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27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The dark,ugly and shameful times of France, June 23, 2010
This review is from: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Hardcover)
Ruth Harris has written one of most comprehensive and intriguing books about one of the best known episodes in the annals of France:The Dreyfus affair.In 1894,an officer in the French army,Captain Alfred Dreyfus,who was also a Jew,was sent to the Devil's Island,after being wrongfully convicted of spying for the Germans.He was sentenced to life imprisonment and stripped of his military rank.All of this happened after a torn-up note containing confidential military information had accidentally been found by a cleaning lady in a wastepaper basket at the German embassy.As the family of Dreyfus despaired,help came from an unexpected quarter.It was Colonel Georges Picquart,a newly promoted intelligence officer,who discovered that the real spy was one Walsin Esterhazy,"a womanizer, a gambler and speculator.However,when Picquart attempted to convince his superiors that they had made a mistake,they set out to silence him and had him even imprisoned on charges of divulging military secrets and of forging documents".(page 2)For a period of more than four years Dreyfus was languishing on the Island,sometimes shackled to his bed in sweltering heat,enclosed in a palisade so he could see nothing but the sky.A diet of scraps and rancid pork left him emaciated,his teeth rotted in his mouth and he all but lost the power of speech.He was not expected to last for long.His correspondence was heavily censored,and after he was brought back to France for retrial in 1899 he was not even aware of the campaign to clear his name-a campaign which had polarized the French nation during those times.There were two groups involved:the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards.On July,1906,he was finally rehabilitated.He was awarded the highest military citation,readmitted to the army and died in 1935. The main parts of the book discuss and analyze these two rival camps and Harris provides the reader with deep insights into the psyche of those characters who peopled both camps.The trial was more than a Manichean battle and the intensity and obsession which it aroused is well described.The battle was not only ideological,and according to Harris was not only between the Left and the Right.It had much deeper roots and she rightly emphasizes the tremendous religious scope of the conflict,showing an intricate web of connections between personal feelings and political motivation. Harris also describes in detail the role played by the ever-supporting wife of Dreyfus,Lucie,who was the daughter of a wealthy diamond merchant and an Alsatian Jewess.Even the most antisemitic newspapers and anti-Dreyfusards had respect for her and she "was a model of motherly and wifely virtue utterly beyond reproach,a true wife and the essence of active virtue,a strong woman,loyal,energetic who inspires the deepest respect".(page 268)Mathieu,the brother of Dreyfus assisted her while drawing support from many sources, among them a medium. The well-known episode of Zola writing his famous J'accuse" in 1898,which was addressed to President Faure,is dissected as well.Zola was not so keen about the whole matter in the beginning and after publishing his words,the French Minister of War sued Zola for libel,forcing him into exile in England.By now Walsin Esterhazy had effecctively been unmasked and fled to England where he made his confession to a number of newspapers. Harris gives a very detailed description of the fin-de-siecle French context,and she discusses the importance of religious beliefs as well as those of occult practices. The trial was regarded by the anti- Dreyfusards,i.d: the Catholic Church and the Army as Judas betraying Christ,while the Dreyfusards (mainly Jews and other prominent intellectuals) saw it in terms of Jesus=Dreyfus crucified.In addition,famous historical figures like Georges Clemenceau,Leon Blum and Jen Jaures were shocked when they realized that many left-leaning friends were not willing to join their cause.Harris offers her readers a profound look at the horrible,ugly antisemitism which was practiced in France by the majority of the French.One of the most famous and ludicrous characters was that of Eduard Drumont,who was obsessed by his father's insanity,the Communards and other fears of degeneration;he managed to eat rats while trapped in Paris during the German siege.He equated the Jews with mice and vermin,and he saw a supposed link between Jews and Freemasons,seeing the latter " as another subversive international that had provoked the Great Revolution and was now continuing its work of moral and social sabotage".(pages 174-176).He strongly believed,like many other anti-Dreyfusards,that the Jews and Dreyfusards possessed diabolical powers,so much that he habitually carried around a mandrake to ward off evil. But the Dreyfusards were also preoccupied with religion as their opponents and even those who tended towards secularism,such as the Reinach brothers(discussed in detail),were keen to defend and distil the best of Judaism and show its compatibility with Republican ideology.Liberal Catholics denounced the Jesuits and hoped to liberate Dreyfus so that their intellectual version could triumph over the narrowly anti-intellectual ultramontanism they despised. In addition to the many letters discovered by Harris and written by Lucie,his wife,in which she is portrayed as a rare woman determined to do everything in order to free her husband and see justice done,the female angle and the role played by women during the whole affair are original elements which star in this exciting book.The opposing factions of intellectuals and anti-intellectuals were supported and,in some degree,shaped by the salonieres-those salons which were founded by various women.These salons provided a crucial venue for opinion-makes and members of the French political class to interact with one another and offered the elite a useful way to keep in touch with the tempestuous politics of the masses.One prominent saloniere was Genevieve Straus,the widow of the composer Georges Bizet,and whose many letters show the extent she was fighting for the Dreyfusard cause. The affair tore France apart and even to this day the sounds of this dark and ugly episode of French history-one of many others-are to be heard.Lucie changed her name during the Nazi occupation and fled Vichy to another free zone in the south while her granddaughter,Madeleine,who was a member of the French resistance,was sent to Auschwitz. Harris managed to show almost all the sides of this turbulent and complex affair in an admirable and exciting way which will linger in the minds of her readers for a very long time.She is careful not to link the anti-Dreyfusards with French fascism of the thirties and forties.Her extremely well-researched and documented book as well as her lively style prove that there are still a limited number of people who are academics and who can write for both the general public and the academic circles without letting them have even one moment of boredom!
