OPINION: 130 years on, the Dreyfus affair still matters to France and the world

Local France

2 days ago

In 1894 an obscure Jewish French army captain was falsely convicted of espionage and treason. Alfred Dreyfus spent five years alone in a cage on Devil's Island in the French Caribbean before he was pardoned and finally rehabilitated in 1906.
For many decades 'the Dreyfus case' divided France.
To the Catholic fundamentalist, antisemitic and ultra-patriotic Right, his guilt – no matter the lack of evidence - became an article of patriotic faith.
To the Left, and not just the Left, the struggle to prove his innocence symbolised the importance and the fragility of the democratic and personal freedoms won by the French Revolution.
On Monday, the National Assembly voted unanimously to promote Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general 90 years after his death. Until relatively recently, any unanimous parliamentary decision on the Dreyfus case in France would have been unthinkable.
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This week's vote managed to be both unanimous and controversial.
Of the 577 deputies, only 197 voted. Thirty-eight were from the far-right Rassemblement National, direct descendants of the Vichy regime of 1940-44 which rehabilitated the senior officers who lied and cheated to frame Dreyfus.
Forty-one of the pro-Dreyfus votes came from the hard-Left La France Insoumise, which has been accused in recent months of anti-semitism in its unconditional support for the Palestinian cause.
The centrist Modem party, the party of the prime minister François Bayrou, refused to take part. They said that the vote, sponsored by their coalition partners, Renaissance, the party of President Emmanuel Macron, gave the far-right and the hard-left a cheap opportunity to white-wash their anti-semitism.
There may be some truth in that but it misses a larger point.
The Dreyfus case IS partly about anti-semitism. The persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus persuaded Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, that the future for the Jewish people was the creation of a Jewish state.
But 'the case' is also about something broader - something which threatens democratic values in the 2020s as much as it did in the 1890s.
The trampling of the rule of law in the name of patriotism?
Politics in which facts do not shape political opinions but quasi-religious beliefs establish bogus facts?
We are confronted in 2025 with the same issues which the novelist Emile Zola addressed in 1898 in his celebrated front-page article on the Dreyfus case under the banner headline: 'J'accuse'.
Twenty-seven years ago, in a speech to mark the centenary of Zola's article, President Jacques Chirac said: 'The Dreyfus Affair…tore French society apart, divided families, split the country into two enemy camps, which attacked each other with exceptional violence ... It was a reminder, that the forces of darkness, intolerance and injustice can penetrate to the highest levels of the state.'
The last sentence is prophetic and chilling. Chirac might have been speaking about Donald Trump.
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In that centenary year of the Zola article, I interviewed Nelly Wilson, a British academic who was an expert on both Zola and Dreyfus. Ms Wilson, who died in 2017, came to Britain in 1945 at the age of 15 as one of 150 young concentration camp survivors invited to settle by the UK government.
'It is perhaps not so surprising that the (Dreyfus) affair remains so vivid in the French mind,' she told me in 1998.
'It describes a conflict at the heart of French political psychology which has not changed so very much to this day. On the one hand, a fierce nationalism and a temptation to justify almost anything for
raisons d'etat
; on the other hand, a fierce attachment to justice for the individual, for the rights of the individual.'
Nelly Wilson believed that the Dreyfus case changed the course of French history. It discredited the forces of extreme nationalism, anti-semitism, clericalism and nostalgic royalism which might otherwise have pushed France into a kind of proto-fascism or Francoism 30 years before Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.
That conflict is still with us but is no longer at the centre of French politics alone. It can be seen in the lies and law-trampling of President Trump, in the brutal creed of Vladimir Putin and in the kleptocratic rule of Viktor Orban in Hungary.
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And, yes, the 'temptation to justify almost anything for
raisons d'etat
' also describes the murderous and cynical forever war for his own survival waged by Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.
The Dreyfus affair has never had quite the same resonance outside France (Jewish communities apart). In the early 20th century, British newspapers wrote puzzled or mocking articles, demanding to know what all the fuss was about.
The parallels are not exact but you can see similar comments today minimising the Trump administration's wrongful arrest and imprisonment in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
We should no longer ask why France is obsessed with Alfred Dreyfus. History has told us, and continues to tell us, that 'the case' was about more than anti-semitism and far more than the persecution of one innocent man.