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| Captain Alfred Dreyfus |
Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, an officer on the French General Staff, was arrested in October 1894 for treason as a German spy after the cleaner who emptied waste baskets at the German embassy in Paris found a bordereau or memorandum unsigned in which a French officer was willing to betray military secrets to the Germans and the official in charge of counter-espionage determined that the handwriting was that of Dreyfus. When news of his arrest and ethnic origin became public, it set off an angry tirade of anti-Semitic invective in the press. After a secret court–martial, the judges convicted on the basis of flimsy evidence. It consisted of the questionable document, dubious because the handwriting experts could not agree the purloined testimony of an officer who indicated that a “secret informer” had identified Dreyfus as the spy, and a secret dossier of “incriminating” evidence provided by the Minister of War. Having already publicly pronounced Dreyfus guilty before the trial, the Minister submitted these documents on the trial’s last day claiming they were so sensitive that a war would ensue if they were made public and therefore disallowed their release to the defence. Recognizing that these procedures constituted blatant violation of due process, the judges justified them on the grounds of national security. Because no details of the evidence for his conviction for high treason were available to the public, and the unanimous vote to court-martial him was undertaken by some of the country’s most respected military leaders, there was no reason at the time for the public or his later defenders to doubt his guilt. Dreyfus was subsequently publicly degraded and cashiered out of the army in the inner courtyard of the War College in a drum-head ceremony that involved breaking his sabre in front of him. The humiliation turned him into a “walking cadaver,” while a baying mob outside its gates howled for his physical extinction. For journalists who witnessed this “monster of evil,” his return to prison was “greeted by an immense relief. The air seemed purer, we breathed easier.” Within six weeks he was dispatched to serve a living death life sentence on the site of a former leper colony on Devil’s Island that was a remote tropical rocky strip of land off the coast of French Guiana in South America. The sole prisoner on the island, Dreyfus, who was forbidden to speak and constantly watched, was shackled, a punishment that lacerated his ankles when he was forced to sleep in an unchanging position. His only respite, and one that probably prevented him from going mad, was that he was allowed books to read and paper to write on.
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| The site where Dreyfus was confined on Devils Island |
Following upon this sensational success and notoriety, Drumont founded the flagship of anti-Semitism La Libre Parole, a splenetic scandal sheet that mined the vein of fear and ignorance that gripped France at the fin-de-siècle as it experienced the upheaval of modernism and secularism. As the publisher of the newspaper, whose motto was “France for the French” and who first broke the news that the officer arrested on the general staff was Jewish, he fed the fear that the Jews were dangerous outsiders, “a nation within a nation.” Connecting the historical blood libel with contemporary secular materialism, he contended that the Jews “in the past attacked the body of children; today it is their souls which [they are] after by teaching them atheism.” The following typified Drumont’s views during the investigation of Dreyfus in 1894, ones that he would repeat in the following years: "If France is defeated, these words ‘The Jews! It is the Jews!’ will once more regain the true meaning they used to have for the French. They will sum up all their indignation, and justify their every impulse. Perhaps a few innocent people will be caught up among the cowardly criminals who have abused the most naïve and the most generous of hospitalities.…We have been called forth from within the people…to predict the invaders from Judea the fearful punishment that awaits them."
This type of
inflammatory prose contributed to igniting a series of anti-Semitic riots in
early 1898 when French nationalists vandalized Jewish shops and synagogues.
Although no lives were lost in continental France, the cancer of modern
anti–Semitism that transformed Frenchmen into ugly mobs bellowing rancorous
imprecations like “Death to the Jews,” demonstrated how the Jews made a convenient
whipping boy for those who felt threatened by the transformation of France into
a modern pluralistic society.
In a
desperate effort to combat what they considered alien forces and to win over
their increasingly indifferent congregations to Catholicism, French priests and
the Catholic press exploited the same fears and prejudices as Drumont.
Demagogic priests fanned the flames of Judeo-phobia in their sermons with the
standard-issue Jew-baiting stereotypes: the Jew as revolutionary, financier,
traitor, ritual murderer and killer of Christ. The wildly popular and rabidly
Judeo-phobic newspaper La Croix published
by the Assumptionists, an order of priests, blamed the Jews for everything they
perceived as anti-Christian and secular in society: the destruction of
religious orders and the French army, removal of the crucifix from schools and
hospitals, even universal suffrage. Through its hysterically distorted
depiction of Jewish people in France as “the deicide people,” the newspaper
contributed to the miasma of hatred that was wafting through French society in
the late 1890s. Not all Catholics or
priests, however, subscribed to this strategy of re-energizing Christian
feelings by scapegoating the Jews. But it is a telling indictment that the
Church disciplined the minority of liberal French priests who resisted this
demagogy as “modernist.”
