The End of the Affair

In Costa-Gavras’s classic 1969 film Z, a reporter shouts a question at a Greek police general being taken into custody for the murder of a left-wing politician: “Is your arrest a new Dreyfus Affair?” The general, played impeccably by Pierre Dux, sputters back: “Dreyfus was guilty!”

On Monday, France’s National Assembly formally voted the posthumous promotion of Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of Brigadier-General. The vote was unanimous, with deputies from the extreme right National Rally joining others in the gesture. Is this the end, at last, of the Dreyfus Affair? I think it is.

Most of the French thought they had heard the last of Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus on January 5, 1895, when he underwent a humiliating ceremony of degradation in the courtyard of the Paris École Militaire, following his conviction, on highly dubious evidence, for having betrayed military secrets to Germany. After discovering a leak, the army had hastily settled on the ambitious young Jewish officer as the traitor. During the ceremony, crowds outside the fence screeched “death to the Jews.” Immediately afterwards, Dreyfus was transported across the Atlantic to the dreadful penal colony on Devil’s Island and left to rot. But his family protested his innocence and kept pushing for further investigation. The cause gained steam after an intelligence officer, Georges Picquart, came across compelling evidence pointing to a gentile officer, Ferdinand Esterhazy, as the true culprit.

Dreyfus’s accusers hoped the Affair had ended on January 11, 1898, when a military court ignored this evidence and acquitted Esterhazy while the General Staff ordered Picquart’s arrest. But two days later the novelist Émile Zola published his grand polemic J’accuse, summarizing the case for Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’s innocence—and denouncing the cowardice and criminality of France’s leaders. There followed a year of white-hot political combat, accompanied by massive antisemitic rioting across the country. Communities and families split at the seams, and the very survival of the Third Republic seemed in doubt. At the end of August 1898, a key figure among the “anti-Dreyfusards,” Major Hubert-Joseph Henry, confessed to having fabricated evidence against Dreyfus and committed suicide. In June 1899, France’s highest court overturned the initial verdict and ordered a new trial. But three months after that, a military tribunal, incredibly, again pronounced Dreyfus guilty. For the anti-Dreyfusards, the honor of the army mattered more than seeing justice done for a Jew.

Many more people hoped the Affair had ended when, just ten days after this new verdict, President Émile Loubet formally pardoned Dreyfus, ending his imprisonment. But it took until 1906 for the high court to pronounce Dreyfus’s full exoneration and his reinstatement in the army. At this point, the name Dreyfus finally began to fade from French public life. But Dreyfus himself protested that the court hadn’t taken into account the five years he had spent in prison, and that he should have received a higher rank. The next year he resigned from the army, although he returned to active service during World War I and ended his career as a colonel. In voting his posthumous promotion to brigadier general, the National Assembly has in effect voted to grant Dreyfus’s 119-year-old request.

Echoes of the Affair continued to resound long after 1906. For decades, the French extreme right routinely referred to Dreyfus as a “false innocent,” and its press organs continued to hint that further evidence, deliberately suppressed by corrupt officials, would finally prove his guilt. After France’s defeat in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy regime eliminated nearly all mention of the Affair from history textbooks.

In 1984, the government of Socialist President François Mitterrand commissioned a statue of Dreyfus from the Polish-born Jewish sculptor Louis Mitelberg, known as Tim. It showed Dreyfus in uniform, holding the saber formally broken during the degradation ceremony. Culture Minister Jack Lang wanted the statue placed in the courtyard of the École Militaire, where the ceremony had taken place, but army officers and Defense Minister Charles Hernu objected. The truth, apparently, still threatened to tarnish the honor of the army. Tim then suggested the Place Dauphine, opposite the Palais de Justice where the high court finally exonerated Dreyfus in 1906. Instead, the government placed the statue in the Tuileries Garden. In 1994, President Jacques Chirac had it moved to near the prison where Dreyfus was first placed under arrest.

