Reyfus Affair and Its Implications for the Prevalence of Anti-Semitism in France Research Paper

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This essay examines the Dreyfus affair and its implications for the prevalence of Anti-Semitism in France primarily through the works of Michael Burns’s seminal work France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History.

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The essay first examines the social and economic conditions that prevailed in France in the 1870s to explain that economic downturn, competing ideologies of proletarian revolution, monarchism, anarchism, nationalism all produced a volatile mix where old prejudices against the Jews surfaced and was quickly taken up by the media that fed the belief that Jews were untrustworthy and corrupt.

This perception spread to the French Army which had its share of anti-Semites. Thus when, the French intelligence agency suspected some officer in the General Staff of passing information to their enemies, the Germans, Dreyfus, a Jewish officer was made the convenient scapegoat and was court-martialled and imprisoned. A subsequent investigation by a new French intelligence chief revealed that Dreyfus was innocent but was silenced by the Army. Leaks of this information in the media released a tidal wave of criticism amongst the French polity that ultimately led to his exoneration.

The essay then analyses how the Dreyfus affair split the French public into two opposing camps. It also analyses that the effects of this persecution made the Jews think anew for their homeland and set the stage for new Zionism that finally fructified in the formation of the state of Israel. The effects of the Dreyfus affairs forced the government to initiate wide-ranging reforms of recognizing Jewish religion, official recognition, and the separation of the Church and the state.

Anti-Semitism in France: The Dreyfus Affair in Perspective

France, since ancient times, has always held itself to be the center of European culture, arts, and philosophical thought. French refinement extended to every field of human endeavor which included developing egalitarian principles and socialist values that served to inspire nations and generations of people across the world. That France holds human values above all was a known clarion call to humanists the world over. However, this image took a severe beating when France involved itself in the persecution and the prosecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a loyal French army officer of Jewish origin, an event that unraveled the larger unknown and untold story of anti-Semitism that existed in France at that time and indeed finds certain echoes in the modern French Republic in its dealings with its minorities. This essay examines the Dreyfus affair and its implications for the prevalence of Anti-Semitism in France primarily through the works of Michael Burns’s seminal work France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History.

The proclamation of the Third Republic in 1870 (Burns, 1999, p. 1) was preceded by economic prosperity that continued through the period of the republic. However, social and political forces in that year produced a lethal mix of proletarian revolution and protests against German occupation in Paris that led to a civil war in which over twenty thousand revolting Parisians collectively known as the ‘Commune’ were put to death. The Commune failed to install an egalitarian society but its ideology continued to burn deeply in scores of French citizens. In 1875, a republican constitution was born that sounded the death knell for the monarchy. A change in the political system was bound to produce turmoil, that followed and uneven economic development in the decade after 1870 increased the number of socialists (Burns, p. 2) in France. Competing ideologies soon leaped into the fray to gain center stage of French politics and that included not just the socialists but also nationalists, the militarists, and the anarchists.

So serious was the disruption by the anarchists that the government outlawed anarchism (Burns, p. 4) and suppressive measures were put into place to maintain law and order. While these measures restored some sense of stability, they did not stem the tide of virulent ideology and political division within France. In the early 1890s, Europe was faced with an economic depression, and some prominent Jewish entrepreneurs who had tried to replicate the success of the Suez Canal project had failed to do so in Panama and had embezzled monies raised through loans from the citizenry of France. The economic condition, the competing ideologies, and political opportunism had thus set the stage for naming a convenient scapegoat, in this case, it was the Jews, who despite earlier emancipation by the French polity now found themselves at the center of controversy and calumny that quickly found many adherents and spread throughout the French nation. The Jews soon found themselves being accused of being a ‘nation within a nation’ who “kept their distinctive traits” and who “have the money that corrupts” (Burns, p. 7). Such propaganda found willing listeners and followers and thus when the Dreyfus Affair surfaced, it quickly degenerated into one long and painful episode of persecution that involved the highest offices of the enlightened French Republic.

