History of the Jews (69 page)

 

He incarnates, in himself, not only the centuries-old sufferings of the people of martyrs, but their present agonies. Through him, I see Jews languishing in Russian prisons…Rumanian Jews refused the rights of man, Galician Jews starved by financial trusts and ravaged by peasants made fanatics by their priests…Algerian Jews, beaten and pillaged, unhappy immigrants dying of hunger in the ghettos of New York and London, all of those whom desperation drives to seek some haven in the far corners of the inhabited world where they will at last find that justice which the best of them have claimed for all humanity.
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Lazare did not stop with his pamphlet. He begged prominent Jews to take up the case and work for a revision. He made one early and vital convert: Joseph Reinach, the great Jewish lawyer. This tipped the scales for the Jewish community: the issue became serious. Many young Jews took up the cause, among them Marcel Proust: ‘I was the first Dreyfusard’, he wrote, ‘for it was I who went to ask Anatole France for his signature.’
¹⁴⁹
This was for the ‘petition of intellectuals’, to rope in prominent writers for the cause. It succeeded, in the sense that it got non-Jewish radicals interested. Among them was Émile Zola, then France’s most popular writer. He investigated the case, wrote an enormous article in defence of Dreyfus and gave it to the rising politician Georges Clemenceau, who ran the liberal paper
L’Aurore
. It was Clemenceau’s idea to print it on his front page (13 January 1898) under the headline ‘
J’ACCUSE
!’ That was the real beginning of the Dreyfus affair. Four days later anti-Semitic riots broke out in Nantes and spread to Nancy, Rennes, Bordeaux, Tournon, Montpellier, Marseilles, Toulouse, Angers, Le Havre, Orléans and many other towns. In France it was simply a matter of students and riffraff smashing the windows of Jewish shops, but in Algiers the riots lasted four days and involved the sack of the entire Jewish quarter. None of the ringleaders was arrested.

It was exactly what the Jewish establishment had feared if the Dreyfus case was made into a major issue. But nothing could now stop the polarization. The army, asked to admit it had made a mistake, refused and closed ranks. When one of its number, Major Picquart, produced evidence pointing to Esterhazy, it was Picquart who was arrested and gaoled. Zola was tried and had to flee the country. In February 1898 the Dreyfusards formed a national organization, the
League of the Rights of Man, to get Dreyfus freed. The anti-Dreyfusards, led by the writer Charles Maurras, replied with the League of the French Fatherland, to ‘defend the honour of the army and France’. Lazare fought a duel with Drumont (neither was hurt); there were at least thirty-two other duels on the issue, one Jew being killed. In the Chambre des Députés, in January 1898, there was an appalling mass fist-fight while Jean Jaurès was at the tribune and the mob raged outside. The diplomat Paul Cambon, returning to Paris from Constantinople, complained: ‘Whatever you may say or do, you are classified as a friend or an enemy of the Jews or the army.’
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The Dreyfus affair convulsed France for an entire decade. It became an important event not just in Jewish history but in French, indeed in European, history. It saw the emergence, for the first time, of a distinct class of intellectuals—the word intelligentsia was now coined—as a major power in European society and among whom emancipated Jews were an important, sometimes a dominant, element. A new issue was raised, not just for France: who controls our culture? The French proletariat sat solidly on the sidelines. The mobs were students and petit bourgeois. ‘I am bound to admit’, Clemenceau confessed, ‘that the working class appears to take no interest in the question.’
¹⁵¹
But for the educated classes it became the only thing that mattered in life. A cartoon by Caron d’Ache showed a dining-room with all the furniture smashed and the guests fighting on the floor: ‘Someone mentioned It.’ Paris society, both aristocratic and bourgeois, divided into two camps. The battle has been repeatedly described, in Proust’s
Jean Santeuil
, Zola’s
La Vérité
, Anatole France’s
L’Île des pinguins
and
Monsieur Bergeret à Paris
, in plays by Lavedan and Donnay, by Charles Maurras, Roger Martin du Gard, Charles Péguy and Jean Barois.
¹⁵²
The ‘Faubourg’, the aristocratic quarter, led by the Ducs de Brissac, La Rochefoucauld and Luynes and by the Duchesse d’Uzès, subscribed overwhelmingly to the anti-Dreyfusard cause; they were joined by many writers, such as Paul Valéry and Maurice Barrès; the great painter Edgar Degas found himself at odds with all his Jewish friends. A breakdown of subscribers to the League of the French Fatherland (1899) showed that over 70 per cent were highly educated, composed (in order) of students, lawyers, doctors, university teachers, artists and men of letters; the names included eighty-seven members of the Collège de France and the Institut and twenty-six out of forty members of the Académie Française.
¹⁵³
The social headquarters of the anti-Dreyfusards was the salon of the Comtesse de Martel, the original of Madame Swann’s salon in Proust’s
À la Recherche du temps perdu
.
¹⁵⁴
They all believed strongly in a (mythical) secret organization of Jews,
freemasons and atheists which they called ‘the Syndicate’. The Prince de Polignac used to ask Proust: ‘What’s the good old Syndicate doing now, eh?’

