Abstract
Since the beginnings of the Dreyfus Affair, its protagonist Alfred Dreyfus has been viewed both by other actors of the Affair and by historians either as a minor detail or even as a potential anti-Dreyfusard. Indeed, one well-known book by Marcel Thomas is even entitled L’Affaire sans Dreyfus (1961). Only in recent years have scholars begun to examine Alfred Dreyfus himself. The aim of Vincent Duclert’s monumental biography is to restore Alfred Dreyfus to his true place in the Affair.1 Following the lead of Dreyfus’s grandson Jean-Louis Lévy, Duclert argues that without Dreyfus’s heroic determination to survive and fight the charges against him, there would have been no Affair, but merely a footnote in history.2
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Notes
Vincent Duclert, Alfred Dreyfus: L’honneur d’un patriote (Paris: Fayard, 2006).
See also Duclert, Dreyfus, voyage au cœur du Panthéon ( Paris: Gallaade Editions, 2007 ).
Jean-Louis Lévy, ‘Alfred Dreyfus, anti-héros, et témoin capital,’ in Alfred Dreyfus, Cinq années de ma vie ( Paris: Maspéro, 1982 ), pp. 239–60.
On rival notions of heroism, see Venita Datta, ‘The Sword or the Pen? Competing Visions of the Hero at the Fin de Siècle’ in Birth of a National Icon: the Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France ( Albany: SUNY Press, 1999 ), pp. 135–82.
On fin-de-siècle images of Jews as cowards, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of Jews (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);
Pierre Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France: a Political History from Léon Blum to the Present, trans. Miriam Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992 )
and Birnbaum, The Jews of the Republic: a Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy, trans. Jane Marie Todd ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 ).
See Philippe Oriol’s introduction, ‘L’Affaire de Dreyfus,’ to the re-edition of Alfred Dreyfus’s Carnets (1899–1907) ( Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1998 ), pp. 7–21.
Vincent Duclert ‘Dreyfus, de l’oubli à l’histoire,’ Cahiers de l’Affaire Dreyfus, 1 (2004): 71.
On history and memory, see Pierre Nora’s introduction‘Entre mémoire et Histoire’ to Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 1997), pp. 23– 43;
Jacques Revel, ‘Histoire vs. Mémoire en France aujourd’ hui,’ French Politics, Culture and Society, 18(1) (Spring 2000): 1–12
and Susan Suleiman, ‘Narrative Desire: the “Aubrac Affair” and the National Memory of the Resistance’ in Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 36–61. The journal Esprit in February 2006 published a special issue on ‘guerres de mémoire à la française’ in which the debates about colonialism and the ‘lois mémorielles’ are discussed.
Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire. The books have been translated into English as Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98).
Paul Gerbod, ‘L’éthique héroïque en France (1870–1914),’ La Revue historique, 268 (1982): 424.
See Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 ), p. 225.
Christian Amalvi, Les héros de l’histoire de France (Paris: Editions Phot’oeil, 1979);
and Jean-François Chanet, ‘La Fabrique des héros: Pédagogie républicaine et culte des grands hommes de Sedan à Vichy,’ Vingtième Siècle, 65 (January–March 2000): 13–34.
On imperial heroes, see Edward Berenson, ‘Unifying the French Nation: Savornan de Brazza and the Third Republic,’ in Barbara Kelly (ed.), Music, Culture and National Identity in France 1870–1939 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008), pp. 17–39. Professor Berenson elaborates further on imperial heroes in The Congo Story: Exploration and Empire in England and France (forthcoming).
Gyp, Napoléonette (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1913). This chapter is part of a book project entitled Legends and Heroes of Fin-de-Siècle France: Gender, Politics, and National Identity. I have also explored these issues in ‘Superwomen or Slaves? Women Writers, Male Critics and the Reception of Nietzsche in Belle Epoque France,’ Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques (Fall 2007): 421–48 and ‘“L’ Appel au Soldat”: Visions of the Napoleonic Legend in Popular Culture of the Belle Epoque,’ French Historical Studies (Winter 2005): 1–30.
See Venita Datta, ‘Sur les boulevards: les représentations de Jeanne d’ Arc dans le théâtre populaire,’ CLIO: Histoire, Femmes et Société, 24 (2006): 127–49.
Historians Mary-Louise Roberts and Lenard Berlanstein have argued that Bernhardt chose to play Joan in order to adopt a more respectable stance and to transform herself into a symbol of the nation: Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: a Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 235;
Roberts, Disruptive Acts: the New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 ), pp. 217–18.
Françoise Benassis, ‘Une Erreur de Nietzsche,’ La Fronde, 6 April 1903: 1. On Nietzsche, see Christopher E. Forth, Zarathustra in Paris: the Nietzsche Vogue in France,1891–1918 (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001 ). On women writers and Nietzsche, see Datta, ‘Superwomen or Slaves?’
On masculinity and male honor codes, see Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor and Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 186–98.
On the crisis of masculinity, see Annelise Maugue, L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle,1871–1914 ( Paris: Editions Rivages, 1987 ).
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1998;
James Lehning, The Melodramatic Thread: Spectacle and Political Culture in Modern France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
See also Jean-Yves Mollier, ‘La littérature et presse du trottoir à la Belle Epoque’ in La lecture et ses publics à l’époque contemporaine: Essais d’histoire culturelle (Paris: PUF, 2001), who speaks of the estheticization of politics at this time and observes that the Right during the Dreyfus Affair (I would add the Left too) was obliged to treat current events as a melodrama, representing traitors as villains in boulevard plays: p. 153.