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Jews who joined the French Army were invariably graduates of the prestigious Saint-Cyr and the Ecole Polytechnique as had Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Burns, p. 9). The anti-Semites through virulent media attacks served to sow dissensions and suspicions in the minds of the army leadership regarding the loyalty and patriotism of the ‘kikes’ in the French Army. Such media attacks led to pistol and sword duels between Jewish officers and the anti-Semites that were further played up by the media as proof of Jewish treachery. Thus by the time Alfred Dreyfus joined the French General Staff, the French Army had its share of anti-Semites, who were just waiting for an opportunity to strike. In 1892, Dreyfus’s high performance to gain entry into the French General staff was deliberately downgraded by General Pierre De Bonnefond because he did not “want a Jew on the General Staff (Burns, p. 18)”. This was protested by Dreyfus and upheld by the authorities who admitted him to the General Staff. Dreyfus’ protest was subsequently held against him during his later indictment.

In 1894, France was at war with Germany and the French counter-intelligence agency came to suspect that information was being leaked by someone in the French General Staff to the Germans. Dreyfus, the ‘kike’, the Jew, who had dared to protest his unjust downgrading of performance was the easiest scapegoat available and was arrested and quickly charged with treason on 15 October 1894 (Burns, p. 27). A secret court-martial followed, which on 5 January 1895, summarily convicted Dreyfus who was discharged with disgrace from the French Army and sentenced to life imprisonment on the Devil’s Island, a French holding in the French Guiana. In August 1896, the new French Intelligence chief, Lt Colonel Picquart reported to his superiors that the actual culprit had not been Dreyfus but a Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Picquart paid for his honesty by being transferred to the desert lands of Tunisia. When the reports of Dreyfus’s unjust imprisonment were leaked to the media it raised a storm of criticism and debate amongst the French public. A concerted campaign thence emerged to free Dreyfus that included the famed Emile Zola. It took more than three years of constant campaigning and appealing to the vaunted French values of egalitarianism and fair play that Dreyfus was finally pardoned by President Émile Loubet on 19 September 1899. In 1908, anti-Semites tried to assassinate Dreyfus who was slightly injured. On 12 July 1906, Dreyfus was finally exonerated by a military commission and reinstated into the Army in the rank of a Major.

The Dreyfus affair challenged the fundamentals of French society. It brought forth deep chasms that had remained under surface for a long period. “[The Dreyfus Affair], like the blade of a plow, tore French society apart; it separated families and divided the country into two enemy camps that confronted each other with extraordinary violence (Burns, p. 191)”. The age-old European stereotypes of Jews being bloodsuckers, clannish, the veritable ‘shylocks who would demand their pound of flesh’ all were accepted by a large section of the French populace without any objective reflection. The violence with which the anti-Semites affirmed their beliefs in Dreyfus’s purported treachery points to a countercurrent of resentment that had been building up in France for some time. It must be recalled that France, being one of the most progressive nations intellectually, had initiated a program of Jewish emancipation in 1791. By 1796, France had granted Jews equal rights with the gentiles. However, the Dreyfus affair made many Jew change their minds regarding their acceptability to the larger public in Europe. This gave rise to a new wave of Zionism that called for a separate state exclusively for the children of Israel.

One such proponent for a separate Jewish homeland was Theodor Herzl who formed the first Jewish Congress in Switzerland that later grew into the World Zionist organization. The Dreyfus affair added new impetus to Zionism and the movement grew all over Europe. This development forced many leaders to change and modify their behavior. In France, Napoleon had previously helped emancipate Jews by liberating them from their ghettos. In 1807, Napoleon had made Judaism a state religion alongside Roman Catholicism, Lutheran, and Calvinist Protestantism. The institutional march to end Jewish persecution in France continued through the 19th century and finally culminated in 1905 when the French government formally separated church and state through the law on the Separation of the Church and the State, bringing an end to Catholic influence in French politics. To support the law, Politicians used examples, such as Jewish emancipation, from the Revolution (Burns, p. 171) and thus ended the institutional persecution of the Jewish community in France.

In conclusion, it can be reiterated that despite the enlightened and active intelligentsia that characterized France through much of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, age-old prejudices against the Jews had persisted. The French Revolution brought forth a maelstrom of ideologies, some favoring emancipation, others expounding exclusivism and hate. All these different and divergent strains coalesced into competing lobbies for Jewish emancipation or exclusion. The Dreyfus affair served to raise the issue to an international stature that gave rise to new Zionism and indeed set the stage for Jewish emancipation across Europe and their subsequent establishment of a Jewish State.

Works Cited

Burns, M. (1999). France and the Dreyfus Affair: a Documentary History. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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