On the Dreyfus side, there was the salon run by Madame Geneviève Strauss, the original of the Duchesse de Guermantes in Proust’s novel. Born a Halévy, the greatest of all Jewish-Protestant haute-bourgeois families, with links to the worlds of art, music and letters,
¹⁵⁵
she used her salon to organize the great petitions of intellectuals. Its hero was Reinach, now in charge of the Dreyfus campaign. He had, wrote Léon Daudet, ‘a voice of wood and leather and used to leap from chair to chair, in pursuit of báre-bosomed lady guests, with the gallantry of a self-satisfied gorilla’. But Daudet was a biased source. Proust put it more mildly: ‘He was comic but nice, though we did have to pretend he was a reincarnation of Cicero.’ Another Dreyfusard hostess, Madame de Saint-Victor, was known as ‘Our Lady of the Revision’. A third, Madame Ménard-Dorien (the original of Proust’s Madame Verdurin), ran a violently left-wing salon in the Rue de la Faisanderie known as ‘the Fortress of Dreyfusism’; it was there that the philosemitic conspiracy theory, of an (equally mythical) clerical-military plot, originated. But some hostesses, like Madame Audernon, enjoyed having both factions and listening to their rows. Asked by a rival, who had banned her Dreyfusard guests, ‘What are you doing about your Jews?’, she replied: ‘I’m keeping them on.’
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But behind the social veneer, real—and for the Jews ultimately tragic—issues were taking shape. The Dreyfus affair was a classic example of a fundamentally simple case of injustice being taken over by extremists on both sides. Drumont and the Assumptionists flourished Dreyfus’ conviction and used it to launch a campaign against the Jews. The young Jewish intellectuals, and their growing band of radical allies, began by asking for justice and ended by seeking total victory and revenge. In doing so, they gave their enemies an awesome demonstration of Jewish and philosemitic intellectual power. At the beginning of the Dreyfus case, the anti-Semites, as always in the past, held all the powerful cards, particularly in the world of print. By a significant irony, it was the liberal press law of 1881, lifting the previous ban on criticism of religious groups and designed to expose the Catholic Church to journalistic inquiry, which made Drumont’s vicious brand of anti-Semitism legal. Press freedom, at least initially, worked against Jewish interests (as it was later to do under the Weimar Republic). Until the Dreyfus affair, the only Jewish attempt to answer
La Libre Parole
, a journal called
La Vrai Parole
(1893), was an embarrassing failure. At its outset, the press was overwhelmingly
anti-Dreyfusard, for in addition to the anti-Semitic papers, which had circulations of between 200,000 and 300,000, the popular papers,
Le Petit Journal
(1,100,000),
Le Petit Parisien
(750,000) and
Le Journal
(500,000), backed the established order.
¹⁵⁷

