The Dreyfus Affair, Part 1

Part one contextualizes the Dreyfus Affair by covering the Franco-Prussian War and the founding of the French Third Republic. Then we’ll cover Alfred Dreyfus and the accusation of treason that he faced in 1894.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I've had
the dray Fist affair on my to do list for
really quite a while, and it finally made its way

(00:23):
up to the top after we mentioned it in our
episode on Esperanto not that long ago. This incident comes
up a lot as a really notable example of anti
semitism in France around the turn of the twentieth century,
and it definitely is that, but it's also that's one
piece of a story that connects to a lot of

(00:43):
other stuff, including the role of the media and the
spread of articles and imagery that we would describe as
viral today uh, and questions about like the relationship between
individual liberties and national security. This is definitely not a
zero sum situation. None of that stuff takes away from
the role of anti semitism and all of this, but

(01:05):
it adds more layers to it. France had also been
through a lot over the decades before this happened, and
a lot of what France had gone through really fed
into this scandal and the response from the French government
and the military and the civilian population, and that is
one of the reasons why this episode stretched into two parts.

(01:28):
And this first part we're going to contextualize all of
this with a discussion of the Franco Prussian War, which
is also called the Franco German War, and the founding
of the French Third Republic. Then we'll move from there
onto Alfred Dreyfuss, which you a lot of English speakers
would say that Dreyfuss, but he said at Dreyfus uh.

(01:50):
And we will get into the accusation of treason that
he faced in four and then in the second part
of this two partner we'll talk about his court martial
and his exile and how all of that blossomed into
something that was just known as the Affair, which divided
French society and became international news. So as Tracy just noted,
the Franco Prussian War was one of the events that

(02:12):
set the stage for the Dreyfus Affair, and it also
directly and profoundly affected the Dreyfus family, and we'll get
into that later in the episode. In eighteen seventy, Napoleon
Louis also known as Napoleon the third was Emperor of
the French. He was the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and
in June of that year, Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck

(02:33):
convinced Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern Sigmartin to make a claim
to the Spanish throne. At this point, Spain did not
have a monarch. Queen Isabella the second had been deposed
in the Revolution of eighteen sixty eight, and Spanish military
leader Jue prim was acting as prime minister. He supported

(02:53):
Leopold's claim to the throne, and France found this enormously threatening.
Leopold was Russian and the House of Hollands Erin was
the ruling house of Brandenburg, Prussia, so if Leopold became
king of Spain, France was going to be basically sandwiched
between two nations that could easily ally against it. French

(03:15):
ambassador Vincent Benedetti successfully negotiated with Prussia to get Leopold
to withdraw his claim, but he also demanded that Prussia
never allowed Leopold to be put forth as a claimant
to the Spanish throne. Again. King Wilhelm of Prussia sent
a telegram to Otto von Bismarck that outlined all of this.
Bismarck edited this telegram to make it seem as though

(03:38):
France had deeply insulted Prussia and then published it basically
attempting to go to France into declaring war, and this worked.
Napoleon the Third Military Advisors thought that France was equipped
to defeat Prussia without a lot of difficulty, and so
France declared war on July nineteenth seventy. But then seven

(04:00):
role other German states allied with Prussia and together their
armies fastly outnumbered the French military force. These newly unified
German states, under the helm of the Prussian army, were
way more efficient and better coordinated than Francis force was
when it came to actually deploying the troops, so unsurprisingly,

(04:22):
this went incredibly poorly for France. Napoleon hoped to be
killed at the Battle of Sudan on August thirty one.
He survived, he surrendered, and he was deposed on September four,
at which point the government announced the establishment of the
Third Republic. But this new government refused to accept Germany's
conditions to end the war, so Germany lay siege to

(04:45):
Paris beginning on September nineteenth, eighteen seventy. Paris was under
siege from then until January of eighteen seventy one. The
German forces cut off the city's food supplies and people
started to starve. Also ran out of fuel, and this
was the winter. Eventually, the German army started shelling the city,

(05:06):
and when Paris finally surrendered on January, a lot of
the people who were living there, especially the working class
and the poor, who had been affected the most by
this siege, they felt abandoned and betrayed. There had been
almost fifty thousand civilian casualties during the siege, and the
people who lived through it had survived months and months

