In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attaché in Paris based on ...perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil's Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards-committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another-against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army's top brass in order to secure Dreyfus's conviction.
Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? InWhy the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honor.
This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie. Through ...close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual, and Jewish man is revealed than was previously suspected. He and Lucie, through their family connections and mutual loyalty, were interested in and supported the artistic, scientific, philosophical and historical movements that formed their Parisian milieu. But as an Alsatian Jew, Alfred was also critical of many aspects of technological and ideological developments, making his mentality one of skepticism as well as idealism.
La madrugada del lunes 14 de octubre de 1894, un joven oficial judío, el capitán Alfred Dreyfus, es detenido y acusado de haber entregado información a Alemania. Unas semanas más tarde es condenado a ...deportación perpetua a la isla del Diablo por un consejo de guerra. Poco a poco, se comprueba que el juicio ha sido absolutamente parcial y que el capitán Dreyfus ha sido condenado a la ligera. Los escándalos se suceden, desde la inculpación de Émile Zola por su famoso «Yo acuso» hasta el suicidio del coronel Henry, desde la detención del comandante Picquart hasta el segundo juicio a Dreyfus. ¿Es un caso de espionaje o una razón de Estado? ¿Es un síntoma del antisemitismo de la sociedad francesa de finales del siglo xix? El caso Dreyfus constituye uno de los asuntos político-jurídicos más importantes que Francia ha conocido. Denis Bon tiene una sólida formación universitaria. Licenciado en Literatura por la Universidad de París III, ha orientado sus trabajos a los campos de la literatura clásica y la semántica. Es autor de numerosas obras y un apasionado de los grandes juicios que han marcado la historia.
The historiography of the Dreyfus Affair has often neglected the crucial role played by Bernard Lazare as the first defender of the wrongly accused French army captain Alfred Dreyfus. Lazare authored ...three brochures, including the very first published work arguing Dreyfus’s defense, and pursued numerous lines of inquiry and advocacy to keep the Dreyfus case alive in the public sphere. In stark contrast to other Dreyfusards who preferred to consider the case as essentially an “error” of the judicial system, Lazare insisted that there was a potent antisemitism operating beneath the surface of the political stage. It was Lazare who made the “Affair” known to the world as an antisemitic plot. He confronted the leading antisemitic figures of his time, including Édouard Drumont, and solicited the support of charismatic celebrities such as Émile Zola. Lazare also crafted the language of “J’accuse” which moved a nation and became a celebrated page of history, though he was never credited for it. Instead, Lazare became a target for the resentments of both his Christian and Jewish contemporaries and died an untimely death as a pariah. This article aims to restore Lazare’s place at the center of the Dreyfus Affair narrative.
The scandalous story of the Dreyfus Affair proved riveting to American readers in the 1890s, who followed the twists and turns of the legal case and the sufferings of Alfred Dreyfus, in newspapers ...and magazines across the country. In marked contrast to the French, American sentiment ran overwhelmingly in support of Dreyfus, who was seen as the tragic hero of a thrilling and scandalous political drama. The unambiguous sympathy of Americans toward this unlikely leading man (bespectacled, bland, unemotional) stands in sharp contrast to French antisemitic attitudes. This sympathy also serves as a puzzling exception to homegrown antisemitism that was inflamed at the time by cross-Atlantic Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. This article will examine the evidence, focusing on the visual imagery that accompanied newspaper and magazine articles, and derive insights into both the difference between French and American biases, as well as the perplexing contradictions within the American viewpoint on Jews.
From the very moment Alfred Dreyfus was placed under arrest for treason and espionage, his entire world was turned upside down, and for the next five years he lived in what he called a ...phantasmagoria. To keep himself sane, Dreyfus wrote letters to and received letters from his wife and exercised his intellect through reading the few books and magazines his censors allowed him. In this volume, Norman Simms explores how Dreyfus kept himself from exploding into madness by reading his essays carefully, placing them in the context of his century.
The book traces the course of what Oscar Wilde called his ‘ancient friendship’ with Carlos Blacker, ‘always the truest of friends and most sympathetic of companions’, from its beginning in the early ...1880s to their tragic breakup in 1898. The friendship through the 1880s, ‘days of laughter and delight’ according to Wilde, was a halcyon time for both. Wilde’s long-time friend and first biographer, Robert Sherard, thought that ‘the days when I first met him in 1883 were the happiest days he lived’, an opinion shared by a second biographer and friend, Vincent O’Sullivan. The 1890s, however, proved a less carefree time for both Wilde and Blacker. The first year of the decade witnessed the onset of what Blacker described as his ‘tempestuous affairs’, which continued to haunt him to the time of his marriage and the start of a ‘New Life’ in the middle of the decade, shortly before Wilde was brought to ruin by his own disastrous troubles. After a three-year separation, the two were reunited in Paris in March 1898, with the Dreyfus affair then at fever-pitch and the city, in Blacker’s words, ‘in a ferment’. During his extended residence abroad while his ‘tempestuous affairs’ played out, Blacker had formed a close friendship with the Italian military attaché in Paris, who, complicit with his German counterpart and fully informed about Dreyfus, confided ‘the whole & entire truth’ in sworn secrecy to Blacker who, in his emotionally charged reunion with Wilde, was impulsively moved to share the information with him. The effect of their chance involvement on the course of events in the affair proved fatal to their ‘ancient friendship’. On 25 June 1898, Blacker recorded prophetically in his diary, ‘After lunch just before dinner letter from Oscar which put an end to our friendship forever.’
