What happened to a French Jew more than a hundred years ago has lessons for all of us today. Do not forget our basic democratic principles of individual rights even in times of crisis.
WHAT WAS THE DREYFUS AFFAIR?
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was accused of treason and condemned by a military tribunal to degradation and deportation to the Ile de Diable, an island off the coast of French Guyana. Two years later, in 1896, the government found that the first condemnation was based on false documents and that a deeply indebted officer, Commandant Esterhazy (1847-1923), was more than likely the actual traitor. After a mockery of a trial, however, Esterhazy was acquitted.
At this point, prominent French intellectuals joined the Dreyfus cause (his innocence had been claimed by his relatives from the very beginning): Leon Blum, Charles Péguy, André Gide, Daniel Halévy, Marcel Proust, and especially Emile Zola, who published his famous article "J'accuse…!" in L'Aurore on January 13, 1898. Zola directly addressed the French president of that time, Felix Faure, and condemned the responsible military officers.
Anti-Dreyfus sentiment was also strong, and many in France reacted against the new trial. Anti-Semitic sentiment latent in French culture was awakened and produced a shift in national attitudes towards Jews that would not reach a climax until World War II. The Dreyfus affair is considered a crucial event in French history, one that crystallized a form of nationalism that, having found its scapegoat, could surface with all its vulgarity. The country was divided between supporters (Dreyfusards) and opponents (Antidreyfusards) of the victim. The Republic was in tumult, and the world watched with indignation the misprision of French justice and, in turn, French ideology. Following the example of Zola, whose writings forced him to flee to Great Britain, Anatole France and others defended Dreyfus with passion, and at personal risk.
Dreyfus was finally given a new trial in 1899. Against all expectation and rationality, he was condemned to 10 years of exile, despite evidence against Esterhazy and several other officers. Facing the continuing outrage of the elite and the apathy of the people after five years of debate, the president gave Dreyfus amnesty. Dreyfus’s defenders claimed that this was not enough; he was not fully cleared of charges until July 21, 1906.
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WHO WAS ALFRED DREYFUS?
HE LED an unremarkable, bourgeois life in fin-de-siècle Paris, riding his horses in the Bois de Boulogne, and sending his family to the Normandy coast to take the sea air. He was a conscientious, if not particularly likeable, army officer, and a graduate of Polytechnique, the highly competitive French engineering school. His father was a successful industrialist from Alsace (which had fallen to the Germans after the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71), supplying him with an unusually handsome income for a man of his rank. He also happened to be Jewish.
WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?
In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was secretly arrested, wrongfully convicted by a court martial of high treason, sentenced to life imprisonment, stripped of his military rank and shipped off in chains to solitary confinement in the sweltering heat of Devil’s Island, a French territory off the coast of South America. The only evidence presented at his trial was a torn-up note containing confidential military information, which had been found in a wastepaper basket at the German embassy by a cleaning lady working as a French spy. It was written in a hand that was said, implausibly, to resemble the captain’s.
How could the French army have conspired to bring down an innocent man in the name of national security? To this day, and despite the scores of books on the subject, the affair that rocked and divided France fascinates historians. Three new works re-examine what happened for contemporary readers.
THREE NEW BOOKS TELL US WHY WAS DREYFUS VICTIMISED
In a dense study, Frederick Brown of the State University of New York, sees the affair as the product of culture wars. The French army was humiliated by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, then shaken by the Paris Commune uprising. Nationalist feeling, spiced with paranoia about traitors and spies, took hold at a time when the top brass was forced to improve military performance through reform. Meritocratic recruitment drew in outsiders like Dreyfus. But this also made him the object of suspicion by the old Catholic families, who traditionally manned France’s officer class.
Political instability and insecurity fuelled social paranoia and anti-Jewish sentiment. Conspiracy theories about Jewish financiers were the talk of Paris salons. “La France Juive”, by Edouard Drumont, an anti-Semitic tract published in 1886, became a bestseller. The respectable Catholic press, notably La Croix, joined in. In one diocesan newsletter in the Cévennes, readers were told about “the Jew”, who, it declared, was: “Servile, slithering, artful, filthy and vile when he is the weaker one; he becomes arrogant when he has the upper hand, as he does now.”
ANTI-JEWISH SENTIMENT WAS THE REASON
Against this background, the clubby French military elite hunted for a traitor. A perfunctory internal investigation swiftly fingered Dreyfus, the only Jewish trainee officer on the General Staff. He stood out, in the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Sandherr, head of intelligence, as reported to a young diplomat, for “his indiscreet curiosity, his constant snooping, his air of mystery, and finally his false and conceited character, in which one recognises all the pride and all the ignominy of his race.” The military hierarchy closed ranks: its singular aim to defend its honour, and incriminate Dreyfus, triumphed over the facts.
The second trial of Dreyfus
In the end, justice prevailed. Yet it took five years before the Dreyfusards secured a second military trial, at which the captain was again found guilty, this time after the top brass forged evidence against him. Dreyfus’s name was not officially cleared until 1906. He was readmitted to the French army, served in the first world war and died in 1935. In another scholarly study, Ruth Harris, an Oxford University historian, shows how the battle to establish his innocence was never, as myth would have it, a neat tale pitting the forces of truth and justice against paranoid military authority and national honour. This, she writes, was “good rhetoric but poor history”.
Anti-clerical republicans—most famously, Emile Zola and his front-page letter to President Félix Faure entitled “J’Accuse”—took on the Catholic elite, with its hold over the military hierarchy. But the Dreyfus affair often cut across political and religious lines. Léon Blum, Georges Clemenceau, Jean Jaurès and other Dreyfusards intellectuels, a term originally coined to insult them, were aghast at left-leaning friends who refused to join the campaign. Through a close reading of a mass of private documents, Ms Harris subtly draws the complex, and contradictory, human behaviour behind the public affair.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR AND GUANTANAMO BAY
Louis Begley, an American novelist and retired lawyer, and a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland, has produced the shortest of the three books. It is also the paciest read. As a primer on the affair, this is a first-rate narrative and a heartfelt plea to modern democracies to stick to their values and defend basic liberties, however threatened they feel.
The author draws an intriguing parallel between the Dreyfus affair and the Guantánamo detainees under President George Bush, held on suspicion of terrorist links, grossly mistreated and denied basic rights. Yet he stretches his point. Dreyfus was innocent, like some of those held at Guantánamo. Crucially, however, he was the “enemy” within: picked from the ranks of the officer class, by the military’s own elite, and in a country—unlike America—that was not at war.
More than a century on, the Dreyfus affair still holds important lessons about freedom, notably the fragility of basic liberties when national security is invoked. It is also a reminder of the deep roots of anti-Semitism, in France and beyond. Even after Dreyfus’s death, the family felt the consequences. As Mr Begley notes, Dreyfus’s wife, Lucie, changed her name and fled Vichy France for the free zone in the south. Her granddaughter, Madeleine, who fought in the French Resistance, was sent to Ausc
Source: The Economist
Lucie and Alfred Dreyfus in 1934
The Dreyfus children: Pierre and Jeanne
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