If you are in Paris before the end of August, you have a chance to see the terrific exhibit on Dreyfus and the Affair at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. It includes the original document sent by Esterhazy to the Germans, which a famous handwriting expert wrongly insisted was written by Dreyfus (you can compare the handwriting samples yourself). There are photos and memorabilia from the Dreyfus family, examples of antisemitic propaganda from the period, original copies of J’accuse, and much more.

Looking back after 130 years, how should we see the Affair? Above all as an episode of antisemitic horror? The historian Pierre Birnbaum presents it this way in his book The Antisemitic Moment. After reading it, you would think that from the standpoint of 1898 France, not Germany, looked like the country most likely to attempt genocide against the Jews. Or should we think of the Affair as a victory, in the end, for truth and justice, for the Republic and toleration over antisemitism and hate? I think both interpretations are true. History can be complicated, even contradictory, in this way.

In France, traces of past conflict and violence can be found almost everywhere. In the Latin Quarter of Paris, an old bookstore called La Libre Pensée (free thought) still sells pamphlets recalling the same clerical atrocities that Voltaire denounced in the eighteenth century. Paris has no streets named for Maximilien Robespierre, the leading architect of the Terror, but just outside the city borders, in a suburban municipality once run by Communists, there is a prominent one. Looming over Paris is the garish basilica of Sacré-Coeur, erected by the Catholic Church to expiate the sins of the Paris Commune of 1871, including the execution of the city’s archbishop. In response, left-wing city officials placed nearby a statue of a teenager cruelly executed for blasphemy in 1766. In the western region of the Vendée, monuments to the doomed Catholic Royalist revolt against the French Revolution and to the victims of the Revolution’s ferociously bloody reprisals are everywhere, and there is even a theme park dedicated to the subject. In the old Jewish quarter of the Marais, sober plaques mark where French officials took helpless Jews into custody during World War II before deporting them to the death camps. And, of course, there are memorials and museums devoted to the Shoah, to the war, to the resistance—and to Alfred Dreyfus.

The theme running through nearly all these sites is atonement, expiation. Evil was done in this place, by French people, and it needs to be acknowledged. There are those in France, especially on the right, who think the country is apologizing too much. The right-wing politician Éric Zemmour—himself of Algerian Jewish descent—defends the Vichy regime despite its collaboration in the Holocaust and denounces mainstream rivals for committing what he calls national self-flagellation. But serious intellectuals, including Jews such as Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre Nora (the great historian who passed away just this week), have also claimed that too great a focus on the country’s past errors and crimes threatens France’s “roman national.” It’s an almost untranslatable phrase. It literally means “the national novel,” and is often rendered into English as “the national epic.” I think “the national myth” comes closer. For what it is worth, I don’t think a country’s unity is threatened by the telling of unpleasant truths about its past. It’s more threatened by the suppression of such truths—something Donald Trump is attempting right now on a scale that Éric Zemmour can only dream of. In any case, whether these intellectuals like it or not, there are still many battles being fought in France over its history: over the events of World War II, over the history of the French overseas empire, over the Vendée.

But not over Dreyfus. While many old causes still have valiant defenders in the country, the anti-Dreyfusards seem to have disappeared almost entirely. The army has lost the place it once held in the national imagination, and almost no one still worries about the tarnishing of its honor. And the National Rally, a party founded by the notorious antisemite Jean-Marie Le Pen with help from a veteran of the Waffen SS, has tried to redefine itself as philosemitic—a convenient way to “de-demonize” itself while attacking Muslim immigrants for antisemitic violence. This week, in fact, the only dissenting voices heard in the discussion of Dreyfus’s promotion came from the centrist MoDem movement, whose leaders called the vote a cheap way for the National Rally and the left-wing France Unbowed party (whose leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has also faced accusations of anti-semitism) to get undeserved credit for supporting French Jews. Meanwhile, voices are calling for Alfred Dreyfus’s reburial in the Pantheon of national heroes.

So while the French may remain a deeply divided people, Alfred Dreyfus is no longer one of the things dividing them.