The French Republic has been threatened most directly in this century by domestic conservative forces. Three major confrontations demonstrating this fact can be identified as the Dreyfus Affair, the Cartel des Gauches in the early 1920s, and the Popular Front in 1934. These three incidents can be seen as evidence that the Republic at the time was radical and was courting a radical political agenda.
The Dreyfus affair involved the false accusation, trial, and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus for having supposedly revealed certain military secrets to Germany. One of the most troubling aspects of the Dreyfus affair was the possibility that it involved anti-Semitism, for Dreyfus was Jewish. The degree of anti-Semitism involved has been argued for some time. The affair began with an error on the part of a military court when it condemned Captain dreyfus to life imprisonment for an act of treason he had not committed; this was in 1894:
Antisemitism played but a minor part in this miscarriage of justice; the chief apostle of that barbaric creed, Edouard Drumont, was admired as a journalist but even the people who relished the virulence of his Libre Parole shrugged away his fanatical bias.
The real problem in the affair after the original conviction was the attitude on the part of the general staff that any decision made by a military court was final. The family of Dreyfus and some jurists and patriots called for a new trial, but the general staff only stiffened its resolve:
They believed in passive obedience and the infallibility of rank. To challenge the verdict of a military court was to break down army discipline; and the army was not merely the sword and shield but the very armature of the nation. Soon, spiritual rather than political forces were definitely polarized. On the one hand, the champions of authority and tradition: aristocracy, clergy, social conservatives; on the other, the defenders of freedom: intell...