Divided France? The Dreyfus
Affair
Dr Chris Pearson
The Dreyfus Affair
• Causes
• Consequences
• Historians’ interpretations
The beginnings of the affair
• “Discovery” of the bordereau in the
Germany embassy (25 September 1894)
• Statistics Section concludes that Dreyfus is
the culprit, after a rapid investigation and
comparison of handwriting
• Dreyfus arrested on 15 October 1894 and
held at in military prison
‘I am totally innocent and protest vehemently
against the rigorous measures taken against me.
Never have I communicated to anyone at all even
the briefest note relating to my service at the
General Staff […].
It is my honour as an officer that I am defending
and however painful my situation might be, I will
defend myself to the end.
I sense, however, that an appalling plan has been
prepared against me, for a purpose I do not
understand, but I want to live to establish my
innocence.’
Dreyfus during his initial interrogation, quoted in
Whyte, The Dreyfus Affair (2005), 346
‘The traitor’: drawing
by Henri Meyer, Le
Petit Journal illustré,
n° 217, 13 January
1895
‘As he came towards us, his kepi pulled down over
his forehead, his pince-nez on his ethnic nose, his
eyes furious and dry, his whole face hard and
defiant, he cried out – what am I saying? – he
ordered in his unbearable voice, ‘You will tell all of
France that I am innocent…’ His face of foreign
race, his impassive uprightness, his whole being
revolted even the most self-controlled of
spectators.’
Maurice Barrès, quoted in Whyte, The Dreyfus
Affair (2005), 353
‘I was suffering agonies, but steeled myself
to concentrate all my strength. To sustain
myself, I evoked the memory of my wife and
children.
As soon as the sentence had been read out, I
called out, addressing myself to the troops:
‘Soldiers, you are degrading an innocent
man: soldiers, you are dishonouring an
innocent man. Long live France, long the
army.’
Dreyfus, quoted in Whyte, The Dreyfus Affair
(2005), 354
The case refuses to go away…
• Dreyfus on Devil’s Island continues to
declare his innocence
• His brother Mathieu and wife Lucie protest
his innocence
• Lucien Herr, the librarian at the prestigious
Ecole normale supérieure, convinces
Clemenceau and Jaurès of Dreyfus’
innocence
‘Judas defended by his
brothers’: La Libre
parole attacks Bernard
Lazare’s A Judicial
Error: The Truth about
the Dreyfus Affair (1896)
Major Ferdinand Walsin
Esterhazy: ‘a swindler and
incorrigible liar and
intriguer.’
LieutenantColonel Georges
Picquart:
discovers evidence
proving Dreyfus’
innocence which
is eventually
picked up by
Auguste
Scheurer-Kestner,
Vice-President of
the Senate
Intellectuals wade in…
• Zola accuses the military of a cover up and
names key officers
• Furthers the efforts of Bernard Lazare
• Zola backed by other intellectuals,
including Marcel Proust and Charles
Péguy
• Small but vocal minority
‘I have raised a cry of alarm, and I leave
history to judge me and to appreciate my acts
[…]. I am not defending my liberty,
gentlemen in presenting myself before you. I
am defending the truth. Look me in the face,
gentlemen. Have I been bought, or am I a
traitor? I am a free writer, who intends to
resume his vocation and again take up his
interrupted labourers.’
Zola at his trial, quoted in Whyte, The Dreyfus
Affair (2005), 378
Charles Maurras:
royalist, nationalist, antiSemite, anti-Dreyfus,
and founder of Action
française in 1899
An antiDreyfusard
politician:
minister for war
Godefroy
Cavaignac
Joseph Henry- forger of documents, who commits suicide
The Republic under attack
• Jules Guérin meets
royalist pretender
• Paul Déroulède leads
botched coup d’état
(Feb 1899)
• Right-wing protesters
knock off President
Loubet’s top-hat at
Auteuil races (right)
Defending the Republic
• Waldeck-Rousseau’s government of
‘republican defence’
• Arrests Jules Guérin and his royalist
backers
• Retrial of Dreyfus at Rennes: found guilty
‘with extenuating circumstances’ by 5 votes
to 2
• Dreyfus receives presidential pardon on 19
September 1899
The end of the Affair?
