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Professor John Merriman: I want today to talk about
two very well known crises in the Third Republic.
One is the Boulanger Affair and the second is the more well
known, the Dreyfus Affair. And I guess what makes the
Dreyfus Affair even more poignant is that Alfred
Dreyfus's granddaughter died at Auschwitz, in 1944,
I think. So, and the context for this is
to--most of the time I'm going to talk about the Boulanger
Affair, and in a way that sets up the
Dreyfus Affair, because the Dreyfus Affair is
more well known. But I agree with the
interpretation that views the Boulanger Affair as the
emergence of the far Right in France,
events that parallel, for example,
the rise of the far Right in Austria, and in other places as
well, and particularly the sort of
propaganda campaign, the anti-Semitism,
and the sort of street thug tactics are rather similar to
movements that we would become all too familiar with,
not personally of course, but in the 1920s and 1930s.
So, that's what I want to talk about today.
And the background of this is, of course, the rise of
anti-Semitism. World War I unleashed the
demons of the twentieth century to a great extent,
there's no question about that. For Adolf Hitler it transformed
his anti-socialism and subsequent anti-communism into a
frenzy, but it added the dimension that
was the most pernicious aspect of his horrible existence,
which was anti-Semitism. But anti-Semitism was already
out there. And Karl Lueger,
who was the mayor of Vienna, said, "I decide who's a Jew,"
and the old liberal Vienna sort of disappeared in this sort of
frenzy of anti-Semitism. Well, anti-Semitism
was--characterized, unfortunately,
many centuries in Europe, and certainly the Third
Republic did not invent anti-Semitism in France,
either. There were riots against Jews
after 1848. One of the members of the
Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution,
who was from Alsace, where there were lots of Jews,
was extraordinarily anti-Semitic,
and all of this is sadly known. But certainly the political
dimensions of anti-Semitism in the '80s and '90s help explain
the intensity of these two big affairs.
And for the Dreyfus Affair, it was so important and so
wrenching that people simply referred to it as
l'affaire, the affair, because it was
so--it preoccupied dinner-table discussions and brawls,
political newspapers and everything else for a very long
time. Now, in addition to the sort of
growth of anti-Semitism, continued growth,
in France and other places, the other part of the context
that needs to be briefly explained has two dimensions.
First, there was the question of revenge, of vengeance,
of the recapture of Alsace and the parts of Lorraine that had
been so rudely snatched away. It's possible to exaggerate,
of course, the impact, as one of my former students,
Rachel Chrastil has argued, of revengisme,
revenge thinking, on French political life in the
1870s and 1880s. But by the end of the 1880s it
still is an important part in political thinking,
and Boulanger's campaign reflected that fact.
And the second is that--the second sort of aspect of
background is the perceived weakness of the republican
government in that in order to protect France against
Caesarism; which, I've explained before,
was the fear of, who knows, another Napoleon or
some sort of strong leader riding a horse and starting
wars, or repressing their own people,
rather like Napoleon III had done--they create a
constitutional framework that invests power in the Chamber of
Deputies, basically.
And the Chambre des Députés is a
political club, which I've said before,
and the same members are often returned year after year,
the same bribes are given, big casks of wine or barrels of
wine are put up near a voting booth and everything
proceeds--at least this is in the popular imagination--as a
political club of swinging door ministries.
And certainly if you look at, just take 1889 to 1893--and
you're not responsible for this because basically who cares
about these details--but there are 546 different sessions
between 1889 and 1893, 873 bills introduced;
between '93 and '98 there are 633 sessions with 1,112 bills,
with the government presenting on its own well over 2000.
But, in fact, if you look at the
accomplishments, besides providing a certain
stability, the accomplishments seem to be
rather pale when you've got people, both on the Left and the
Right, saying that the big issue is
over there; and over there is in the east
of what had been France, that is Alsace and Lorraine,
and--because each bill had to be discussed by a whole
commission of deputies, and it went on and on,
commissions become sort of mini-ministries.
