Remembering Anti-Semitism in France
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
FROM DREYFUS TO TOUVIER Remembering Anti-Semitism in France BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL THE first Frenchman ever charged with crimes against humanity, Paul Touvier, received a life sentence on April...
...In addition to hate mail, the Dreyfas family received letters of encouragement, some addressed simply to "Captain Dreyfus, France...
...Elderly visitors to the exhibition are painfully reminded of the Vichy regime's anti-Semitic posters—but even the young can almost hear Dreyfus being hounded by the rabid pack of Right-wing Paris newspapers, led by La Libre Parole, that incited and fed upon attacks against synagogues and Jewish shops...
...Another victim of anti-Semitism was a young woman named Madeleine Levy, a Resistance fighter arrested by French police who died that year in Auschwitz...
...He opposed the Munich Pact, and was Interior Minister during the last 24 days of the Third Republic...
...In 1906 another French officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, confessed to being the memo's author, and Dreyfus was at last rehabilitated...
...His Devil's Island was a fortress in the Pyrenees, where he was kept in a dark cell dripping with wet...
...Mandel was well looked after by a young doctor in the Pyrenean fort, then by the director of the French prison he was brought to from Buchenwald in 1944, before being handed over to the Milice...
...The only crime of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, as it turned out, was his Jewishness...
...Dreyfas' wife Lucie and Mandel's daughter Claude spent 1943-44 hidden in Catholic convents, and thus survived...
...Not in the short term...
...The same year Georges Mandel, a veteran French Jewish political figure, also was savagely murdered by members of the pro-Nazi Milice to which Touvier belonged...
...Soon afterward the pro-Dreyfus "Republican Front" emerged, the League of Human Rights was set up, and petitions on his behalf were signed by 2,000 intellectuals, scientists, students, and politicians...
...A century after that infamous Dreyfus court-martial, 50 years after Mandel's murder, the "Republican Front" rides forth once more, led by Sarkozy, Leotard, Boisset, Semprun, Touvier's pursuers, and others...
...This made his rehabilitation possible, just as it had made it possible for him to expect a brilliant career in the Army...
...Mandel hesitated: Wouldn't "the Jew" then be rightly called a deserter...
...Whatever, the Dreyfus ordeal and the Mandel murder are being marked here this spring too...
...Between Dreyfus' overhasty court-martial and Touvier's overdue trial stretches a whole century that has seen France wrestle with—and ultimately overcome —the anti-Semitic demon that gained the upper hand during the 1940-44 Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, when the worst atrocities were committed...
...Hated in anti-Semitic circles, feared but respected by those he worked with, Mandel was that rarity in prewar French politics—an independent...
...Perhaps it has taken so long to try Touvier (who never fled the country) because the past is easier to come to terms with the farther it recedes...
...In the long term, the Republic lived up to their expectations...
...Petain's first measure, after seeking an armistice with Germany, was to order his arrest and hold him hostage...
...Amid the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of D-Day, it should not be forgotten that 1944 was a dark time for thousands of Jews in Occupied France...
...Mandel was pushed around France from one bleak prison to the next...
...Tolstoy and Plutarch for Mandel), the prisoners were gradually overwhelmed...
...Remarkably, Dreyfus saw his fate—except in moments of despair—not as the consequence of anti-Semitism but as "the most dreadful mistake of this century...
...For all of its shortcomings, Dreyfus' France was a democracy...
...Mandel, labeled "the Jew" by his political enemies, had no such illusions...
...The director of the Paris prison where he was held after his arrest did everything he could to assist him...
...He died in 1935...
...That issue contained Emile Zola's thundering indictment "J'Accuse" in which he laid the blame for Dreyfus' plight on the Minister of War and the mihtary chiefs of staff...
...His subsequent deportation to Buchenwald may very well have seemed an improvement...
...Indeed, the screaming anti-Dreyfus headlines and cartoons foreshadowed the propaganda techniques perfected by the Nazis...
...Confident that the anti-Semitic page in France's history has finally been turned, they nevertheless remain watchful—aware of the ugliness that can be brought on by a Dreyfas Affair...
...The two men revered the Republic, placing it above the pettiness of the individuals seeking to destroy both it and them...
...FROM DREYFUS TO TOUVIER Remembering Anti-Semitism in France BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL THE first Frenchman ever charged with crimes against humanity, Paul Touvier, received a life sentence on April 20 for having ordered the execution of seven Jews in 1944...
