The Dreyfus Affair

By Donald Morrison
Published: March 27 2010 00:09

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters
By Louis Begley
Yale University Press £18, 272 pages

For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus
By Frederick Brown
Knopf $28.95, 336 pages

Les artistes et l’affaire Dreyfus, 1898-1908
By Bertrand Tillier
Champ Vallon €29, 374 pages

The 20th century dawned not on the first day of 1900 (or, for purists, 1901) but on a September evening in 1894, when a cleaner at the German embassy in Paris found a torn-up letter in the military attaché’s wastebasket. The cleaner was working for French intelligence, and the letter, once reassembled, was found to contain military secrets being offered by an unnamed French Army officer. After a cursory investigation, authorities arrested Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain working at General Staff headquarters ...

Dreyfus was an unlikely spy, and an even unlikelier hero. Stiff and humourless, he had a sound military record, substantial personal wealth and little interest in politics, social climbing or anything except the Army. Nonetheless, he was tried for treason shortly after his arrest, convicted (with help from a crackpot handwriting analyst) and stripped of his insignia in a degradation ceremony at which crowds shouted “Death to the Jews”. He was sent to lifetime solitary confinement on a sweltering South American rock aptly named Devil’s Island.

Meanwhile, Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu, manager of the family textile business, started a ferocious campaign to free him. Mathieu enlisted novelists, artists, scientists, journalists and politicians, including publisher and future prime minister Georges Clemenceau, whose newspaper published Zola’s pro-Dreyfus thunderbolt article “J’Accuse”. Despite heavy return fire from the Army, the Catholic hierarchy and the rightwing press, public opinion gradually came around. Pro-Dreyfus demonstrations erupted across Europe and the US, and the republican government of the day fretted over France’s image as the 1900 Paris Exposition approached. In 1899, a new trial was ordered.

By then, the Army had invested too much prestige to back down. So it manufactured new evidence, and the guilty verdict was reaffirmed. Soon, however, the forgeries were uncovered. Plotters betrayed each other and even died mysteriously. The real traitor surfaced: a slippery, debt-hounded major named Ferdinand Esterhazy, who was acquitted at his own Army-rigged trial. With outrage mounting, Dreyfus was pardoned and, in 1906, fully exonerated ...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ccfdd586-384c-11df-8420-00144feabdc0.html

was hounded out of his job by National lab security and the New York Times.

And I was thinking of a more exact parallel in any event.