On this day in history, January 5th, 1895 Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of his rank in the French army and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. We wanted to learn more so we went to the Oxford Reference Online which led us to The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French edited by Peter Franch. Below is the excerpt about the Dreyfus Affair by Richard Griffiths.
Dreyfus Affair (L’Affaire Dreyfus). One must distinguish between the judicial Dreyfus Case and the Affair which grew out of it. The Case was very simple: in December 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer serving in the French artillery, was found guilty of spying for the Germans and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. In the next few years the discovery of new evidence led a number of people to the realization that a serious miscarriage of justice had taken place.
Colonel Picquart’s discovery in 1896 of evidence pointing to another figure, Commandant Esterhazy, was a turning-point; but it was the public revelation of these suspicions in late 1897 which led to the crisis of the Affair. The controversy which raged thereafter divided France into two violently opposed camps. Dreyfus himself, and the initial miscarriage of justice, tended to be lost from view. Though, for a significant number of Dreyfusards, the case remained one purely and simply of justice, the Affair became a battleground for an already deeply divided France, in which fear of the other side, and the necessity for its defeat, became paramount for both parties. Generalizations are dangerous, and many figures crossed the expected lines; but on the whole military men, Catholics, antisemites, monarchists, Bonapartists, and ex-Boulangists tended to be anti-Dreyfusards, and anticlericals and anti-militarists to be Dreyfusards. One side attacked Jews, freemasons, Protestants, and republicans; the other, the army and the Church. The Affair was a symptom rather than a cause; but it exacerbated these hatreds still further.
For two years, 1897–9, the fortunes of both sides waxed and waned, with animosities at fever-pitch. Finally Dreyfus was brought back in August 1899 for retrial; but he was found guilty once more. By now the choice was between Dreyfus and the army’s honour. Dreyfus received a pardon, but was finally exonerated only in 1906. Many of the political forces that had jumped on the Dreyfusard bandwagon extracted advantage from the outcome of the Affair, as some of the purer Dreyfusards noted with concern.
The Affair was a catalyst that produced some remarkable polemics and saw the emergence of the intellectuals who were so prominent in 20th-c. French history. Zola’s article ‘J’accuse’ (13 January 1898) was a turning-point, and leading parts on the Dreyfusard side were played by Bernard-Lazare, Jaurès, Clemenceau, Péguy, and Mirbeau, together with extreme anti-militarists and anticlericals like Urbain Gohier and Laurent Tailhade. Prominent anti-Dreyfusard polemicists included Barrès, Rochefort, Maurras, Drumont, and the cartoonists Forain and Caran d’Ache. Among sympathizers, Dreyfusards included Proust and Anatole France, anti-Dreyfusards Claudel, Léautaud, and Valéry.
The Affair also figures in various ways in literary works of the succeeding period, e.g. Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois, France’s M. Bergeret à Paris and L’Île des pingouins, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, and Zola’s Vérité. Outstanding among later commentaries on the Affair is Péguy’s Notre jeunesse (1910), where the author’s concern at the political use that had been made of the Affair in its aftermath is translated into a brilliant polemical attack on those who had thus sullied the ideal ‘mystique’ of Dreyfusism.
