Renoir’s Cahen d’Anvers Portraits Became a Record of French Anti-Semitism
Catherine Ostler tells Andrew Roberts that the Dreyfus affair was not an isolated miscarriage of justice but the eruption of a France already “soaked in anti-Semitism.” Using the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, painted by Renoir as children and later scattered by conversion, war and deportation, she links the military frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus to the social world that first admitted wealthy Jewish families and then turned on them. The paintings, in her account, survive as evidence of both Belle Époque assimilation and the limits of that acceptance.
Hoover Institution·May 19, 2026·16 min read
