The Dreyfus affair: the scandal that tore France in two

389 Pages·2012·3.37 MB·English

by  Piers Paul Read

Contents
Map
Preface

Part One: Before the Affair
1 The French Revolution
2 The Third Republic
3 Édouard Drumont

Part Two: Alfred Dreyfus
4 Evidence of Treason
5 Dreyfus Accused
6 Dreyfus Condemned
7 The Salvation Islands

Part Three: The Affair
8 The First Dreyfusards
9 Colonel Picquart
10 Commandant Esterhazy
11 Émile Zola
12 The Pen versus the Sword
13 The Road to Rennes
14 Rennes
15 The Last Act

Epilogue
Plate Section
Acknowledgements
Principal Characters
Bibliography
Notes
By the Same Author
Copyright

Preface
Many books have been written about the miscarriage of justice in France in 1894
which led to the Dreyfus Affair. A complete bibliography of the Affair published
in 1970 listed 551 titles1 and many more have been published since then. Few
have contained startling revelations. Already by 1960 the French historian
Marcel Thomas recognised that ‘it would be vain to hope to solve in an entirely
new way a “mystery” which, in fact, has no longer been a mystery for quite a
time’.2
One reason for the continuing interest in the Affair is the intriguing nature of
the story itself. A year before he himself became a protagonist by writing
‘J’accuse’, the French novelist Émile Zola saw its potential. ‘What a poignant
drama,’ he wrote in Le Figaro, ‘and what superb characters.’3 Moreover the
events took place at a period in French history – the belle époque – which saw an
extraordinary flourishing of arts and sciences, flamboyant fin de siècle
architecture and a sexual permissiveness that brought Edward, Prince of Wales
and Oscar Wilde to Paris to escape the chilly moral climate of Victorian
England.
However, as the Dreyfusard poet Charles Péguy realised at the time, the Affair
was more than a dramatic story in a colourful setting. The tumult that divided
France was of major and long-lasting significance in three interconnected
histories – that of France, that of Israel and ‘above all’ that of Christianity.4
When Péguy talked of Christianity he had in mind the Roman Catholic Church,
and by Israel he meant not the state of that name, yet to be established, but the
Jews. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew and it was the anti-Semitic passions that
erupted during the Dreyfus Affair that provoked outrage at the time and, after the
Second World War, led some to regard it as ‘a kind of dress-rehearsal’5 for the
anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Modern historians of the Affair dispute this linkage. ‘The history of the Right
during the affair’, wrote Ruth Harris in her The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred
Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (2010), ‘has too often been distorted
by attempts to press the fin de siècle into an inter-war mould, to find a dark
teleology that does not really exist.’6 However, the enormity of the Holocaust
has affected some historians’ perceptions. ‘After the Nazi genocide,’ wrote
Stephen Wilson, ‘the endemic prejudice of non-Jews against Jews has assumed a
monstrously inhuman dimension that has unbalanced the study of the Affair.’7
Vincent Duclert, in his Alfred Dreyfus: L’honneur d’un patriote (2006) wrote of
‘a hyper-sensitivity’ found in reputable Jewish historians which ‘distorts their
analysis’.8
As the title of Duclert’s book suggests, he sees Alfred Dreyfus as a hero of the
secular French Republic and of the values of the Enlightenment, rather than of
the Jewish people or the Jewish religion. That is undoubtedly how Dreyfus saw
himself. However, if Dreyfus had not been Jewish it seems unlikely that his case
would have become a cause célèbre of such magnitude. The French historian
Alain Pagès asked how the sufferings of Dreyfus could cause worldwide
indignation at a time when France was committing crimes in Africa or in Indo-
China that were ‘without a doubt a thousand times more odious . . . without
arousing much reaction from French political opinion’.9 Nor was Alfred Dreyfus
the only innocent man to be deported to the prison colonies of French Guiana:
the case of Guillaume Seznec, pardoned by General de Gaulle in 1946 after
twenty-four years imprisoned in French Guiana and posthumously rehabilitated
by the Cour de Cassation only in 2005,10 is as obscure as that of Dreyfus is well
known.
In France the Dreyfus Affair remained contentious well into the twentieth