While
Dreyfus endured his torments of dysentery, malaria and a struggle with suicidal
despair, evidence gradually emerged to challenge the guilty verdict with the
revelation that the writing of another officer, a Major Esterhazy, was
identical to that found in the Embassy documents. Whereas Dreyfus who came from
a patriotic, wealthy Jewish family and had no apparent motive for betraying his
country, Esterhazy, a swaggering rake of Austrian-Hungarian descent, with an
abiding hatred for the French, a string of unpaid debts and a dissolute
lifestyle, had plenty of reason. In the meantime, the intelligence officer who
perjured himself at Dreyfus’ trial was arrested, confessed that he had forged
crucial evidence against Dreyfus and promptly committed suicide. The journalist
Georges Clemenceau, who never questioned the original verdict, reflected on
these revelations to first raise doubts about the case and gradually as the
evidence unfolded to use his editorial page in L’ Aurore as a platform to exculpate Dreyfus. The army likely
recognized that it had made a mistake but decided to close ranks, and they were
supported by the government who refused to order the case be reopened for fear
of undermining confidence in the army. When Esterhazy demanded a trial to clear
his name and then was acquitted in January 1898, the legal matters and the
figure of Dreyfus were superseded by the larger political and societal issues.
The Dreyfus Affair obsessed France because it put the Republic itself on trial
before its countrymen and the world.
Notwithstanding
this electrifying outburst, Zola had written five letters in the previous year
and a half in which he assailed the fanaticism and chauvinistic nationalism
that polluted public discourse for years, especially since the arrest of
Dreyfus in 1894. Zola assailed “the gutter press in heat…[that were] driving the
public mad for the sake of selling its drivel” that has poisoned people with
“their rabid hatred of Jews” turning decent people into “Jew-baiters” and most
reprehensibly “in the name of morality.” He did not mince words when he
described them as “false patriots” and “braying anti–Semites...who thrive on
the public debacle.” He accused the clergy of fomenting the fanaticism of a
holy war starting with the Jews and then unleashing hatred against the
Protestants, allegations that were more reminiscent of sixteenth-century France
than a country about to enter the twentieth century. While lies and filth drove
people into the streets in a state of bigoted frenzy, the government lapsed
into silence; deputies who were afraid of alienating their voters refused to
speak out and denounce the lies because the few who did were vilified.
It was a
foregone conclusion that the serious allegations and the inflammatory language
deployed in J’ Accuse would result in
Zola being charged with defamation of the Army. Nonetheless, he turned the
courtroom into a platform to hold France accountable to the ideals of liberty
and justice bequeathed to its citizens by the French Revolution. He reminded
France of that legacy when he addressed the jury:
By now, gentleman, the Dreyfus
Affair is a very minor matter, very remote and very minor and very blurred,
compared to the terrifying questions it has raised. There is no Dreyfus Affair
any longer. There is only one issue: is France still the France of the
Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man? The France that gave the
world liberty, and was supposed to give it justice? Are we the noblest, most
fraternal, most generous of peoples? Are we going to keep our reputation in
Europe as a humane and fair-minded nation?…Open your eyes! Realize that if the
soul of France is in such disarray, it must have been stirred to its innermost
depths because the danger is truly awful.
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| Emile Zola |
Meantime,
revelations that challenged Dreyfus’ guilt and the hasty (and permanent)
retreat of Esterhazy to England did nothing to disabuse the die-hard
anti–Dreyfusards of his guilt. For them Dreyfus was guilty simply because he
was a rich alien Jew, and no evidence, however persuasive, would change that
reality. Along with the fiercely anti-Semitic Drumont, who exulted, “the Yids
and the accomplices are wallowing in the mud, the filth, the torrent of shit
they unleashed and…spatter[ed] the army,” the strident nationalist press
discharged a maelstrom of vitriol toward Jews. In areas where there were Jewish
residents, mobs pillaged stores, desecrated synagogues, and attacked rabbis. In
French Algeria, instigated by the taunting of a friend of Drumont who wrote,
“We will water our liberty tree with Jewish blood,” mobs carried out pogroms
resulting in the murder of Jews.
Tragically, Zola’s J’ Accuse
that arguably had resuscitated the dispirited pro–Dreyfusards may have also
responsible for intensifying a flagging anti–Semitic campaign.