(05:28):
of just incredible hardship. This compounded existing unresolved frustrations and
divisions in Paris and in France as a whole. Many
people in France's more rural regions were Royalists, and consequently
Royalists held a majority of seats in the newly established
National Assembly. Conservative Adolph Tier was heading the Assembly, which

(05:50):
was meeting at Versailles, further reinforcing fears about the possibility
of the restoration of the monarchy among the people who
did not want that to happen, and a face of
a potential uprising in Paris, Tierre ordered the National Guard
that had defended Paris during the siege to be disarmed,
and when troops started removing cannons that had been placed

(06:12):
around malmart to defend the city, people started fighting back.
Paris formed its own rival government, the Paris Commune, and
that formed on March eighteenth, eighteen seventy one. Its leaders
included anarchists, socialists, communists, and Jacobins, united in their opposition
to what they saw as a conservative royalist assembly. Similar

(06:33):
rebellions followed in other cities around France, but those quickly
fell apart or were suppressed. But Paris held municipal elections
and the Communards tried to implement a whole series of reforms,
including limiting the power of the Catholic Church, protecting the
rights and pay of workers, ending child labor, and expanding
rights for women. On May twenty one, Tierre dispatched troops

(06:57):
and volunteers from the country to put down this uprising,
and this led to the deaths of twenty thousand Parisians
and about seven hundred and fifty government troops. And there
were also tens of thousands of arrests. Thousands of people
were deported. In response, people set fire to multiple buildings
in Paris, including the Tuilerie Palace. By the end of

(07:20):
the Paris Commune, France had also formalized its peace with
Germany through the Treaty of Frankfurt. Germany took control of
alsacein part of Lorraine which had previously been French territory.
France also had to pay an indemnity of five billion
francs along with other costs, and that left the country
deeply in debt, and on January eighteen seventy one, King

(07:42):
Vilhelm the First of Prussia was named Emperor of Germany,
with that taking place at their side. So this was
all financially disastrous and just humiliating for France, while also
unifying multiple German states into one nation, which had been
auto on Bismarck's intent from the beginning. Over the next

(08:03):
few years, France really tried to recover from all this.
The National Assembly passed a collection of laws in eighteen
seventy five that together essentially formed a new constitution for
the Third Republic. It established a b cameral legislature with
a Senate that was elected every nine years by mayors
and counselors, and the Chamber of Deputies that was elected

(08:24):
every four years by male citizens. And at first monarchists
held the majority in this new assembly, but Republicans eventually
came to power, and then of course the response to
that shift in who was holding seats and these bodies, like,
the response to that dependent on which side you were
on between the monarchists and the Republicans. Even as the

(08:46):
Republican government got onto more solid footing, there were still
a lot of unresolved tensions and divisions that were lingering
after the war, the siege and the Paris Commune, between
Republicans and monarchists, between Paris and the provinces, between the
Church and the secular community. These conflicts sort of just
went on and on. In the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties,

(09:07):
the French government passed a series of laws and reforms
that were meant to try to unify the people of
France and to repair some of the ongoing divisions that
had both contributed to and grown out of all of this.
In eighteen eighty one, a law replaced a collection of
earlier laws that related to free speech and freedom of
the press generally expanded on those freedoms. This combined with

(09:31):
public education reforms, increased literacy and new printing technologies, and
it led to a proliferation of newspapers that were widely
read and widely distributed all through the country. This expansion
of the French media would go on to play a
huge role in the Dreyfus affair. During these years, the
French government also passed new laws related to civil liberties

(09:55):
and freedoms and the relationship between the church and the state.
Many of these new laws were anti clerical in nature
and reduced the power of the church, but at this
point the church and the state were still formally connected.
France also extended its colonial empire into Africa and Asia.
But while the government was trying to take some steps

(10:16):
to try to stabilize things and recover from just a
long period of strife and hardship, France also went through
several scandals during the late eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties.
We're not going to talk about all of them, but
a couple in particular both grew out of and fed
into anti Semitism in France, and then that all also

(10:39):
fed into the Dreyfus affair, and we're gonna get to
that after a quick sponsor break. Towards the end of
the nineteenth century, a lot of different groups of people
with different ideologies thought that Rants was in immediate peril,

(11:02):
but often for totally contradictory reasons. Republicans feared a restoration
of the monarchy. Monarchists feared a growing support for the
Republican government. Catholics feared the erosion of the Church's power
and this rise of anti clerical laws. People in the
country feared the influence of Parisians in the Chamber of Deputies,

