Does Alfred Dreyfus Matter?

Norman Simms

Every year when we come around to an anniversary of Alfred Dreyfus's ceremonial degradation and loss of all his Army ranks and benefits, after he was wrongfully found guilty of treason and espio age, we have to ask if the case matters still today.  When his name comes up, the commentators jump on the band wagon, rehearse the general outlines of the case against him, and turn their attention away from the man--and his family and friends--to legal issues, the relationship to Herzl's commitment to Zionism, and the question of whether France has ever really gotten over its anti-Semitism.  My attention has been--and my several books on Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus give proof to this--on the way the shock and trauma of his arrest, conviction and exile, as well as the further trials and efforts to clear his name brought out the real bravery and heroism in the man, along with the unwavering support and devotion of his wife.  The long struggle from 1894 and on to 1906 showed their true character, made them realize as never before how Jewish they were, and what the meaning of their love meant to them and the world.

...but often we find in history of the immense power of contagion, of poisoning by the moral climate...

—Charles Baudelaire[1]

To ask if or why the Dreyfus Affair still matters more than a hundred years after the matter seemed to be closed by the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus and his election to the Legion of Honour is tantamount to asking if anti-Semitism still matters in world politics—and not just to the Jews.  But when journalists and essayists discuss the issue today, or merely bring up Dreyfus’s name as an arguing point, they don’t mention anti-Semitism, nor even mention that Dreyfus was a Jew, persecuted because he was a Jew, and found his strength to survive the horrible torment of imprisonment on Devil’s Island for five years and an additional struggle to clear his name because he was a Jew.  What these columnists discuss about the Dreyfus Affair and to a lesser degree mean by the code name of Dreyfus is something else: it is the question of government corruption, intrigue and duplicity in the law.  For at least the last ten years, when these matters come in newspapers, magazines and blogs, the writers see the false accusations against Dreyfus and the manipulation of courtroom evidence in terms of contemporary politics and from a particular point of view.  The analogy is drawn between the French military, judiciary and parliamentary abuse of the law and American, British, and even Israeli abuses: that the Americans over-reacted to the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, that the British joined the Americans in imposing unjust and ridiculous security laws and thus criminalizing people for expressing their opinions and protesting government actions, such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that the Israelis use torture and commit war crimes against the Palestinians for attempting to regain their lost lands and freedoms, and because it is an unequal battle, stigmatize the PLO, Hamas, and Hizbollah as murderers, suicide killers, and indiscriminate terrorists when they are freedom fighters and martyrs.

            These are all not only false analogies, thus making them intellectual failures of logc, however; and whatever your sympathies might be for persons incarcerated by Homeland Security Laws or Arabs arrested and shot for attacking pizza parlors, hotels and marketplaces, you cannot create a persuasive argument if the facts of Dreyfus Affair are all wrong.  They are signs of a collective mental illness, as Charles Baudelaire points out in our headnote. 

            When he speaks of the “moral climate” in 1859, Baudelaire means the psychological matrix in which ideas and attitudes play out their games of articulation and denial, so that again, in nineteenth-century usage, “contagion” refers to what we would call suggestibility or, in more psychohistorical terms, a collective fantasy or mass trance.  The immense power of contagion can be therefore point to the way in which a large group of people, such as most of a national public, can undergo a series of profound collective traumas, become increasingly suspicious and paranoid, and thus find their institutions of rationality, law and civil order destabilized, to the point in which fantastic dreams of the past substitute for the actual experience of reality.  Only in this sense can we understand why the Dreyfus Affair happened when it did and with the persons at the centre being completely innocent Jews.  Against all historical expectations in the last decades of the nineteenth century, following the great debacle of the Prussian victory over France in 1870 and the consequent terrible loss of Alsace and Lorraine, the same population that prided itself on the ideals of the Revolution of 1789 and on the glorious victories of Napoleon Bonaparte, felt so humiliated and disgraced that they searched for scapegoats on whom to project their bad feelings.  Anti-Semites who had been a small marginalized band of fanatics opposed by a tolerant, liberal majority became the loudest voices in the land and directed key events in political and social history for nearly thirty-five years.  Against all common sense and statistical evidence, the French press, politicians, military elites and Catholic clerics—who had before had religious not biological reasons to oppose the Jews—began to claim that Jews were dominating every facet of French life, from economics to musical tastes, from scientific theories to sexual behaviour.  This is the moral contagion that was spreading from one corner of France to another,

