Joseph Reinach

Origins and early life

Joseph Reinach was born in Paris on 30 September 1856, the eldest of the three Reinach brothers, sons of Hermann-Joseph Reinach, a Jewish banker from Frankfurt who had settled in France, and of Julie Büding; the brothers were Jews by birth and never left it, and Paris called them, half in mockery and half in awe, 'les frères Je-sais-tout', the know-it-all brothers, the very type of the assimilated Jewish intellect of the Republic.

Work and career

A lawyer and journalist, Joseph became at twenty-five the chief of staff of Léon Gambetta, the founder of the Republic, when Gambetta formed his government in 1881, and after Gambetta's death he directed his newspaper, La République française, and was elected deputy for the Basses-Alpes in 1889. The Panama scandal of 1892, in which his uncle and father-in-law, Baron Jacques de Reinach, was the central figure, cost him his seat and gave the antisemitic press a target for life.

He answered with the fight of his life: from 1897 he was the first politician of standing to declare Captain Dreyfus innocent, he assembled the evidence, wrote the pamphlets, faced the duels and the libel suits, and lost his seat again in 1898 for it; when Dreyfus was rehabilitated in 1906 he wrote the definitive account, the Histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus in seven volumes, which remains the foundation of everything written on the affair since.

Re-elected in 1906, he sat until 1914, then wrote the daily war commentary of Le Figaro under the name Polybe; his son Adolphe, an archaeologist, was killed in the first weeks of the war. He died in Paris on 18 April 1921.