The Crossroads of Truth: Ferdinand de Saussure and the Dreyfus Affair
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPIl ne nous reste plus, aujourd'hui, que le souvenir d'avoir vécu un drame historique à nul autre comparable; un drame à milliers de personnages, joué sur la scène du monde, et d'un intérêt si pathétique et si universel, que toute la nation, puis autour d'elle toute la civilisation, est venue y prendre part.
Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Barois
Les Dreyfus d'aujourd'hui [. . .] resteront à l'île du Diable. Ceci n'est pas un pronostic mais un constat.
Régis Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France
1. The Birth of the "Intellectual"
In the spring of 1898, turbulent days in those crowded years when France was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair, the newspaper Le Siècle began publishing a series of pieces from a semi-fictitious journal. Entries dating from November 1, 1894, consisted of reflections upon the incredible course of events that had precipitated a national crisis. The work, which began to appear from May 19, was entitled Les Étapes d'un intellectuel.1 The title gave prominence to a term that had only [End Page 961] become current at the beginning of the year 1898, "l'intellectuel."2 The word was very quickly caught up in the intense crossfire between two sides of a deeply divided nation. Almost a hundred years after this significant emergence, the term was to be claimed by the twentieth century as its own in the self-conferred title "the century of the intellectual" (Jennings and Kemp-Welch ch. 1).
In the hard-fought polemics of the day, the new substantive was invoked by one side as a derisory label that contained a note of warning to those who had dared to intervene in public affairs: they were uninvited intruders, specialists trespassing beyond the narrowly circumscribed limits of their specialties. The safety and order of the nation, it was argued, depended upon maintaining carefully guarded realms of hierarchy and authority. The writer Maurice Barrès, who had been attracted by the concept in his early work, was to describe the intellectual as "un ennemi de la société" (46): "Ici comme partout notre sagesse s'accorde avec le préjugé populaire qui dit aux hommes de bibliothèques et de laboratoires: 'À chacun son métier et les moutons seront bien gardés'" (38). Barrès advised the intellectuals, "laissez les hommes et étudiez les mathématiques" (40).3
The author of the pieces published in Le Siècle, Albert Réville, was a teacher at the Collège de France. Like a number of his university colleagues, he brandished the term "intellectual" with self-conscious pride.4 The Affair was seen as a fundamental confrontation between [End Page 962] authority and the spirit of free enquiry, "le libre examen," what Kant had termed the "test of free and open examination" (9). Réville's critical examination of the issues raised by the Dreyfus Affair aimed to be an exercise in careful reflection and calm reasoning in the midst of "cette sainte hystérie" where passion alone held sway (Rolland 67). The journal mapped the long process whereby an intellectual comes to reverse his former belief, shared with the general public, that Dreyfus was guilty. Through doubt, critical analysis and reasoning, from November 1, 1894, to January 10, 1898, the writer of the journal had gradually reached the conviction that the prisoner on Devil's Island was innocent. These were the "steps" or "stages" through which the writer wished to walk his audience and thereby contribute to the movement for reopening the case.5
Réville's work was a notable contribution to the Dreyfusard cause. It was written in the wake of the Zola trial and drew its inspiration from one of the most compelling moments in those tumultuous proceedings. Proust has recorded how thrilling it was to hear the testimony of the counter-experts, savants...
