![]() The Dreyfus affair matters, he believes, because we have, in the past decade, made our own Devil’s Island and hundreds of new Dreyfuses-the Dreyfus affair matters because we’re still in the middle of it. ![]() Brave because Begley wants to use the occasion not for French-bashing, or for reciting the enduring history of European anti-Semitism, bleak as it is, but as a pointed warning and reminder of how fragile the standards of civilized conduct prove in moments of national panic. The Dreyfus affair never goes away, and is the subject of a brave new book by the novelist and lawyer Louis Begley, “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” (Yale $24). The Dreyfus affair was the first indication that a new epoch of progress and cosmopolitan optimism would be met by a countervailing wave of hatred that deformed the next half century of European history. The very improbability of such an act’s happening at such a time-to an assimilated Jew who had mastered a meritocratic system and a city that was the pride and pilothouse of civic rationalism-made it a portent, the moment where Maupassant’s world of ambition and pleasure met Kafka’s world of inexplicable bureaucratic suffering. Yet it took place in the immediate shadow of the monument of modernity, the Eiffel Tower, then six years old, which loomed at the north end of the Champ-de-Mars. ![]() His insignia medals were stripped from him, his sword was broken over the knee of the degrader, and he was marched around the grounds in his ruined uniform to be jeered and spat at, while piteously declaring his innocence and his love of France above cries of “Jew” and “Judas!” It is a ceremony that seems to belong to some older, medieval Europe, of public torture and autos-da-fé and Inquisitions. On a January day in Paris, in 1895, a ceremony was enacted in the courtyard of the École Militaire, on the Champ-de-Mars, that still shocks the mind and conscience to contemplate: Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish artillery officer and family man, convicted of treason days earlier in a rushed court-martial, was publicly degraded before a gawking crowd. Dreyfus was convicted on the evidence of handwriting identified as a “self-forgery,” and a single initial in a playful lover’s note. Then, when it's finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that's nearly broken his back. I begin to say the book's no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I've wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. The day will come when France will thank me for having helped to save her honor.įrom the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. I was determined that my country should not remain the victim of lies and injustice. And I have for me only an ideal of truth and justice. All seems against me - the two Chambers, the civil authority, the military authority, the most widely-circulated journals, the public opinion which they have poisoned. May all that melt away, may my works perish if Dreyfus be not innocent! He is innocent. ![]() By all I have now, by the name I have made for myself, by my works which have helped for the expansion of French literature, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. By my forty years of work, by the authority that this toil may have given me, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. I swear it! I stake my life on it - my honor! At this solemn moment, in the presence of this tribunal which is the representative of human justice, before you, gentlemen of the jury, who are the very incarnation of the country, before the whole of France, before the whole world, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent.
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