The perception is that this is an impotent system,
it's an impotent system, that's condemned France to be
less than virile. And remember,
this is the time when the population--people are becoming
very afraid of the fact that the population is not reproducing
itself. So, this is one of the big
images of simply--of instability.
And it's the same people, it's the same ministries that
are reconstituted, rather like Italian politics
and much of the post-World World II Era.
There were 180 ministries between 1870 and 1940,
and the average tenure is about three years.
But that's really not much. But yet, I mean,
this is to exaggerate because the Third Republic does provide
stability for all of these great affairs.
The Republic survives these two big affairs.
The Republic raises enough money to pay off the indemnity
to the newly formed German Empire,
but people react as to what they're thinking and not
necessarily the reality of the people who are looking at this
deeper. So, thus the Boulanger Affair,
or the crisis, is more--let's call it the
Boulanger Crisis and the Dreyfus Affair is better--is more
significant than the events, which are interesting in their
own way. And, of course,
the other background, as I said the other day,
or the other context are these political crises of corruption,
which in our country we are all too familiar with as well,
the Panama Crisis and the sale of Légion d'honneur by
the president's son-in-law, et cetera, et cetera.
But this kind of frustration then builds up an
anti-parliamentarian movement in France,
and the temptation of trying to find a strong man who will right
this wrong and who will reattach the right arm of France,
Alsace and Lorraine, to France. The General Ferry,
whom you've read about, Jules Ferry,
he wrote in 1885 that "the general impression is that the
Republic is at the end of its rope.
Next year we will have revolutionary excesses again and
then a violent reaction. What will come out of this?
Surely some sort of dictatorship"--the feeling that
the government was powerless. Now, a guy called Paul
Déroulède creates in May of 1882 the League of the
Patriots. He called himself a simple bell
ringer for this anti-parliamentary,
ultra nationalistic movement. And it quickly has 182,000
members, which is a phenomenal amount, and there are great
echoes of aggressive patriotism, et cetera, et cetera.
And with this began the rapidly rising career of General Georges
Boulanger, who was born in 1837, the son of a Breton farmer and
a Welsh mother. He had fought in four
campaigns, he was wounded six times.
He was lucky in that he wasn't killed.
He was wounded during the Paris Commune but before the great
reprisals took place; so he wasn't identified with
the massacre of ordinary people. The campaigns,
he'd fought in Africa, he'd fought in Italy,
and he'd fought in Vietnam, or what they called in those
days Indo-China. He was a brave, heroic figure.
He cut a mean image on a horse; he was a good horseman.
He wasn't very bright but that never hurt him at all.
He received one promotion after another.
He's the head of a whole military division at the age of
forty-eight, which is extremely young.
He had lots of energy but, as I said, not many brains and
no particular talent for organization,
but he fit the image of what many people in France who were
fed up with the Republic believed that they--that France
needed. He was sent to the U.S.
(that is, this place) at Yorktown, in order to represent
France at the centennial of essentially the British
surrender in the American Revolution,
and he caused a stir by refusing to leave the ship on
which he'd arrived in America until they took down the German
flags that were also being flown at the same time.
And it's precisely the '80s, when the mass press is
developing in France. And so these are just fabulous
gros titres, big headlines,
in the newspaper. So, he becomes part of the
chouchoux, he becomes kind of the darling
of a press which is dominated by,
as always in France, by the rightwing press because
of big money, as is the case traditionally in
the United States and other countries as well.
But he's on good terms with Clemenceau, who was the
republican par excellence. Both had graduated from the
same high school, or lycée,
in Nantes, on the edge of Brittany.
He shared Clemenceau's residual or at least inherent
anti-clericalism, and that's something he would
temper later as he's going after rightwing support.
He became the Director of the Infantry at the War Office and
his superiors noted that he had a taste for clumsy intrigue,
and complained about the civilians, or the pekins,
as they were called, the Peking people,
the civilians, and they were treated with
contempt by the military; and of course the rule in the
French Army, really all the way through to the Algerian War,
has been this tension between the officer corps,
very, very rightwing, and the civilian
population--thus the attempts to kill de Gaulle himself,
in the time of the Algerian situation.