‘When disagreements have divided
and torn apart a country all men of
political wisdom understand that the
time comes when these need to be
forgotten.’
Waldeck-Rousseau
‘Either way, at the end of the argument
concerning details, there lies a grand theory,
an interpretation with the widest
implications. It is as if the facts are not
enough in themselves, or as if their
complexity is unbearable. The historian, like
the poet, aspires to achieve order amid chaos
and meaning in the middle of confusion. The
facts have to be placed in some sort of
pattern.’
Douglas Johnson, France and the Dreyfus Affair
(1961), 199
The affair’s political dimensions
• The Affair ripped apart the anti-socialist alliance
of republicans and conservatives
• Republic seemed under threat – its partisans
united to defend it
• The Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist
Party was founded in 1901 to rally ‘all the sons
of the Revolution, whatever their differences,
against all the partisans of counter-revolution.’
Dreyfus Affair as part of the
guerre franco-française
• Revolutionaries
•
•
•
•
Republicans
Secular
Dreyfusard
Resistance (1940-44)
• Counterrevolutionaries
• Royalists
• Catholic
• Anti-Dreyfusard
• Vichy Regime (194044)
‘Two concepts of legitimacy clashed: one
based on the idea of a rational, secular,
Jacobin state open to all citizens, the other
based on an idea of “Frenchness” understood
in terms of local roots, of an organicist
localism said to foster a virility capable of
overcoming the decadence brought on by
effeminate, cosmopolitan humanism.’
Pierre Birnbaum, ‘Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy and
the Rue Copernic,’ in Nora, Realms of Memory
(1996), 409
‘True France’
• Emergence of right-wing, exclusionary
nationalism after the Affair
• ‘The discourse of True France employs the
essentialist, determinist language of a lost
hidden authenticity that, once uncovered,
yields a single, immutable national identity.’
Herman Lebovics, True France (1992), 9
• Forerunner of French fascism, according to
Robert Soucy, Zeev Sternhall
The Jewish community in France
before the Dreyfus Affair
• “Emancipation” during the Revolution, led
by Grégoire – Jews granted civic equality
• But anti-Semitism continued – pogroms in
Alsace, Napoleon’s 1808 decree
• Distinction made between highly
assimilated “Israélites” and “Juifs” - Yiddish
speaking new arrivals from Russia and
Eastern Europe
The Jewish Community during the
Dreyfus Affair
• Dreyfus Affair- high tide of anti-Semitic
feeling in 19C France (Marras, Politics of
Assimilation [1971])
• Tested assimilated Jews faith in the
Republic
• But majority of Jewish Dreyfusards saw
defence of Dreyfus as a defence of the
republic
‘It is we who are defending the
honour of the army.’ Dreyfusard
Joseph Reinach
‘In the light of the
Dreyfus case, the
whole of the gentile
world seemed to him
hostile; there were only
Jews and antisemites.’
Hannah Ardendt, ‘From the
Dreyfus Affair to France Today,’
Jewish Social Studies 4/3 (1942)
Theodore Herzl
Stripping away
Dreyfus’ honour and
manhood?
See Venita Detta ‘From Devil’s
Island to the Pantheon?’ in Forth
and Accampo (eds) Confronting
modernity in Fin-de-Siecle
France (2009)
Gender and the Dreyfus Affair
• Both sides attacked the other’s manhood
• Anti-Dreyfusards mocked the supposedly
weak and unhealthy bodies of the
intellectual Dreyfusards
• They also portrayed Dreyfus himself as
weak and effeminate (stereotype of Jewish
men)
• See Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the
Crisis of French Manhood (2004)
Zola aux outrages by Henri Degroux
La Vérité sortant
du puits, by
Édouard DebatPonsan