By Louis Begley
Yale University Press, £18
Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters combines the acuity of a legal mind — its author Louis Begley was a lawyer for 45 years — with the sensibility of a novelist (he wrote, among other novels, About Schmidt and Matters of Honour). The result is a brilliant work of historical storytelling, reminding us to what extent the drama is in the detail.
The broad brush-strokes of L’Affaire Dreyfus are known to every French schoolchild: the conviction for treason of an Jewish officer in the French army, condemned to a life sentence of solitary confinement on the infamous Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guyana, for a crime he did not commit.
Begley takes us deep into the byzantine maze of the Affair, reminding his readers that it is no less true today that it is through the faithful execution of the law that we safeguard our liberties and the honour of our institutions.
The Affair began with a piece of paper retrieved from the wastepaper basket of the German military attaché giving detailed and confidential military information from the French. The handwriting resembled that of Dreyfus but not to the extent that it could prove his guilt. Consequent events came close to tearing France apart; a feral antisemitism was found to be festering in the belly of a country that had barely a century earlier proudly given the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Literally in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the ultimate symbol of human progress and modernity, Dreyfus was subjected to public humiliation. His military insignia were ripped from his uniform, his sword was broken and a crowd of thousands jeered and spat at him.
As Adam Gopnik succinctly expressed it in the New Yorker last year, “The Dreyfus affair was the first indication that a new epoch of progress and cosmopolitan optimism would be met by a countervailing wave of hatred that deformed the next half-century of European history.”
It took more than five years for Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu and his wife, with the support of politicians and writers including Emile Zola and Jean Jaurès, to prove that the judicial process had been perverted by a government minister and to overturn the court-martial and rehabilitate Dreyfus.
France was painfully divided, with Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards seeking to exemplify the soul of the country.
Begley’s book is one of a series from Yale called Why X Matters, which uses epochal ideas, movements or moments from history to illuminate and explore contemporary issues.
Begley ranges from Vichy to Watergate to Guantanamo Bay, at the conclusion of each chapter proposing a series of contemporary twists to the terrible tale — but after a while these brief, if suggestive, explorations begin to feel intrusive and even facile in the light of the marvellously detailed analysis of the Affaire itself.
The book is especially well-produced, printed on heavy matte paper with deckled edges, but it is sprinkled with copy errors and one egregious misuse of language wherein “hieratical” is used for “hierarchical”. Might Why Copy Editing Matters be next on Yale’s list?