            Alfred Dreyfus was charged with being a spy for the Germans and a traitor against France.  False or at best ambiguous and at worst non-existent documents were used to convict him in two courts martial where his lawyers were prevented from seeing the papers supposedly proving his guilt.  Dreyfus maintained his innocence constantly.  He never wavered in his cry of loyalty to the Army and France.  When he was condemned, he said it was because of a judicial error, and demanded a re-trial to prove his case.  He never threatened the state and never accused anyone else of crimes or even of lying.  The laws were subverted to obtain verdicts against him, and the regulations of the army were changed to have him sent into perpetual exile, placed in solitary confinement, and treated as a pariah; and he was shackled to his bed at night.  Everything he did, said and wrote was scrutinized and subject to censorship.  Never once did he cry out that he was persecuted as a Jew.  Though he never denied his Judaism, he never charged his opponents with anti-Semitism. His ideals were honour, truth, justice and loyalty to the French Republic.  So the Dreyfus Affair demonstrates something quite different from what the modern commentators think it does, when they see Dreyfus as unfairly treated for his beliefs, for his actions, or his association with protests or rebellion.  Behind the scenes, moreover—and not really a secret because these issues became more and more part of the public debate which eventually turned the tide and saw the government changed and a new regime installed that would finally rectify the wrongs done against Dreyfus: these issues had to do with two ways of looking at the world, the old way based on the army, the church, and rural landed power, and the new way based on democracy, separation of church and state, and urban, industrial power. 

            However, to a greater extent than we can imagine now, from 1894 to 1906 it did not seem all black and white, and hindsight also allows us to see that, on the one hand, people on both sides often had rational and historical reasons for taking the positions they did, while on the other, it is possible to see extremists on both sides who sought to exploit the debate for their own private ends.  Proust, though a supporter of Dreyfus, nevertheless shows in A la recherché du temps perdu that the issues were complex and the boundaries blurred.  It was never simply a regressive, irrational band of anti-intellectuals trying to hold back the tide of modernity, and progressive, logical intellectuals on the other seeking to reform France and bring her into the twentieth century.  There were no good guys in white hats for Dreyfus and bad guys in black hats against him: there were individuals and groups who manipulated the themes thrown up by the Dreyfus Affair for their own private ambitions. Out of the real debate were the anti-Semites—and they existed on both sides in the opposition—and the arrogant officers and officials who simply wanted to stay in power or to gain power, regardless of what principles they gave lip service to in public.  Probably, as Dreyfus seems to say when he returned to France after being incommunicado for five years and so unaware of the great contention that had come into play while he was gone, he probably would have been an anti-Dreyfusard, in the sense that he was opposed to any radical or violent opposition to the state, had no animus towards the Church or any other religious institutions, and respected fully authority and hierarchy, as a good soldier should.  It was rather Emil Zola and Georges Clemenceau who challenged the status quo and called it to account, and when the socialists and anarchists who had rallied to the Dreyfusard cause as a strategic move came to power, they disestablished the Catholic Church, they reduced the influence of the army, and they instigated policies that actually weakened France, so that when the Great War broke out in 1914, it could not prevent disaster.  These men, and not all the friends, relatives and supporters of the Dreyfusard cause, abandoned Alfred Dreyfus when he accepted a pardon—they preferred he go back to Devil’s Island so they had a good argument again—and they refused to help Alfred work for his rehabilitation and exoneration—they found him a troublesome pest, and merely as a Jew he was not worth the effort.

            For this reason we have to ask did Dreyfus receive justice at any time during his long ordeal—or even long afterwards?[2]  Technically, that is, going by the rules of the legal system in France at the time, he seemed to get a fair trial, and most people, including many Jews, felt that if one, and then a second, military court found him guilty, then he must be guilty.  What was wrong, for those who could not believe him as anything but innocent, given who and what he was, there must have been an error made in the conduct of the court, not a systemic fault or a deliberate series of deceptions, forgeries and suppressions of the truth.  However, by the time of Dreyfus’s being sent into exile, there were, at least in his family and among the supporters who began to rally to his cause, suspicions that justice had not been served.  Some of these people now suspected that someone or other and perhaps some small cabal in the military were out to get Alfred Dreyfus, either because they hated him as an individual or as a Jew, but more likely, at this early stage, because once the error was made of accusing him in public—as was done to a newspaper reporter—then the military men and the politicians in government could not back down without losing face.  That decision being taken, to sacrifice this single man, this Jew, who shouldn’t have been in the army at all, or at least not posted to the high command and its intelligence bureau, wheels were set in motion to ensure that the court martial would find him guilty and he would be sent far away so as not to cause any trouble.  This is the arrogance of power.  Those with vested interests in the system, those who believe they have a right to be where they are, cannot stand for anyone to question their authority or to place principles before power. 

