Panama Scandals - Aftermath

Aftermath

Georges Clemenceau was defeated in the 1893 election because of his association with Cornelius Herz. Although three governments collapsed, this crisis differed from the Boulanger affair in that the Republic was never really in threat of being overthrown. However, it did raise doubts in the public eye and meant that politicians were no longer trusted. To monarchists it proved that the republic was corrupt.

Hannah Arendt argued that the affair had an immense importance in the development of French Antisemitism, due to the involvement of two Jews of German origin, Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Herz. Although they were not among the bribed Parliament members (or on the company's board), they were in charge of distributing the bribe money among them. Reinach was working on the right wing of the bourgeois parties while Herz was working on the radicals. Reinach was a secret financial counselor for the government and handled its relations with the company. Herz was Reinach's contact in the radical wing, and his inside information enabled him to blackmail his boss, ultimately driving him to suicide.

However, before his death he had given the Libre Parole a list of the suborned members of Parliament in exchange for the paper covering up for him upon publication. The story brought Edouard Drumont's antisemitic daily a great deal of newfound popularity. The scandal showed, in Arendt's view, that the middlemen between the business sector and the state were almost exclusively Jews, thus helping to pave the road for the Dreyfus Affair.