And, so, he as an operator--and he was that--he took every
possible opportunity to be seen in front of his troops.
He welcomed recruits with military music as well as with
the Marseillaise. It was his idea to paint all
the sentry boxes red, white and blue.
And he at one point had been insulted by somebody in the
Chamber of Deputies and he fights a duel (and people fought
duels a lot then) and his adoring public forgave him for
the fact that his gun actually didn't go off,
and that nobody was hurt. In 1886, during the Strike of
Decazville, he did a very clever thing, in one of those sound
bytes before there were sound bytes.
Somebody said, "what do you think about the
strike in Decazville, of the miners in Decazville?"
And he replied, "at this very moment French
soldiers are sharing their rations with striking workers."
It was perfect. And, so, he gets the support,
at least in the early days, of many workers who could
imagine a kind of Napoleonic figure who could at least talk a
good game of caring about them, even though he really didn't at
all. On the 14th of July,
1886, all eyes are on him, and they start writing songs
about him: "our brave general, Boulanger, who will bring back
Alsace and Lorraine." He is called General Victory,
fairly soon. One of the lines goes,
"look at him over there, he's smiling at us as he passes
us by; he has just brought us back
Lorraine and Alsace." And, so, the German situation,
tensions with the German Empire increase his popularity.
Bismarck himself, that is Otto von Bismarck,
the cagey chancellor of the second Reich was aware of him,
and he uses Boulanger's popularity for his own internal
benefit in Germany, saying, "when France has any
reason to believe that she is stronger than we are,
on that day I believe that war is certain."
And one of the few ways of--that the Reichstag had in
trying to reign in the Kaiser, arguably, was attempting to
have some control over military budgets.
So, Bismarck uses him very effectively.
And then there's a spy crisis that's terribly uninteresting,
and it helps Boulanger. So, this begins to scare
people, and Jules Grévy, whose son was the one
implicated in the sale of Légion d'honneur,
says that he's got to go. Well, what do you do with him?
You can't really make him a martyr.
If you make him a martyr then it looks like he--who knows?
Maybe there'll be some sort of a coup d'état attempt.
He is not allowed to run for office because he's still in the
army, but as a write-in candidate he gets something
like--he gets 39,000 votes, which is a large amount.
And, so, the government says, "let's get rid of him before
the next July^( )14th, so he can't ride his horse down
the Champs-Elysées again."
And, so, they send him to--decide to send him to
Clermont-Ferrand, in Auvergne,
and he's supposed to leave from the Gare de Lyon,
on the train, on the 8th of July,
and huge crowds start singing, "tout à
l'Élysée" that is seize power,
and they block the tracks. It's the first case that I know
of, of people actually physically blocking railroad
tracks as a sign of political protest.
And they're singing the Marseillaise also which is--for
one thing it's the song of the French Revolution,
but you have this sort of mix, because you've got this old
sort of Jacobin, "we'll take what we want"
attitude, mixing with this sort of anti-republican Right;
and Boulanger seems like somebody who could please
everybody. In the early days he
gets--well, he would soon be a real candidate--he gets votes
from the Left while he's getting money,
lots of it, from the far Right, and among all from monarchists
who somehow see him as a way of bringing back the monarchy.
There's this very wealthy monarchist duchess
from--originally the family is from Uzes in the Gard,
in the south of France, and she gives him lots of big
bucks. And Clemenceau dumps him as a
friend, saying that "General Boulanger's popularity has come
too soon, for one who likes noise so very much."
And then this incident I keep referring to,
this crisis, this scandal of Grévy's
son-in-law begins to come along, and there are demonstrations
against the Republic's very existence.
The Republic, again, it cannot take back
Alsace Lorraine and seems as rampant by this sort of
pourri, this sort of corruption,
corrupt politics here and there.
