battery to keep the peace. Entrenched political and religious convictions often dictated responses: The Vendée, traditionally Catholic, was unanimously anti-Jewish; Toulouse and the surrounding region were republican and socialist, and therefore less affected by nationalist emotion.
Parliamentary elections were due to be held in May that year. In his truly masterly work The Affair (1986), Jean-Denis Bredin reached the judgment that the trials of Dreyfus and Esterhazy had little impact on these elections. Not so, counters Birnbaum: The elections prolonged the period of demonstrations, and many candidates—whether nominally royalist, republican, nationalist, socialist, or radical—exploited the anti-Jewish platform to promote themselves. A strong bloc of anti-Semites then entered parliament.
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