UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff PPeennnnssyyllvvaanniiaa SScchhoollaarrllyyCCoommmmoonnss Honors Program in History (Senior Honors Department of History Theses) April 2008 TThhee AAffffaaiirr oorr tthhee SSttaattee:: IInntteelllleeccttuuaallss,, tthhee PPrreessss,, aanndd tthhee DDrreeyyffuuss AAffffaaiirr David Rimoch University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/hist_honors Rimoch, David, "The Affair or the State: Intellectuals, the Press, and the Dreyfus Affair" (2008). Honors Program in History (Senior Honors Theses). 8. https://repository.upenn.edu/hist_honors/8 A Senior Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Honors in History. Faculty Advisor: Kristen Stromberg Childers This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/hist_honors/8 For more information, please contact [email protected]. TThhee AAffffaaiirr oorr tthhee SSttaattee:: IInntteelllleeccttuuaallss,, tthhee PPrreessss,, aanndd tthhee DDrreeyyffuuss AAffffaaiirr AAbbssttrraacctt In his introduction to The Age of Revolution historian Eric Hobsbawm considers "a few English words which were invented, or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period" between 1789 and 1848. The list includes 'capitalism', 'socialism', 'aristocracy', 'liberal', 'conservative', 'nationality', 'crisis', 'journalism', and 'ideology'. For Hobsbawm, "To imagine the modern world without these words (i.e. without the things and concepts for which they provide names) is to measure the profundity of the revolution which broke out between 1789 and 1848, and forms the greatest transformation in human history since the remote times when men invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the city and the state." This analysis is relevant when thinking of the Dreyfus case. To imagine the Affair without words such as 'capitalism', 'aristocracy', 'nationality', 'crisis', or 'ideology', is not hard, it is impossible. CCoommmmeennttss A Senior Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Honors in History. Faculty Advisor: Kristen Stromberg Childers This thesis or dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/hist_honors/8 The Affair or the State: Intellectuals, the Press, and the Dreyfus Affair By David Rimoch A Senior Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in Intellectual History University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA March 2008 Advisor: Dr. Kristen Stromberg Childers Reader: Dr. Jonathan Steinberg Honors Director: Dr. Kristen Stromberg Childers Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………….3 Chapter I The Origins of the Dreyfus Affair………………………………………..8 Chapter II The Fight for Light: Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards……………..23 Chapter III The State and the Individual: the Case of Dreyfus……………………53 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………..96 Conclusion………………………………………………………………..98 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….103 2 Introduction In his introduction to The Age of Revolution historian Eric Hobsbawm considers “a few English words which were invented, or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period”1 between 1789 and 1848. The list includes ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, ‘nationality’, ‘crisis’, ‘journalism’, and ‘ideology’. For Hobsbawm, “To imagine the modern world without these words (i.e. without the things and concepts for which they provide names) is to measure the profundity of the revolution which broke out between 1789 and 1848, and forms the greatest transformation in human history since the remote times when men invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the city and the state.”2 This analysis is relevant when thinking of the Dreyfus case. To imagine the Affair without words such as ‘capitalism’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘nationality’, ‘crisis’, or ‘ideology’, is not hard, it is impossible. This thesis argues that the only way to fully understand the Dreyfus Affair is to situate it inside a conflict between modernity and premodernity. Zeev Sternhell writes that “the Affair provoked a conflict between two visions of the world, two conceptions of society, two stairways of moral values.”3 4 In an intellectual sense the Affair brought into the open the clash between two visions of man. Premodernity understands man as a being determined by external circumstances – age, gender, family, social class, religion, church, community, nation. Modernity, on the other hand, sees in each man an individual; a being determined by his internal aspirations. Premodern man does not know liberty; modern man does not know stability. Premodern man does not know equality; modern man does not know community. If the two cannot be opposed it is 1 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le Nationalisme Français (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 278. 4 All translations from French are my own unless otherwise noted. 3 because the shift from premodernity to modernity is not immediate and uncomplicated. More importantly, an analysis of these conceptions must avoid being too categorical. Elements of the modern are present in the premodern, and vice versa. By tracing the divisions at the heart of the Dreyfus Affair one discovers that the modern period is in fact torn between these two visions. Before turning to the intellectual stakes, the Affair must be understood as the personal drama of a French Jewish Captain under the Third Republic. In 1894 the French Army discovered that secret military information had been received by the German Embassy in Paris. After a short and biased investigation Alfred Dreyfus was suspected and arrested. A court martial tried him based on one document and unanimously convicted him after receiving a secret dossier made up of fabricated evidence. The trial sparked important demonstrations of anti-Semitism. Dreyfus was sent to Devil’s Island and after a prolonged period of silence the new head of counterintelligence, Colonel Picquart, discovered that the real traitor was in fact another officer, Esterhazy, and that most of the evidence had been forged. The matter slowly turned into a national debate and after Esterhazy was acquitted by a court martial in January 1898, Dreyfus’ few supporters mobilized for his cause. The turning point came when the famous novelist Émile Zola wrote an open letter, J’accuse, to Félix Faure, the President of the Republic. In the months that followed, the debate went from being a legal discussion to a full-fledged ideological battle. After the forger of the documents, Henry, committed suicide, and Esterhazy fled to England, a new trial was held at Rennes in the summer of 1899. Dreyfus was again found guilty, but with mitigating circumstances. The President then granted him a pardon and the Affair died out. 4 Dreyfus continued to fight for rehabilitation, and in 1906 he was finally reintegrated into the Army and awarded the Legion of Honor. 