Hannah Arendt once called the Dreyfus affair a “dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.” For more than a decade, the saga of a Jewish military officer wrongfully convicted of treason riled turn-of-the-century France and foreshadowed the European horrors to come. Yet there has been a curious tendency by some historians to remove both Dreyfus and his Jewishness from the center of the story. In his authoritative new book, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, the historian Maurice Samuels rectifies this error, while challenging long-standing myths.
As Paul Johnson pointed out in his magisterial History of the Jews, the Dreyfus affair brought a “decisive end to an epoch of illusion in which assimilated western Jews had optimistically assumed that the process of their acceptance in European society was well under way and would shortly be completed.” It upended Jewish life, leading Jews as far away as the United States to ponder whether they would ever be truly accepted in the lands in which they were a tiny minority. It gave a shot in the arm to political Zionism and eventually mobilized much of the French left against anti-Semitism. And it led to years of political upheaval, toppling French governments and revealing divisions that, as Samuels notes, are still evident today.
Born in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse in 1859, Dreyfus grew up in an upper-class Jewish family. Alfred’s father, Raphael, made his fortune in the mill industry and was able to provide a comfortable life.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 shattered the family’s serene existence. The forces of Prussian minister Otto Von Bismarck defeated Napoleon III and France. A new nation, Imperial Germany, was declared at Versailles. And the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany. This amputation was a severe blow to the French psyche, which mourned the loss for the next half-century. It also made quite the impression on young Alfred, who watched enraged as Prussian troops entered Mulhouse. It spurred his desire for a career in the military.
At the time, it was not unusual for a French Jew of Dreyfus’s social and economic background to pursue such a calling. Indeed, as scholars such as Derek Penslar have highlighted, in the 19th century the armed forces of many European nations opened their ranks to Jewish officers. This was certainly true in France, which had played a historic role in emancipating Jews after the French Revolution. An ardent patriot, Dreyfus wanted to serve.
“The Dreyfus family,” Samuels notes, “had embraced French culture because it was socially advantageous, but they also felt a great loyalty to France for having been the first country to emancipate the Jews.”
Alfred joined the army in 1880 after finishing college. He chose to join the artillery, which tended to be more welcoming to Jewish officers than other fields, such as the cavalry. He became a specialist in munitions. His rising career as a budding technocrat was indicative of the army’s attempt to modernize following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
Dreyfus’s intellect won him high marks, earning him a coveted internship on the General Staff, known as the “Holy of Holies” for its prestige. He didn’t know it yet, but this was to be his undoing.
Dreyfus had seldom encountered anti-Semitism in his army career. Most of his evaluations didn’t even mention his Jewishness. But one examiner, General Pierre de Bonneford, declaring that he didn’t want a Jew on the General Staff, gave Dreyfus a top grade for technical capabilities but awarded him a zero for the subjective grade of character. Dreyfus had unwittingly made himself a target.
He began his internship at the “Holy of Holies” in January 1893. Nearly two years later, on October 15, 1894, he was summoned to arrive for an inspection in civilian clothes. He was asked to provide a handwriting sample before being told that he was arrested and accused of the crime of high treason.
While Dreyfus had been rising in the army, “a powerful force had been taking shape in France, a force opposed to his rise through the military ranks and especially to his entry onto the General Staff,” Samuels notes. “That force was antisemitism.”
France had long been more welcoming to Jews than other European countries were. But paradoxically, this openness made it the very country where modern anti-Semitism first took shape. As Samuels observes, the growing visibility of Jews—a mere two-tenths of 1 percent of the population—“made them targets both for xenophobic nationalists on the right and for a certain strain of Socialists on the left.”
By the time that Dreyfus had entered the army, France “was in-creasingly divided between two competing visions of its past and future.” One, largely but not exclusively Catholic, harkened back to an idealized past and a return to the old feudal order. The other was progress-oriented and saw democracy and modernity as positives. The former viewed the emancipation of Jews as responsible for societal ills. The latter viewed the advancement of minorities as linked to a better future. As the philosopher Raymond Aron later observed: “Political thought in France is either nostalgic or utopian.”
The charge of treason rested on flimsy evidence. Even now, more than 130 years later, the sordid details are still shocking.
In September 1894, French counterintelligence came into possession of a document known as a bordereau, or note. It had been found, ripped in several pieces, in the trash of the office of the German military attaché. The bordereau offered to supply information about the workings of the hydraulic brake of the 120-millimeter cannon, as well as information about troop maneuvers, artillery formations, and French policies relating to its colony, Madagascar.
Dreyfus was an unlikely candidate to be a spy. Independently wealthy, he seemed to lack a motive. The author was uncertain in the note about artillery matters—a subject in which Dreyfus was well versed. Moreover, the author of the bordereau said that he was going on maneuvers at a time and place that would have been impossible for interns of the General Staff, including Dreyfus. And the handwriting sample that Dreyfus provided didn’t even match the note.
But none of that mattered. Dreyfus was guilty of being a Jew on the General Staff. And for some in the French high command that was enough. As Dreyfus reportedly told his interrogator: “My only crime is being born a Jew.”
Top French military officials soon realized that Dreyfus wasn’t the spy. Yet some, such as Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry, forged evidence to implicate him. Unfortunately, Dreyfus was unaware of the forgeries—his trial was a military tribunal, and the faux evidence was presented in secret to the judges. Even in military court-martials in the France of the day, the defense was normally allowed to examine evidence, but the military persuaded the court that state security prevented the items from being shown to anyone but the judges.
On December 22, 1894, Dreyfus was found guilty. As the verdict was read to assembled soldiers, he yelled, “Soldiers, an innocent man is being degraded; soldiers an innocent man is being dishonored. Long live France! Love live the army!” He was met with cries of “Down with the traitor!” and “Dirty Jew!”
Dreyfus was shipped off to Devil’s Island off the coast of South America, where he lived in solitude in a former leper colony. The conditions—oppressive heat and lack of shelter and food—were barbaric. Victor Hugo once called the area the “dry guillotine.” There is little doubt that the French military hoped that he would die there.
Yet Dreyfus’s family soon took up his cause, working tirelessly to clear his name. Eventually, some politicians and reporters joined them. As evidence mounted of his innocence, France became divided between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. In 1898, the novelist Émile Zola published his famous pamphlet J’Accuse, attacking the French military for its role. It would take more trials and another eight years before Dreyfus was fully cleared, his military rank restored.
Dreyfus soon left the army and died in retirement in 1935. But anti-Semitism continued to play a role in French politics and society. Decades later it would emerge in full force, embodied in the Vichy regime of Nazi collaborators. Dreyfus’s favorite granddaughter, Madeleine, would die at Auschwitz.
The whole spectacle is told in grim detail by Samuels, the director of Yale’s center for the study of anti-Semitism. In stressing both Dreyfus’s Jewishness and the forces brought to bear on him because of it, Samuels is offering a warning about complacency. Anti-Semitism will always be there, and it will always be capable of mass destruction. And it takes a mass mobilization by the forces of liberalism to hold it at bay.
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