Civil War in the Making

… And antisemitism? Suppose we said a word or two about it?
The other day Mr Drumont wrote that "the blood of the Jews will stream from the scaffolds."
In vain would the condemned offer their possessions to save their heads: their property would already have been taken from them.
That, I suppose, is indeed antisemitism.
It may be objected that this is merely an individual opinion, and that Mr Drumont had to travel all the way to Africa to find a seat as a French deputy.
It is no less true that his newspaper is to be found in every château and in every sacristy, and that his lieutenant Guérin held the government in check for several weeks, at the very heart of Paris, with an armed troop.
This required, no doubt, the cowardice of the ministry — and also the audacity of the rebels.
I need scarcely recall that the disturbances in Algiers were put down by the Republic with less severity than the strikes of the François or of Chalon.
The Dreyfus Affair thus finds itself placed in its proper setting.
An unfortunate man who had been in the penal colony for several years has just been recognised as innocent.
Since he is not Jewish, the judges will be at full liberty to do him justice.
For a long time I believed that the trials of Dreyfus, of Esterhazy, of Zola, of Picquart, would mark the low-water mark of the savagery into which the Roman spirit could spread within the homeland of the French Revolution.
I am no longer at all certain of that today, and there are several reasons for it.
Firstly, the psychology of the Jews does not drive them to do battle.
Their history shows them capable of revolt and of combative tenacity, but they have remarkably preserved the Eastern trait of passive courage carried to its extreme.
Few of us, perhaps, would have been able to endure in stoic silence the four years of torment on Devil's Island.
But once the ordeal had been borne, when he found himself face to face with new judges, with Boisdeffre, with Mercier — what Celt or Latin would not have lashed them in the face with their crime?
An innocent Dreyfus, a surviving Dreyfus, undefeated under the most appalling torture, was able to remain master of himself.
I grant that he was broken by despair and illness.
Even in agony, some men would have cried out.
His racial mentality, his soldier's discipline did not allow him that fine theatrical stroke.
Of his co-religionists, it can be said in general that they have been too methodically beaten for too many centuries not to have kept something like a stoop of the spine that predisposes them to the role of martyrs.
And then, races have their gifts of pliancy or of stiffness.
The American colonist could never subjugate the Red Indian, who refuses servile labour and who, once subdued, had no other thought than to kill his master.
By contrast, the Africans prospered in slavery.
Thus the Dreyfus Affair found the Jews more accustomed to injustice, more shaped by blows than would have been needed for an energy of victory.
In fact the Jewish proletariat is no more capable than the so-called Christian proletariat of defending itself.
But the great lords of Israel, as every honest observer has noted, far from organising themselves into a "syndicate" — that scarecrow meant to mask the all-too-real workings of the Roman slush fund — wished nothing so much as silence on the subject of the prisoner of Devil's Island.
One of them addressed this charming remark to an "Intellectual" of my acquaintance:
"You defend us well. But I may as well tell you that we would much rather not be defended, for then we would not be attacked."
And when the other replied:
"I am not defending you; I am simply defending justice," the Great Jew retorted: "Ah, if only you could defend it on behalf of a Christian!"
I have already quoted the remark of a Jewish banker, the director of a great Paris newspaper, on the very day of the Rennes verdict:
"What good fortune! Had he been acquitted, it is we who would have been made to pay for the broken crockery."
It is certain that this campaign had the effect of terrifying all the Jews of "high society," now disowned by the right-thinking aristocracy that once honoured their hunting parties with its presence and that now closes ranks behind Mr Drumont.

I say nothing of the renegades, from Porgès to Arthur Meyer, who serve on all fours "the Holy Father and the King" in exchange for the affronts that are by no means spared them.

