THE DREYFUS ERA
Lens, Sidney
The Dreyfus Era Captain Dreyfus, by Nicholas Halasz. Simon & Schuster. 267 pp. $3.50. The Dreyfus Case, by Guy Chapman. Reynal. 360 pp. $5. Reviewed by Sidney Lens NATIONS, like men, sometimes...
...Only in 1906, twelve years after the first miscarriage of justice, did the high court reverse the older decisions...
...In this traumatic circumstance a relatively minor event plunged the whole nation for five long years into a veritable snake pit as it tottered on the brink of reactionary revolution, filled with fears and phobias both mad and indecent...
...Who told him...
...Once again the hysteria prevented justice...
...And to defend that bastion the military forged scores of documents, shielded the real traitor when it knew he was a traitor, and committed a whole series of shady acts to compound its frame-up...
...Bigots led demonstrations in the hopes of overthrowing the regime...
...Not a shred of evidence existed against Dreyfus...
...But what was lacking in evidence was more than made up for by innuendo and administrative chicanery...
...Thus instead of a simple judicial issue, the Dreyfus affair became a life-and-death struggle between the democratic process on the one hand and military dictatorship on the other...
...The Halasz book is racier, more emotionally stimulating, and far more difficult to put down once you have started it...
...A planned coup d'etat by the partisans of the Right failed, and Dreyfus was brought back for another trial...
...When it became evident that even this kangaroo court would not convict Dreyfus, the Army sent a secret memo to the judges which detailed its hazy suspicions, but was-—like our present FBI documents—never shown to the accused...
...Anti-Semitism became the shield for anti-democracy...
...Neither book will let you sleep, for in both an implicit tocsin rings long and loud...
...The famous writer, Emile Zola, in a ringing and powerful article, J'Accuse, and scores of similar zealots of democracy, helped turn the tide...
...In Captain Dreyfus Halasz points out that he was already convicted by the press, particularly the vitriolic anti-Semitic sheets, even before the proceedings began...
...The only evidence in the case, the bordereau, could not be tied to him because the prosecution's own handwriting "experts" were equivocal on this subject...
...This lie, eventually disproved in every detail, posed for the judges the honor of the army against the right of the individual...
...Such a nation was France on the eve of the Dreyfus affair in 1894...
...Dreyfus went to jail and torture in Devil's Island, but the conscience of a small minority committed to democracy would not let it rest...
...The vast majority, including even some on the Left, argued that the Army must be upheld at all costs even if it were wrong...
...That these two books appear now, in our own period of uncertainty and insecurity, is no whim of the publishing profession...
...That, he insisted, must remain a secret...
...Dreyfus was tried privately before a court-martial rather than in public...
...That it was based on forgery and falsehood made little difference, because it was never unveiled to the public...
...Both books are excellent manuscripts...
...Reviewed by Sidney Lens NATIONS, like men, sometimes go berserk...
...A short while later it was discovered that Esterhazy was the actual writer of the bordereau...
...Insecurity drives them to absurd and illogical acts which in retrospect seem incredible...
...Unfortunately one of his communciations to the attache-, detailing some of these documents, was intercepted by the French "statistical section"—a euphemistic term for the Army intelligence—and this list, or bordereau, started a chain of events that almost toppled the Republic...
...But by that time it was no longer a question of simple justice...
...But by now the wave had spent itself and the government granted a full pardon...
...An intelligence officer, Major Henry, testified that someone had told him Dreyfus was a spy...
...The man was no longer important, only the army and the state...
...A French major named Esterhazy, part owner of a brothel and inamorato of a prostitute, offered to sell military documents to the German military attache to pay some of his debts...
...The facts in the famous Dreyfus case are so simple they would hardly warrant a fourth page notice were it not for the soil of hysteria that surrounded them...
...Still smarting from the German defeat of 1871, enervated by a decade of ded-pression, hunger, unemployment, and suicide, it sought a scapegoat for its ills rather than a positive solution to its problems...
...Even the exposure of some of the forgeries and the suicide of the forger, Major Henry, did not stop the process...
...Governments toppled...
...Once again he was taken before a court-martial...
...A group of Army officials, fearful of parliamentary investigation, and tinged with anti-Semitism, hastily foisted its suspicions on a stiff Alsatian Jew, a minor officer with the general staff, named Alfred Dreyfus...
...The Chapman version is more erudite, deeper in social perspective, but I found its middle-of-the-road bias a bit annoying at times...
...A few thousand people, a haunted and insulted minority, insisted that the rights of an individual must be protected against the state and the army...
...In the mirror of the past all liberals will recognize the foibles of the present...
...The Dreyfus era, though more vicious than the era of McCarthyism in our own land sixty years later, nonetheless manifested the same general characteristics...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