5 I vaguely remember learning about the Dreyfus Affair as a young child. An image that has stayed with me is an original copy of J’accuse. On a trip to Paris my family decided to visit the Museum of Jewish History and Culture, and as I walked through the galleries I came across a room dedicated to the Affair. J’accuse lay behind glass and as I read over it I realized how confusing the matter seemed. I skipped most of the first part quickly and moved on to the conclusion, with its famous repetitions of J’accuse (I accuse). And yet, I knew none of the names and I could not verify any of the claims. The letter appeared as a dramatic act but I was not quite sure why it still resonated in the present. Having studied the Affair, the names of du Paty de Clam, Mercier, Boisdeffre, are no longer meaningless. They are characters in an important drama, and the legal matters touched upon by Zola are the realities of a man unjustly accused and convicted. I learned more about the Affair throughout the years, but when I gave thought to writing my thesis on the topic the obvious question came to mind: why did the fate of one man – no matter how unjust – mobilize French society for decades? Why did the French of 1898 and 1899 care about Dreyfus? Why did they attach such importance to one case of individual iniquity? Historians have of course touched on these questions in almost all imaginable ways. I have many times read introductions to books and articles about the Affair that begin by stating – or appreciating – the fact that so much research has been dedicated to Dreyfus, as if they would have to justify their own attempt at understanding the significance of the Affair. In the same way that the intellectuals, writers, journalists, and politicians of the Third Republic used their efforts to defend or attack Dreyfus, we now 5 Instituted by Napoleon in 1802, the Légion d’honneur or Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur is the highest decoration of the French Republic. The order’s motto is “Honor and Fatherland.” 5 continue to use our time for the analysis and understanding of this period. There are in fact different levels to the Affair. There is the legal conflict between the fate of one individual and the raison d’État: “It is a veritable national crime to weaken the military institution, which is the protection of the country, in the name of the hypothetical innocence of one individual.”6 More importantly, “For the trial to become an affair it must have ideological implications. It must, in other words, develop into something more than a strictly legal issue of innocence or guilt. Participants in an affair see themselves as selflessly involved in a larger struggle, one that meshes into their general political convictions, into their view of the world.”7 In this light the Dreyfus Affair was also about the conflict between the individual and society, one that encompassed the fight for universal justice; the immunity of the Army; the role of the Catholic Church in society; the national question; and the place of Jews in France.8 In this last respect the Affair revealed the power of political anti-Semitism and put into question the completeness of emancipation and assimilation. Even though the Affair was not only about anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism stimulated the debates of the Affair. Between the universalism of the Enlightenment and the specificity of the Jewish question, between the ideal of secularism and the religious foundations of the French nation, the contradictions opposed republicans and reactionaries in their opinions on the relationship between Church and State.9 All these questions seemed to point in one direction: a conflict between two visions of the State. The stakes were “moral and political. On the moral level, the Dreyfusards had defended the universal causes of Justice and Truth against the 6 Michel Winock, « Une question de principe, » in La France et l’Affaire Dreyfus, ed. Pierre Birnbaum (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 554. 7 Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894-1915 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5. 8 Winock, « Une question de principe, » 566. 9 Michel Winock, Édouard Drumont et Cie. Antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Le Seuil, 1982), 207. 6 particular cause of the raison d’État,”10 and on the political level the antagonism was between the preservation of republican institutions and the development of nationalism. One vision saw France as the embodiment of universal values, another as the product of a specific history and context. Stephen Wilson argues that “the encounter on the national level between intellectuals and politicians of different persuasions, championing on the one side the Army, the Nation and Reasons of State, and on the other, Justice, the Rule of Law and Individual Rights, has had many chroniclers, but they have not told us why this particular battle took place in the France of the 1890s.”11 Faced with this question and unconvinced by the argument of the role of the State, I moved in a different direction. If Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards invoked particular philosophical traditions the obvious next step was to go back to the origins of the problem: the French Revolution. Zola saw the Affair as the culmination of 1789, and many important anti-Dreyfusards as a symptom of the malady that had afflicted France since the end of the Old Regime. In this respect the question could be posed with particular attention to the development of French intellectual thought during the nineteenth century, and in accordance with preoccupations over how the Jewish question fit into the Affair. Intellectual history is concerned with how ideas affect, and are affected, by the historical setting in which they are created. This thesis takes as its starting point a crisis under the French Third Republic, but it argues that in order to understand its historical significance and contemporary relevance one must situate it within larger intellectual trends. Only through a close reading of the preoccupations it created among intellectuals can we grasp the significance of the Affair for the modern world. 10 Ibid., 99. 11 Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (East Brunswick, NJ: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1982), 6. 7 Chapter I The Origins of the Dreyfus Affair On July 19, 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Backed by the North German Confederation, Prussia had also signed secret treaties of mutual defense with the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria. The war that followed was an isolated conflict in which no other European powers were involved. A diplomatic clash over the succession to the Spanish throne had resulted in the escalation of tensions between the French Second Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Prussia, had ensured that the confrontation would lead to war by editing a telegram describing an encounter between King Wilhelm I and the French ambassador in an incendiary light. Pressured by the press, public opinion, the political establishment and his wife Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III ordered the general mobilization of the French Army. The Franco-Prussian War was a quick and disastrous defeat for the French. After a series of German victories, Napoleon III and an army of over 100,000 were defeated and captured at Sedan on September 2. The German forces were swift, better organized, and had the tremendous backing of the modern and powerful Krupp artillery. On September 4 the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris and a Government of National Defense was created to continue the fight against the Germans. The Prussian and German armies made their way across northern France, quickly reaching Paris and instating a siege on September 19 – it wasn’t lifted until January 28, 1871. Although at first the new government decided to continue the war, by January it had become clear that an armistice was necessary. The Treaty of Frankfurt, on May 10, 1871, put a definitive end to the Franco-Prussian War, but its conditions were deeply resented by the French. Territorially, Alsace and the Lorraine department of Moselle were annexed 8