The Dreyfus Affair.

Résumé du document

Dreyfus is capable of treason, I conclude from his race', wrote Edouard Drumont, a notorious antisemit figure, in La Libre Parole. Such a statement is representative of the tone of a certain press, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Captain Dreyfus was prosecuted and convicted guilty of collusion with Germany, the greatest enemy of France at the time. From the beginning, doubts on his culpability were voiced. They gave way to a long and passionate confrontation between the dreyfusards, convinced of the innocence of Dreyfus and advocates of the Republican values and the antidreyfusards, persuaded that he was guilty and that the so-called raison d'Etat had to be preserved. Thereby, the Affair leads to question the very essence of the newly established Third Republic. In reality, looking at this episode conducts to look at the legacy of the Revolution, the emancipation of the Jews, and evaluate whether it bore its fruits. One could thus wonder whether the Dreyfus Affair is the expression of a French modern antisemitism, that would find its final expression in the Vichy regime, or if the fate of Alfred Dreyfus rather demonstrates the success of the integration of the Jews into the French fabric.

Extraits

[...] Edouard Drumont's work, La France juive, is a relevant illustration of this form of antisemitism since he denounces the Jews as the followers of a primitive religion and at the head of modern France. His work is also telling of the new form of antisemitism. Modern antisemitism claimed to be scientifically rooted. It developed as a misconception of the Darwanian theory. It differed from traditional antisemitism in the sense that it made the condemnation against the Jews irremediable. From the 1880s, France became a favorable cradle for antisemitism. A series of crisis had indeed led to a growing popularity of antisemit ideas. [...]

[...] Antisemits uniting against the jews and the republic At the end of the 19th century, a modern form of antisemitism progressively came to complement the traditional one. The Dreyfus Affair operated as a vehicle for the ideas of modern antisemits and provided them with the opportunity to gather. This unity was built on the hatred of the Jews and the Republican regime. It provided the Jews of France with the guarantee that the government was on their side. The antisemitism that “permeated the atmosphere of the Dreyfus Affair”[9] reflects a renewal of the usual antisemit corpus. [...]

[...] Dreyfus graduated from the École Polytechnique and was a captain in the French army. As Pierre Birnbaum explains[3], this situation was unique in Europe where the Jews were still excluded from public service positions. In France, not only were they tolerated but somehow, they were even favored by the policies implemented by the new regime. Indeed, as the State was heading towards laïcité, a significant amount of the Catholic elites chose to step back, leaving their positions open for newcomers. [...]

[...] The injunction of Count de Clermont-Tonnerre, at the time of the debate, encapsulates this idea: the Jews as a Nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything.”. At the end of the 19th century, Dreyfus's condition can be considered a model of a successful emancipation. Complying with the wishes of the Revolutionaries, the Jewish captain is a French patriot. Dreyfus was born in Alsace, in 1859. When France lost this district to Germany, in 1871, his family decided to leave its hometown to remain French. By moving to Paris, the Dreyfus family demonstrated its commitment to the French nation. [...]

[...] In the course of the affair, the Jews and the Jewish institutions adopted a low profile. As Léon Blum observes : Jews had accepted Dreyfus's condemnation as definitive and fair. They did not talk of this affair among themselves.”. In the same perspective, Hannah Arendt notes that :“Dreyfus found very few defenders among the French Jews.”. According to her, French Jews refused to enter the fray because they feared the Affair could be instrumentalized against the whole community. The Jews were not however indifferent to the fate of Dreyfus. [...]