Nearly 130 years after a hasty and mendaciously conceived court-martial found the innocent Alfred Dreyfus guilty of espionage, “any idea that the Dreyfus Affair was closed for good was illusory,” writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Review’s April 18 issue.“Its repercussions were felt long after—maybe even until today.”

The court-martial, Dreyfus’s imprisonment, and the legions of “anti-Dreyfusards” who continued to call for his head long after his innocence had been established all testified to widespread antisemitism in France and Europe, but, Wheatcroft observes, the questions many European Jews asked themselves at the time—“socialists thought it showed the need for the Jewish left to organize, while Zionists were stimulated by that rage of Jew-hatred to pursue their dream of a homeland of their own…. Integrationists not only could point to the final outcome of the Affair as a vindication of French republican justice; many of them also believed that it was Zionism that endangered their position, by implicitly accepting the antisemites’ case that Jews didn’t belong in the countries where they lived”—remain unanswered.

Below, alongside Wheatcroft’s article, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about l’Affaire Dreyfus.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The Unwilling Celebrity

Maurice Samuels’s Alfred Dreyfus is a biography of the very private man at the center of one of the greatest public controversies of modern times.

Stephen Breyer, interviewed by Ioanna Kohler
On Reading Proust

“The Dreyfus case plays an important part in the Recherche. Proust describes quite well the sharp division between the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards, showing that what prevailed at the time in fashionable salons and in society at large was loyalty—not truth.”

Robert Gildea
How to Understand the Dreyfus Affair

“The Dreyfus Affair…demonstrates the fragility of reason, of the rights of man, and indeed of civilized values when a nation feels itself under threat from an external or internal enemy.”

Julian Barnes
Holy Hysteria

“From January until October 1898 a convulsion of anti-Semitism ran through France; no major population center was spared, whether there were Jews living in it or not. There were demonstrations and riots, attacks on synagogues and shops; ‘patriots’ encouraged hotelkeepers to evict Jews from their rooms.”

Robert O. Paxton
The Lesson of the Dreyfus Case

“Another book about the Dreyfus Affair? What could possibly justify loading another volume upon that already over-crowded shelf? The simplest answer is the timelessness of the story. It is a morality tale.”

James Joll
No End to the Affair

“French politics after 1900 were not the same as before. Perhaps even without the Affair, the new forces—socialists demanding reform, syndicalists calling for direct action, a new right-wing anti-democratic nationalism represented by the Action Française, a renewed movement among the Radicals for the final separation of the Roman Church from the French State—these would have begun to make themselves felt; but there seems little doubt that the Dreyfus experience accelerated these developments. ”

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