And who comes along to be President of France but Sardi
Carnot, the same one who is going to be assassinated in
1894, as you've already heard. And when he's elected-- there
was a famous line went around, somebody said--the president is
elected by the deputies, not by the French
population--and someone says to Clemenceau, "who shall we vote
for, Georges?
Who should we vote for?" And he says,
"vote for the stupidest, vote for Sardi Carnot."
And, arguably, Sardi Carnot was the stupidest
and so he becomes President of France.
I'll let any further comments go.
Anyway, the contrast between Boulanger and between--and this
sort of impotent republic become more and more marked.
Now, one thing leads to another, and Chip Sowerwine
tells the story, but it comes down to the fact
that he's sitting in a restaurant,
in Paris, in 1889. He's now no longer ineligible
to be a candidate, and he's elected to the Chamber
of Deputies, and he's dining in a restaurant
near the Church of the Madeleine.
One could imagine it being Maxime's, a favorite--a famous
restaurant there. And there was crowds of people
in the streets; and this particular restaurant
is not far from the Chamber of Deputies, it's right across the
river basically from the Chamber of Deputies.
And he hears the crowd shouting for him to take action,
to go out and greet his adorers.
And then, who knows, as the rightists would try to
do on February 6th, 1934, to go across the river
and to end this impotent republic.
But he just sits there, and he sits there--en
France, on mange quand même--and he sits
there and he finishes his elaborate meal.
I would've been there, not with him,
I wouldn't have dined with him, but I would have finished every
plate myself, and every glass of wine as
well. And then he goes upstairs with
his mistress, to a nearby hotel,
and the opportunity is past. And while he hesitates,
as someone once wrote, his enemies do not.
They eliminate the electoral procedure that allowed him to be
elected. He is worried that they're
going to arrest him and so he goes off to Brussels,
he goes off to Belgium. And this makes him seem a
little less dashing and a little less brave as he scurries across
the frontier. And there's a committee working
for him in France, but he stays there,
and in the end what he does is--he was very devoted to his
mistress, for all these years,
and she becomes ill in 1891, and she dies after a long,
horrible illness. And Boulanger,
notre brave géneral,
on the^( )30th of September, 1891, he went alone to her
grave and blew his brains out, and that was the end of
Boulanger. The Republic emerged
strengthened by this crisis. But that's only one thing
that's important about it. What's more important about it
is what was happening to the Right, in this context,
and what does this have to tell us about mass politics?
What it has to tell us is that it's the mass politics--that
Boulanger and this crisis is one of the great examples of this
new political world that you could find.
I had one of my TAs years ago, whose dissertation I directed,
il y a longtemps, ça passe vite les
temps, a long, long time ago,
he went off for his thesis, which became a very interesting
book, and was interested in this very question;
and, so, I draw on some of his findings that I discussed with
him very often. What he did,
incidentally this is what one does with some dissertations,
he went off and he looked at four different parts of France.
And one was the Marne, that is the department of
Reims; one was the Isère,
which is Grenoble's department; one is the Gers,
famous for its foie gras, and its Armagnac too,
at least in part; and the other was the Orne,
which is a Norman department in the west, the capital of which
is Alençon. And what he was more interested
in is how the message got out to very ordinary people,
living in those places. How do they know about
Boulanger? And what--and this is part of
mass politics. One of the ways that people for
centuries had learned how to read, or not,
if they didn't even know how to read,
but how to imagine religious and political and military
events was in reading the equivalent--I'm not dissing them
like calling them comic strips, but their format was rather
like that; they were called the images
d'Epinal; they were images that were
cranked out that were produced in the town of Epinal in the
east of France, in the Vosges that would
describe or show you pictures of saints, it would show you
pictures of generals, it would show you Napoleon,
it would show you all sorts of things.
