Details of the investigation were leaked to mass-circulation anti-Semitic newspapers. Handwriting experts were rounded up to testify that Dreyfus was the document's author. The handwriting bore a loose resemblance to that of Dreyfus-who happened to be the only Jewish officer attached to the general staff. The affair began when French intelligence found the now-famous bordereau, a letter containing French military secrets, in the wastebasket of the German military attaché in Paris. The Dreyfus affair brings together a mass of tangled legal details resting at the center of one of the great political divides in French history Bredin has mastered both the legal and the political aspects, and is outstandingly successful at presenting all the elements of the courtroom contest clearly and vividly.
Nearly a thousand titles have been devoted to the Dreyfus case, but it is unlikely that anyone will surpass this new synthesis by the prominent French lawyer and part-time historian Jean-Denis Bredin. On the other side, a figure like Charles Maurras, the royalist essayist and anti-Dreyfus agitator, would never forget the affair fifty years after Dreyfus's arrest, the founder of the Action Française would exclaim that his own conviction on the charge of collaboration with the Nazi occupation was “the revenge of Dreyfus.” A man like Léon Blum-who at the time of Dreyfus's arrest was just starting out as a young lawyer and literary critic-owed his entry into politics to the passions aroused by the Dreyfus case he would lead the Socialist party for thirty years. This was true across the political spectrum. The mob did not prevail, but the question of Captain Dreyfus's guilt or innocence did emerge as the lodestar of political belief for an entire generation. The affair brought to the center stage of French politics a fateful alliance between Catholic anti-Semitism and the anti-bourgeois, anti-democratic mob-a French advance screening of the shock troops of 20th-century fascism. The affair which grew out of the Dreyfus case began as a curious 19th-century courtroom drama, but was eventually transformed into an epochal event that foreshadowed a great many of the tragic tendencies in the next century.
This circumstance would turn out to be more decisive in shaping his life than any choice made by him alone. Although he was hardly religious, Dreyfus was also a Jew.
Married, the father of two, financially comfortable-by nearly any measure, Dreyfus was pointed toward a life of the most conventional respectability. His superior officers described him as “conscientious.” He had been diligent enough in his work to win an envied position in the army, despite having finished below the middle of his class at the Polytechnique. Like others from the Alsatian bourgeoisie whose families had chosen French citizenship and exile after the German annexation of their province, he was a passionate French patriot. $24.95.īefore Captain Alfred Dreyfus was charged with high treason in 1894, he was a thirty-four-year-old, career-conscious officer on the French army general staff.
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