            But also by the time Lucie Dreyfus, Alfred’s wife, and Mathieu Dreyfus, his older brother, started to ask questions, to investigate procedures, and to petition for a retrial, it started to become clear to them that what had happened was not a simple error of judgment and not an arrogant display of the establishment protecting itself, though errors clearly had been made and arrogance was at work.  Evidence was being manufactured, documents were claimed to exist that did not exist, and high-placed men were perjuring themselves: so that the first court martial was conducted in secret and the military judges were asked to trust the prosecuting attorneys that documents proving Dreyfus’s guilt could not be made public for fear of starting a war with Germany—the Republic’s security was at stake.  Fellow officers had been jealous of Dreyfus because he was wealthy, married and made no effort to socialize with them.  They also had an inherent anti-Semitic bias that was stirred up by Eduard Dreyfus’s popular pseudo-history France juive and his newspaper La libre parole, and the government of the day was weak and feared an election defeat, so that any occasion that showed them in a patriotic light and indicated their need to stay in power at a crucial moment, would be welcome; and a series of scandals over the past decade that had implicated the leftwing opposition, including Jews such as the Rothschilds and Reinachs, made the show of firmness against a Jewish spy like Dreyfus was to their advantage.  In brief, though neither Dreyfus nor his supporters played the race card, as we would say today, this was really the essential point.  The proof is that, while the Dreyfusards tried to argue on high principles of Truth and Justice, the newspaper headlines, the mobs in the street, and the backroom chatter in the barracks and the speeches in the National Assembly quite explicitly made everything turn on preventing a Jewish conspiracy, a so-called syndic of rich and powerful Jews from destroying traditional French values.  The progression moved swiftly from Down with Dreyfus to  Kill Dreyfus the Jew and then to  Kill the Jews.

            So we come back to the subordinate question of whether the Dreyfus Affair still matters: Does anti-Semitism matter?  We would expect almost everyone who isn’t an anti-Semite to answer in the affirmative: yes, the Affair matters because it exposes the deep-seated hatred of Jews that permeates Christian societies and because that same hatred of the Jews has leaked into Islamic societies as well where it wears the rather shabby and transparent mask of anti-Zionism.  Here is where memory comes into play, both as a moral or immoral zone of social construction, or as judicial history, a pattern of precedents and developing understanding of the law in regard to changing circumstances.   For us, hopefully, the Holocaust and the current wave of anti-Zionist propaganda based on not always covert anti-Semitism should act as a filter to clarify the past, to allows us to construct our memories of what happened in the Dreyfus Affair and thus to see through all the obfuscations laid out by those who wish to use the Affair for their own ends, and to make judgments on the way the court of human history can distinguish between immoral and moral memories and constructions.  This is what Avishai Margalit calls “the ethics of memory”. [3]

            Anti-Semitism is alive and well and now plays out its dirty tricks and spreads its lies among Jews as well as among Gentiles.  There would seem then to be an unambiguous agreement on the need to keep studying what happened to Alfred Dreyfus between 1894, when he was first wrongly accused of treason, and 1906, when the two guilty verdicts against him in a pair of courts martial were finally over-turned and he was re-instated fully into the French Army. And the constant increase in anti-Jewish rhetoric and terrorist attacks seem to assure that the age-old problem of anti-Semitism still requires our attention and vigilance.

Unfortunately, the answer to the questions of if they these things still matter is often either an outright No—forget it, get over it, it’s time to move on—or a more complicated version of Yes which is really a No.  To begin with the second issue, we have the problem of what I call Incidentalism,[4] that is, the tendency both in the media and in the teaching of history—as well, probably, in most peoples’, Jews’ included, consciousness—that Jews and Judaism are merely incidental to world history and culture, and therefore vile slanders against Jews, Israelis and Judaism are trivial and insignificant, best ignored—and at worst called attention to because then people get upset and really do think Jews whine too much and probably are responsible for the bad things that used to happen to them in the past.