And these are pedaled to villages by these
colporteurs, they're called in French,
by these peddlers who carry these huge leather sacks that
look like medicine balls but they're about three times bigger
than that. And a lot of them were from the
Haute-Garonne, from the area of Toulouse;
a lot of them were from the Cantal, that is in the mountains
of the Massif Central, and a lot of them,
above all, were from the mountains of the Alps,
near Grenoble. And these people had their
whole credit networks established, where they could
get credit to get to their next stops, always through France.
It's a tremendously interesting phenomenon, and they followed
the same routes year after year. They were known, anticipated.
They sold pins, they sold pens,
they sold images of the *** Mary, they sold images of
Saint-Sebastian, though you wouldn't get away
with selling that in parts of France.
They sold cups, anything that they could carry
and they could sell. And they sold these images
of--they became political life. And, so, Boulanger is plugged
into this sort of popular library, if you will,
at a time when most people could now read.
The kinds of pamphlets and images of him arrive with these
peddlers, carrying this stuff on their backs--these were hardy
people--and now arriving also by train.
And so this stuff is arriving in Charon, en Champagne,
or wherever--this stuff gets dumped off at the dock,
and it goes to its next stop on horse-drawn wagons,
or on the backs of these people.
And, so, what Burns found was that in all of these
départements that these images just inundate the
place--and this is modern political life,
this is really the emergence of modern political life.
So, there are two things really interesting about Boulanger in
the end, besides the Republic survives.
The first really is that--and I'll make this case hopefully
clearer in a minute--it's the origins maybe of the modern
Right, but it's also part of this sort
of mass politics that happens. And these are very rural
départements. The Gers--again,
I'm sorry, g-e-r-s--the Gers, the capital of which is Auch,
which has a wonderful cathedral, is eighty-three
percent rural, at the time we're talking
about. So, these peddlers are going
around to farmhouses, or people are coming to the
market and they're hearing these sort of speakers,
along with sort of charlatans and jugglers on market day.
They're hearing people talk about notre brave
géneral, our brave General Boulanger;
and talking about how they hate Jews.
And, so, this merges with the anti-Semitism.
A remarkable thing about this Department of the Marne--now,
as I've said before, there's Reims,
and Charon, and now all those graves, all those graves--is
that the anti-Semitic propaganda has a tremendous impact in the
Department of the Marne, which supports Boulanger and
the people who follow him; and there were no Jews in the
Department of the Marne. So, what happens is the
anti-Semites and this mass politics constructs the Other,
the imagined Other, that literally does not exist
in the Department of the Marne. So, but it lodges in what the
French would call the imaginaire,
in the mental universe, the mental world of ordinary
people--not all of them, to be sure.
But it is this sort of onslaught of images of Boulanger
that become part of this enormous propaganda campaign.
In France they would print out ballots;
and, so, political lists would already be printed out,
and you pick your list. It's still a case in municipal
elections today, at least where we live,
it must be everywhere. And how many millions of the
ballots are printed? In 1889 Boulanger posters,
five million posters--that's a phenomenal amount-- seven
million ballots and, talking about mass politics,
photos. They are no longer just
dependent upon images that some clever person with crayons and
pens have sketched that become these images of Epinal.
There are real photos of the guy on his horse.
And you had--before you had to imagine what Napoleon looked
like, you had to imagine what the king looked like;
although Louis XVI is identified by somebody who once
saw him from a distance when he tries to escape to Varenne.
Somebody had actually seen him, and somebody else knew it was
him because his nose looked the same as his face on a coin.
But you didn't see people. But here you could see
Boulanger, you could imagine what he looked like,
and even if you lived in the Pyrenees,
if you lived in the Ariège or the
Bas-Pyrénés, you could imagine what Alsace
looked like. And it feeds into this kind of
frenzy of publications about Alsace-Lorraine.
The most famous is called the Tour de France par deux
enfants, in which two brothers promise their father on
his deathbed that they will see France.
