The Dreyfus Affair

Bredin, a professor of law at the University of Paris, opens his biographical history of the Dreyfus Affair with what is perhaps one of the most riveting and archetypal scenes in the entire story: the scene as Dreyfus is stripped of his military insignia and publicly humiliated in the main courtyard of the +cole Militaire on Place Fontenoy in Paris on January 5, 1895. As a sergeant-major tears Captain DreyfusÆs uniform to shreds, the crowd outside the walls shouts, ôDeath to the Jew!ö If there were still any doubt in any rational personÆs mind about whether anti-Semitism was at the root of this affair, this fact alone should serve to settle the question.

However, that is merely where Bredin begins. In this meticulously researched work of more than 600 pages (in its English version), which cites more than 220 primary and secondary sources, Bredin documents and analyzes every aspect of the Affair and demonstrates that the anti-Semitism rampant in French society at the time was a major factor in its origins and evoluti

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ons joined those that a century of revolutions had produced. It was the Affair that, within a few contentious years, precipitated the separation of Church and State . . . that turned the presence of Jews in France into a Jewish Question . . . that allied anti-Semitism clearly with the Right . . . that launched anti-Semitism on its amazingly successful twentieth-century career; and also suggested the special affinity of Jews for social justice. . . . Henceforth . . . more and more Jews would sense that freedom from the inequities that oppressed them went naturally with freedom from inequities oppressing others (p. xxvi). The arguments and conclusions about the history of the Dreyfus Affair stated in this book do not differ markedly from those of Bredin, who is cited as a major source. However, the history of what actually happened to Dreyfus is here assumed as background. The focus of the book is more on what happened to French society as it halved into the moieties of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. The persons who have remained important in the history of French art and literature for the last century (such as Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, and Anatole France, whose Penguin Island, still considered by many a delight to read, i
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Approximate Word count = 1508
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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