Why dreyfus affair matters

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Email alerts Article activity alert. Advance article alerts. New issue alert. The Dreyfus Affair will continue to matter as long as there are those prepared to defend human rights and the dignity of every human life against claims of expediency, reasons of state and official miscarriages of justice.

And he has written a brilliant book, using a lawyer's skill to marshal the facts and a novelist's art to relate them. The result is a history that drives the reader forward and occasionally steals his breath. Also of Interest Books from this Series. German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity. Peter Barham. Zionism and Statecraft.

Michael Makovsky. Robert Gildea. Extending the Frontiers of Christendom. Jonathan Phillips. That hideous degradation ritual is at the heart of the Dreyfus affair; it was meant to be public and demonstrative—this is what happens to faithless Jews. The Dreyfus affair matters not because of the parallel with our time but because it was one of the first tests of modern pluralist liberalism and its institutions—a test that those institutions somehow managed to pass and fail at the same time.

In France a century ago, the system finally worked, as they used to say after Watergate. The good guys rallied around, the courts did their job, Dreyfus was vindicated and came home to his family.

Yet what the system exposed as it worked was, in a way, worse than the injustice it remedied. It showed that a huge number of Europeans, in a time largely smiling and prosperous, liked engaging in raw, animal religious hatred, and only felt fully alive when they did. Hatred and bigotry were not a vestige of the superstitious past but a living fire—just what comes, and burns, naturally. The typical modern media melodrama involves the courtroom: from Scopes to O.

The Dreyfus affair, in some ways the first of those dramas, held France spellbound in part because it included not one but at least six trials; to keep track of them—the trials and courts-martial of Dreyfus defenders and accusers, as well as his own—is exhausting.

Just last year, though, George R. Alfred Dreyfus came from Alsace, which was part of his luck and then part of his tragedy. As spoils of war, the Prussians took most of Alsace and Lorraine, the northeastern provinces; the figure of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde was draped in black and remained that way until after the First World War. This meant that the Jews of Alsace were both frustrated foreigners and beloved native sons.

Above all, many Frenchmen thought that France had lost the war because it had turned away from the faith. It was dedicated explicitly to the expiation of the sins of and the redemption of France by a restored Catholic Church. A saner response to the war had been to reform and democratize the French Army, by making its officer ranks meritocratic and national rather than aristocratic and narrow.

Dreyfus, as a Jewish son of Alsace, took advantage of these reformist impulses, and came to Paris to become an artillery officer. It was in that city of two towers, one finished and one rising, that, in the fall of , Dreyfus became the accidental victim of a stupid plot, which was not, in its origins, anti-Semitic. From the scraps, the spies reassembled a shocking memorandum, the bordereau , in which a French officer offered to sell military secrets.

The nature of the secrets to be sold seemed to point to an artillery officer, and suspicion fell on Dreyfus, not least because he made regular visits to his family in Mulhouse, then still in German hands. With the normal prejudice of the secret police in favor of their own suspicions, the Statistique had Dreyfus arrested. The bordereau had actually been written by another officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy—one of those subjects in the history of espionage who are so obviously guilty that only the geniuses of counter-intelligence could look past them.

Just as no one in the C. Then black comedy was piled on stupidity. The accusation was first kept secret, but as soon as it was made public the secrecy itself became an occasion for assault: the Army was protecting a traitor Jew.

He was responding to the waves of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe who had arrived in France during the previous twenty or so years, bringing with them, he argued, values and a faith alien to Christian France.

This had happened under the demoralizing pressure of modern art and culture, which was, of course, Jewish culture: the culture of bankers and speculators and atheists and decadent artists. It seemed perfectly natural—a heartbreaking irony, in retrospect—to suspect that Jews would sell out France to their spiritual home in Germany. The more eagerly a Jew attempted to escape from Judaism, the more Jewish he revealed himself to be—a snaky shape-shifter with no allegiances to anything except clan.

This coalition of hatred of immigrants and Catholic reaction did not put Dreyfus in a cage. But it helped keep him there. Overnight the most despised man in the country he worshipped, he was torn from his wife and children and sent to rot on a tiny, desolate island in the Atlantic, in a prison altered to prevent him from ever seeing the ocean that surrounded him. It must also be said, with Begley, that his treatment was by modern American standards benevolent.