The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus & the Affair that Divided France
By Ruth Harris
Allen Lane, 2011
542 pages, $26.95 (pb)
The Dreyfus Affair in France a century ago shows how little has changed. “National security” was on the lips of politicians and military officers as an innocent man from a vilified group was framed for treason in a rigged military court and sent to rot in a prison hell-hole to serve political ends amid war hysteria.
Make the name “Alfred Dreyfus” or “David Hicks” and the template fits.
Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was accused by the military in 1894 of spying for Germany. The French minister of war, wanting to be seen as tough on Germany, nabbed the nearest, vaguely-plausible suspect.
The evidence against Dreyfus was gossamer-thin and the real spy (a debt-ridden army officer) was soon fingered by a conscientious army intelligence officer.
But a secret dossier, bulked out to a crushing 370 items with forged and tenuous evidence, was used to convict Dreyfus.
Dreyfus’s German accent (common to all French residents of his German-occupied French homeland, Alsace-Lorraine) and his Jewish religion (used as part of an anti-Semitic scare about a Jewish conspiracy) were the racist nails in a court martial closed to public scrutiny.
Imprisoned on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana in South America, Dreyfus spent five years in solitary confinement. He was shackled in sweltering heat, endured fever and malnutrition, his teeth rotted and his legs and voice atrophied.
He was not supposed to survive.
A campaign to free Dreyfus, however, changed all that. It was sparked by the novelist Emile Zola, whose polemical broadside, J’accuse, charged France’s military and political hierarchies with complicity in the stitch-up.
Conscionable Republicans united with socialists and anarchists under the banner of “Truth and Justice”.
Popular outrage forced a retrial of Dreyfus. But hostile military judges and widespread perjury by prosecution witnesses saw Dreyfus sentenced to 10 more years.
This grotesque result, together with a failed right-wing coup against the Republican government, forced the government to seek social peace by proposing a pardon for Dreyfus, which would have left him legally free but morally stained, and a general amnesty for the conspirators and perjurers.
Faced with another decade of Devil’s Island, however, Dreyfus not unreasonably opted for the pardon. But the Marxist leader of France’s Socialist Party, Jean Jaures, launched a campaign to clear Dreyfus, which culminated in Dreyfus’s first fair trial and full exoneration in 1906.
Ruth Harris’s particular take on the Dreyfus Affair is to challenge what she calls the myth of righteous and pure Dreyfusards battling a wicked, anti-Dreyfusard right.
She documents the existence of Catholics on both sides of the struggle (liberal and republican versus reactionary and monarchical), writers and intellectuals split on the issue, and spiritualists cohabiting with scientists under the Dreyfusard watchword of reason.
This, however, is merely an unremarkable fact of broad coalition politics.
Harris’s other conclusion, that, “on right and left”, positions on the Dreyfus Affair were shaped by long-standing emotional animosities rather than by evidence alone, is but an illustration that in politics everything is connected.
Certainly, some Dreyfusards were influenced by their opposition to Catholic Jesuits in the anti-Dreyfusard camp whom they, rightly, saw as “pre-Enlightenment throwbacks”.
For their part, many Catholic priests used Dreyfus as a pretext to oppose a Republic that was winding back clerical privilege and promoting secularisation.
That the fate of one individual can act as an emotional lightning-rod in polarising society along a left-right divide, with truth and justice pitted against lies and prejudice, is not surprising.
Nor does it invalidate what Harris laments as the “pervasive impact of Marxist ideas”, which allegedly “privilege thought over feeling”.
Harris’s coolness towards Marxism also biases her book towards elite, rather than mass, politics. She focuses on the ideological battle among intellectuals.
Harris is, however, a “Dreyfusard at heart” and she recognises that the “energy, passion and enthusiasm that fired the idealism of a generation” a century ago is essential for political progress today.