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this book., September 5, 2010
This review is from: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Hardcover)
In France in the last days of the 19th Century, there were 2 kinds of people: Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. There apparently was no neutrality. Within these groups there was plenty of diversity. There were Dreyfusards who wished to secure the freedom and restore the honor of a good man who was the victim of a disgusting miscarriage of justice and there were those who primarily wanted to redirect a shaky democracy and used Alfred Dreyfus as their poster-boy. Among the anti-Drefusards were a large and vocal faction of rabid anti-Semites, who had their own clubs and publications, and there were those who were merely patriotic, who never thought the Revolution was a good idea, ( would we call them "neo-cons"?) who wanted, at the expense of a man's life, to preserve the "honor" of the army that wrongly and egregiously convicted him. Twice. At the start of this engaging and original history of the period, Harris lays out the skeleton of the events that precipitated this factionalization of French society and she provides a more detailed chronology at the end. After more than 100 years, they are no longer in dispute. What makes this book worth reading and what made it worth writing, is the details of how they could happen. If the devil is in the details, he is also in the hearts of men; Harris makes clear this scandal, which polarized a nation and nearly brought down a government, was all about emotion. Fin de seicle French polititians, salonierres, journalists, military officers, clerics and philosophers are creatures so foreign to my existence that they may as well be insects stuck in amber. Harris's astonishing scholarship, her devotion to tracking down primary sources such as letters scattered in archives across Europe, her willingness to let these people speak for themselves, enables the reader to see them as fleshed-out men and women with fully human, if flawed, motivations. Harris carefully and compassionately dissects these very personal emotional motivations, colored by class, religion, notions of patriotism, education, ambition, loyalty to institution, and in some cases even madness. Understanding how one court-martial in one dingy courtroom could lead to a scandal of this magnitude requires a fair amount of psycho-history. Each actor in the event is introduced with a biography in enough detail to let the reader understand something about what drove him. What schools he attended, what was the meaning of that kind of background, why he was attached to a particular philosophy, how that drove him to one side or the other of the scandal and how he could almost have chosen the other. Attitudes toward science, religion, the occult, all of which were important in this era, were also important in the evolution of the Dreyfus Affair. Harris' previous scholarship in these areas serves to put the emotional charge of the Dreyfus Affair in some kind of understandable context. Women had two roles in the Affair and I appreciate that Harris chose not to ignore them because they made for great reading. One role was Feminine Icon; Lucy Dreyfus and Berthe Henri,(the widow of an anti-Dreyfusard conspirator, who committed suicide in prison after it was revealed he forged some evidence) were both cast as suffering madonnas by the press and used as rallying points for either side. The other role was Shaper of Opinion. Elegant ladies with social connections ran glittering salons where politics and culture were discussed; they operated through the men who adored them to support their faction and used the threat of social banishment as currency. Among the Shapers of Opinion was one also female journalist. Despite the gravity of the story, and it is relentlessly sad, there is humor and wit in this telling of it. Chapter titles like "Trials and Errors" and "The Alsatian Connection" read like titles of her husband's mystery novels; "The End of the Affair" was one of Graham Greene's. A wry poke at French sensibility and English perception of it was made in describing Zola's exile to England. Worried that Zola's unconventional family life (married,with a second household of mistress and children), a supporter urged him to keep mum about it so as not to offend his English hosts and English public opinion. He needn't have worried; the English, Harris says, "fully expected a Frenchman to behave in such a way". She also lets us see the funny sparring in letters between two brothers central to the Dreyfusard movement. Harris' narrative style is engaging, even when referring to a lot of "-isms" not familiar to this lay reader. The last few chapters especially are as compelling and page-turning as any mystery novel . I guess it was a sort of mystery. For all her careful dissection of the motives behind each of the actors, it is still a mystery to me how so many people could look the truth in the face and still perform--and get away with-- their actions. Ultimately, this book is important because of its warning to us. What kind of person can twist an honorable, intelligent, and patriotic man, who served his country in war, into a villain? Anti-Dreyfusard, or "swift boat veteran"? Historians of the 19th Century have the letters of their subjects to study and try to make some sense of how their personal thoughts drove the events of the time. Historians of the 21st Century may not ever be able to make sense of our foolishness since our communication is so transient.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Familiar story, new approach, July 30, 2011
I'm amazed that there are so few reviews for this fascinating book. I think it's because everybody thinks he knows the story, so who needs another book. But do we really know the story? What's puzzled me over the years is how polarizing "The Affair" has been for the French. An innocent officer was sent to Devil's Island by high-ranking scoundrels who knew he was innocent but who ordered up a guilty verdict, concocting and suppressing evidence, suborning perjury and silencing witnesses, in not one but three sham trials. The motives of the perpetrators were based on careerism, class, anti-Semitism and rank stupidity and incompetence. It is they who belonged on Devil's Island. This is what the evidence shows. So, why the continuing controversy? What author Ruth Harris shows is that for the "Dreyfusards" and "anti-Dreyfusards," Dreyfus the man had become subordinated to Dreyfus "The Affair," where evidence was beside the point. The man was about guilt or innocence, but The Affair was about identity politics. The two sides just didn't like each other and used The Affair to justify their animosity. Harris's book, then, is an examination not only of what happened to Dreyfus but what drove The Affair. The great contribution Harris makes is the relevance of her approach to today's politics. Republicans and Democrats have much in common, but their differences -- particularly personality and class -- make them behave as polar opposites, who don't just disagree with each other but despise each other. One can even hear echos of Dreyfus in the rhetoric surrounding the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. Harris makes the Dreyfus affair a case study of what Freud called, "the narcissism of marginal difference," and for me it's been a revelation.
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