Turning Points: The Dreyfus Affair

     We talked about the famous Dreyfus Affair today, beginning with the single piece of evidence that set off that infamous event and the vast Affair it spawned in France.  The evidence involved is the so-called bordereau (literally a note), a single piece of paper with a list of military items, especially the then secret 120 mm gun. It was found in a waste basket in the German Embassy in Paris and delivered to the Statistical Section (the French CIA of the day) by a cleaning woman who spied on the Germans for the French.  The Statistical Section made a couple of false assumptions (that it had to have been written by a member of the General Staff and that he was an artillery officer).  They then arrested Alfred Dreyfus, a model soldier and the only Jewish member of the General Staff.  The army at the time was aggressively Catholic and antisemitic.  From this document, worthless in a court of law (it was undated, unsigned, and its recipient was not mentioned) followed by an illegal arrest and interrogation, came the famous Affair.
     Dreyfus was convicted by a secret military court who received a secret envelope containing the bordereau and a few other pieces of equally dubious evidence, none of it demonstrably connected to Dreyfus.  Dreyfus was never shown this evidence and the military court accepted its authenticity on the word of General Mercier, the senior French general of the day.  Dreyfus was then publicly degraded, having been already tried and convicted in the antisemitic press, and sent to Devil's Island.
     I tried to impress on the kids the difference between civilian and military courts (Mark Sigunick was in class and explained this) and how the subsequent cover-up by the military, the virulence of the press, and the pusillanimity of the government perpetuated the injustice.  I also stressed that when the case finally got into a civilian court the military was curbed and Dreyfus was ultimately pardoned.  The rule of law prevailed.  I mentioned in passing -- and will return to this in a future lesson -- that Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was a reporter sent to cover the famous case.  He witnessed Dreyfus's degradation and this served as the seed for his insistence that Jews must have a homeland.  If a Secular Jew (and so was Herzl) could be condemned and illegally convicted in France, the home of the Rights of Man, then no Jew, however assimilated, was safe from persecution.
     We also talked about howthe utterly unexpected interventions in the course of the Affair not only kept it alive but eventually brought about Dreyfus's exoneration.  Colonel Piquart, himself an ardent Catholic and professed antisemite, was the first to discover that the handwriting on the bordereau was not Dreyfus's.  When he blew the whistle his army superiors sent him on a tour of North African army outposts.  When the greatest novelist of the day, Emile Zola, published his J'Accuse in the daily paper L'Aurore, excoriating the generals, it caused a sensation.
     We also talked about the lessons of the Dreyfus Case: the inherent balance of military courts in favor of the army, the virulence of the mass press (especially the antisemitic press), the fact that a weak government let the army run amok, that the rule of law eventually prevailed, and how Dreyfus himself chose to play down the antisemitic aspects of his ordeal, putting his faith in the laws of the land and the essentially honorability of the army.
     Our next lesson will be on the origins of Zionism and the early years of a then hoped-for Jewish state.