...He was brought back to France in 1899 for a retrial, only to be found guilty by a second military court—albeit this time with unspecified "attenuating circumstances...
...A biography of Mandel by Nicolas Sarkozy, the 38-year-old neo-Gaullist Minister for the Budget, has just been published, as have several new books on the Dreyfus Affair...
...Charles de Gaulle admired him...
...Dreyfus and Mandel: An exhibition that provides a vivid, chilling glimpse of the anti-Semitism linking both men?and countless other French Jews—is currently on view at the Hotel des Invalides...
...He defended the Republic's principles to the last...
...Sarkozy's biography of Mandel doubles as an impassioned plea for democratic tolerance in today's Republic...
...The flagship of the pro-Dreyfus press was L'Aurore...
...Exactly half a century earlier, in 1894, her grandfather, a captain in the French Army, had been court-martialed on treason charges and sentenced to military degradation as well as deportation for life...
...When the Resistance assassinated Philippe Hen-riot, the spokesman of the Vichy regime, Mandel was "executed" in retaliation...
...His enemies, meanwhile, organized into the proto-fascist Action Francaise...
...Mandel's Buchenwald diary is a pathetic checklist of his declining health...
...Three weeks later Mandel was killed...
...During World War II, by contrast, Mandel did not stand a chance?and his friends knew this...
...Both men did find help and sympathy along the way...
...Boisset is close to the Socialist Party, and his scriptwriter is novelist Jorge Semprun, an ex-Communist who was for a time Spain's Culture Minister under Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez...
...Elected as a deputy in 1919, he went on to become Minister for Telecommunications, then for Colonial Affairs...
...Almost everyone is familiar with the story of how Dreyfus was scapegoated and sent to Devil's Island for allegedly offering classified information to the military attache at the Germany Embassy...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...Believing he was dying, Dreyfas stopped his diary in September 1896 and dedicated these four lines from Hamlet to his wife: "Doubt thou the stars are fire;/ Doubt that the sun doth move;/Doubt truth to be a liar;/But never doubt I love...
...A political mouthpiece for its editor, Georges Clemenceau—who would later serve twice as Prime Minister—the paper was not afraid to take risks...
...The night of June 16,1944, Churchill's envoy, General Spears, tried to persuade Mandel to leave for London...
...Despite their tremendous stoicism and the solace they drew from books (Montaigne and Shakespeare for Dreyfus, who taught himself English in the penal colony...
...Thanks to his family's efforts, support for his case gradually snowballed...
...The offensive fin-de-siecle rhetoric was a harbinger of the verbal and physical abuse Mandel and Leon Blum, who became Prime Minister in 1936, had to endure...
...It was Leotard's personal intervention that allowed the exhibition to be housed at the Hotel des Invalides, one of the capital's best-known monuments, near the Ecole Militaire...
...Its institutions were solid and its press, however cacophonous, was free...
...He clung to the belief that the rump of French democracy could reorganize somewhere on French territory, perhaps in Algeria...
...Clemenceau became his hero, and would one day be his mentor...
...yet he remained, like Dreyfus, a dedicated patriot...
...Mandel's story is less well-known...
...On the day a jeering mob massed behind the railings of the Ecole Militaire as the Captain was stripped of his honors and rank, a young Austrian Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, came away sickened by the scene...
...Convicted of libel, the writer fled to Britain to avoid prison, but the article brought worldwide attention to the affair...
...Winston Churchill considered him one of France's most reliable democrats...
...Furthermore, he is making available soldiers and military locations to Yves Boisset, who is directing a 200-minute film on Dreyfus...
...French officialdom subjected them to shameful conditions of detention...
...At the Defense Ministry, his Center-Right colleague Francois Leotard has been doing his bit for Dreyfas, whom a few officers still eye askance...
...It also made a deep impression on the 13-year-old Mandel...
...Poor health and family pressure persuaded Dreyfus to accept a presidential pardon...
...On January 13,1898, L'Aurore sold over 200,000 copies...
...On Devil's Island, Dreyfas fought madness and malaria as guards put him in irons, withheld his mail, and erected a high wooden fence around his hut to block out even the sun...
...Entitled "The Dreyfus Affair," it includes posters, newspaper articles, caricatures, and card games that exude a mixed stench of nascent xenophobic nationalism and of popular Christian prejudice rooted in anti-Judaic lore...
...If this could happen in a country that granted Jews fall citizenship a century earlier, he declared, assimilation was hopeless...
...So de Gaulle left instead...
Vol. 77 • May 1994 • No. 5
