Theodore Dalrymple writes:
This was typical of the anti-Semitic iconography of the time, but not just of anti-Semitic iconography. The year in which the book was published, 1905, was the year in which France became a fully secular state, and the ferocious anti-clerical propaganda that led to the final divorce between France and the Church was iconographically indistinguishable from anti-Semitic propaganda, being complete with giant Vatican hands looming over the world, Vatican spiders whose thin legs encompassed the globe, and hook-nosed Vatican priests luring innocent children into their dark, smothering cloaks, from which they would never again emerge.
