Alfred Dreyfus The Man at the Center of the Affair
By Maurice Samuels.
Yale University Press, 2024.
Paperback, 224 pages, $20.
Maurice Samuels published Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair early this year. The University Bookman contributor JP O’Malley caught up with Dr. Samuels to discuss the writing of his latest book.
At the beginning of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), Josef K, a 30-year-old bank clerk, wakes up one morning to find himself arrested, even though he has committed no crime. In October 1894, Alfred Dreyfus suffered a similar fate when his superiors in the French military accused him of selling military secrets to Germany, and he was imprisoned for five years.
“The Dreyfus Affair plunged France into a domestic political crisis because it raised fundamental questions about the nature of liberal democracy—the form of government that guaranteed rights to the individual through the rule of law,” writes Yale historian Maurice Samuels, in Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair.
Samuels, who is the author of five books, including The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016) and The Betrayal of the Duchess (2020), is currently the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University, where he also chairs the Department of French. A native of Chicago, he was educated at Harvard and spent a year studying at the École normale supérieure in Paris.
His latest book begins by looking at Alfred Dreyfus’s early life. After joining the army in 1880 at 21, Dreyfus moved to Paris. His father, Raphaël, was a millionaire. This made Dreyfus a suitable candidate to court Lucie Eugénie Hadamard, another French Jewish aristocrat. The couple married in April 1891. “Dreyfus was from a well-to-do family, but Lucie Eugénie Hadamard’s family were more educated and wealthier, so Dreyfus married up,” Samuels explains from his office at Yale University, where he is currently Director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.
Within two years, Lucie bore two children, Pierre and Jeanne. The Dreyfus family lived in a salubrious neighborhood in the 16th district of Paris, where they kept horses and enjoyed servants. “Dreyfus received a yearly salary of approximately 20,000 Francs from his own private income, in addition to this army pay. This meant he was paid ten times what the average French officer was paid annually,” Samuels explains. “Which caused a lot of resentment against Dreyfus within the ranks of the army.”
On the morning of October 17, 1894, Dreyfus was summoned to the ministry of war. First, he was conned into giving a sample of his handwriting. Then he was arrested for high treason. The evidence (or lack thereof) centered on a document, ripped into several pieces, that French counterintelligence services came into possession of in September 1894 called the bordereau. “This hand-written note was an offer to sell military secrets [to the Germans],” says Samuels. “The handwriting was the main piece of incriminating evidence used against Dreyfus.”
So, too, were the specific details the documents mentioned: munitions. Dreyfus did, in fact, work in this area of the army. But “Dreyfus’s Jewishness played a major role” in convincing many within the army hierarchy to believe he was a traitor and a spy, Samuels stresses.
This, in essence, is the main thesis put forward in Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair. “Clearly, you cannot write about this case without mentioning the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish, or bringing up the role of antisemitism,” the historian points out. “But very few authors have made it a central part of the story.”
There have, of course, been some exceptions, Samuels stresses. The Anti-Semitic Moment (1998) by French historian and sociologist Pierre Birnbaum, for instance, looks at the antisemitism during the Dreyfus Affair. “But the Dreyfus case was often portrayed more in terms of universalist [western] values—like truth, justice, and the rule of law,” says Samuels.
He also investigates why antisemitism was so prevalent in Fin de Siècle France. “The term antisemitism was actually coined in Germany in the late 1870s, so it was definitely a political force in Germany. But it was more extreme in France at that time, even though there were fewer Jews there,” says Samuels.
The author and academic points out that in the latter part of the nineteenth century, most of that racial prejudice in France was driven by reactionary French conservatives, who were against the emancipation that Jews were granted after the French Revolution (1789). This far-right faction in France wanted to bring the country back to an old feudal order, where Jews would be denied equality before the law, he claims.
“The rise of antisemitism in France at this time was partially in reaction to the fact that France had been so good for the Jews, who, by the nineteenth century, were by far the most integrated Jews in the world,” says Samuels. “That aroused a reaction from various segments of society, who were left behind by modernity.”
Samuels is keen to place the Dreyfus Affair into a broader historical context. But he doesn’t lose sight of the fact that he is, after all, writing a biography. Many historians have typically portrayed Dreyfus as a cold, aloof, awkward, unlikeable, and antisocial figure. Samuels describes a shy and private family man who was capable of great strength, courage, and sensitivity.
In December 1894, a French court found Dreyfus guilty of treason. For the next five years, he was imprisoned on Devil’s Island, a French penal colony off the northeast coast of South America.
The conditions were brutal. Dreyfus was the only prisoner living on Devil’s Island, which the French authorities cleared solely for him. The prison guards watched Dreyfus day and night but did not speak to him. “Because he didn’t speak for five years, Dreyfus essentially lost his voice while he was on Devil’s Island,” says Samuels. “At one stage, he was even chained to his bed with a big iron bar, and he couldn’t move.”