The clearest result of all this is that the Jewish mentality is one of the most important factors in the unfavourable situation now imposed on the sons of Israel in Catholic and republican France.
But the Christian mentality, as one may well think, plays no small part of its own. Our republican "Christendom" is made up of various elements.
Reared in hatred of the Jew, the clergy of church and convent looks back longingly to its old pyres, those famed instruments of the "auto-da-fé."
The "deicide race" figured there in the company of every heresy; and it is a sign of our times that Mr Drumont's antisemitism is rounded out by Mr Georges Thiébaud's anti-Protestantism and by Mr Jules Lemaître's hostility to free thought.
Three heads beneath the same Roman skullcap.
I am well aware that, set against this preaching of intolerance, stands the secular power of justice and liberty born of the French Revolution.

....

Excerpts from La Honte (1903) by Georges Clémenceau

1899 Affaire Dreyfus. I, L’Iniquité
1899 Affaire Dreyfus. II,Vers la réparation
1900 Affaire Dreyfus. III, Contre la justice
1900 Affaire Dreyfus. IV, Des juges
1901 Affaire Dreyfus. V, Justice militaire
1902 Affaire Dreyfus. VI, Injustice militaire
1903 Discours pour la liberté
1903 Affaire Dreyfus. VII, La Honte

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was the highest-ranking Jewish artillery officer in the French army.
He was charged with passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and in 1894 was convicted of treason and imprisoned on Devil's Island.
The conviction was based on documents which were found in the waste-paper basket of the German military attaché, Major Max von Schwartzkoppen, and which initially appeared to the French military authorities to implicate Dreyfus.
Fearing that the sometimes anti-Semitic press would learn of the affair and accuse the French army of covering up for a Jewish officer, the French military command pushed for an early trial and conviction.
By the time they realised that they had very little evidence against Dreyfus (and that what they had was not at all conclusive), it was already politically impossible to withdraw the prosecution without provoking a political scandal that some feared would have brought down the French government [citation needed]. The subsequent court martial was notable for numerous errors of procedure.
Most notably, the defense was unaware of a secret dossier which the prosecution provided to the military judges.
The withholding of this dossier made Dreyfus' trial illegal under French law.
The dishonourable discharge of Dreyfus.
L'Aurore's front page on 13 January 1898 features Emile Zola's open letter to the French President Félix Faure regarding the Dreyfus Affair.
Alfred Dreyfus was put on trial in 1894 and was accused of espionage, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison on Devil's Island.
In June 1899 the case was reopened, following the uncovering of exonerating evidence, and France's Court of Cassation overturned his conviction and ordered a new court martial.
Despite the new evidence presented at his new military trial, Dreyfus was reconvicted in September and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
He was subsequently pardoned by President Émile Loubet and freed, but would not be formally exonerated until July 12, 1906, when the Court of Cassation annulled his second conviction.
He was thereafter readmitted to the army and made a knight in the Legion of Honour.
Dreyfus was recommissioned to serve behind the lines of the Western Front during World War I as a Lieutenant-Colonel of Artillery though he did perform some front-line duties in 1917.
He served his nation with distinction beyond his natural retirement age.
The Dreyfus Affair was one of the most important scandals of the French Third Republic, if not the most important.
The Affair deeply divided the country into Dreyfusards (those supporting Dreyfus) and anti-Dreyfusards (those against). Generally speaking, royalists, conservatives and the Catholic Church (the "right wing") were anti-dreyfusards while socialists, republicans and anticlericalists (the "left wing") were dreyfusards, though there were exceptions.
The Dreyfus Affair could not have happened in a country wholly antisemitic, nor in a country devoid of antisemitism.
Indeed, Alfred Dreyfus, openly Jewish, had been admitted to the most selective military schools in the country, and had been commissioned into a sensitive position; this was, at the time, unheard of in several other European countries, where policies of discrimination were often in place.
The Affair then greatly split French society and had important political repercussions; it contributed to the radicalization of opinion against the Catholic Church and the "clerical" party, which resulted in the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State.
The writer Émile Zola is often thought to have exposed the affair to the general public in a famously incendiary open letter to which the French statesman and journalist Georges Clémenceau appended the eye-catching title "J'accuse!" (I Accuse!); it was published January 13, 1898 in the newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn).
In the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, it was "one of the great commotions of history."
Zola was convicted of libel and was forced to flee the country.