HISTORY: The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided FranceBy Ruth Harris, Allen Lane, 542pp. £30
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR offers an excellent example of the importance of contingency in shaping history. Were it not for the diligence of the spy-cum-charwoman who fished some torn scraps out of a wastepaper bin in the German embassy in Paris, then the chain of events that led to the court martial of a young Jewish army captain accused of spying would probably never have occurred. And if President Félix Faure had not expired in the course of a particularly vigorous afternoon’s entertainment with his mistress several years later, then Alfred Dreyfus might very well have died in captivity before justice could be done.
It is this sense of messy complexity that Ruth Harris captures in her history of the Dreyfus affair, The Man on Devil's Island. For Harris doesn't have much time for the traditional view of a righteous, universal struggle between the dogged partisans of Truth and Justice (yes, they used capital letters) and a sinister anti-Semitic cabal. Without wanting to detract from the loathsome mendacity of Dreyfus's persecutors, she makes a compelling case that the position of many Dreyfusards was more ambiguous than "the orthodox interpretation" will admit. "Such triumphalism is good rhetoric but poor history," she argues. "It downplays to the point of caricature the sordid dimensions of the Affair, which even today many French seek to forget. Not only was Dreyfus convicted twice, but his release was due to a political fix, not to the triumph of justice."
One of the more surprising “sordid dimensions” was the extent of reflexive anti-Semitism and opportunism among many of the figures who became associated with Dreyfus’s cause. The socialist leader Jean Jaurès, today regarded as a secular saint in France, was not above making speeches denouncing the Jews as agents of international finance. And, like the bulk of the French left, he initially saw no advantage in campaigning on behalf of a wealthy bourgeois army officer. Bernard Lazare, the anarchist journalist who first publicised Dreyfus’s plight at the instigation of the prisoner’s family, authored a pamphlet arguing that flaws in Jewish culture had contributed to anti-Semitism.
Émile Zola was similarly in thrall to cliches about the Jewish “love of money”, and initially took no interest in Dreyfus’s case. It was only in late 1897, three years after Dreyfus had been dispatched to Devil’s Island, that he was seized by the affair’s dramatic overtones. “What a gripping tragedy, and what superb protagonists!” he wrote. “My novelist’s heart leaps in passionate admiration.”
It was in this giddy state that he penned J’accuse . . ., his open letter to President Faure. But Harris is unimpressed by the most famous newspaper article in history. The text is, she says, “full of errors” and entirely failed to identify the main actors in the conspiracy; had Zola been humble enough to consult Dreyfus’s family and other supporters, this travesty would have been avoided. As it was, the minister for war successfully sued Zola for libel, forcing him into exile in England. Despite his heroic status in popular lore, Harris’s assessment of the novelist’s role is damning: “His tendency to demonize helped to destroy any possibility of compromise.”
The intervention of the “intellectuals” (a term coined by Clemenceau to describe the Dreyfusards) was thus fraught with ego and indiscipline, which had a calamitous effect on Dreyfus’s second court martial, in 1899. By now the cartoonishly louche Walsin Esterhazy had effectively been unmasked as the real spy. Having fled to England, he even confessed to a number of newspapers. As the burden of implausibility mounted, the high court annulled Dreyfus’s conviction and ordered another court martial, which became the scene of intense squabbling between those Dreyfusards who wished to cut a deal and those who wished to expose the full extent of the military cover-up and Esterhazy’s guilt. A conciliatory closing statement ultimately made no difference, as the generals decided to reconvict Dreyfus by a majority vote: after dozens of officers had publicly sworn the Jewish captain’s guilt, the reputation of the French army was at stake. They, along with self-styled “anti-intellectual” writers like Maurice Barrès, were thus prepared, in Harris’s words, “to sanctify lies in the name of a greater national truth”.
Yet Dreyfus’s innocence had now become clear to the entire world. Since the deceased anti-Dreyfusard Faure had been replaced by the more malleable Émile Loubet, the government resolved to grant a pardon after 10 days of deliberation. Once again the Dreyfusards were split by this grubby compromise, which deprived them of the opportunity to continue to use Dreyfus as a pawn in their struggle for broader political and philosophical ends. Clemenceau objected to the sell-out in particularly emphatic terms: “I am indifferent about Dreyfus, let them cut him into pieces and eat him.”
In spite of continuing bitterness, Dreyfus was finally rehabilitated in 1906 and awarded the Légion d’Honneur in a ceremony at Paris’s École Militaire, where, 12 years previously, he had been subjected to ritual degradation by his fellow officers.
As an account of the machinations and paradoxes of political, military and intellectual elites on both sides of the affair, The Man on Devil's Islandis a triumph of research and analysis. Harris also avoids the trap of assuming that later French Fascism grew directly from the anti-Dreyfusards – "a dark teleology that does not really exist".
Missing is any investigation into the way these years were experienced by the bulk of Frenchmen and -women. The successes of anti-Dreyfusard nationalists in the 1898 elections, along with the reach of lurid anti-Semitic newspapers, suggest that truth and justice may not always have been the people's choice. A study of attitudes in the champsas well as the salonswould thus be welcome.
Max McGuinness is a faculty fellow at the department of French and Romance philology at Columbia University