Letters, though, were the prisoner’s saving grace. “It seems to me, when I write to you … that I see your beloved face in front of me,” Dreyfus wrote in one of many letters he penned to his wife, Lucie, at this time.
“What kept Dreyfus going was Lucie’s constant letters to him, which are very moving,” says Samuels. Lucie also worked tirelessly behind the scenes to clear her husband’s name. It wasn’t easy, especially since many close friends and family shunned her after her husband was imprisoned. “Most people just assumed that the French army must be telling the truth,” says Samuels. “So Dreyfus and his family were facing this huge uphill battle.”
Eventually, many outspoken intellectuals lent their support to the Dreyfus family. “By the time the Dreyfus Affair reached its height in 1899, all of France was really divided by the case,” says Samuels.
Those on the anti-Dreyfus side included the novelist Jules Verne and the impressionist painter Edgar Degas. The pro-Dreyfus side, meanwhile, had figures like fellow impressionist painter Oscar-Claude Monet and Émile Zola. The French novelist and journalist caused a national sensation in France when he wrote an open letter published on the front page of the liberal newspaper L’ Aurore. Addressed to the French president, Félix Faure, under the headline “J’accuse,” the article repeatedly called for Dreyfus to be freed. Which he was, eventually.
In June 1899, the High Court of Appeal in France found that there had been insufficient evidence, and Dreyfus’s initial guilty verdict was overturned. Dreyfus was brought back to France for a second trial and found guilty again. Pardoned in September 1899, Dreyfus was finally exonerated for treason and awarded the Legion of Honor in 1906.
Samuels dedicates one chapter of his book looking at the impact the Dreyfus Affair had on the Jewish community in various parts of the world at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, he examined newspapers from the time in France, Germany, the United States, and Britain, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers within the Russian empire, including Poland.
“That was super interesting and the place in the book where I did the most original research,” Samuels admits. “I had suspected that [Jewish communities] in these places would have been interested in the case, but they were obsessed with it.”
On one level, the Dreyfus affair was a form of light entertainment that was made for good copy in newspapers. But it also provided inspiration for fellow Jews to draw parallels with their own social, economic, and political woes. The Russian pogroms of 1881-1884, where 250 anti-Jewish riots erupted in the Russian empire, was just one example of antisemitic violence Jews faced. But countless other incidents were happening across the world, which forced Jews to consider the possibility of where their future was headed and the threats they faced as a people.
These debates had raged for years, but became especially fierce in 1897 when the Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. This was the beginning of the Zionist movement, which advocated for Jews to form their own nation in Palestine. That same year, Herzl founded Die Welt. The Vienna-based Zionist newspaper used its in-depth coverage of the Dreyfus Affair to build support for the Zionist project.
Not all Jews, of course, were Zionists. Some believed in socialism. Most of the radical Jewish socialists then resided in Eastern Europe and were split into three movements: The Bund, Poale Zion, and the international communist movement. Their views varied. But most rejected all forms of nationalism in favor of working-class solidarity. Internationalists in outlook, they sought to synthesize modernity with noble old-world Jewish values. Meanwhile, the integrationists, or assimilationists, as they were sometimes called, believed in neither Zionism nor socialism. They argued that Jews should fight to gain equal rights and become loyal citizens of the countries in which they were born.
“All three of these groups saw in the Dreyfus case confirmation of their own ideology,” Samuels explains.
He points out that the debate over the Dreyfus Affair has never really ended in France. In the 2022 presidential election run-up, for instance, the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour claimed that Dreyfus’s innocence “was not obvious.”
Samuels claims the Dreyfus trial forces us to consider what it means when the institutions of liberal democracy come under assault. He mentions the ongoing human rights abuses in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, a military base in Cuba, where the United States military continues to hold prisoners for ill-defined reasons of state.
On October 7, 2023, the attack launched by Hamas terrorists in Israel waged the deadliest attack on Jews in one day since the Holocaust. But Israel has since been accused of genocide, killing an estimated 35,000 Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war since last October.
Can we draw parallels with the Dreyfus Affair and Gaza in 2024?
“I could see people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict finding parallels in [Dreyfus] case to support their point of view today,” says Samuels, who offers a carefully worded response, clearly not wanting to say anything that might be deemed controversial. “I finished the book over a year and a half ago before the [Israel-Hamas] war began,” he says. “And the parallel that was really on mind then was to the American context, where an entire country is becoming increasingly divided and extremely polarized over politics.”
“During the Dreyfus affair, half the country was committed to believing a lie,” Samuels concludes. “That seems to have real parallels with our present moment in America today. The Dreyfus Affair has much to tell us about the causes of hatred and the ways it can be resisted.”
JP O’Malley is an Irish writer living in London.
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