And it was the biggest selling book, outside of the Bible,
in nineteenth-century France; and they go around in this very
banal, boring book, and they see people all wearing
different costumes, and eating different things,
and doing different work, but their hearts all pound the
same way, and they're practically in
tears and a state of collapse when they imagine
Alsace-Lorraine, and these Alsatian young women
dressed in Alsatian costumes, and thinking of la belle
France, and having to put up les
borschts, with the Germans and all of
this stuff. But, so, the numbers are--they
just flood the countryside, and these songs that people
could sing in music halls; and a lot of the music halls in
Paris--there might have been a lot of them in Montmartre--that
were singing anarchist songs in the 1890s,
but a lot of the other music halls are singing about General
Boulanger. And songs like The
Big Sweep, that is with a broom,
sweeping away the corruption of these deputies,
of the Chambre des Députés,
and putting in your kind of big, heroic guy.
And what about busts? If you think about busts,
that is sculptured busts, this is the time when the image
of the Republic, Marianne, as I've said before,
is elbowing the *** Mary out of the way and there's this sort
of battle over space, on classroom walls and in the
streets of cities and villages and all of that.
The mission crosses are being broken off in the middle of the
night by their enemies, et cetera, et cetera.
And Maurice Agulhon, who's a great historian,
one of the books that he did, one of the many,
many, many books that he did was on the images of the
Republic in town halls, in the mairie where
people get married and the kinds of statues that they put up in
the Third Republic, comparable to the kind of work
being done on war memorials after World War I.
And, so, Boulanger fits right into that because there's
100,000 busts of Boulanger, and you can--you don't have to
buy one, they will give one to you to put it up where you want,
on your dresser or whatever. And, so, this is really mass
politics. And he erodes Republican
support in some places; he doesn't do well everywhere.
The Republic is really stronger than its opponents,
that's obviously one of the points.
In one of the departments that I mentioned, it doesn't matter
which one--it was the Gers--but he builds upon strong support
for Bonapartism in that part of France.
And of course, one thing that he does is that
he is able to--it plays off beautifully with the
anti-Semites and their newspapers.
Drumont--there's a newspaper called La libre parole,
the free word or the open word, is sort of the classic,
virulent, rightwing newspaper. And Charles Maurras,
who was a monarchist and he was a salaud,
but he was a really great writer,
Maurras was, just a fantastic writer,
he also is just vehemently anti-Semitic,
though in a less--well, anti-Semitism is vulgar,
totally, but he's more restrained in his criticism,
et cetera, et cetera. But this just fits right into
the image of Boulanger. And Boulanger is willing to go
along with this. Who knows if he was
anti-Semitic or not? Probably because of the long
traditions of anti-Semitism in the army--more about this
later--one imagines that he was. But this is what's important
about him, that and the fact that for the first time these
people are in--the Right is in the streets,
and they're toughs, they're tough guys.
And this anticipates the 1920s and the 1930s also,
that--and Paris has changed too.
I'm going to do a whole lecture on Paris one day.
But Paris is no longer the Paris of radical republican
sans-culottes, of the artisans and the petty
bourgeois who supported Maximilien Robespierre,
in the French Revolution. It's no longer the Paris of
1848. The geographic shifts in social
structure of Paris have transformed it,
and henceforth, until 1968, the big
demonstrations, les grands manifs,
demonstrations, are those of the Right for the
canonization of Joan of Arc, after 1920, against the
Republic in 1934. So, it's a different Paris.
But this is, as my friend William Irvine has
argued, he was one of the first to argue this I think,
it is a turning point in the history of the Right,
as well. Now, to be sure,
you can't always look through those wonderful glasses of
hindsight, and if you're trying to explain
Auschwitz or you're trying to explain the arrests of the Jews,
the Jewish children, and their parents,
and grandparents, in Paris in '42 and '43,
by the French, it's a little much to go back
and say, "c'est bien la faute du Boulanger,"
but that's the kind of connection--it's Boulanger's
fault, that's the kind of connection that hindsight gives
you, that you have to be a little
careful with. But this stuff was out there.
It was out there much more in Germany than it was in France.
