No other issue divided France and other European countries more intensely in the last years of the 19th century than the Dreyfus affair. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, was banished for allegedly spying for the Germans. Gradually, however, it became increasingly clear that his superiors tampered with his dossier, and the military command covered the scandal up.
Possible rehabilitation was discussed intensely but it was Emile Zola who opened the public debate with his fiery article in L’Aurore, titled ‘J’Accuse!’. What is more important, he asked, the rights of individuals or the prestige of the state? This was a question that will reverberate time and again throughout the 20th century and beyond, and in 1898, when Zola first asked it, it was no less divisive. Friends, family members and literary salons were ripped apart by their differing stances; there were fights, divorces, and libel lawsuits.
A retrial was commissioned. During it (above), Marcel Proust sat in the public gallery each day with coffee and sandwiches, so as not to miss a moment. Proust and his brother Robert helped to circulate a petition for Dreyfus – an act that angered their father intensely. The petition, ‘The Manifesto of the Intellectuals’ was signed by 3,000 notables, including Anatole France, Andre Gide and Claude Monet. Anti-Dreyfusards also included equally eminent artisans, such as Renoir, Cezanne and Degas. Degas stopped speaking to Monet, Cassatt and Pissarro and disparaged his former friends’ art.
As Barbara Tuchman wrote in her monumental history of Europe before the First World War, The Proud Tower, Dreyfus affair was the death struggle of the old world. Many things we now take for granted – sensationalist press, public debates, petitions, liberal bourgeoisie class – were born out of the trial, as were impetuses that would drive many important events in the following decades. Anti-Dreyfus papers ran daily columns about a conspiracy involving Jews, Freemasons, socialists and foreigners. The Viennese Neue Freie Presse‘s correspondent in Paris was so shocked at the anti-Semitism that he would write the first sentences of his Der Judenstaat, ‘the Jews had to be given a country of their own’ subsequently. His name was Theodor Herzl, and the first seeds of what will become the state of Israel were first sown at the Dreyfus trial.
Dreyfus himself was pardoned, rehabilitated and awarded the Legion of Honor when France finally realized that the affair was damaging its international image. Once free, Dreyfus proved himself to be less idealistic than those who had fought for him. Years later, when a group of intellectuals asked him to sign a petition to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti – two American victims of a political process – Dreyfus flew into a rage: he wanted nothing more to do with such affairs. As Charles Péguy, one of the most fervent Dreyfusards, lamented in Notre Jeunesse: ‘We were prepared to die for Dreyfus, but Dreyfus himself was not’.
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People will defend a process even when doing so destroys the credibility and legitimacy of the institution the process was created to serve. Whether it is the trial of Dreyfus or the disciplining of priests by the Catholic Church or peer reviewed credentialing of global warming reports or the maintenance of feudal loyalty to the staff in the Committee to Reelect the President during Watergate the result is the same. It is the coverup that destroys the institution that those who perverted the process with lies had a duty to serve.
If the Anti-Dreyfusards had any idea of the damage that would be done to institutions that they valued would they have insisted on the truth? It is easy to teach children to admire the discipline of Titus Manlius Torquatus, who ordered his own son executed for breaking the law.
Human beings being social animals naturally rely on loyalty to shelter us from from harsh realities. When to that fear of the harsh disinfecting light of truth is added the pull of anti-Semitism the choice for many became irresistible. Some were willing to risk damaging the law, the social structure, and the loyalty of the people to defend the authority of the French army. More were secretly willing to sacrifice their public loyalty to all those institutions to indulge their desire to attack the Jews.
Dreyfus himself only survived by being convinced that he was living out the ideal of Manlian virtue. He became more conservative than his opponents. He was a Jew acting "more Catholic than the Pope." The idea that he could be equated with the Anarchists Saccho and Vanzetti must have filled him with horror.
The law is a rather crude instrument. There are many people who are in jail (and have been executed) who have gone through the entire system and been found guilty, but are still innocent. Seen the Illonios death house clearing with new DNA evidence of a few years back.
Of course, the issue is the fact of Sacco and Vanzetti's trial being a political trial in that way like Dreyfus or for that matter the Rosenbergs, or the Stalin show trials. Some guilty some innocent.
Uh, "lawguy", as a matter of law, Sacco and Vanzetti were long ago found guilty. From their trial through two appeals to and reviews by the Massachusetts supreme court, the judiciary's verdict was consistent: Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. (For someone going by the name "lawguy", you don't seem to have much grasp of the law.)
The vast majority of the "ink spilled" since then has been spilled trying to prove Sacco and Vanzetti were NOT guilty. Unfortunately for those revisionists, the man who probably did more than anyone else to perpetuate the myth of Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence, Upton Sinclair, had a pang of conscience about what he was doing: lying. He confessed in letters to his lawyer that he knew from their own defense attorney that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. But Sinclair also knew that claiming innocence was a better commercial proposition, especially abroad, so he went with that instead.
The proof of Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt was long ago adduced, tested and acted upon. As it happens there is also subsequent proof that the chief doubter of the original proof was a liar and the other doubters were dupes.
"Easy to make sweeping statements with no proof" is, of course, self-referential and self-refuting.
Once again it is easy to make sweeping statements with no proof. I know that there has been a lot of ink spilled trying to prove Sacco and Vanzetti guilty, but there is still no proof, just ink.
ETat is absolutely right. Why should Dreyfus support Sacco and Vanzetti? Dreyfus was innocent. Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, as subsequent history proved. (The Iconic Photos post is in error in describing them as "victims of a political process".)
Well, naturally Dreufus would not act in solidarity with supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti - why should he? That was a question of political fight - they Socialists of the worst, vulgar caliber, while he was persecuted just for the fact of his genetic composition, something he couldn't choose conscientiously; he was falsely accused of the crime he didn't commit - but they did.
Equaling defense of a wrongly accused Jew with defense of criminal Lefties is characteristically what some anti-Semites think: that all Jews are socialists/communists and vice-versa. Wrong reasoning.
Btw, the timing of this post could not be more precise for me. I have just finished [somewhat naive and propagandistic, but overall a good read] The diary of a chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau. Towards the end of the book he portrays one of the "anti-Dreyfusards", an inn-keeper in Cherbourg, shouting : "If the traitor is guilty, let him be sent back! If he is innocent, let him be shot" to the total adoration and applause of his patrons...
Bravo! This image, utterly fascinating from a myriad points of view is the very essence for all, everything that "iconic" has come to define. What a find of monumental proportions.
You've really outdone yourself.
Marc,
Somewhere, at the turn of the century, a new world paradigm emerged. I would have placed it later, perhaps with DuChamp's "nude descending the stairway" or Stravinsky's "rite of spring," but this brief essay may prove that l'affaire Dreyfus was at least the harbinger of the new world.
Love this website.