(11:25):
but people in the city's feared the influence of rural
interests in the French Senate. This again went on and on.
Anti Semitism both fed into and grew out of all
of these fears, and was connected to a number of
major scandals and crises that unfolded during these decades. One
involved General George Ernest Genrey Boulanger, who served as Minister

(11:47):
of War under Prime Minister Renego Blay. Because of his
military position, it was illegal for Boulange to run for office,
but he did it anyway. In some circles, he was
imagined as sort of a potential successor to Napoleon, an
authoritarian figure who might supplant the Republican government, restore the monarchy,
take back Alsace and Nourin from Germany, and make Germany

(12:11):
pay for the Franco Prussian War. People were so sure
that he was the man to do this that he
was nicknamed General Revanche or General Revenge. Boulange also grew
in popularity thanks to some other scandals. One became known
as the Decoration's Scandal of eight eight seven, and this
was a scheme to trade honors for money, including basically

(12:34):
selling ranks in the French Legion of Honor. One of
the people who was involved in this scheme was Daniel Wilson,
who was the son in law of President Jule Grave.
When Grave was forced to resign because of his son
in law's involvement in this, it sparked even more popular
support for Boulange. And like, what kind of does this characterize?
This support? A little bit um. He had supporters among

(12:58):
a surprisingly why an array of people of different viewpoints.
People were voting hit for him in elections where he
wasn't even on the ballot, and when the army transferred
him out of Paris to try to just get him
out of the way and cut him off from the
support a little bit. People thronged the train station and
physically blocked the train from leaving, and then when they

(13:20):
finally cleared that away so that the train could go,
they were chanting, he will return. As he pulled away.
It's intense. It is in. Boulange was dismissed from the
army because of his political activities. With nothing legally prohibiting
him from seeking office, he ramped up his political ambitions

(13:41):
even further. People either feared or hoped that he might
attempt a coup, particularly after he was elected to the
Chamber of Deputies in eighteen eighty nine. His supporters were
disappointed when this imagined coup did not materialize, and after
the Chamber voted to strip him of his parliamentary immunity,
he fled Paris. The Senate tried him for treason and

(14:03):
convicted him in absentia, and he took his own life
in There was a lot of overlap between the people
who supported Boulange because they imagined that he was going
to restore France to greatness and anti Semites. The same
newspapers that were printing a lot of pro boulange A
propaganda were also printing anti Jewish propaganda, including Boulangey propaganda

(14:27):
that was itself anti Semitic. Some of the places where
this was happening had few, if any Jewish people actually
living there, so people were kind of constructing an imaginary
enemy to blame for every perceived ill and threat. At minimum,
Boulange seems to have been willing to use this to

(14:48):
his own advantage, and after his death the movement that
had risen to support him became more and more explicitly
anti Semitic. This all merged together into a mass of nationalism,
anti semit Is, m authoritarianism, militarism, and revenge against Germany.
And then there was the Panama scandal of eighteen ninety three,

(15:09):
which came up very briefly in our previous episode on Gustavefel.
After raising huge amounts of money, including through a lottery
that had been approved by the French government, the French
Panama Canal Company went bankrupt. The people who lost all
of their investments in this included about half a million
ordinary middle class French citizens. There were also allegations that

(15:33):
more than a hundred and fifty members of the French
Parliament had taken bribes to cover up what was happening
and to try to keep the Panama Canal Company afloat.
A parliamentary commission of inquiry was convened and numerous members
of the government were prosecuted or forced to resign during
the investigations that followed. One of them was Emil Loube,
Premier and Minister of the Interior. Investigations also revealed that

(15:56):
the French Panama Canal Company had already been a essentially
bankrupt before it's huge round of fundraising and the subsequent
mismanagement of those funds. None of the prominent investors involved
in all of this were Jewish, nor were any of
the board of the French Panama Canal Company, but various
people who had been involved in the bribery scheme or

(16:18):
had acted as liaisons between the government and the Panama
Canal Company were Jewish. This included Baron Jacques de Reinach
and Cornelius Hers, who were both of German Jewish descent.
Anti Semitic newspapers focused primarily on these two men in
their coverage, even though they were just two figures in
a massive scandal of mismanagement and deception. In addition to

(16:41):
the illegal and unethical activity going on, this reinforced anti
Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Anti Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole,
which was founded and edited by Edward Joumont, framed all
of this as a widespread Jewish conspiracy that involved banks
and secret control of the government. And this was further