But Anti-Semitism was part of all of this, and it was part of
the whole image of this man, of this poor man who had had
enough and blows his brains all over his mistress's grave.
Now, that's a long way of getting to the Dreyfus Affair,
and I'll say less about that because the Dreyfus Affair is
more obvious than the Boulanger Affair.
The Dreyfus Affair reflects this anti-Semitism that had been
accentuated by the economic crisis that begins in the
mid-1870s, in 1873 and 1874,
where it was easy to blame it on the Jews, blame it on the
Jewish bankers, blame it on the Jewish
department stores, blame it on somebody.
And, but it fits rather nicely into all that,
from the point of view of trying to analyze all that.
Now, Drumont--Edward was his name, I never did say his first
name--Edward, Edward,
Drumont, his newspaper La libre parole
had been very--at the forefront of denouncing the
scandals of the Republic, arguing that the scandals were
inherent in a Republic by its very form of--its very
existence, and by the fact that it's the
Jews who dominate le mur d'argent,
that is the wall of money controlled by the Rothschilds
and all of this, the usual kind of claims.
He had published a book in which he claimed that Jewish
financiers were conspiring to dominate France,
and that they indeed had done so.
And he is at the forefront of this, of l'affaire.
And what the affair does is it pits basically against--it pits
Right against Left, it pits the French Army,
and the Catholic Church, and the monarchists,
who are against Dreyfus, it pits them against the
Republicans, against socialists who supported Alfred Dreyfus.
Now, he's worth a minute. In fact there's a very good
book called--written again by my former student Michael Burns,
called Dreyfus, a Family Affair,
about the Dreyfus family, not just about
Dreyfus--there've been probably forty books written about him;
but it's about his whole family. And that's interesting in
itself. He was the son of an old Jewish
family from Alsace. His family had been peddlers,
and there were many Jewish peddlers in Eastern Europe,
particularly in Poland but in other places as well.
His family became textile manufacturers in the town of
Mulhouse and then end up in a place,
a beautiful place, called Ribeauvillé
where the--oh-la-la--it's
magnificent where the vineyards go right down to the
bord. But they're assimilated and
proudly consider themselves French.
Following 1871, for obvious reasons,
they move, and they move to Paris, they move to the 16th
arrondissement, that is the fancy part of
Paris. Now, again, in the history of
Jewish movement, physical movement in France,
and from other places to France,
you have a growing gap between assimilated Jews with origins in
Germany or Alsace and other places who were more
assimilated, who come, who have more money,
they're more friqué,
they have more money--they're not all wealthy--but they see
themselves as very assimilated and they live in the fancier
quarters; and the huge number of Jewish
immigrants who arrive with virtually nothing from the old
Pale, from where they were allowed to
settle in the Russian Empire, and from Poland;
Poland had lost its independence in 1795 and
wouldn't get it again until--with the Third Partition
it wouldn't get it again until 1918.
And they come to Paris carrying virtually nothing.
There's one story about these Jews who carried an empty
suitcase and they said, "why are you carrying an empty
suitcase when you're leaving Russia?"
And they said, "because it's too shameful to
have nothing to carry. We want people to think that we
have something." And they had nothing.
And they get to Paris and some of the assimilated Jews said,
"hey, we don't want those people here because they're
going to fit into this anti-Semitic propaganda of these
characters, the dirty Jew coming from
Poland, coming from Congress Poland, and coming from Russia.
And they settle in the Marais in Paris, and they work in the
garment industry, and some of them are anarchists
and some of them are Marxists, and they were all extremely
interesting people. But Dreyfus and his family were
extremely assimilated, they were of some means,
and so they live in the fancy neighborhoods.
And now, in 1894--I'll just tell this story very briefly,
for those of you who haven't had time to read it
yet--evidence surfaced from a wastepaper basket in the office
of a German military attaché
that somebody in the French Army was passing secret
information to the Germans about French military operations on
the edge--on the new frontier, that is the Vosges,
and Alsace and Lorraine. And circumstantial evidence
pointed to a captain, Dreyfus.
