The Dreyfus Affair: When France Lost Faith in Its Army

The Basilica of Sacré Cœur de Montmartre, Paris.

In The Spectator, Artemis Cooper details a new book by Mike Rapport, titled City of Light, City of Shadows, that discusses the moment many French lost faith in their armed forces. A scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair rocked the reputation of France’s military. Cooper writes:

Between 1789 and 1871 Paris went through five kings, two Bonapartist empires, two republics, several revolutions and a Commune. Each had been an attempt to accommodate or neutralize one of two visions of France. The oldest was traditional and conventional; it mourned the ancien régime, and preferred the safety of autocracy over the chaos of democracy and God over science. The younger was progressive and eager for change, building on the ideas of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary ideals of 1789.

We are taken through slums, cafés, law courts, theaters, brothels, strikes and demonstrations

For Mike Rapport, “the friction between change and tradition is perhaps the defining characteristic of the modern condition.” In City of Light, City of Shadows, he explores that friction in the Belle Époque, from 1875 to 1914. He takes the reader through department stores and brothels, slums, snack shops and cafés, law courts and newspaper offices, theaters and meeting halls, concerts, strikes and demonstrations. He believes that historians should have good walking boots as well as sharp eyes. The buildings and boulevards of Paris come to life as he describes them, while the conflict between the modern and the traditional is conspicuous in two monuments that dominate the city.

The Eiffel Tower was built as the centerpiece of the Universal Exposition of 1889. So precise was its construction that every rivet hole was bored in advance and assembled by workers who, proud of their revolutionary heritage, sported red caps and sashes. Furious letters in the press declared it an eyesore. Guy de Maupassant claimed to patronize the tower’s restaurant because it was the only place from which the splay-footed monster was invisible. Yet its soaring height proved invaluable for scientific experiments; it launched the first radio transmissions in France, and it is now the very symbol of Paris.

The Sacré Coeur, by contrast, was built over decades with donations from pious Catholics, rich and poor. They shared a general feeling that France’s crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 was the result of Second Empire decadence more than Prussian military superiority. But modernization was not enough: only national repentance, a return to strict morals and a strong government would preserve France from further disastrous revolutionary experiments. Their basilica is built on the very mound where the story of the Commune began, as if to obliterate its memory.

Never did these ideas collide with greater force than over the Dreyfus Affair. In the 1880s, the French army was seen as the embodiment of national honor and self-sacrifice, focused on reversing the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War. Meanwhile a wave of Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Russia fueled antisemitism, and the collapse of a large Catholic bank — too holy to fail — was blamed on Jewish financiers. So when the army court-martialed the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus for passing military secrets to the Germans in 1895, sentencing him to a lifetime in shackles on Devil’s Island, most people assumed he was guilty.

The Dreyfus family and their supporters set to work to prove his innocence. Over the next four years, the verdict against him began to look increasingly flimsy, while the real culprit emerged as Major Walsin Esterhazy. Yet big institutions, as we know, cannot admit they are wrong. The army was forced to bring Esterhazy to trial; but since it refused to revisit the evidence in the Dreyfus case, Esterhazy was acquitted.

This unleashed one of the most explosive articles ever written, Émile Zola’s J’Accuse, published in L’Aurore in January 1898. Zola tore into the case against Dreyfus, naming the army officers whom he accused of lying, falsifying evidence, illegally using secret documents and concealing the truth to protect themselves. He knew it would lead to his arrest, but it was the only way of airing the details of the Dreyfus case again.

The result was an outpouring of hatred: Jewish shops were vandalized, students chanted anti-Zola slogans, and 8,000 people joined a huge nationalist rally that was overtly antisemitic. Much of this was spear-headed by a mass-market press, which had little interest in weighing the Dreyfusard argument versus the anti-Dreyfusard. Each side knew it was right, and used its power to arm its readers with irrefutable arguments, and inflame them with rage.

Read more here.