority intellectuals, so we screened for education and chose roughly five hundred.”
It was a number that could be called large or small, depending on one’s view. Waldemar scanned the list and gave his instructions.
“Treat them the same as French citizens.”
“Pardon? That would be far too costly.”
Foreigners who barely spoke the language and lacked grape-growing skills, paid the same wages as French farmers? It made no sense—if one only thought about winegrowing.
“I want those people to be able to go to a café once a month, drink coffee, and see the city.”
“Aren’t you being far too generous with them?”
Waldemar answered with a smile. He did not expect the selected immigrants to grow fine grapes. He merely hoped that, when the time was ripe, they would show Russia a bright red fruit of their own.
On Waldemar’s orders, hundreds of minority intellectuals from Russia boarded trains bound for France. Among the procession of minority intellectuals emigrating to France was the Piłsudski family, long tormented by financial hardship.
Still young, yet already filled with a fierce hatred of Russia, the boy Józef Piłsudski and his older brother Bronisław Piłsudski showed a faint flicker of expectation toward their new life.
“Brother, do you think there’ll be secret police in France too?”
“No. It’s a free republic over there. Everything is free.”
Józef Piłsudski tried to imagine how different the French would be from the Russians.
“They won’t give us that rubbish education the Russians do, right?”
“They won’t make us shout ‘Long live the Tsar.’”
The brothers giggled together. Their father watched their happy faces and sank into thought.
The children’s happiness…
Józef Wincenty Piłsudski had loved Poland enough to join the January Uprising of 1863 and fight a hopeless battle. For a man like him, the decision to leave Poland was never easy. But the words urging him to think of the children’s future had changed his mind.
Stripped of social standing as a landowner, stripped of property, branded as anti-Russian, the Piłsudski family was a bloodline that could not even dream of a future. Huddled together in a collapsing house, scraping through each day—where in that was tomorrow?
Leaving the motherland had been an unavoidable choice for Piłsudski. Yet even so, Poland remained in his heart.
These children will be the same.
With eyes full of complicated emotion, Piłsudski gazed at the homeland receding into the distance.