There is, for instance, a bothersome argument that comes up now and then about the failure of the Allies in World War II to make any efforts to stop the Holocaust.  Some say that the Americans and the British did not really have sufficient evidence to act on and necessarily turned their full attention to the destruction of the Nazi war machine.  Others say, one must be realistic and recognize that the Allies had to concentrate all their men and material on the actual fighting on the ground and not squander their efforts on destroying the death camps or the railway lines bringing millions of Jewish victims to their inevitable fate.  Still others argue that, since the best way to help Jews was to end the war by a victory over the Nazis, the best way to have ended the Holocaust was by defeating the Nazis totally and not by making token raids on Auschwitz and Birkinau and other camps, raids whose effects would have been mended within a matter of days or weeks anyway. 

Then others say, since the Germans expended so much effort on this non-strategic enterprise, making the machinery of genocide a primary target, would have released vast numbers of men and large amounts of material for the Germans to use against the Allies on both the Western and Eastern fronts.  Yet some say that the reason why the Americans, the British, the Russians and the other allies did nothing to save Jews was because deep down they were not interested at all, that Jews simply didn’t matter enough for them to be bothered with this incidental sideline to the war, and if they were interested, they were actually thankful for the Nazis doing the job for them.  The Jewish Problem would thus not have to be dealt with after the war. 

Now take this statement for more consideration.

Anti-Semitism is not the main reason that the Allies did nothing.  The main reason was because, love us or hate us, the allies couldn’t figure out why they should care.  Dead or alive, Jews weren’t a part of their war plans.

So writes Caroline Glick in her regular essay in The Jerusalem Post on 2 May 2011 when discussing “Our World: Competing Versions of ‘Never Again’”.  But she might as well have said, expanding the compass of her remarks: Anti-Semitism is not the main reason non-Jews cannot understand what Jews, Judaism and Jewishness are all about, whether in regard to Israel or America or anything else.  The main reason is, because love us or hate us—and the two attitudes are often merged into an impossible and ahistorical notion that Jews are the Chosen People, as though that meant not God but we did the choosing, and the choice supposedly makes Jews smarter than anyone else—the rest of the world can’t figure out why they should care about anything we have ever done, are doing or might do in the future, with are doing consisting of thoughts, writing and dreaming.  Dead or alive, if they can figure out the difference they usually prefer us to be dead, Jews are not a part of their concept of the world or of culture or of the values of civilization.

            The two main reasons why the Dreyfus Affair still matters then are (1) that it is a paradigm for understanding current political, social, moral and military events, and because it has been misunderstood and misused by many people to argue the case for precisely the social and ethical values that Dreyfus came to recognize as important in his life, his sense of honor and his concept of justice.  The second reason the Dreyfus Affair still matters is because it opens up or rather re-opens a discussion on ideas of morality, justice, and honour that seemed to veer off in other directions from the outbreak of the First World War, then in the rise of Fascist, Communist and other tyrannical states, and continues in the obfuscations of what are called post-modernist and politically correct discourses.

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[1] Charles Baudelaire, “Some Foreign Caricaturists” (1859) in Selected  Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P.E. Charvet  (Harmonsdworth: Penguin Books, 1972) p. 243.

[2] In the following discussion, I am following and adjusting the argument outlined in Frank Haldemann, “A Different Kind of Justice: Transitional Justice as recognition” Global Fellows Forum, NYU School of Law, online at http://www/law.nyu.edu/idcplg?IdcService=GET­_FILE&dDocName=ECM_DLV_013773&Revision SelectionMethod=LatestReleased (7 February 2006).

[3] Cited and expounded in Haldemann, “A Different Kind of Justice” p. 4.

[4] I explain at length what this means in Marranos on the Moradas; the term is a critique and parody of Orientalism, which slanders western scholarship and colonialist policies as based on the infantalization and eroticising of non-western peoples, and a refinement of Occidentalism, which awkwardly seeks to turn the tables on Edward Saïd’s ideologically constructed myth of Orientalism, by evaluating all non-western scholars as being incapable of adequately judging civilization and democratic principles.  Incidentalism refers to the way in which explicit and covert anti-Semites trivialize Jewish participation in world history by treating Jews, Judaism and Jewish achievements as merely incidental to real world-historical events.