The Dreyfus affair is the most important cause célèbre in French history: anyone who cares anything for modern France needs to understand it. This, unfortunately, is easier said than done. Generations of historians have struggled to explain how the 1894 conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant young Alsatian Jewish army officer, caused French society to tear itself apart in an internecine struggle that continues to this day. Ruth Harris's new book, The Man on Devil's Island, is a dramatic advance in scholarship and historical interpretation.
The first and most fundamental problem is relating what happened to Dreyfus to the affair that became shackled to his name. Harris begins with the wastepaper bin at the German embassy in Paris, out of which a cleaning lady stole an unsigned memorandum, or bordereau, containing military secrets, and passed it to her employers at French military intelligence. The bordereau was the work of a spy in the French army. Dreyfus was framed as its author on no real evidence: his handwriting did not match, and as a wealthy, happily married father of young children, and rising fast in his chosen profession, he had no motive for treason. Nevertheless, he was Jewish, and that was apparently sufficient cause for suspicion and unanimous conviction when he was brought before a military court.
At a ceremony of degradation at the Ecole Militaire on 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes and other insignia of rank, and then paraded before the crowd to chants of: "Death to Judas, death to the Jew." Because the death penalty for treason during peacetime had been abolished in 1848, he was taken to Devil's Island, off the coast of French Guiana, to be held in solitary confinement for life.
Fed on scraps of rancid pork, hand-cuffed to his bed at night, constrained by day behind a palisade that blocked his view of the sea, constantly guarded by men forbidden to converse with him, Dreyfus literally rotted in the sweltering heat of Devil's Island. His correspondence was so heavily censored that when he was brought back to France for retrial in 1899 he was unaware of the campaign to clear his name, which had polarised the nation in the intervening five years. "With touching naivety," Harris writes, "Dreyfus believed that these changes in his circumstances were due to letters he had written to his superiors and the president of the Republic." In fact, it was the campaign of the Dreyfusards (who were pitted against the anti-Dreyfusards) that triumphed when Dreyfus was at last formally rehabilitated, on 12 July 1906.
Harris painstakingly examines the passions and ideas on both sides of the campaign. She reconstructs the fin-de-siècle context, with particular emphasis on the importance of beliefs concerning religion, science and the occult. She challenges the view, still prevalent among historians, that the clash between the Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards was a str aightforward ideological struggle between the left and the right in French politics, with the intellectuals predominantly supporting the left and Catholicism supporting the right. Her research uncovers a kaleidoscope of religious belief and sentiment supporting an intricate web of connections between personal feeling and political motivation.
Starting with those closest to Dreyfus – his wife Lucie and brother Mathieu, whose previously un-deciphered letters play a crucial part in the story she tells – Harris traces the transformation of private emotion into public action. The crime against Dreyfus was like a stone kicked down an insecure cliff: the slippage became a landslide and afterwards an avalanche that permanently changed the landscape of French politics.
In a letter to Dreyfus, Lucie equated his sufferings with Christ's: "You have been sublime, my poor martyr; continue on your Road to Golgotha; terrible days have yet to be lived through, but God will one day compensate and reward you generously for all your sufferings."
Harris remarks on how Lucie's use of the language of martyrdom became vital in shaping the campaign to free her husband. Mathieu drew spiritual support from less conventional sources: he visited the medium Léonie Leboulanger, who identified him as "the brother of a man who suffers far away". In the fight for Dreyfus, Léonie became Mathieu's mainstay. Harris acknowledges this fact without prejudice or embellishment. "Their relationship," she writes, "was a human drama between a wealthy, educated bourgeois and an ignorant woman who sustained and comforted him in his darkest hours."
Connections between the intimate sufferings of the Dreyfus family and French society were first forged in the press. In their search for a polemicist who would help them, the Dreyfus family turned to Bernard Lazare, an anarchist of Jewish origin. He had already attacked the novelist Zola as a mere "grocer" and had published a controversial book on the history and causes of antisemitism in 1894. Mathieu asked Lazare to campaign for his brother in journalistic and literary circles, which he did, even seeking reconciliation with Zola. At first, Zola was unhelpful, but as the campaign gathered pace, he was drawn in deeply. His famous "J'accuse", published in January 1898, addressed the president of the republic, Félix Faure, and accused officers, generals and the press of conspiring to conceal a miscarriage of justice. Zola was himself tried and found guilty of criminal libel. He fled into exile to Kent, the standard bearer then, and afterwards, of the pursuit of truth over reason of state.
The anti-Dreyfusards typically viewed the military as the nation's greatest institution. Ferdinand Brunetière, for example, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, became an anti-Dreyfusard not because he was passionately antisemitic, but because he feared the intellectuals would destabilise France through their attacks on the army. In his tract, After the Trial, Brunetière queried the link between scientific or technical expertise and moral authority. He insisted that science only ever produced evidence that was precarious and contingent, and so could not be of use in deciding the verdict of a court martial. In his view, antisemitism was "but a name to disguise the strong desire to dispossess" the arrivistes (freemasons, Protestants and Jews) who dominated the republic through their high-ranking positions in the nation's universities. An anti-elitist democrat, Brunetière criticised Zola for ignoring ordinary people in his fiction, and concentrating on the violent and pathological extremes of human nature. Zola's intervention in the Dreyfus Affair was seen by Brunetière as a similar feat of exhibitionism, aimed at debasing the nation and the army it relied on.
When he returned to France in 1899, Dreyfus was a frail, stick-thin, white-haired, almost voiceless man. His supporters had at last to choose between Dreyfus and the affair: between rendering what remained of his life tolerable and winning an ideological battle. The retrial took place in Rennes and Dreyfus was reconvicted on no further evidence in September 1899, but pardoned by the president soon afterwards.
It is brave to enter a highly polemical and moralised dispute with calm, critical intelligence and a genuine openness to the feelings and engagements of both sides. Harris does this knowing she may be accused of undermining "a vision of French history that has galvanized French men and women to oppose oppression". Nevertheless, she reasonably insists that the moral absolutism of the left requires the same free and honest examination as the moral absolutism of the right. Her research has shown that the divisions between the two sides were not as hermetic as previously assumed: some of those who defended Dreyfus were anti-Semitic; some of those who attacked him also attacked antisemitism.
The enduring mystery is why this outbreak of virulent antisemitism occurred in France, the country that abolished all legal sanctions against Jews during the revolution of 1789. The Man on Devil's Island sheds new light on that question, and is itself another victory in the perennial battle against intolerance, as urgent today as it ever has been.
Ruth Scurr is the author of Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Vintage).
