At the end of 1899 there was only one subject in the press, the Dreyfus Affair, and it was alone, or almost, that Dreyfus had to fight for his second sentence to be quashed and his innocence at last recognised. This « two-year war » ended in the triumph of the Republic over its opponents, nationalists and anti-Semites, at the price of appeasement: Dreyfus’s second trial and conviction at Rennes, his pardon and rehabilitation. Scheurer-Kestner’s conviction that Dreyfus’s was innocent, the denunciation of the true culprit, Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (1847-1923), by Alfred Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu Dreyfus (1857-1930), the first articles by Zola, including his famous open letter to President of the Republic Félix Faure, « J’accuse ! » published by Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) on 13 January 1898 in the daily newspaper L’Aurore, launched a movement that profoundly divided the French nation, split between two opposing and irreconcilable conceptions of France. Convinced of his innocence and shocked by a procedure and trial in which the law had been blatantly disregarded, Captain Dreyfus's few supporters were joined daily by new converts to his cause: several young writers, the senators Arthur Ranc (1831-1908) and Ludovic Trarieux (1840-1904), the member of parliament Joseph Reinach (1856-1921), the new head of counter-espionage, Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart (1854-1914), who discovered the name of the real traitor, the vice-president of the Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner (1833-1899), the writer Émile Zola (1840-1902) to name but a few. In 1896, following a failed attempt to reopen the case by Dreyfus’s family and a young journalist, Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), the affair made history at the end of the following year. Saving the honour of the army and the foundering career of the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier (1833-1921), and deep-rooted anti-Semitism, amplified by a virulent press relentlessly exploiting the affair, made Dreyfus the perfect culprit. Dreyfus was tried behind closed doors and sentenced instead of the true culprit, whom the high command had made no attempt to identify. Stripped of his rank, he was deported to Devil's Island, the penal colony in French Guiana. Cast of characters, chronology, index, notes.Late in 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a young army officer at the Ministry of War, was arrested and sentenced for life for high treason for having allegedly communicated military secrets to the Germans. He asks whether each succeeding generation will have its own Zolas, “ready to defend human rights…against abuse wrapped in claims of expediency and reasons of state.” Begley’s riveting details and unremitting passion make this book a worthy successor to J’accuse. They wanted Jews out of the way.”īegley, writing in 2008, was struck by the parallels between the standard operating procedures for the Guantánamo prison camp and the instructions for the administration of Devil’s Island, where Dreyfus suffered solitary confinement under horrible conditions for some four years. …Emancipated Jews had fallen in love with the good news that they could be like other people, ‘other people’ did not want Jews to be like them. The French Jews, he writes, nonetheless had a “tendency to minimize the importance of anti-Semitism, remain passive, and avoid speaking out against outrageous behavior. Then he goes on to draw a straight line from the anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church and the French military in the 1890’s down to the present. In the spare language of his novels, Begley builds a devastating case against the conspirators who knowingly perverted the justice system as they made Dreyfus a scapegoat. Louis Begley insists that the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair, beyond the particulars of the historical episode, extend to abuses of power and anti-Jewish behavior at large today. History remembers Captain Alfred Dreyfus as a victim of French anti-Semitism who was convicted of espionage he did not commit, and exonerated thanks to the passionate support of the novelist Emile Zola.
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