And they confront him with the evidence.
It looks like his handwriting. And when they do this--this is
a very military gesture--they gave him, present him with a
pistol, saying, "you too can blow out your
brains." And, in doing so,
it meant your guilt. And he was shocked,
he said, "moi, je ne suis pas
coupable"--"I didn't do this, it's not me,
it's not me." But that didn't matter to the
army at all. They convene him with-- and the
writing did look like his writing too, but then more
things would come along to devastate the whole case.
They convoke a secret court martial and find him guilty of
treason. He was stripped of his rank in
a ceremony at the École Militaire, the big military
school, and he's sent to Devil's
Island, about which you have heard, off the coast of South
America, the northern coast, a hellhole.
Yet more documents continued to be leaked and the new Chief of
Army Intelligence, a guy called Piccard--the name
doesn't matter; well, it does matter but you
don't have to know it for this--comes to the conclusion
that it wasn't Dreyfus, it couldn't have been him,
the writing is not really the same.
Now, Piccard was an unlikely hero in all this scenario
because he was an anti-Semite, he was a vicious anti-Semite
like almost everybody in the Officer Corps at this same time.
And he comes to the conclusion that they were penned by another
Frenchman, Esterhazy, a Hungarian immigrant
to--second or third generation, to France, Walsin Esterhazy.
But high-ranking officers get together and they say,
"it's better to have this Jew languishing in misery than to
admit that we made a mistake." And then along comes the right
wing of the Catholic Church, particularly the Assumptionist
Order, which says the same thing:
"he's a Jew, thus he is guilty."
And, so, he is just--there he is, and nothing happens.
They send Piccard off to a post in Tunisia as punishment for
having discovered the truth, and a court puts Esterhazy on
trial in a military court and he is acquitted.
Now, at this point Zola takes up the case, he writes the
famous article in a newspaper with a headline, gros
titres, J'accuse. He says, "I accuse the Army,
I accuse the government of covering all this up,
the man is innocent." And, so, the political Right
and the church hierarchy jump against Dreyfus and socialists,
and generally socialists and radical republicans support
Dreyfus. The newspaper of the
Assumptionist Order demands that all Jews lose their citizenship
and Charles Maurras, who I mentioned before,
an anti-Semitic novelist, jumps into the fray against
them. And soon some more documents
were discovered and it turns out that these--they were added to
Dreyfus's file, long after he was languishing
on the island, and they were suddenly
discovered by a man called Henry,
an officer. And he'd forged them to make it
even clearer for those people who wanted to believe that
Dreyfus was guilty, that Dreyfus had done other bad
things too. And, so, they--and Maurras at
one point salutes Henry for his "patriotic forgery," his
patriotic forgery. If that doesn't sound like some
things in this country too, I don't know what does.
But, anyway, finally Henry slits his throat
in the military prison, where he had been condemned for
this forgery, and they bring Dreyfus back
from his island, a broken man,
and they find him guilty again--a military court,
you're not talking about a civil court it's a military
court--and they say he is guilty,
but with "extenuating circumstances."
So, finally--and they send him back to Devil's Island--finally
he is pardoned in 1906; no, he's pardoned actually
before that, about 1900 he's pardoned, or even 1899,
but he's not fully exonerated until 1906.
But, still, this was another moment for the right,
as well, particularly the anti-republican right,
because they had concluded that Dreyfus was guilty by the very
fact that he was a Jew, and it was better to have him
in prison than to suffer the blow of the army having been
caught up in its own snare. And he retreated to his
own--sa petite vie, comme on dit,
his own life, amazingly enough forgiving for
all what had happened. And again, I said this earlier
but I'll simply end with this, one of the ironies of all this,
and it helps us make the point of what happens to the Right,
and the anti-Semitism in France and in Europe,
is that his granddaughter dies in the death camp of Auschwitz.
Have a good week; see you on Monday.