It is ironical
that Zola, who has often been portrayed as a symbol of justice and friend of
the Jews, had been hostile to them, as had so many others on the left that had
viewed them as capitalist exploiters. In his novels, his characterization of
Jews could easily fit the stereotype of the demagogic Drumont who presented
himself as a prophet of social justice waging war on the cosmopolitan,
avaricious, scheming Jewish plutocrats. For example, in L’ Argent published as recently as 1891, Zola’s portrayal of Jews was
scabrous in his examination of the world of high finance, the stock market and
the rise and fall of a Catholic Banking House. He compares “a pack of Jews” to
“dried up vultures with hooked noses emitting guttural sounds as if preparing
to devour their prey.” Here is one character’s venomous assessment of the
vampiric Jews: “He had against the Jew the ancient grudge against that race,
found especially in the south of France. He in his mind, accused that despised
race which no longer has a country or a prince, which lives like a parasite
amongst the various nations pretending to recognize their laws, but in reality
obeying only its God of theft, blood and anger – and its mission given to them
by God, of ferocious conquest, was being fulfilled everywhere, establishing
itself in every country – like the spider of the web – in order to stalk its
prey, drain its blood, to fatten himself at the expense of others.” (My
Italics)
Had Zola
undertaken to explore the anti-Semitic mind, he might have increased the
readers’ understanding of that pathology, but since there is no attempt to
distance the narrator from this perspective, the conclusion appears inescapable
that Zola shared to some extent these views. Yet remarkably within five years,
before he was convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, he wrote his passionate polemics
against anti-Semitism. Whether he changed his views, or as a rationalist he
recognized its irrational pathological character, is hard to say because there
is no documentary evidence of a conscious evolution of his thinking on the
issue. What is extant is his letter “On behalf of the Jews” that warned how
this ancient hatred of the Jews, which he described as “atavistic” because it
would inevitably plunge the country back in time, could precipitate horrific
massacres of “a reign of terror.” Appalled by the primitive frenzy to “gobble
them up, massacre them, exterminate them, to burn them at the stake,” he
believed the task of “civilizations is to erase this savage need to throw
ourselves upon someone else who is not exactly like us.” His solution was to
call upon Catholics to embrace Jews and for Jews the price was that they must
assimilate and abandon any cultural distinctiveness. His reservations about them as
a people were coded in the language he used; Catholics were referred to as
“you” while Jews were alluded to as “them.” Yet Zola’s actions connote a change
from his own poisonous attitudes that he had imbibed from his early days
growing up in the south of France, a confronting of his own views in the last
decade of his life. It is probably true
that Dreyfus the man meant little to him, and that he was animated more by the
fear of a military dictatorship. In
other words, justice for Dreyfus, important as that was to Zola, was secondary
to the survival of the Republic. But the courage he demonstrated and the risks
he took in challenging the formidable prestige of the Army, and the obloquy he
incurred from the press, government officials and even students, whom he
believed would be more tolerant, needs to be emphasized. Without Zola’s
impassioned crusade to assail a flagrant injustice, it is unlikely that the
Dreyfus case would have become the Dreyfus Affair, a cause célèbre that garnered world attention, or whether Dreyfus
would have been eventually exonerated.
At the same
time, there were officials within military intelligence, especially Colonel
Georges Picquart who became its head in 1896, who investigated the case
independently of Zola. Despite a personal aversion to Dreyfus, Picquart and
senior military officers worked to uncover sufficient evidence to cast serious
doubt on the original verdict; they took it to their political masters who then
revealed it to the public. Some of the anti-Dreyfusards were still convinced of
his guilt, and those who relented, rationalized that the sacrifice of one
innocent man on the altar of expediency was a small price to pay when France
faced an existential threat from Germany. A demoralized army, fractured by the
impugning of its integrity and its competence, would be vulnerable to a German
attack.
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| 1991 film in which Richard Dreyfuss plays Colonel George Picquart |
Nevertheless,
because of the violent fissures and international condemnation, the French High
Court granted Dreyfus a new trial. In the late summer of 1899, he appeared “an
old man at forty” in a padded uniform to disguise his emaciated body, was found
guilty but with “extenuating circumstances,” and sentenced to ten years detention.
Internal and external pressure persisted, however, until the government
acceded, and in September granted Dreyfus a presidential pardon, which he
accepted much to the disappointment of his supporters because a pardon
suggested that he had committed a wrong, and he still faced the visceral hatred
of those who were unswervingly committed to the belief that Dreyfus was a
traitor. A representative sample of the Catholic press that regularly denounced
Dreyfus as a perfidious Jew was the Catholic daily in Florence which charged
that the “colossus of Jewry” was taking over France using its gold to “buy an
acquittal for the traitor.” In France
Dreyfus thwarted at the last moment an assassination attempt by one enraged
citizen. Murderous feelings did not abate even with his full exoneration and
reinstatement in the French Army in 1906. Ostensibly, it was a victory for the
Dreyfusards.
