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Alfred Dreyfus in an army uniform, wearing a mustache.The "Dreyfus Affair" was a political scandal which divided France for many years during the late 19th century.
It centered on the 1894 treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army. Dreyfus was charged with passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. Dreyfus was, in fact, innocent; the conviction rested on false documents, and when high-ranking officers realised this they attempted to cover up the mistakes. The writer Émile Zola exposed the affair to the general public in the literary newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn) in a famous open letter to the Président de la République Félix Faure, titled J'accuse! (I Accuse!) on January 13, 1898. In the words of historian Barbara W. Tuchman, it was "one of the great commotions of history".
The Dreyfus Affair split France between the dreyfusards (those supporting Alfred Dreyfus) and the antidreyfusards (those against him). The quarrel was especially violent since it involved many issues then highly controversial in a heated political climate. To some extent, these divisions followed those between a right wing often supporting a return to monarchy and clericalism—the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in public policy—on the antidreyfusard side; and a left wing supporting the republic, often with violent anti-clerical feelings, on the dreyfusard side. However, the distinctions were not that simple as some right-wingers supported Dreyfus.
The virulence of the passions aroused by the case was to a large extent due to the anti-Semitism then existing in France, often related to Catholic, reactionary, anti-Republican feelings. This may have been due partly to the failure of the Union Générale—a Roman Catholic banking establishment which aimed at superseding Jewish finance—in 1885; it also may have been partly due to the publication of Edouard Drumont's book La France Juive in 1886.
However, the affair would not have had that much importance if France had been solidly or even mostly anti-Semitic. Indeed, Alfred Dreyfus had been admitted to France's highest schools, had been made an army officer, and had been given access to military secrets. It is doubtful that any of the above would have been possible in a solidly anti-Semitic country such as Czarist Russia. The controversy that ensued was possible because a large share of the population was not anti-Semitic and was willing to fight for an innocent Jew.
The Dreyfus Affair bitterly divided the whole of French society. Here, caricaturist Caran d'Ache depicts a fictional family dinner. At the top, somebody remarks "w/.Above all! let's not speak of the Dreyfus Affair!". At the bottom, the family is fighting and the caption reads "w/.They spoke of itw/."The case itself was more immediately the outcome of the continuous attack upon the presence of the Jews as officers in the French army, spearheaded by Drumont and others in the journal "La Libre Parole" (founded with the help of Jesuits in 1892). The articles of the "Libre Parole," which denounced French Jewish officers as being future traitors, led a Jewish captain of dragoons, Crémieu-Foa, to declare that he resented as a personal insult the slanderous assault made upon the body of Jewish officers. He fought a duel, first with Drumont, then with Lamase, under whose name the articles had appeared. It had been agreed that the report of the proceedings should not be made public. The brother of Crémieu-Foa, following the advice of Captain Esterhazy, one of the Jewish captain's seconds, communicated the information to the journal "Matin."
The Marquis de Morès, who had been chief second of Lamase and was a well-known anti-Semite and famous duellist, held Captain Mayer, chief second of Crémieu-Foa, responsible for the breach of confidentiality. Though innocent of the matter, Mayer accepted a challenge from the marquis. The duel was fought on June 23, the Jewish captain being mortally wounded at the first attack; he died a few days after the duel. Owing to the sensation that was caused by this event, the "Libre Parole" thought it wise to stop the campaign against the Jewish officers until further orders.
The Aftermath
Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899, readmitted into the army, and made a knight in the Legion of Honour. The factions in the Dreyfus affair remained in place for decades afterwards. The far right remained a potent force, as did the moderate liberals. The liberal victory played an important role in pushing the far right to the fringes of French politics. It also prompted legislation such as the 1905 enactment separating church and state. The coalition of partisan anti-Dreyfusards remained together, but turned to other causes. Groups like Maurras' Action Française that were created during the affair endured for decades. The right-wing Vichy regime was composed mostly of old anti-Dreyfusards or their descendants. It is now universally agreed that Dreyfus was innocent, but his statues and monuments are occasionally vandalised by far-right activists.
An Austrian Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl was assigned to report on the trial and its aftermath. Herzl soon became the most important activist on behalf of Zionism in its foundational phase. For many years it was believed that the anti-Semitism and injustice revealed even in "enlightened" France by the conviction of Dreyfus had a radicalizing effect on Herzl, showing him that Jews could never hope for fair treatment in European society, thus orienting him toward Zionism. Herzl himself promoted this myth some years later. However, in the past few decades this view has been rejected by historians who have closely examined the chronology of events. They have shown that Herzl, like most contemporary observers, both Jewish and Gentile, initially believed in Dreyfus's guilt. While eventually convinced of Dreyfus's innocence and indeed upset by French anti-Semitism beyond the Affair, he seems to have been much more influenced by developments in his home city of Vienna, including the rise to power of the anti-Semitic Mayor Karl Lueger. It was this rather than the Dreyfus Affair which provided the chief stimulus for his turn to Zionism at a time (1895) when the pro-Dreyfus campaign had not really begun.
Films
- "L'Affaire Dreyfus", Georges Méliès, Stumm, France, 1899
- "Trial of Captain Dreyfus", Stumm, USA, 1899
- "Dreyfus", Richard Oswald, Germany, 1930
- "The Dreyfus Case", F.W. Kraemer, Milton Rosmer, USA, 1931
- "The Life of Emile Zola", USA, 1937
- "I Accuse!", José Ferrer, England, 1958
- "Die Affäre Dreyfus", Yves Boisset, 1995
An American television film of 1991, "Prisoner of Honor", focuses on the efforts of a Colonel Piquart to justify the sentence of Alfred Dreyfus. (Colonel Piquart was played by American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who claims to be a descendent of Alfred Dreyfus.)
External links
- Text of J'accuse! (in French)
- Text of J'accuse! (in English)
- Complete Digital Bibliography on CD-ROM
- Greatest Newspaper Article of all Time (Journalistic retrospective of Zola's "J'accuse!")
- Prisoner of Honor at the Internet Movie Database
Further reading
- Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (1986)
- Eric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics (1996, ISBN 0582276799)
- Guy Chapman, The Dreyfus Trials (1972)
- Nicholas Halasz, Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria (1955)
- Burns Michael, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (1999)