‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus,’ came the cry from the dock. The speaker was the veteran right-wing ideologue, Charles Maurras, found guilty of treason in 1945 for his support of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It wasn’t of course that, and yet there is a sense in which Maurras spoke the truth.
The Dreyfus case had divided France half a century before Maurras was put on trial in Lyon. The division between what Piers Paul Read, in this masterly and eminently balanced account of the Affair, calls ‘the France of St Louis and the France of Voltaire’ had never been closed. The end of the Third Republic and its replacement by Vichy’s ‘Etat Français’ in 1940 represented the victory of the anti-Dreyfusards. The anti-clerical Republic with its roots in the great Revolution of 1789 gave way to a regime that was Catholic, monarchical, militarist and nationalist, hostile to Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, socialists, communists and anti-clericals..
The Affair itself, complicated and often confusing in its course, was simple in essence. A French agent, working as a cleaner in the German embassy in Paris, retrieved a paper — the famous ‘bordereau’ — from a wastepaper basket and handed it to her controller. Clearly a French officer was passing information. Suspicion fell almost at once on Captain Dreyfus. There was no good evidence — virtually no evidence at all — against him. But he was an outsider: a rich Alsatian Jew, who still had family in Alsace, annexed by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
Anti-Semitic feeling was strong in late-19th-century France — Jews and French Protestants controlled most of the banks. Yet, as Read points out, there were other Jewish officers in the Army, and by no means all Dreyfus’s accusers were anti-Semitic.
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