Suzanne Kaufman too uses this trope to describe the women who went to Lourdes to be cured in Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 96–7.
One of the earliest works to use this approach is that of Judith Walkowitz, borrowing from the work of literary scholar Peter Brooks. (See his The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976 ). )
See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ).
See Christopher E. Forth’s chapter ‘Masculine Performances: Alfred Dreyfus and the Paradox of the Jewish Soldier’ in The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004 ), pp. 21–59.
On the army, see Jérôme Hélie, ‘L’Arche sainte fracturée,’ in La France de l’affaire Dreyfus, ed. Pierre Birnbaum (Paris: Gallimard, 1994 ), pp. 226–50.
Joseph Reinach, Histoire de l’Affaire Dreyfus 2 vols (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 2006), Vol. 1, pp. 276–7.
This idea of the culture of spectacle is very much in evidence. Reinach notes that the women on both sides were more passionate, thus commenting indirectly on the feminine nature of the culture of spectacle. Reinach, Histoire de l’Affaire Dreyfus, Vol. 2, p. 501. Indeed, Anne-Marie Thiesse describes the newspaper as a sexually divided space such that faits-divers, trials, and dramatic public representations of private events occupied the intermediate zone separating the masculine space of politics from the feminine space of the serialized novels, which was located, in her words, on the ‘rez de chaussée’ (below the fold) of the newspaper: Anne-Marie Thiesse, Le Roman du quotidien: Lecteurs et lectures populaires à la Belle Epoque ( Paris: Le Chemin Vert, 1984 ), p. 20.
Victor Basch, ‘Discours de Victor Basch sur l’affaire Dreyfus prononcé au Congrès de la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme à Rennes, 29 mai 1909,’ reproduced in Françoise Basch, Victor Basch, De l’affaire Dreyfus au crime de la Milice ( Paris: Plon, 1994 ), pp. 356–7.
A reading of the trial transcripts seems to indicate that Dreyfus defended himself admirably and forcefully, as Vincent Duclert notes. Nevertheless, fin-de-siècle notions of manhood shaped representations of Alfred Dreyfus. Furthermore, present-day historians cannot capture the impression that Dreyfus’s ‘performance’ may have had on those in attendance in the courtroom. While anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barrès, who was in attendance at Rennes, admitted to feeling some pity for Dreyfus, he found Dreyfus to be ‘monotonous,’ like a ‘phonograph,’ concluding that Dreyfus’s tone detracted from the nobility of the words he was uttering. Barrès was admittedly an opponent of Dreyfus, but his characterizations were shared by some Dreyfusards. See Barrès, Scènes et Doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Editions du Trident, 1987), p. 103. See also p. 105, where he speaks of Dreyfus’s ‘dry’ voice. At a time when Sarah Bernhardt used her ‘golden voice’ to convince audiences she really was the young Joan of Arc (rather than a middle-aged woman), the role of voice in a public ‘performance’ was important.
Sarah Bernhardt, Ma double vie ( Paris: Editons Phébus, 2000 ), pp. 99–100.
Richard Vinen notes that for many French men and women during World War II, the head of the Vichy regime, Marshal Pétain, was viewed as a national hero ‘above politics.’ Vinen quotes Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton, as stating that ‘the national leader incarnates the tradition of the nation. In extreme necessity, he can be a woman or a young girl (Joan of Arc for us), Pétain is above all a national leader.’ In this manner, contemporaries of the Second World War could separate loyalty to Pétain from disapproval of the actions of the Vichy regime: The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 57. In some respects, this desire for a national hero above politics was presaged by the search for unifying heroes under the Third Republic. Such a concept of a national leader also allows for the possibility of a female hero.
Reinach quotes Clemenceau as declaring before Rennes that a guilty verdict would be ‘more beautiful:’ Histoire de l’Affaire Dreyfus Vol. 2, p. 652. To which Reinach replies that real individuals are not marionettes in the theater nor are they chess pawns to be pushed around. Note that Zola’s article about the guilty verdict at Rennes was called ‘Le Cinquième Acte.’ Published originally in L’Aurore, 12 September 1899, it is reproduced in Emile Zola, The Dreyfus Affair: ‘J’Accuse’ and Other Writings, ed. Alain Pagès, trans. E. Levieux (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 136–43.
This letter to Madame Dreyfus, published in L’Aurore on 22 September 1899, is also reproduced in the Pagès volume, p. 146. Zola goes on to characterize Dreyfus as a martyr. It is interesting to note that Dreyfus himself, writing to Lucie on the eve of his degradation in 1894 had distinguished between physical courage and heroic martyrdom: ‘Alas, I have the courageous soul of a soldier, I wonder though if I have the heroic soul of a martyr!’ Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, Ecris-moi souvent, écris-moi longuement, ed. Vincent Duclert (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2005), pp. 122– 3. Ruth Harris is currently working on a project on Lucie’s heroism. See her article ‘Letters to Lucie: Spirituality, Friendship and Politics during the Dreyfus Affair,’ French Historical Studies, 28 (Fall 2005): 601–27.
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Datta, V. (2010). From Devil’s Island to the Pantheon? Alfred Dreyfus, the Anti-Hero. In: Forth, C.E., Accampo, E. (eds) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_11
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