(17:03):
compounded by the existence and the activities of the Rothschild
banking family, which was Europe's most famous banking dynasty and
was also of German Jewish descent. The Rothschild family had
become quite powerful thanks to being able to make loans
to nations and governments, and this included two large loans
that were issued to France in the wake of the

(17:24):
Franco Prussian War. In addition to the spread of anti
Semitic conspiracy theories, this whole incident had a meaningful impact
on France's most notorious anti Semitic newspaper, Drumont had funded
La Libre Parole using money from the sale of an
anti Semitic book that he had written, called Jewish France.
Its circulation remained fairly small until Baron Jacques de Nach

(17:48):
provided Drumont with a list of all of the members
of Parliament that he said were involved. Rainoch allegedly did
this in exchange for the paper covering up his own
involvement in the handle in its reporting, and thanks to
its publication of this list, La Le Parole saw a
massive increase in its circulation and its influence today. Historians

(18:11):
often described the French Third Republic as being relatively stable,
but with some caveats. These two scandals are usually included
in the caveats, along with the Dreyfus affair that we're
going to discuss. The Republic also went through a series
of fairly brief administrations between eighteen seventy when it was
established in nineteen forty, when France fell to Nazi Germany

(18:34):
during World War Two, the Chamber of Deputies was responsible
for choosing the ministry of France, and because there were
so many different parties and divisions within the Chamber of Deputies,
the ministries that they created often lasted for less than
a year before being replaced. So when you read quick

(18:54):
summaries of the French Third Republic, it's often summed up
as stable in spite of a series of short of
the governments and a couple of major scandals. It's stable
with air quotes, right, But as people were living through it,
especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they
did not feel stable at all. It felt unstable, and

(19:16):
it often felt like it was on the precipice of disaster.
The general perception was that France had been deeply wronged
during the Franco Prussian War and needed not only it's
lost territory back, but also, as we've mentioned, revenge on Germany.
And as we said earlier, people from all different political
perspectives saw France as being in immediate continual peril, with

(19:38):
the media often hyping up that perceived peril through sensationalized
and sometimes outright false reporting. And all of that finally
brings us back to Alfred Dreyfuss in the scandal that
further divided and already divided France, and we will get
to that after a sponsor break. Alfred Dreyfus was born

(20:04):
on October ninth, eighteen fifty nine, in Milus, Alsace, which
at the time was French territory, although parts of Alsace
had a lot of German influence. Mulus in particular was
seen as like the most French of the city's About
ten percent of the population of Mulus was also Jewish,
including the Dreyfus family. Alfred's parents were Rafael and Jeannette Dreyfus.

(20:29):
Rafael was a merchant, dealing in various types of trade
before eventually focusing on fabrics and buying a mill, and
Jeanette was a seamstress, and the family was very comfortable.
The Dreyfus family had slowly built up their wealth over
several generations, transforming themselves from a family of peddlers to
a prosperous group of employers, landowners, and business owners, and

(20:51):
they had also tried to assimilate with French society over
the course of those generations. Rafael's generation had changed the
spelling the family's last name from d r e y
f u s s with a diaresists over the y
tow d r e y f u s without that
accent mark. Raphael and Jeanette's first languages were a Judaeo

(21:13):
Alsatian dialect and German, but they gave their children French
names like Jacques, Auriette and Leon, and they made sure
that they all learned fluent French. Alfred was the youngest
of seven surviving siblings, and he and his older brother
Matthew were the first ones in the family to learn
French as their first language. The Dreyfus family witnessed to

(21:35):
the Franco Prussian War firsthand. German troops invaded Mulus, where
they were living, conscripting vast amounts of supplies and threatening
to sack the city if those demands were not met.
The people of Mulus also secretly sent the same amount
of goods and supplies to the French army, which is
sort of a wonderful little detail in here. One of

(21:55):
Alfred's older brothers also joined the Lejon d'Alsace laurent to
against Germany during the war. When the Treaty of Frankfurt
ended the war on May seventy one, France ceeded most
of Alsace and part of lorent to Germany, and this
included LUs, and if the Us family continued living there,

(22:16):
that would mean they would be considered German, but the
Dreyfuss loyalty was to France. They considered themselves French. At
the same time, there were also some practical considerations involved.
Their home and their business were in Mulus. The dust
family was still trying to decide what to do when
Germany passed a conscription law that was going to force

(22:37):
Alfred and some of his older brothers to serve in
the German military. That really settled the matter. The family
decided to move to French territory, leaving Alfred's oldest brother, Jacques,
who was too old to be conscripted, to see to
the family business. Alfred's mother also stayed behind it first
because she was too ill to travel. It was not
military service in general that the Dreyfus family objected to.

