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New book out on the Dreyfus Affair
Thought this passage from the review was interesting:
What is striking, as Read makes clear, is the failure of the French Jewish community to do much to help Dreyfus. It was worried that a strident defence would invite a wave of Jewish persecution in a country where Édouard Drumont's anti-Semitic tract La France Juive had sold a million copies. The army, too, had no real interest in whether Dreyfus was innocent or guilty as long as the spy scandal was solved at a tricky time in international relations. It was uninterested when new evidence appeared showing that a shallow, impoverished officer, Count Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was the author of the memo. New documents were forged that appeared to confirm Dreyfus's guilt and Esterhazy was told to lie low. Miscarriages of justice almost always suit somebody; otherwise, they would not happen.
The interesting question raised by Read's account is how the few who came to realise that there had been such a miscarriage were able to circumvent all the efforts to stifle inquiry. This had something to do with the conservative and withdrawn prisoner on Devil's Island but, in the final analysis, a good deal more to do with tensions in French society.
The Dreyfus affair became a symbol that grew rapidly out of all proportion with the original case. The progressive left and centre used it as a stick to beat the army and the Church; the clerical and nationalist right used it as a way to discredit secularists and liberals and to sustain French anti-Semitism. The affair exposed deep fissures in the French nation that reflected the profound differences between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary traditions.
The interesting question raised by Read's account is how the few who came to realise that there had been such a miscarriage were able to circumvent all the efforts to stifle inquiry. This had something to do with the conservative and withdrawn prisoner on Devil's Island but, in the final analysis, a good deal more to do with tensions in French society.
The Dreyfus affair became a symbol that grew rapidly out of all proportion with the original case. The progressive left and centre used it as a stick to beat the army and the Church; the clerical and nationalist right used it as a way to discredit secularists and liberals and to sustain French anti-Semitism. The affair exposed deep fissures in the French nation that reflected the profound differences between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary traditions.
While the latter assertion isn't new of course, it really is applicable to today. Like so many other famous cases, it ended up being at lot less about the particulars of the case and much more about broader tensions and fissures that transcended the figure at the center. OJ, anyone?
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2012/01/dreyfus-affair-france-army