The Dreyfus Affair

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Anatoly Korolev) - This significant date went almost unnoticed in Russia, although it is worth recalling. Here's the story.

A hundred years ago a court of appeals reached a verdict on the Dreyfus Affair. Alfred Dreyfus was acquitted and even awarded the Legion of Honor, the highest decoration given by the French Republic.

This affair is worth remembering even a hundred years later.

Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a French Army captain who worked in the General Headquarters. The scandal started when a cleaner found a letter in a waste-paper basket in which an agent shared secrets from the French Headquarters with the Germans. Counter-espionage officers studied the handwriting and decided that Dreyfus was the author.

Dreyfus himself adamantly denied having committed treason. His lawyers tried to prove that the handwriting, though similar to his, was not identical. However, he was unanimously found guilty and condemned to life in prison on Devil's Island, off the coast of South America.

I should mention at this point that Dreyfus was a Jew. I should also add that a hundred years ago France was markedly anti-Semitic. Counter-espionage picked Dreyfus partly because he was the only Jew at the Headquarters. On the other hand, many French people were against anti-Semitic attitudes.

The Dreyfus case turned into a battle between the two camps. It transpired before long that the real culprit was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, an aristocrat from an elite family. The authorities, however, did not wish to admit their mistake for fear of discrediting the army. A second trial again found Dreyfus guilty and acquitted Esterhazy. But the new chief of French counter-espionage, Colonel Picquart, proved that Esterhazy was the author of the fatal letter. The case was brought to the Senate. Some senators were reluctant to convict Dreyfus, but the executive authorities would not change their decision.

Eventually, the scandal splashed into the streets of Paris. Demonstrations were held in support of the army. The then idol of the French public, writer Emile Zola, decided to intervene, writing an open letter entitled "J'accuse" (I Accuse) to President Felix Faure. On January 13, 1898, it was published in the newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn). Zola denounced Esterhazy's acquittal as a crime against humanity. In response, the authorities accused Zola of slandering and insulting the army. The case was taken to court, and a jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to a year in prison and fined 3,000 francs. But Zola had the right to appeal the verdict and was not put behind bars. When his appeal failed, he fled to Britain.

The powder keg exploded. In Paris, crowds attacked Jewish shops, burned Zola's article, and chanted: "Death to Zola, death to Jews!" Anti-Semitic petitions demanded the expulsion of all Jews from France. The bulk of newspapers backed the nationalists' ultimatum.

Here I'd like to pause. I think that World War II originated in 1898. It started before World War I. European civilization showed the world its worth: envy, xenophobia, racism, and turpitude.

Rhetoric reigned supreme once again.

In European history, France was the first to use mechanisms of repression. It was there that the method of making unfounded allegations emerged in the years of the French Revolution. Anyone could be accused of being an enemy of the French people. Robespierre exacerbated this legal vacuum with a phenomenal thesis: only the revolutionary verdict of a judge was necessary to convict a defendant.

Dispensing with evidence was an invitation to the guillotine.

A hundred years later, the Dreyfus Affair produced a second method of repression: accusations of spying. But it was in Russia, rather than France, that this system became a full-fledged reality.

Two young men - future fuehrers Hitler and Stalin - were closely following the Dreyfus case. Hitler borrowed from it the idea of a Jewish conspiracy against Germany, while Stalin appreciated the immense power of accusations of espionage. On the one hand, it is impossible to refute them; on the other, a veil of secrecy makes it possible not to bother about evidence. In addition, Stalin liked the idea of formally closed trials with simultaneous extensive press coverage. The Paris press wrote daily about the spy who betrayed his country and army. Death to the traitor to the motherland!

To sum up, the Dreyfus Affair was the source of two bloody rivers in the 20th century: the black river of the Holocaust encrusted with the ashes of Auschwitz, and the snow-covered scarlet Volga of the Gulag.

But there was one more man who was watching the Dreyfus Affair attentively. He was the future founder of Zionism, Binyamin Ze'ev, whom the world knows as Theodore Herzl. He was working on his play "The New Ghetto", in which he wondered whether Jews could become Frenchmen.

As a journalist, he attended two hearings of the trial and the ceremony in which Dreyfus was publicly demoted. As his captain's epaulets were torn off his uniform, Dreyfus muttered in a toneless voice: "I'm not guilty. Long live France! I'm not guilty. Long live France!"... The crowd booed and hissed.

This is when Herzl made his final conclusion. He wrote later that the Dreyfus case was not a mistake of the court, but a de facto renunciation of the Declaration of Human Rights. From now on, he thought, most French people do not want equality for the Jews; the Revolution's guarantee has been withdrawn, and we have no choice but to flee the new ghetto, return to Palestine, and create our own state of Israel.

This is where the roots of the current war in Lebanon lie.

But let's return to the Dreyfus Affair.

The political crisis in France propelled to power new political forces headed by Prime Minister Waldeck-Rousseau. The unfortunate Dreyfus was brought home and pardoned by President Emile Loubet.

He was pardoned, but not acquitted. It was only in July 1906, 12 years after the start of the case, that the French appeals court found him not guilty of anything.

But before long a war of minds turned into a war of worlds.

This is why we should remember the hundred-year-old Dreyfus Affair. It was a historical crossroads for European civilization. As we now know, that civilization took the most sanguinary path.