(23:01):
It was the idea of serving in an army that
they felt was their enemy, which they had seen defeat
the nation that they considered to be their own. Alfred
ultimately decided that he did want a career in the
French military, based on what he had witnessed during the
Franco Prussian War and because he wanted his former home
returned to France. To that end, Alfred entered a cold

(23:23):
polytechnique in eighteen seventy eight, and he graduated in eighteen eighty.
He decided to join the artillery, which required additional training
and education. He was recommended for the Ecosiperier de Guerre,
which was a newly established school for officers, and he
was described as being spirited, with a lively intelligence and
qualified to teach horsemanship. Dreyfus taught mathematics and drafting while

(23:47):
continuing his education, and while he was in the middle
of all that, he also met his future wife, Lucy Hadamard.
They got married in April of eighteen ninety, with a
civil wedding on the eighteenth and a Jewish ceremony on
the twenty one. Alfred's army rank meant that there was
a minimum dowry required for his marriage to be approved,
but Lucy's family was even more wealthy and prominent than

(24:10):
the Dreyfus family was, so this was not a problem.
Rabbi Zadok Cohn, the chief rabbi of France, presided over
their wedding. Alfred and Lucy would go on to have
two children, Pierre Leon in eighteen ninety one and Jeune
in eighteen ninety three. Dreyfus graduated from a close Superie
in eighteen ninety two. He ranked ninth out of eighty

(24:31):
one in his class, and that earned him a place
in the French Army's General Staff, which he joined in
eighteen ninety three. Thanks to his officers supplement, which was
meant to offset the cost of living in Paris and
Lucy's income and his own inheritance. After his father's death
in eighteen ninety three, Alfred Dreyfus and the rest of
the family lived very comfortably. They had an Alsatian wet

(24:54):
nurse to care for the children, and Alfred indulged in
his love of fine chocolates and cigars, and he had
his uniforms specially tailored. Alfred Dreyfus became the highest ranking
Jewish person in the French Army and the only Jew
on staff at the French Army's General Headquarters, and military
reforms that had followed the Franco Prussian War had really

(25:15):
allowed this to happen. The military had become more of
a meritocracy rather than an organization in which aristocrats automatically
became officers regardless of their competence and performance. Not only
in France but also in other European countries, the army
had also become an organization that was seen as a
noble and patriotic pursuit rather than the last resort for

(25:38):
people who had nothing in their family background or any
skills to distinguish themselves. But this shift in the French
military also meant that Dreyfus didn't always fit in with
his peers and with older officers. Especially in his younger years.
He was known to visit nightclubs and race tracks from
time to time, and before he met Lucy had had

(26:00):
relationships with various women. He does seem to have been
intensely devoted to her after he met her, but the
culture among many of the other officers was more one
of excessive drinking and debauchery and gambling, and none of
that was really Dreyfus. This thing he could also be
fairly aloof, and he was ambitious in his military career,
which came off to people as being arrogant. His family

(26:23):
wealth made him the target of envy as well. During
his education, he had worked really hard in pretty austere circumstances,
as did his classmates, but a lot of them were
just barely starting to make ends meet on their military
salaries at this point in their career, while Drayfus had
finished his education with financial comfort already waiting for him.

(26:46):
In September of the French armies counter intelligence unit, which
was known as the Statistics Section, retrieved a torn up
document from the waste basket of Lieutenant Colonel Maximilian von
schwartz Koppen, the German military attache. The Statistics Section was
employing a cleaning woman who routinely delivered waste basket contents

(27:07):
for analysis. This document is known as the Bordereaux and
it referenced secret documents that someone in France was offering
to sell to Germany. It's not totally clear whether this
document actually passed through Schwartzkoppin's hands. There's been some discussion
about whether it was planted in the waste basket already

(27:28):
torn up, as part of an anti Semitic plot to
try to implicate Dreyfus and get him forced out of
the army as a result. To be absolutely clear from
the outset, Alfred Dreyfus had nothing to do with this
document and he had not tried to sell French secrets
to Germany. He also had no motive at all for
doing so. As we already discussed, his family had moved

(27:49):
rather than becoming German citizens after the Franco Pressian war,
and his entire motivation for joining the military had been
his French patriotism and his hope of Alsace being returned
to Rands. Also, because he and his wife were both
from affluent families, he didn't have the kind of debts
or financial strains that might make a person desperate for money.