century. Alfred Dreyfus’s son Pierre wrote that his father would ‘be recognised
by future generations as one of the truest heroes in the history of our beloved
France’;11 yet even today, writes Vincent Duclert, ‘Dreyfus is not to be found in
the Panthéon of the national memory . . . and the French authorities remain
hesitant when faced with the commemoration of the event.’12 The historian
Marie-Christine Leps describes how, in 1985, an offer made by the Socialist
President Mitterrand of a statue of Alfred Dreyfus to be erected in the École
Militaire was refused by the French military ‘because it was perceived as a
reminder of division and humiliation’. In 1994 the Director of the Historical
Section of the Army was dismissed by the Minister of Defence for stating that
Dreyfus’s innocence was merely ‘a thesis generally admitted by historians’. It
was not until 1995 that the French Army officially declared through the then
Director of its Historical Section that Dreyfus was innocent.13
On the centenary of the publication of ‘J’accuse’ in 1998, the then President of
the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, wrote to the descendants of both Alfred
Dreyfus and Émile Zola to mark the occasion. In 2006, a stamp was issued
depicting Alfred Dreyfus, and the Socialist Minister of Culture Jack Lang
proposed that the body of Dreyfus, like that of Zola, should be reinterred in the
Panthéon. Dreyfus’s grandson, Jean-Louis Lévy, said he thought his grandfather
would rather remain in the Montparnasse cemetery. ‘His grave is extremely
modest and I think he was a man who would not like to have been
Panthéonised.’14
The ‘Panthéonisation’ of Alfred Dreyfus has been left to historians. ‘If Dreyfus
and his friends become historians and write text-books,’ wrote Maurice Barrès,
the anti-Dreyfusard author and journalist, ‘we shall be villains in the eyes of
posterity.’15 Albert S. Lindemann, in The Jew Accused, talks of ‘the confident
tone of moral superiority assumed by most Dreyfusards and accepted by later
generations as wholly justified’.16 The subtitle of Vincent Duclert’s recent work,
L’honneur d’un patriote – the honour of a patriot – conveys the author’s view of
Dreyfus in this volume of more than a thousand pages. Ruth Harris, in her recent
book on the Dreyfus Affair, acknowledged that the subject has been
overwhelmingly dominated by the Dreyfusard historians. She expresses an
anxiety that her attempt to be fair to both sides ‘might be seen as undermining a
vision of French history that has galvanized French men and women to oppose
oppression’;17 yet one reviewer judged that she herself never entirely abjures ‘her
own preference for the Dreyfusard cause’.18
Can anything be said for the anti-Dreyfusards? Because so many of them were
Catholics, both tribal and devout, Catholic historians have been wary of writing
about the Affair, and before starting this book I asked myself whether it was
prudent for me, as a Catholic, to remind the world of their role. However, Péguy
was right to see the Affair as a defining moment in the history of the Catholic
Church. The Affair is intelligible only if it is seen in the context of the
ideological struggle between the France of St Louis and the France of Voltaire.
Moreover, as Albert S. Lindemann wrote in The Jew Accused, if ‘anti-Semitism
is to be comprehended, it must be through an analysis of the Gentile mind, a
dissection of the pathologies of western Christian thought that have over the ages
powerfully conditioned non-Jews to hate Jews’. Like Lindemann, I believe that
‘a calm, balanced and unflinching effort to understand anti-Semitism and anti-
Semites is in the long run the best defence against the views they propagate’.19
The Dreyfus Affair tells a story that needs no fictional embellishment and the
account which follows is based either on the memoirs of those involved or on
facts established by reputable historians. Unless otherwise indicated in the Notes
and Bibliography, translations from the French are my own. I have been free in
rendering dialogue to make it easy on the modern ear. I have used the term
‘Prime Minister’ rather than‘President of the Council of Ministers’ for the same
reason. ‘Commandant’ and ‘Major’ are used interchangeably. To make the story
manageable, and yet render its complexities comprehensible for a general reader,
I have started this account with the event that saw the birth of modern Europe –
the French Revolution of 1789.