The Dreyfus Affair continues to haunt France to this day

A short new book on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the proudly patriotic French army officer who was falsely accused in 1894 of being a German spy, and whose court cases divided France into two warring camps, could not have been better timed. For the division sounds horribly familiar. Liberal, democratic, secular, cosmopolitan, urban France was pitted against provincial, religious, authoritarian, anti-immigrant, chauvinistic France.

Dreyfus, an assimilated Alsatian Jew, was first sentenced by a military court, using faked documents and trumped-up charges, to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. When it became obvious that it wasn’t Dreyfus who had handed military secrets to the Germans but Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a disreputable minor aristocrat addicted to gambling and women, a second trial was held. To cover up the fraudulence of the first trial, Esterhazy was acquitted, and Dreyfus remained, more dead than alive, shackled to his bed in his island prison.

A wave of anti-Semitic riots convulsed the whole of France. This frenzy was whipped up by fiercely anti-Semitic newspapers such as La Libre Parole, comparing Jews to rats who should be eliminated. But at the same time, supporters of Dreyfus, including the writer Émile Zola, organised themselves to defend the liberal republic. Zola published his famous article J’Accuse, in which he denounced the anti-Semitism of the French general staff as well as the odious press that called for the death of Jews, liberals and other enemies who were supposedly polluting the purity of France. Zola, and many liberal intellectuals, were the Dreyfusards. Their opponents were the anti-Dreyfusards.