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.
[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.