L'affaire Dreyfus by Benoît Marpeau (review)

This meticulously researched and insightful book takes a thematic approach and, like Ruth Harris's magisterial Dreyfus: Politics, Emotions and the Scandal of the Century (2010), investigates not so much the succession of events that make up the Affair as the distinctive bodies that controlled the Affair and its legacy. Part I recounts the plot to convict Dreyfus and the long road leading to his liberation in 1899 and overdue rehabilitation in 1906. Part II investigates how the Affair reflected the attitudes of French society at the turn of the last century. Part III deals with the legacy of the Affair. Marpeau has little to add to the conventional narrative but excels in relating events to the conditions that made them possible. Part II is more original in terms of content and approach. Its first chapter offers insights into the workings of the army, justice system, and police. The following chapter looks at religion and both confirms and overturns many stereotypes about the Catholic Church. To be sure, most mainstream Catholics were anti-Dreyfusards, as were religious orders such as the Assumptionists and Catholic newspapers like La Croix. But high-ranking church officials were surprisingly discreet, anxious to avoid conflict with the Republic, in accordance with the new Concordat, and keen to not provoke anti-Dreyfusard ire that might fuel anti-clericalism. Conventional wisdom holds that French public intellectuals came into their own during the Affair. Marpeau unpacks this stereotype to show that intellectuals already existed and that engagement varied strongly, depending on profession. Marpeau looks at universities, newspapers, publishers, artists, and salons. Not surprisingly, he concludes that all were split or, in many cases, chose not to take sides. In Part III Marpeau studies the outcomes of the Affair and argues that it had far less impact than generally claimed. For starters, the coalition government known as the Bloc des gauches that emerged in 1899 was disinclined to mention the Affair. On the contrary, it went out of its way to praise the army, no doubt to soothe tensions. Moreover, anti-clericalism existed before the Affair but naturally was reinforced during the Affair and helped unite the government around the separation of church and state and the closing of all non-authorized religious schools. World War I put an end to the Affair, and the union sacrée unified the nation. After the war, the ideological divide prevailed but the new force to be reckoned with was Bolshevism. The Great Depression and the struggle against Fascism later brought together intellectuals across a broad spectrum. In post-World War II France, the only valid reference to the Affair would come during the Algerian war of independence when opponents, such as the authors of the Manifeste des 121, evoked the universalist spirit of Dreyfus to protest torture, the abrogation of civil rights, and reason of state. In conclusion, the irreconcilable division of France, as illustrated by Caran d'Ache's famous cartoon "Ne parlons pas de l'Affaire," has been exaggerated. The Affair was far more complex, as Marpeau ably demonstrates.