(28:10):
But based on the information contained in the Borderaux, it
seemed like it must have come from someone on the
general staff, And because he still had family in Malus
and he visited them regularly, that raised suspicions. Dreyfuss Alsatian
wet nurse also spoke German and had German visitors. Again,

(28:30):
the army saw this as suspicious. Rumors spread that Dreyfus
was spending huge amounts of money on women in gambling.
This was compounded by the fact that he'd briefly had
a relationship with a woman while he was still a
lieutenant a few years before. He apparently had not known
that woman was married, and he had ended the relationship
after her father told him that she was already married

(28:53):
and actually had two small children. Later on, she had
been murdered by another man she was seeing, and Dreyfus,
along with several other men that she had previously been
involved with had all been called to testify at her
murderer's trial, So this was just another tick against Dreyfus
in this investigation. All that said, though the statistics sections

(29:15):
evidence against Dreyfus was incredibly thin. A graphologist compared his
handwriting to the border Oaux and found that the two
were not similar, but the graphologists claimed that this dissimilarity
was evidence that Dreyfus had created this document. The graphologist
described this as a self forgery. In other words, the

(29:36):
big piece of evidence that was supposedly connecting Dreyfus to
this document was the fact that it did not look
like it was in his handwriting. He concocted a whole
other handwriting to cover his tracks. All of the stuff
that we talked about in the first two thirds of
this episode meant that France was particularly primed to just

(29:57):
believe that Alfred Dreyfus was guilty, and that his guilt
was a sign of a much greater crisis and a
serious existential problem for the nation. He was Jewish, he
was also from Alsace, and even though in his mind
that led directly to his love of France, in his
desire to serve in the French army. To other people,
that meant that he was really German and loyal not

(30:19):
to France but to France's enemy, which had not only
humiliated and devastated the French during the Franco Prussian War,
but had also stripped France of Alsace and Loraine, and
he was accused of selling military secrets to that enemy.
Pretty Much everyone who saw France as under threat in
some way saw Dreyfus as emblematic of that threat, whichever

(30:40):
direction they saw the threat as coming from. Alfred Dreyfus
fell under suspicion for selling French military secrets to Germany
on October six, and we will get into his court
martial and what followed it in our next episode. Bump
bum bum cliffhanger. Yeah. When I started on this, I

(31:02):
wasn't expecting it to be two parts, and then it
as it became two parts, I was like, this is
a this is a place to have to end it,
but like this is where it's gonna have to break. Uh.
While we wait on tenter hooks for that next installment,
do you also have listener mail? I do this is
from Cassandra or maybe Cassandra. It is about our recent

(31:22):
episode on Lola Montez. Is one of several notes we
got along the same topic, and Cassandra has says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy. First off, I love your podcast and
have been listening to it for the past few years.
I just recently listened to the episode about Lola Montes.
You kept mentioning how everyone said she was beautiful, so
I decided to google her, and when I plugged her

(31:43):
name to Google, the song Lola Montez by vul Beat appeared.
I've heard that song many times before. In fact, it's
a liked song on my Spotify playlist, but honestly, I
can't understand a word the lead singer is saying. So
I just bombed my head to the beat and enjoy
the tune. When I re lies the title to this song,
I looked up the lyrics and it's basically a synopsis

(32:04):
of your recent podcast. I thought this was so funny,
as I've heard this song a million times and never
knew what it was really about. Thanks for broadening my
musical background, Cassandra, So thanks so much for writing this note. Uh.
We heard from a lot of people who told us
they were disappointed that we did not mention this um.
That song is actually the background music in the Dickinson

(32:26):
story arc that we talked about a little bit in
the episode and more in the behind the scenes about
Lola Montez, and I just forgot to mention it. It
is basically a song about Lola Montez and I do
also enjoy it, So thank you Sandra for giving me
the chance to add that into the episode. If you'd
like to write to us about this or any other podcast,

(32:47):
where at history podcast at iHeart radio dot com, and
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(33:11):
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