The reality
was much more complex. Within their ranks there were many Dreyfusards that
harboured anti–Semitic feelings about the economic and cultural influence of
the Jews, among them, the two men probably most responsible for the vindication
of Dreyfus, Zola and Picquart. There were also bitter divisions and bigotry
within the Jewish community itself: whether to rally behind Dreyfus or keep
quiet. Dreyfusards also often stooped to the same tactics as their opponents by
associating physiognomy with degeneracy and investigating bloodlines for
evidence of pathology. One observer compared Esterhazy’s “strange physiognomy”
to “an animal of prey…a bird’s head, with a great beak of a nose.” A noted
politician, who wrote an authoritative account of the Affair, echoed these
sentiments and plumbed the traitor’s family history to conclude that his
tainted heredity from a series of Franco-Hungarian unions predisposed him to
treachery and lying. Moreover, the respect for truth and justice was eroded
when Dreyfusards believed that their cause could justify whatever means were
necessary to ensure victory. Once many of their supporters were elected in
1906, they resorted to duplicity and illicit manipulation of the legal system.
For example, the French Premier secretly contacted the prefect of Rennes where
Dreyfus’ retrial was held to instruct him to pressure the military prosecutor
and judges to render a not guilty verdict.
Duplicity, rancour and bigotry within the Dreyfusards may complicate our
perception of this case. But it should not obscure the larger reality that they
and officials like Picquart did expose evidence of malfeasance on the part of
both the French government and military corps who had permitted a flagrant
injustice and subsequently tried to cover–up it up. The French authorities had
allowed an innocent man to be disgraced and moulder in a hellish one-man
concentration camp. The
turbulence of the Dreyfus Affair was not only a stigma that stained the
ideals of the French Revolution. It was in embryonic form a prototype
for the virulent racism that gripped Nazi Germany thirty years later and a harbinger for what occurred during the Vichy Regime during the Second World War when French officials actively abetted the Third Reich in dispatching Jews to the death camps.
Postscript
In The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, that Harvard University Press will publish in October 2013, Ben Urwand draws on a wealth of previously uncited documents to argue that Hollywood studios, in an effort to protect the German market for their movies, not only acquiesced to Nazi censorship but also actively and enthusiastically cooperated with that regime’s global propaganda effort. During the 1930s, Georg Gyssling, Hitler’s consul in Los Angeles, was invited to preview films before they were released. If Gyssling objected to any part of a movie—and he frequently did—the offending scenes were cut. As a result, according to Urwand, the Nazis had total veto power over the content of Hollywood movies. Among the cuts requested by Gyssling was that the word “Jew” be not spoken in the 1937 The Life of Emile Zola which depicts the Dreyfus case. Jack Warner acceded to that request. Only when a member of the General Staff fingers Dreyfus from a list of names can the viewer spot the word "Jew." Zola does not allude to the anti-Semitism that poisoned France at the time. This is a film about a wrongly-convicted man without any personal or cultural context. Warner Bros. was disingenuous when the company reassured the German consul that Dreyfus was not a major figure in the movie given that most of the film is devoted to his degradation and attempt by a saintly Zola to vindicate him.
Postscript
In The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, that Harvard University Press will publish in October 2013, Ben Urwand draws on a wealth of previously uncited documents to argue that Hollywood studios, in an effort to protect the German market for their movies, not only acquiesced to Nazi censorship but also actively and enthusiastically cooperated with that regime’s global propaganda effort. During the 1930s, Georg Gyssling, Hitler’s consul in Los Angeles, was invited to preview films before they were released. If Gyssling objected to any part of a movie—and he frequently did—the offending scenes were cut. As a result, according to Urwand, the Nazis had total veto power over the content of Hollywood movies. Among the cuts requested by Gyssling was that the word “Jew” be not spoken in the 1937 The Life of Emile Zola which depicts the Dreyfus case. Jack Warner acceded to that request. Only when a member of the General Staff fingers Dreyfus from a list of names can the viewer spot the word "Jew." Zola does not allude to the anti-Semitism that poisoned France at the time. This is a film about a wrongly-convicted man without any personal or cultural context. Warner Bros. was disingenuous when the company reassured the German consul that Dreyfus was not a major figure in the movie given that most of the film is devoted to his degradation and attempt by a saintly Zola to vindicate him.
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