From 1897, with the founding of papers like
L’Aurore
and the all-woman
La Fronde
, the Jews and their allies began to hit back. They had of course the inestimable benefit of an overwhelming case. But their skill at presenting it grew progressively. It was the first time secular Jews had worked together, as a class, to put their point of view. They invoked the new media of photography and cinema. There were photographic action shots of the Algiers pogrom.
¹⁵⁸
As early as 1899 the pioneer
cinéaste
Georges Méliès made eleven short movies reenacting scenes from the affair; they provoked fights in the audience whenever they were shown.
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Gradually, the Dreyfusards began to tilt the media balance in their favour, as uncommitted newspapers and magazines swung behind them. Outside France, their capture of public opinion was decisive everywhere. Inside France, as their media power increased, so did their political influence. The affair throughout was propelled forward by weird accidents. The most important, and for the Dreyfusards their real breakthrough, was the sudden death of the violently anti-Dreyfus President, Félix Faure, on 16 February 1899. He had a cerebral haemorrhage while
in flagrante delicto
with his naked concubine, Madame Steinheil, and collapsed clutching her hair in a steely grip—it was her terrified screams which brought the staff rushing to his locked study, whose door they were forced to break down.

After this, the anti-Dreyfusard front began to bend. Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island, white-haired, malarial, scarcely able to speak. He was retried, convicted again, offered a free pardon which, under pressure from his family and the old Jewish establishment, he accepted. The men who were profiting from the Dreyfus campaign, the radical politicians like Clemenceau, the new intellectuals, Jewish and gentile, were furious. ‘We were ready to die for Dreyfus,’ wrote Charles Péguy angrily, ‘but Dreyfus himself is not.’
¹⁶⁰
Why should he? He seems to have realized, along with many older Jews, that the pursuit of the case
à l’outrance
was increasing, solidifying and would end by institutionalizing anti-Semitism in France. According to Léon Daudet, he used to say to the fanatics on his side: ‘I’ve never had a moment’s peace since leaving Devil’s Island,’ or ‘Shut up, all of you, or I’ll confess.’
¹⁶¹
He even remarked, with heavy Jewish irony: ‘There’s no smoke without fire, you know.’ But the new power of the written word in alliance with the radical left was now out
of control. It pushed on for revenge and total victory. It got both. The Assumptionists were kicked out of France. The left won an overwhelming electoral success in 1906. Dreyfus was rehabilitated and made a general. Picquart ended up Minister for War. The state, now in Dreyfusard hands, waged a destructive campaign against the church. So the extremists won, both in creating the affair and in winning it.
¹⁶²

But there was a price to pay, and in the end it was the Jews who paid it. Anti-Semitism was institutionalized. Charles Maurras’s League went on to become, after the 1914-18 war, a pro-fascist, anti-Semitic movement which formed the most vicious element in the Vichy regime, 1941-4, and helped to send hundreds of thousands of French Jews, native and refugee, to their deaths, as we shall see. The victory of the Dreyfusards established in the minds of many Frenchmen the Jewish conspiracy as an incontrovertible fact. One need hardly say that there was no conspiracy, certainly no Jewish one. Joseph Reinach, who not only vindicated his client but wrote the first full history of the affair, showed in his sixth and last volume how much he deplored and feared the excesses of his own supporters.
¹⁶³
There was no master-mind. The nearest to a master-spirit was Lucien Herr, librarian of the ultra-elitist École Normale Supérieure, and he was the centre of a Protestant, not a Jewish, circle.
¹⁶⁴
Yet the demonstration of Jewish intellectual power which the affair provided, the ease with which Jewish writers now strode the French intellectual scene, the fact that nine-tenths of the vast literature which accumulated around the affair was Dreyfusard, all this disturbed Frenchmen who in general sympathized with the Jewish point of view. There is a significant passage in the journals of the Protestant novelist André Gide, 24 January 1914, about his friend Léon Blum, leader of the younger Jewish Dreyfusards and later French Prime Minister:

 

his apparent resolve always to show a preference for the Jew and to be interested always in him…comes above all from the fact that Blum considers the Jewish race as superior, as called upon to dominate after having been long dominated, and thinks it his duty to work towards its triumph with all his strength…. A time will come, he thinks, that will be the age of the Jew; and right now it is important to recognize and establish his superiority in all categories, in all domains, in all the divisions of art, of knowledge and of industry.

 

Gide then voiced his objections to what he saw as a Jewish takeover of French culture; why could not Jews write in another language—why did they have to write in French?

 

there is today in France a Jewish literature that is not French literature…. For what does it matter to me that the literature of my country should be
enriched if it is so at the expense of its significance? It would be far better, whenever the Frenchman comes to lack sufficient strength, for him to disappear rather than to let an uncouth person play his part in his stead and in his name.
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