British. Toussenel's Les juifs rois de l'époque, histoire de la féodalité financière (1845) argued that French finance and commerce was controlled by an alien' Jewish presence, typified in the malign influence of the Rothschild banking family of France. Toussenel's antisemitism was rooted in a revolutionary-nationalist interpretation reading of French history. He was innovative and using zoology as a vehicle for social criticism, and his natural history books, as much as his political writings, were infused with antisemitic and anti-English sentiments. For Toussenel, the English and the Jews represented external and internal threats to French national identity. Antisemitism based on racism emerged in the 1880s led by Edouard Drumont, who founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper La Libre Parole. After spending years of research, he synthesized three major strands of antisemitism. The first strand was traditional Catholic attitudes toward the "Christ killers" augmented by vehement antipathy toward the French Revolution. The second strand was hostility to capitalism, of the sort promoted by the Socialist movement. The third strand was scientific racism, based on the argument that races have fixed characteristics, and the Jews have highly negative characteristics. Dreyfus affair The Dreyfus affair was a major political scandal that convulsed France from 1894 until its resolution in 1906, and which had reverberations for decades more. The affair is often seen as a modern and universal symbol of injustice for reasons of state and remains one of the most striking examples of a complex miscarriage of justice where the press and public opinion played a central role. The issue was blatant antisemitism as practiced by the Army and defended by traditionalists (especially Catholics) against secular and republican forces, including most Jews. In the end, the latter triumphed, albeit at a very high personal cost to Dreyfus himself. The affair began in November 1894 with the conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent almost five years. Two years later, in 1896, evidence came to light identifying a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real spy. After high-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence a