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March 31, 2006
A look back at persecution
100 years later, the Dreyfus Affair still resonates among Jews.
EUGENE KAELLIS
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the restoration of Alfred
Dreyfus as a French army officer and his induction into one of France's
greatest tributes – the Legion of Honor. These events also
happen to mark the formal end of one of the most notorious affairs
in a period rich in scandals and financial chicanery.
In 1894, when the Dreyfus Affair – as it came to be known –
began, French nerves were still raw from the swift and humiliating
defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. German troops had marched
flauntingly down the Champs Elysées and France was forced
to give the new German Reich all of Alsace and part of the Lorraine
territories. The French, always nationalistic and now doubly so,
burned for revenge and restoration of their lost territories. In
just two years of this charged environment, France had convicted
six spies for Germany and sentenced them to between five and 20
years in prison.
In 1894, Dreyfus, attached to the general staff, was tried before
a court martial for betraying military secrets to Germany, found
guilty and sentenced to life in solitary confinement on Devil's
Island, off French Guyana, where he was the only inmate. Formerly
a leper colony and a prison, the island had been abandoned because
of the many deaths of those interned there. While isolated, Dreyfus
received no news of the struggle for his freedom.
With additional evidence emerging, some as recently as 1930, it
is incontrovertibly certain that Dreyfus was the victim of a deliberate
set-up based on forged documents and anti-Semitism for its initiation
and success. Dreyfus, for whom Jewishness was an insignificant part
of his life, was more hurt than angered by the guilty verdict, as
his passions were for France and the army.
At the time of his trial, European, and especially French, anti-Judaism
had already metamorphosed into anti-Semitism, which condemned the
Jews as racially – and, therefore, irremediably – inferior
and evil. The Inequality of Human Races by the French Count
Gobineau (1816-'82), the first authoritative work of modern Jew-hatred,
was part of a growing literature in eugenics and "race purity"
inspired by the corrupt application of Darwinism.
Why this malignancy affected France, the birthplace of the Enlightenment,
is a subject of some interest. The rationalists had attacked Judaism
because of its alleged primitivism, just as they had attacked the
Church. But some, conspicuously Voltaire, strayed further, into
anti-Semitism.
France was nevertheless considered the crucible of liberty, equality
and fraternity. Napoleon had established an accord with France's
Jews and had eliminated ghettos wherever his army went. It was the
peculiarities of French history that produced a country full of
the most profound contradictions.
In less than 100 years, France experienced four violent revolutions
– none of which achieved their major stated objectives –
and additionally, two coups d'etat, which changed not only leadership
but the system of governance: Napoleon's (1804) and his nephew's
(Louis Napoleon, 1851). France was, therefore, heir to a legacy
of shattered hopes, unremitting social warfare and unfulfilled promises,
invariably giving rise to sharp and bitter divisions, cynicism and
the scapegoating of convenient victims.
This history bred an unholy alliance of the most reactionary members
of the Church with disgruntled authoritarian and monarchist remnants.
Together with the upper echelons of the army, they convicted Dreyfus
and promoted anti-Jewish editorials, speeches and riots during and
after his trials. In the Second World War, their heirs in both Nazi-occupied
and unoccupied (Vichy) France zealously rounded up Jews for shipment
to death camps. Today, these sentiments persist in what can charitably
be called an ambiguous policy regarding Israel.
With the suicide of one of the officers involved in the set-up,
the case against Dreyfus began to unravel. Émile Zola, one
of France's greatest writers, publicly denounced the army for Dreyfus's
conviction and was abruptly charged and convicted with libel. He
escaped to England, rather than face imprisonment, but his accusations
helped re-open the case.
All France split between Dreyfusards – anti-clericalists, republicans,
socialists - and anti-Dreyfusards, comprised of the military, almost
the entire Church, reactionaries and monarchists who raised the
cry – "Mort aux Juifs!" ("Death to the
Jews!")
The mob demonstrations, threats, violence, abuse, lies and intrigues
that split France in the last stages of the affair threatened to
destroy the Republic. In 1898, the Court of Appeals ordered a new
court martial for Dreyfus, but high-ranking officers, as well as
the minister of war, had so compromised themselves that they stuck
even more tenaciously to their lies and fabrications. Again, Dreyfus
was judged guilty, but this time the president of the Republic pardoned
him and he was returned to his family. Many of Dreyfus's supporters
objected to the pardon as appeasing the worst elements in the army;
they wanted complete exoneration. Some claimed that the pardon was
to placate American and British public opinion in advance of the
1900 opening of the Paris Exposition. Only in 1906 was there an
official finding of innocence.
After Dreyfus's first conviction, in a public ceremony in which
he was drummed out of the army in disgrace, his uniform torn off
and his sabre broken, one of the onlookers, most of whom applauded
his public degradation, was Theodore Herzl, correspondent for an
Austrian paper. Strongly affected by what he experienced and observed
of European Jewish communities, in 1896 he published The Jewish
State, for the first time coherently developing a political
concept of Zionism.
Dreyfus fought for France in the First World War. He lived to see
the publication in 1930 of the memoirs of a German embassy official
at the time of the alleged treason which completely absolved him
of any wrongdoing. He died in 1935, two years after the triumph
of Nazism in Germany.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.
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