Charles Petzold

One of my 2024 projects is to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at the rate of about 10 pages a day, and so far it’s been successful: I’m currently heading towards the end of the 3rd volume, The Guermantes Way. During a long dinner party in this novel, seemingly everyone has taken sides in the Dreyfus Affair. This is an episode in French history centered around a wrongful arrest and conviction for an act of espionage, but characterized by a shockingly overt manifestation of antisemitism.

If you don’t know anything about the Dreyfus Affair — or (like me) need some reminders of the details — the recent book Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale University Press, 2024) is an excellent place to start. It is part of the Yale University Press’s renowned Jewish Lives series, and the shortness of the narrative (just 172 pages) is balanced by plenty of footnotes if you want to dive deeper. Author Maurice Samuels is a Professor of French at Yale and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.

The short version of the story begins like this: An act of espionage committed in 1894 by Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (an officer in the French army) is wrong attributed to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who is then convicted in a secret military trial and sent to Devil’s Island, where he suffers extreme mental and physical duress for five years.

That Alfred Dreyfus was one of many Jewish officers in the French military was a tribute to the concepts of equality that arose during the Enlightenment, and which became explicitly enumerated in 1789 in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” This resulted in the emancipation of French Jews as part of the French Revolution. In terms of establishing equal rights for Jews, Franch was far ahead of other European countries as well as the United States.

Yet, the arrest and conviction of Dreyfus unleashed unprecedented levels of ugly and violent antisemitism. This is when and where (Maurice Samuels writes) “modern antisemitism first took shape.” (pp. 35–6)

The case also became a stress test of human rights and democracy:

What had begun as a case of petty espionage came to seem an event of global importance, because more than the fate of a single man was at stake: the Dreyfus Affair offered the first real test of the liberal institutions that had developed in the West over the course of the previous century. Could the rights of the individual compete against the interests of the military and state bureaucracy? Would the justice system prove independent of the press of the military and popular prejudice? Did equality before the law truly apply to every citizen, regardless of race and creed? (p.87)

The French public became split between Dreyfusards — those who believed that Dreyfus was innocent — and anti-Dreyfusards. The increasing evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence and the push for a new trial was capped by Emile Zola’s famous indictment of the military courts “J’Accuse…!” in 1898. Yet far from convincing all of France of the injustice committed against Dreyfus, the antisemitic attacks became worse. To many, questioning the integrity of the military was itself treasonous.

Zola’s article generated an enormous backlash against Jews, a public demonstration of hatred the likes of which France had never seen. The extent of the anti-Jewish antipathy is shocking. Over the course of several months, no fewer than sixty-nine cities and towns in metropolitan France and colonial Algeria — including many locales with few or no Jews — witnessed anti-Jewish agitation that can be compared to the pogroms that shook the Russian empire during the 1880s, even if there were fewer fatalities. (p. 98)

Zola himself was convicted of libel and fled to England.

The debate over Dreyfus went far beyond the particular case of treason. The two factions were often associated with a bundle of other political beliefs:

The Dreyfusards shared a liberal, pluralistic vision of the nation, in which the rights of the individual were paramount, and Jews and other minorities would enjoy full equality. They opposed the influence of the Catholic Church in French life and sought to reduce the political power of the military. The anti-Dreyfusards, in contrast, embraced a deterministic model of French identity defined by race and religion, which excluded Jews — even those Jews, like Dreyfus, whose families had lived in France for centuries. (p. 102)

As Marcel Proust’s portrayal of the dinner party in The Guermantes Way illustrates, not only society but families were split on the Dreyfus Affair. Proust himself was a Dreyfusard, as was his brother and their Jewish mother, while Proust’s non-Jewish father was pro-Army. While many other authors and artists took Dreyfus’s side, others did not. Among the anti-Dreyfusards were Jules Verne and artists: Cézanne, Rodin, Renoir, and Degas. (p. 103)

When Dreyfus was convicted for a second time — evidence that would have exonerated him was kept secret from the public due to “national security” — much of the rest of the world reacted in outrage. American newspapers in particular were appalled at the French miscarriage of justice. But as American journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells noted, “in our own land and under our own flag, the writer can give day and detail of one thousand men, women, and children who during the last six years were put to death without trial before any tribunal on earth.” (p. 125)

Interestingly, antisemitic posters in France often portrayed Dreyfus being hung rather than executed by the guillotine, suggesting to author Maurice Samuels “the extent to which the European antisemitic imagination was fed by anti-Black racism in the United States.” (p. 125)

The most significant long-term effect of the Dreyfus Affair was the birth of Zionism. If even liberal France was not immune from antisemitism, then where could Jews be safe except in their own homeland? One of the more interesting aspects of Maurice Samuels’ narrative is a discussion of the early debate among three groups: Zionists, integrationists (who believed Jews should strive to live among gentiles), and socialists, who sought a unity among workers of the world but sometimes expressed their own variety of antisemitism.

We today can see how the antisemitism during the Dreyfus Affair was mixed in with anxiety about modernism, secularism, and immigration, which still today often trigger anti-liberal politics. The far-right in France continues to cast doubt on the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus. As Samuels writes, “Demonizing Dreyfus remains a potent dog whistle for this demographic” (p. 170)